Evolving Hamlet: Brains, Behavior, and the Bard

When Harold Bloom produced his hyperbolic tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he did the bard a great disservice. Dramatization would have been a more accurate word choice than Invention and would have offered less of a distraction from Shakespeare’s actual achievements. Hamlet remains Exhibit A in making the case that Shakespeare attempted to put more humanity on stage than those who had come before him. The title character is hardly a fully realized human, which may be a dramatic impossibility, but he does, at least, represent an element of humanity and, as such, can be examined in terms of forces that act on humans. One of these predominant forces is evolution. Matt Ridley argues in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, “A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff’s bombast, Iago’s cunning, Leontes’s jealousy, Rosalind’s strength, and Malvolio’s embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature we know today” (11). If audiences could not see elements of humanity in plays like Hamlet, they would be less likely to derive as much emotional, intellectual, and perhaps even aesthetic pleasure as they have for so long—this work and these characters cannot be reduced to merely cultural signifiers. The humanity expressed in Hamlet displays varied characteristics of the human and, therefore, human evolution. But first, to set the stage.

Since the one-two punch of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1983) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1989), New Historicism and cultural materialism have dominated Shakespeare studies and interpretations. This dominance entails the study of culture; the employment of identity politics; and the historical contextualizing of texts, authors, and audiences. Indeed, even a cursory glance at quite recent editions of Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Studies offers current articles: “Questions of Identity in Renaissance Drama” and “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital,” respectively. Johnathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (2009), one of a handful of current biographies, places Shakespeare in his cultural context in hopes of gaining insight into his life. On the other hand, Shakespeareans enthralled with French theory propose the most frequently used critical alternatives, Sausserian and deconstructive explications. Volumes such as Lacanian Interpretations of Shakespeare (Brooks and Sharon-Zisser, 2010) abound and articles using these theoretical stances are published regularly.

Hamlet itself has been read and explicated through these critical lenses. David Bevington’s most recent book, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011), advertises its argument that the play can be seen as “a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.” Margreta De Grazia’s seminal “Hamlet” Without Hamlet (2007) decenters “Hamlet” the character and focuses on historicism. Danish politics, possession of land, and a sense of historical epoch and empire inform De Grazia’s book. While books about Shakespeare’s play proliferate, the slate of recent journal criticism specifically about Hamlet seems scant in comparison. Articles concentrate on what seems like Hamlet esoterica, such as “The History of Air: Hamlet and the Trouble with Instruments.”

Regardless, historical and cultural critiques have afforded scholarship great insights into Shakespeare and Hamlet. Yet the focus on cultural meanings has been to the detriment of the human, the biological, in the text. Small wonder evolution would not be considered, as without the biological it is a moot point. Multitudinous reasons exist for this neglect, from the old phantoms of “essentialism” and “reductionism” to the irrational fear that literature will become the handmaiden of science. Cultural critics worry they will be supplanted by what they often consider the antithesis of their work.

To address the last first, reading Hamlet with an eye toward evolutionary forces is not a competing or alternative methodology. This theoretical approach, like the cultural critiques that came before it, just reveals another layer of meaning in the play. The slow breaking down of the false dichotomy of nature versus...