Hamlet: analyse af tøven og hævn

By all accounts, the dream of any actor is to play Hamlet and Hamlet-quotations have become household words which crop up in the most varied contexts. Both critics and psychologists have felt tempted to probe the profundities in this enigmatic Shakespeare-figure. Because Hamlet is a man who has a peculiar problem: it is incredibly difficult for him to make an effort to avenge his father’s dead by killing his murderer – even though it is certainly expected of him, that he must demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. In the first act we experience, that his father’s ghost is haunting Hamlet and tells him that he has been assassinated by his treacherous brother who poured poison in his ear while he was sleeping peacefully in his garden. Afterwards the murderer succeeded in taking over his victim’s throne by marrying the sexy queen dowager. In this way there is enough to avenge: a fratricide is at any rate an abominable crime. To this must be added a sexual relationship which by the moral concepts in the past was considered as incest. And worst of all: We are dealing with a regicide which for an Elizabethan was directly sacrilege.Even though Hamlet is aware of, that it is his task to restore order, he keeps procrastinate and has a lot of good excuses not to act. The explanations are good enough, the only suspicious thing is, that Hamlet has so many different reasons to wait – a new one every time. And it is characteristic for Hamlet, that it only causes him problems when he finally takes up the sword. He believes that he gets his villainous uncle Claudius when he kills a person who is spying on him while he is talking seriously with his mother. But “the rat” behind the tapestry is not the king himself, only his loyal henchman, Polonius, who in addition is the father of two people who are very close to Hamlet: his friend Laertes and his love Ophelia. King Claudius is a master of intrigues and immediately he utilizes the situation to his own advantage. Laertes now becomes Hamlet’s bitter enemy and Ophelia gets insane and dies of grief at the insoluble conflict which is the result of the would-be heroic deed. The question is now if Hamlet is an anti-hero, a “poor” killer or if his fate demonstrates that violence itself is a bad solution. The traditional Hamlet is a harassed, pale, dressed in black, man. Freudian critics have made him an object of psychoanalysis. From their point of view the diagnosis is clear: Hamlet has a psychoneurosis, an Oedipus complex. He loves his mother and he has in an early age repressed the dreams about killing his father and taking his place by his mother’s side. According to the Freudians this explain both his problematic relationship with Ophelia and his missing ability to finish off Claudius: he is tormented by jealousy and righteous indignation but identifies himself so strongly with the uncle, that he cannot kill him without destroying the farther end of his own self. For that reason he first succeeded revenging the father when the mother is dead and he on the same occasion is being destroyed.