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Bradley Smith
Dr. Strickland
Shakespeare on Stage
Final Paper
August 4, 2004
A Modern Man in a Premodern Play:
The Clash of Ideological Systems in Hamlet
In his introduction to Hamlet appearing in the Riverside Shakespeare, Frank Kermode states that “although it is formally related to a popular set of dramatic conventions (which we know from many other surviving examples), Hamlet clearly works on a different level from any other play of its kind, and indeed from any preceding Shakespeare play” (1183). As readers, we must ask ourselves what this difference consists of and its reason for being. Why isn’t Hamlet like other revengers? And how does that difference affect the way Hamlet unfolds? An answer may lie in the ideological changes occurring all across Europe, especially in England, while Shakespeare was writing and re-writing his version of Hamlet. When viewed through this lens, Hamlet emerges as an autonomous figure of the modern age against the backdrop of a premodern plot line and a premodern genre.
Lawrence Stone in Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, discusses the paradigmatic shift between the premodern and the modern eras that was occurring during this time. According to Stone, during the premodern era, peasants were interpellated into a network of ideologies that posed their lord had a divine right to rule passed down from God. Moreover, God was thought of as a part of everyday life. Things like death and birth in the family were certainly mourned and celebrated, but these events had a less exaggerated impact on families when compared to later centuries. This lessened sentiment caused feelings that all people of an equal station were interchangeable. “One wife, one child could substitute for another, like soldiers in an army,” Stone writes (257). The emphasis in this society was not on the individual, but to “assure the continuity of the family, the clan, the village or the state” (Stone 258). As the economy shifted to capitalism, these things became less important. Stone writes, God went from being a daily part of people’s lives to a distant watchmaker who presided over the maintenance of a mechanical universe (246).
This shift was seemingly invisible for many years. The idea that all humans are individuals with equal rights was seemingly second nature to mainstream twentieth century scholars as they looked back on history—so much so, that they assumed every society throughout history valued individuality in the same way they did. The reason for this is explained by Michel Foucault in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault discusses a theory of knowledge that talks about the history of ideas as one of a history of ruptures in discourse. According to Foucault, history is formed by looking back in time for a narrative strain from the present. He writes:
Recurrent redistributions reveal several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies, for one and the same science, as its present undergoes change: thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn to break with themselves. (5)
Thus, knowledge is socially narrated in that certain strands are chosen and followed backwards into history—a practice, which has the effect of essentially erasing other narrative strands and discourses. History, therefore, is utterly dependent on the current construction of knowledge. In place of a history of knowledge, Foucault wants to place an archaeology of knowledge: a system that tries to define the discourses as “practices obeying certain rules” rather than concentrating on the thoughts, images and themes that a history values (138). Such a practice allows us to see knowledge as the product of a society. Knowledge becomes the product of a discursive agreement, where speaking practices rule how knowledge is produced, rather than chunks of information, nuggets of gold that can stand acontextually. The project, therefore, requires us to acknowledge our situatedness inside discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge that we are looking for a specific narrative strain when we look back through history.
At the times of these discursive breaks, such as the break between the premodern and modern eras, ideologies begin to change. As a part of those linguistic systems, ideologies have a strong connection to language. Often, it is through language that interpellation occurs, for instance in Althusser’s example of the subject and the police office. Thus, as ideological systems struggle for control in a society, that struggle manifests itself as a discursive struggle for control. Often the outmoded discourse, along with its ideologies, is historically erased or subsumed into the other, simply because we stop looking for its presence when constructing histories.
It is in this way that we can find traces of a modernist narrative strand by looking back through history. In as such, the development of the human being as an individual is in fact the product of the modern historical time period and our society. We have created that narrative strand and projected its development back in time. Our problem arises when we assume that society always privileged the individual over the group or the family—a practice, which shows that we were blinded by our own values.
Situated in this discourse, we can look back through history to see the development of the modernist narrative strain. Such projections can have benefits. It clearly shows the break that Stone discusses and allows us to apply a reason for that break. Though he does not contribute the changes occurring during this time solely to the new economic advancements, Stone finds a great deal of change occurring around the status of the individual in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. He cites a number of changes in iconography as diverse as tombs to diaries showing the emphasis has switched from the family to the individual. For example, tombs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries bore the family name and coat of arms with little recognition of the individual. Stone writes, “It was a display of family pomp and position, not a memorial to the individuality of the dead” (225). But as the seventeenth century ended and the eighteenth century began, tombs began to become personalized, bearing a bust of the deceased based on personal sittings or a death mask—though, as Stone notes, the family’s coat of arms was still quite prominent. This is a trend that can be seen when viewing Shakespeare’s own grave, which has its own bust perched nearby. Stone writes, “What needs explaining is not a change of structure, or of economics, or of social organization, but of sentiment. [...] There was a shift in a whole cultural system, defined as the growth of Affective Individualism” (658). He cites the cause of this rise in autonomy to the Renaissance ideal of the individual hero and the Calvinist ideal of guilt and anxiety about salvation. Yet he never discusses what might have been the cause of these phenomena and why they developed during this time period. The answer that Stone tries so hard to overlook is the shift from a feudal system to a capitalist system.
