Belyaeva N. Shakespeare

Natalia BELYAEVA
Shakespeare. "Hamlet": problems of the hero and the genre

Hamlet is the most difficult of all Shakespeare's tragedies to interpret because of the extreme complexity of its concept. Not a single work of world literature has caused so many conflicting explanations. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, learns that his father did not die of natural causes, but was treacherously killed by Claudius, who married the widow of the deceased and inherited his throne. Hamlet vows to devote his whole life to the cause of revenge for his father - and instead, for four acts, he reflects, reproaches himself and others, philosophizes, without doing anything decisive, until at the end of the fifth act he finally kills the villain purely impulsively, when he finds out that he poisoned him. What is the reason for such passivity and apparent lack of will of Hamlet? Critics saw it in the natural gentleness of Hamlet's soul, in his excessive "intellectualism", which allegedly kills the ability to act, in his Christian meekness and inclination to forgiveness. All these explanations contradict the clearest indications in the text of the tragedy. By nature, Hamlet is not at all weak-willed and passive: he boldly rushes after the spirit of his father, without hesitation, kills Polonius, who hid behind a carpet, shows extraordinary resourcefulness and courage during the voyage to England. The point is not so much in the nature of Hamlet, but in the special position in which he finds himself.

A student at the University of Wittenberg, who was completely absorbed in science and thought, keeping away from court life, Hamlet suddenly discovers aspects of life that he had never "dreamed of" before. A veil is lifted from his eyes. Even before he was convinced of the villainous murder of his father, he discovers the horror of the inconstancy of his mother, who remarried, "before having time to wear out the shoes" in which she buried her first husband, the horror of the incredible falsehood and depravity of the entire Danish court (Polonius, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz , Osric and others). In the light of his mother's moral weakness, it also becomes clear to him the moral impotence of Ophelia, who, with all her spiritual purity and love for Hamlet, is not able to understand him and help him, because she believes in everything and obeys the pitiful intriguer - her father.

All this is generalized by Hamlet into a picture of the corruption of the world, which seems to him "a garden overgrown with weeds." He says: "The whole world is a prison, with many locks, dungeons and dungeons, and Denmark is one of the worst." Hamlet understands that the point is not in the very fact of his father's murder, but in the fact that this murder could be carried out, go unpunished and bear fruit to the killer only thanks to the indifference, connivance and servility of all those around him. Thus, the whole court and all of Denmark are participants in this murder, and Hamlet would have to take up arms against the whole world in order to take revenge. On the other hand, Hamlet understands that he was not the only one who suffered from the evil poured around him. In the monologue "To be or not to be?" he lists the scourges tormenting mankind: "... the whip and mockery of the century, the oppression of the strong, the mockery of the proud, the pain of contemptible love, the judges of untruth, the arrogance of the authorities and the insults inflicted on uncomplaining merit." If Hamlet were an egoist pursuing exclusively personal goals, he would quickly deal with Claudius and regain the throne. But he is a thinker and a humanist, concerned about the common good and feeling himself responsible for everyone. Hamlet therefore must fight against the untruths of the whole world, speaking in defense of all the oppressed. This is the meaning of his exclamation (at the end of the first act):

The century was shaken; and worst of all
That I was born to restore it!

But such a task, according to Hamlet, is unbearable even for the most powerful person, and therefore Hamlet retreats before it, going into his thoughts and plunging into the depths of his despair. However, showing the inevitability of such a position of Hamlet and his deep reasons, Shakespeare by no means justifies his inactivity and considers it a painful phenomenon. This is precisely the spiritual tragedy of Hamlet (what was called "Hamletism" by the critics of the 19th century).

