For Hamlet nothing is simple, everything raises questions. His dilemma is not about what decisions he should take but rather whether he will be able to make any decisions at all. According to some interpretations, Hamlet makes no decisions and instead projects the image of an indecisive, inactive and passive individual, a romantic incapable of action who is sniveling and pathetic; he is nothing but a compulsive talker taking pleasure in his own words. Jean-Louis Barrault said of him that he is ‘the hero of unparalleled hesitation’.
He astonishes us with soliloquies of unequalled beauty, his emotions are of stunning force, but he does not evolve beyond them. This is why T. S. Eliot regarded Hamlet as a failure and said that it presented a character ‘dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it exceeds the events that occur’. Why so much emotion and so little action? That is his nature, say some critics: this is what he is, the absolute opposite of Macbeth.
Others see him as stunted by an Oedipus complex which has turned him into a belated adolescent, somewhat mad, mired in sterile existentialist ponderings (this alone would disqualify him as king! Others still see him as suffering from an overdose of chastity.
Others go further: is he not simply a puritan or a homosexual? A drunkard, even? Could he be the unfortunate hero, the hero-victim for whom life holds nothing but frustration and disillusionment? The murder of his father and the revelation that his own brother was his assassin (who then throws himself on the widow, Hamlet’s mother! ), the betrayals by Gertrude, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even Laertes: it is not only the state of Denmark which is rotten, it is the entire world.
The celebrated French critic Henri Fluchre, who sees Hamlet as ‘the first Shakespearean drama which can lay claim to both extremes in personality and universality’, interprets the play as a symbolic representation of the battle between man and his destiny, his temptations and contradictions. To this is opposed another reading. First of all it has to be said that Hamlet, loquacious as he is, is nevertheless extremely active, although it is true that the impulse for his actions is imposed on him by other characters or by events.
He listens to the ghost (which his friends refuse to do), he adopts a coarse attitude verging on insubordination vis–vis the king, he violently rejects Ophelia, he thwarts one after the other plots aimed at revealing his plans, he stages for the court a show which is nothing but a trap in which he hopes to catch the king, he confronts his mother in a scene of extreme violence, and he fights Laertes. Engaging further in pure physical violence he kills Polonius, sends his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, kills the king, and is indirectly responsible for the death of Laertes.
Not bad for someone who, for some, doesn’t know the meaning of the word action. It is possible, even probable, that in his particular fashion Shakespeare wanted to disrupt the conventions of classical tragedy, which he may have seen as too heavily laden with stereotypes. His Macbeth, his Othello, his Brutus, even his King Lear, are, from the first act, so imprisoned in conventional attitudes that they become perfectly predictable: the mechanisms of the plot evolve through cause and effect, the outcome becomes ineluctable.
None of that in Hamlet; Shakespeare surprises us at each turn, it is the unpredictable which dominates, and even the scene of the final slaughter has only tenuous connections with the elements provided by the first act. True, Hamlet does kill the king, but he does so because the latter has just inadvertently killed Gertrude, and it is particularly striking that at this moment Hamlet utters not one word concerning the assassination of his father, just as it is curious that no-one at the Danish court seems disturbed by the monstrous carnage which has, in the space of a few seconds, done away with the most important individuals of the kingdom.
Maybe Shakespeare, merely simulating the grand themes of classical tragedy (vengeance, madness, the struggle for power, etc. ), wanted to shake the established certainties flooding each of these themes and chose, in the final analysis, to present the only themes which for him had any fundamental importance: doubt and uncertainty. In this, he could have been a precursor of the theatre of the twentieth century: he may, in 1601, have anticipated the theatre of the absurd.