This shift in family dynamics slowly displaced the emphasis from what was best for the family onto what was best for an autonomous individual, though the old ideologies still maintained a partial hold. Stone writes the feudal relationship between father and child was characterized by a great deal of deference to the father. Children would kneel, or stand if they were sitting, or doff their cap to their parents as signs of respect. These forms of respect begin to fade, however, by the middle of the seventeenth century, and they were replaced by a mutual affection and a less physical show of respect. Under the feudal arrangement, the head of the family or clan would make marital decisions based on what was best for the family, but as the feudal period ended and agrarian capitalism began, children were given more and more power to choose their spouse or overrule the judgment of their father.
Most importantly, though, as society began to shift, discourse began to shift along with it. Looking at the moment when these discourses begin to clash, allows us to recognize those fights and begin to parse out their ideologies. According to Mikhail Bakhtin texts become time-spaces where the author can allow a number of competing discursive elements, manifestations of different ideological worldviews, to mingle, interact, and form a dialogue. Through this interaction, the writer forms a dialogic space through which one of the discourses, and the ideologies of that language system can be viewed objectively. Hamlet represents the textual outcome of the discursive competition between premodern society and modern society, and thus it becomes an opportunity for us to be able to recognize the ideologies of the different discourses of those systems.
In the world where these two ideological structures were changing and their ideologies were starting to clash, Shakespeare began to write and produce Hamlet, pulling his plot from other versions of the same play. In fact the plot of Hamlet itself had been in existence for many years before Shakespeare adapted it to his own liking. According to Stephen Greenblatt in an introduction to Hamlet, the tale of Hamlet had been around since the twelfth century, reported by Saxo the Grammrian. Furthermore, it was adapted in French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570. And texts in England refer to an Ur-Hamlet produced around 1589 (1661). Thus, the story of Hamlet’s revenge was, by the time Shakespeare began to write, centuries old. As Margreta de Grazia writes in “Hamlet before Its Time,” “To begin with, it [Hamlet] was a recycling of an earlier play. Even the supposed original the Ur-Hamlet, was remembered not for its novelty but for its tired formulas and stock devices” (356). The age of the plot, therefore, places it squarely under the control of ideologies produced as part of the premodern era. This is confirmed by the criticism of Anthony Low, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, and Stephen Greenblatt, who, according to de Grazia, “work to recover the material and textual traces of ghosts in Shakespeare’s time and earlier,” seeing the ghost as belonging to a premodern ideological system (374-75).
Likewise, the genre of revenge tragedy has numerous premodern roots. Revenge plays have their history entwined deeply with Greek and Roman societies and their dramatic traditions—a point which John Kerrigan discusses in Revenge Tragedies: Aeschylus to Armageddon. Oftentimes Elizabethan playwrites adopted whole plot lines from Classic stories—such as Seneca’s Thyestes, which was rewritten by Jasper Heywood in 1560—changing them in ways that would update the story in order to fit with Elizabethan ideologies. Seneca, whose plays were studied in school during the Elizabethan age, became one of the main Classic influences on Elizabethan theater. The plot lines of these premodern stories, however, carry with them premodern plot devices, simply because they were composed using premodern language systems.
For instance, the whole arrangement of a revenge tragedy revolves around familial obligation. Kerrigan writes, the displacement of revenge from one character to another creates a structure of obligation which modifies the economy of vengeance” (7). This structure of obligation is one that is dependent on the premodern structure of the family laid out by Stone.
Under the premodern ideologies that shape the basis of the plot, Hamlet is obligated to carry out the ghost of Old Hamlet’s command to revenge his death—that is, if the ghost truly is his father’s spirit. However, this set of ideologies clashes with another set that presents Hamlet as an autonomous individual. This second set begins to emerge at the time that Shakespeare is writing, as Elizabethan England moves into the modern era. This is a view that Andrew Mousley shares in his essay “Hamlet and the Politics of Individualism.” Mousley writes, “Hamlet may be seen as dramatizing the failure of ideologies fully to interpellate or precisely ‘speak through’ the individual” (68).
Viewing history in this way, Hamlet can be seen as a character who is placed in the center of this ideological conflict. And the result is Hamlet must first weigh the consequences of losing his autonomy through death with his filial obligation of revenge. Thus, Hamlet vows carefully not to revenge his father but to remember him, as Kerrigan notes: “The contrast with Hieronomo [of The Spanish Tragedy] is striking: Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember” (182). According to Kerrigan, this lack of a vow to revenge turns on a word. Hamlet tells the ghost that he may revenge him rather than he will: “Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge” (I.v, 29-31). Thus, Hamlet makes no vow other than to remember his father. Alexander Welsh, in Hamlet in His Modern Guises, also remarks this odd turn. He notes that, “This subordination of revenge to mourning markedly differs from the medieval story” (34). The comparison between the two texts allows us to see the effects that the new ideological linguistic system has on the play. This difference can be directly attributed to this change in the ideological system governing Hamlet’s actions. No longer is Hamlet obligated to revenge his father under the premodern ideological system. Instead Hamlet vows to remember his father and his love for his father—a vow that reflects the individuality of not only Hamlet’s character but Hamlet’s sense of his father’s individuality. This love for his father gives Hamlet an entirely different motive for seeking revenge than filial obligation. Instead Hamlet’s reasons for revenge arise to assuage his own grief rather than to fulfill any filial obligation in slaying his father’s murderer.