Shakespeare very clearly expressed his attitude to Hamlet's experiences by the fact that Hamlet himself laments his state of mind and reproaches himself for inaction. He sets himself as an example of the young Fortinbras, who "because of a blade of grass, when honor is hurt," leads twenty thousand people to a mortal battle, or an actor who, while reading a monologue about Hecuba, was so imbued with "fictitious passion" that "the whole became pale "while he, Hamlet, like a coward, "takes away the soul with words." Hamlet's thought expanded so much that it made direct action impossible, since the object of Hamlet's aspirations became elusive. This is the root of Hamlet's skepticism and his visible pessimism. But at the same time, such a position of Hamlet unusually sharpens his thoughts, making him a sharp-sighted and impartial judge of life. The expansion and deepening of the knowledge of reality and the essence of human relations becomes, as it were, Hamlet's life's work. He unmasks all the liars and hypocrites he meets, exposes all old prejudices. Often Hamlet's utterances are full of bitter sarcasm and, as it may seem, gloomy misanthropy; for example, when he says to Ophelia: “If you are virtuous and beautiful, your virtue should not allow conversations with your beauty ... Go to a monastery: why do you produce sinners?”, Or when he declares to Polonius: “If you take everyone according to their deserts then who will escape the whip?" However, the very passion and hyperbolism of his expressions testify to the ardor of his heart, suffering and sympathetic. Hamlet, as shown by his relationship to Horatio, is capable of deep and faithful friendship; he passionately loved Ophelia, and the impulse with which he rushes to her coffin is deeply sincere; he loves his mother, and in a nightly conversation, when he torments her, traits of touching filial tenderness slip through him; he is genuinely delicate (before the fatal rapier match) with Laertes, of whom he frankly asks for forgiveness for his recent harshness; his last words before his death are a greeting to Fortinbras, to whom he bequeaths the throne for the good of his homeland. It is especially characteristic that, taking care of his good name, he instructs Horatio to tell everyone the truth about him. Thanks to this, while expressing thoughts of exceptional depth, Hamlet is not a philosophical symbol, not a mouthpiece for the ideas of Shakespeare himself or his era, but a specific person whose words, expressing his deep personal feelings, acquire special persuasiveness through this.

What features of the revenge tragedy genre can be found in Hamlet? How and why does this play transcend this genre?

Hamlet's revenge is not decided by a simple blow of a dagger. Even its practical implementation encounters serious obstacles. Claudius is heavily guarded and cannot be approached. But the external obstacle is less significant than the moral and political task facing the hero. To carry out revenge, he must commit murder, that is, the same crime that lies on the soul of Claudius. Hamlet's revenge cannot be a secret murder, it must become a public punishment for the criminal. To do this, it is necessary to make it obvious to everyone that Claudius is a vile murderer.

Hamlet has a second task - to convince the mother that she committed a serious moral violation by entering into an incestuous marriage. Hamlet's revenge must be not only a personal, but also a state act, and he is aware of this. Such is the outer side of the dramatic conflict.

Hamlet has his own ethics of revenge. He wants Claudius to know what punishment awaits him for. For Hamlet, true revenge is not physical murder. He seeks to arouse in Claudius the consciousness of his guilt. All the hero's actions are devoted to this goal, up to the "mousetrap" scene. Hamlet strives to make Claudius imbued with the consciousness of his crime, he wants to punish the enemy first with internal torments, pangs of conscience, and only then strike a blow so that he knows that he is punished not only by Hamlet, but by the moral law, universal justice.

Having struck down Polonius, who was hiding behind a curtain, with his sword, Hamlet says:

As for him
Then I mourn; but heaven said
They punished me and me him,
So that I become their scourge and servant.

In what seems to be an accident, Hamlet sees the manifestation of a higher will. Heaven has entrusted him with the mission to be the scourge and the executor of their destiny. This is how Hamlet looks at the matter of revenge.

A variety of tonality of tragedies has long been noticed, a mixture of the tragic with the comic in them. Usually in Shakespeare, the carriers of the comic are low-ranking characters and jesters. There is no such jester in Hamlet. True, there are third-rate comic figures of Osric and the second nobleman at the beginning of the second scene of the fifth act. The comical Polonius. They are all ridiculed and laughable themselves. Serious and funny interspersed in "Hamlet", and sometimes merge. When Hamlet describes to the king that all people are food for worms, the joke is at the same time a threat to the enemy in the struggle that takes place between them. Shakespeare constructs the action in such a way that the tragic tension is replaced by calm and mocking scenes. The fact that the serious is interspersed with the funny, the tragic with the comic, the sublime with the everyday and base, creates the impression of a genuine vitality of the action of his plays.

Mixing the serious with the funny, the tragic with the comic is a long-noted feature of Shakespeare's dramaturgy. In Hamlet, you can see this principle in action. Suffice it to recall at least the beginning of the scene in the cemetery. Comic figures of gravediggers appear before the audience; both roles are played by jesters, but even here the clowning is different. The first gravedigger belongs to the witty jesters, who know how to amuse the audience with clever remarks, the second jester is one of those comic characters who serve as the subject of ridicule. The first gravedigger shows before our eyes that this simpleton is easily fooled.

Before the final catastrophe, Shakespeare again introduces a comic episode: Hamlet makes fun of Osric's excessive court gloss. But in a few minutes there will be a catastrophe in which the entire royal family will die!

How relevant is the content of the play today?

Hamlet's monologues evoke in readers and viewers the impression of the universal significance of everything that happens in the tragedy.

"Hamlet" is a tragedy, the deepest meaning of which lies in the awareness of evil, in the desire to comprehend its roots, understand its various forms of manifestation and find means of fighting against it. The artist created the image of a hero, shocked to the core by the discovery of evil. The pathos of tragedy is indignation against the omnipotence of evil.

Love, friendship, marriage, relations between children and parents, external war and rebellion within the country - such is the range of topics directly touched upon in the play. And next to them are the philosophical and psychological problems over which Hamlet's thought struggles: the meaning of life and the purpose of man, death and immortality, spiritual strength and weakness, vice and crime, the right to revenge and murder.

The content of the tragedy has eternal value and will always be relevant, regardless of time and place. The play poses eternal questions that have always worried and worried all of humanity: how to fight evil, by what means and is it possible to defeat it? Is it worth living at all if life is full of evil and it is impossible to defeat it? What is true in life and what is false? How can true feelings be distinguished from false ones? Can love be eternal? What is the meaning of human life?

1) The story of the plot of Hamlet.

The prototype is Prince Amlet (the name is known from the Icelandic sagas of Snorri Sturluson). 1 lit. a monument in which this plot is - "History of the Danes" by Saxo Grammar (1200). Differences of the plot from “G”: the murder of King Gorvendil by brother Fengon takes place openly, at a feast, before that F. had nothing with Queen Gerutha. Amlet takes revenge in this way: returning from England (see Hamlet) for a feast on the occasion of his own death (they still thought that he was killed), he makes everyone drunk, covers them with a carpet, nailed him to the floor and set fire to it. Gerutha blesses him, because. she repented that she had married F. In 1576, fr. writer François Belforet published this story in French. language. Changes: The connection between F. and Gerutha before the murder, the strengthening of the role of Gerutha as an assistant in the cause of revenge.

Then a play was written, which has not reached us. But we know about it from the memoirs of contemporaries about the "bunch of Hamlets" who utter long monologues. Then (before 1589) another play was written, which reached, but the author did not reach (most likely it was Thomas Kidd, from whom the “Spanish Tragedy” remained). The tragedy of bloody revenge, the ancestor of which was just Kid. Secret assassination of the king, reported by a ghost. + motive of love. The intrigues of the villain, directed against the noble avenger, turn against himself. Sh. left the whole plot.

2) The history of the study of the tragedy "G".

At the expense of G. there were 2 concepts - subjectivist and objectivist.

Subjectivist perspective: Thomas Hammer in the 18th century was the first to draw attention to G.'s slowness, but said that G. was bold and resolute, but if he had acted immediately, there would have been no play. Goethe believed that G. required the impossible. Romantics believed that reflection kills the will.

Objectivist point of view: Ziegler and Werder believed that G. does not take revenge, but creates retribution, and for this it is necessary that everything looks fair, otherwise G. will kill justice itself. In general, this can be confirmed by a quote: The century was shaken - And the worst thing is that I was born to restore it. Those. he administers the highest court, and not just revenge.

Another concept: the problem of G. is connected with the problem of interpreting time. A sharp shift in chronological perspective: the clash of the heroic time and the time of the absolutist courts. The symbols are King Hamlet and King Claudius. Both of them are characterized by Hamlet - "the chivalrous king of exploits" and "the smiling king of intrigues". 2 fights: King Hamlet and the Norwegian king (in the spirit of the epic, “honor and law”), 2 - Prince Hamlet and Laertes in the spirit of the policy of secret murders. When G. finds himself in the face of irreversible time, Hamletism begins.

3) The concept of the tragic.

Goethe: “All his plays revolve around a hidden point where all the originality of our “I” and the daring freedom of our will collide with the inevitable course of the whole.” The main plot is the fate of a person in society, the possibilities of the human personality in a world order unworthy of a person. At the beginning of the action, the hero idealizes his world and himself, based on the high purpose of man, he is imbued with faith in the rationality of the life system and in his ability to create his own destiny. The action is based on the fact that the protagonist enters into a great conflict with the world on this basis, which leads the hero through a “tragic delusion” to mistakes and suffering, to misconduct or crimes committed in a state of tragic affect.

In the course of the action, the hero realizes the true face of the world (the nature of society) and his real possibilities in this world, dies in the denouement, by his death, as they say, he atones for his guilt and at the same time affirms the greatness of people in all the action and in the finale. personality as a source of tragically “daring freedom”. More specifically: G. studied at Wittenberg, the cultural and spiritual center of the Renaissance, where he gained ideas about the greatness of man, etc., and Denmark with its intrigues is alien to him, it is “the worst of prisons” for him. What does he think of a person now - see. his monologue in act 2 (about the quintessence of dust).

4) The image of the protagonist.

The hero is a highly significant and interesting nature. The subjective side of the tragic situation is the consciousness of the protagonist. In the originality of the character of the tragic hero lies his destiny - and the very plot of this play, as a heroically characteristic plot.

The tragic hero of Sh. is quite at the level of his situation, she is on his shoulder, without him she would not exist. She is his lot. Another person in the place of the protagonist would have come to terms with the circumstances (or would not have got into such a situation at all).

The protagonist is endowed with a “fatal” nature, rushing against fate (Macbeth: “No, come out, let's fight, fate, not on the stomach, but on death!”).

5) The image of the antagonist.

Antagonists are various interpretations of the concept of "valor". Claudius is valiant according to Machiavelli. The energy of the mind and will, the ability to adapt to circumstances. Strives to “seem” (imaginary love for the nephew).

Iago - the quality of the Renaissance personality: activity, enterprise, energy. But nature is rough - it's a boor and a plebeian. Insidious and envious, hates superiority over himself, hates the high world of feelings, because it is inaccessible to him. Love is lust for him.

Edmund - activity, enterprise, energy, but there are no benefits of a legitimate son. Crime is not an end, but a means. Having achieved everything, he is ready to save Lear and Cordelia (the order for their release). Macbeth is both an antagonist and a protagonist (S. never called tragedies by the name of the antagonist). Before the advent of witches, he is a valiant warrior. And then he thinks that he is destined to be king. This is supposedly his duty. Those. witches told him - now it's up to him. Driven by the ethics of valor, becomes a villain. To the goal - by any means. The finale speaks of the collapse of a generously gifted person who has embarked on the wrong path. See his last monologue.

6) The concept of time.

Hamlet - see above.

7) Features of the composition.

Hamlet: the plot is a conversation with a ghost. The climax is the “mousetrap” scene (“The Killing of Gonzago”). The connection is understandable.

8) The motive of madness and the motive of life-theatre.

For G. and L. madness is the highest wisdom. They in madness understand the essence of the world. True, G.'s madness is fake, L.'s is real.

Lady Macbeth's madness - the human mind has gone astray and nature is rebelling against it. The image of the theater world conveys Shakespeare's view of life. This is also manifested in the vocabulary of the characters: “scene”, “jester”, “actor” are not just metaphors, but words-images-ideas (“Two truths are told as favorable prologues to the brewing action on the theme of royal power” - Macbeth, I, 3 , literally; “My mind had not yet composed a prologue, when I started playing” - Hamlet, V, 2, etc.).

The tragedy of the hero is that he must play, but the hero either does not want to (Cordelia), but is forced (Hamlet, Macbeth, Edgar, Kent), or realizes that at the decisive moment he was only playing (Otteleau, Lear).

This polysemic image expresses the humiliation of a person by life, the lack of freedom of the individual in a society unworthy of a person.

Hamlet's maxim: "The goal of acting was and is - to hold, as it were, a mirror in front of nature, to show its likeness and imprint to every time and class" - has a retroactive effect: life is acting, the theatricality of art is a small resemblance to the big theater of life.

Tragedies of Shakespeare. Features of the conflict in the tragedies of Shakespeare (King Lear, Macbeth). Shakespeare wrote tragedies from the beginning of his literary career. One of his first plays was the Roman tragedy "Titus Andronicus", a few years later the play "Romeo and Juliet" appeared. However, Shakespeare's most famous tragedies were written during the seven years of 1601-1608. During this period, four great tragedies were created - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, as well as Antony and Cleopatra and lesser-known plays - Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. Many researchers associated these plays with the Aristotelian principles of the genre: the main character must be an outstanding person, but not without vice, and the audience must feel certain sympathy for him. All tragic protagonists in Shakespeare have the capacity for both good and evil. The playwright follows the doctrine of free will: the (anti)hero is always given the opportunity to get out of the situation and atone for sins. However, he does not notice this opportunity and goes towards fate.

Features of the conflict in the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Tragedies are the creative core of W. Shakespeare's heritage. They express the power of his brilliant thought and the essence of his time, which is why subsequent eras, if they turned to W. Shakespeare for comparison, first of all comprehended their conflicts through them

The tragedy "King Lear" is one of the most profound socio-psychological works of world drama. It uses several sources: the legend of the fate of the British King Lear, told by Holinshed in the "Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland" according to earlier sources, the story of old Gloucester and his two sons in Philip Sidney's pastoral novel "Arcadia", some moments in Edmund's poem Spencer's The Faerie Queene. The plot was known to the English audience, because there was a pre-Shakespearean play "The True Chronicle of King Leir and his three daughters", where everything ended happily. In Shakespeare's tragedy, the story of ungrateful and cruel children served as the basis for a psychological, social and philosophical tragedy that paints a picture of injustice, cruelty, and greed prevailing in society. The theme of the anti-hero (Lear) and the conflict are closely intertwined in this tragedy. A literary text without conflict is boring and uninteresting to the reader, respectively, without an anti-hero and a hero is not a hero. Any work of art contains a conflict of "good" and "evil", where "good" is true. The same should be said about the significance of the anti-hero in the work. A feature of the conflict in this play is its scale. K. from a family develops into a state and already covers two kingdoms.

W. Shakespeare creates the tragedy "Macbeth", the main character of which is such a person. The tragedy was written in 1606. "Macbeth" is the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies - it contains only 1993 lines. Its plot is taken from the History of Britain. But its brevity did not in the least affect the artistic and compositional merits of the tragedy. In this work, the author raises the issue of the destructive influence of sole power and, in particular, the struggle for power, which turns the brave Macbeth, a valiant and illustrious hero, into a villain hated by everyone. Even stronger sounds in this tragedy by W. Shakespeare, his constant theme - the theme of just retribution. Just retribution falls on criminals and villains - a mandatory law of Shakespeare's drama, a kind of manifestation of his optimism. Its best heroes die often, but villains and criminals always die. In "Macbeth" this law is shown especially brightly. W. Shakespeare in all his works pays special attention to the analysis of both man and society - separately, and in their direct interaction. “He analyzes the sensual and spiritual nature of man, the interaction and struggle of feelings, the diverse mental states of a person in their movements and transitions, the emergence and development of affects and their destructive power. W. Shakespeare focuses on the critical and crisis states of consciousness, on the causes of the spiritual crisis, the causes of external and internal, subjective and objective. And it is precisely such an internal conflict of a person that constitutes the main theme of the tragedy Macbeth.

The theme of power and mirror reflection of evil. Power is the most attractive thing in an era when the power of gold has not yet been fully realized. Power - this is what, in the era of social cataclysms that marked the transition from the Middle Ages to the new time, can give a sense of confidence and strength, prevent a person from becoming a toy in the hands of capricious fate. For the sake of power, a person then took risks, adventures, crimes.

Based on the experience of his era, Shakespeare came to the realization that the terrible power of power destroys people no less than the power of gold. He penetrated into all the bends of the soul of a person who is seized by this passion, forcing him to stop at nothing to fulfill his desires. Shakespeare shows how lust for power disfigures a person. If before his hero knew no limit in his courage, now he knows no limit in his ambitious aspirations, which turn the great commander into a criminal tyrant, into a murderer.

Shakespeare gave a philosophical interpretation of the problem of power in Macbeth. Full of deep symbolism is the scene where Lady Macbeth notices her bloody hands, from which traces of blood can no longer be erased. Here the ideological and artistic conception of the tragedy is exposed.

The blood on Lady Macbeth's fingers is the climax of the development of the main theme of the tragedy. Power comes at the cost of blood. The throne of Macbeth stands on the blood of the murdered king, and it cannot be washed off his conscience, as well as from the hands of Lady Macbeth. But this particular fact passes into a generalized solution of the problem of power. All power rests on the suffering of the people, Shakespeare wanted to say, referring to the social relations of his era. Knowing the historical experience of subsequent centuries, these words can be attributed to a proprietary society of all eras. This is the deep meaning of Shakespeare's tragedy. The path to power in bourgeois society is a bloody path. No wonder commentators and textual critics pointed out that the word "bloody" is used so many times in Macbeth. It, as it were, colors all the events taking place in the tragedy and creates its gloomy atmosphere. And although this tragedy ends with the victory of the forces of light, the triumph of the patriots who raised the people to the bloody despot, but the nature of the depiction of the era is such that it forces one to raise the question: will history not repeat itself? Will there be other Macbeths? Shakespeare evaluates the new bourgeois relations in such a way that there can be only one answer: no political changes guarantee that the country will not again be given over to the power of despotism.

The real theme of the tragedy is the theme of power, and not the theme of boundless, unbridled passions. The question of the nature of power is also essential in other works - in Hamlet, in King Lear, not to mention the chronicles. But there it is woven into a complex system of other socio-philosophical problems and was not posed as the cardinal theme of the era. In "Macbeth" the problem of power rises to its full height. It determines the development of the action in the tragedy.

The tragedy "Macbeth" is, perhaps, the only play by Shakespeare where evil is all-encompassing. Evil prevails over good. Good seems to be deprived of its all-conquering function, while evil loses its relativity and approaches the absolute. Evil in Shakespeare's tragedy is represented not only and not so much by dark forces, although they are also present in the play in the form of three witches. Evil gradually becomes all-consuming and absolute only when it settles in the soul of Macbeth. It corrodes his mind and soul and destroys his personality. The cause of his death is, first of all, this self-destruction and already secondarily the efforts of Malcolm, Macduff and Siward. Shakespeare examines the anatomy of evil in tragedy, showing various aspects of this phenomenon. Firstly, evil appears as a phenomenon that contradicts human nature, which reflects the views on the problem of good and evil of people of the Renaissance. Evil also appears in tragedy as a force that destroys the natural world order, the connection of man with God, the state and the family. Another property of evil, shown in Macbeth, as well as in Othello, is its ability to influence a person through deception. Thus, in Shakespeare's tragedy "Macbeth" evil is all-encompassing. It loses its relativity and, prevailing over the good - its mirror image, approaches the absolute. The mechanism of the impact of the forces of evil on people in Shakespeare's tragedies "Othello" and "Macbeth" is deceit. “Macbeth” this theme sounds in the main leitmotif of the tragedy: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. tragedies of gloomy, ominous images such as night and darkness, blood, images of nocturnal animals that are symbols of death (raven, owl), images of plants and repulsive animals associated with witchcraft and magic, as well as the presence in the play of visual and auditory images-effects creating an atmosphere of mystery, fear and death. The interaction of images of light and darkness, day and night, as well as natural images reflects the struggle between good and evil in the tragedy.

The problem of the Renaissance man or the problem of time in Hamlet. Conflict and the system of images. The Tragical Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, or simply Hamlet, is a five-act tragedy by William Shakespeare, one of his most famous plays, and one of the most famous plays in the world dramaturgy. Written in 1600-1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play at 4,042 lines and 29,551 words.

The tragedy is based on the legend of the Danish ruler named Amletus, recorded by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammatik in the third book of the Acts of the Danes and is devoted primarily to revenge - in it the protagonist seeks revenge for the death of his father. Some researchers associate the Latin name Amletus with the Icelandic word Amloði (amlóð|i m -a, -ar 1) poor fellow, unhappy; 2) a hack; 3) fool, blockhead.

According to researchers, the plot of the play was borrowed by Shakespeare from Thomas Kidd's play The Spanish Tragedy.

The most probable date for compositions and first production is 1600-01 (Globe Theatre, London). The first performer of the title role is Richard Burbage; Shakespeare played the shadow of Hamlet's father.

The tragedy Hamlet was written by Shakespeare during the Renaissance. The main idea of ​​the Renaissance was the idea of ​​humanism, humanity, that is, the value of every person, every human life in itself. The time of the Renaissance (Renaissance) first approved the idea that a person has the right to personal choice and personal free will. After all, only the will of God was previously recognized. Another very important idea of ​​the Renaissance was the belief in the great possibilities of the human mind.

Art and literature in the Renaissance come out from under the unlimited power of the church, its dogmas and censorship, and begin to reflect on the "eternal themes of being": on the mysteries of life and death. For the first time, the problem of choice arises: how to behave in certain situations, what is right from the point of view of the human mind and morality? After all, people are no longer satisfied with the ready-made answers of religion.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, became the literary hero of a new generation during the Renaissance. In his person, Shakespeare affirms the Renaissance ideal of a man of a powerful mind and strong will. Hamlet is able to single-handedly go out to fight evil. The Renaissance hero seeks to change the world, influence it, and feels the strength to do so. Before Shakespeare, there were no heroes of this magnitude in literature. Therefore, the story of Hamlet became a "breakthrough" in the ideological content of European literature.

The conflict in the tragedy "Hamlet" occurred between Hamlet and Claudius. The reason for this conflict was that Hamlet was superfluous in society, and Claudius wanted to get rid of him. Hamlet loved the truth too much, and the people around him were liars. This is one of the reasons why Claudius hated Hamlet. After Hamlet learned that Claudius killed his father, he decided to take revenge. The conflict between Hamlet and Claudius is so strong that it could only end in the death of one of them, but Hamlet is the only fair person, and power was on the side of Claudius.

But the desire for justice and grief for the dead father helped Hamlet to prevail. The cunning and deceitful king was killed.

The central image in Shakespeare's tragedy is the image of Hamlet. From the very beginning of the play, the main goal of Hamlet is clear - revenge for the brutal murder of his father. In accordance with medieval ideas, this is the duty of the prince, but Hamlet is a humanist, he is a man of the new time and his refined nature does not accept cruel revenge and violence.

The image of Ophelia evokes different emotions in different readers: from indignation through the meekness of the girl to sincere sympathy. But fate is also unfavorable to Ophelia: her father Polonius is on the side of Claudius, who is guilty of the death of Hamlet's father and is his desperate enemy. After the death of Hypnoigius, who was killed by Hamlet, a tragic break occurs in the girl's soul, and she falls ill. Almost all heroes fall into such a whirlwind: Laertes, Claudius (who, seeing his obvious “negativity”, is still tormented by pangs of conscience ...).

Each of the characters in the work of William Shakespeare is perceived by the reader ambiguously. Even the image of Hamlet can be perceived as a weak person (is it possible that in our modern world, partly brought up on comics and films of dubious quality, does not one who does not look like a superhero in the fight against evil seem weak?), or as a person of extraordinary intelligence and life wisdom . It is impossible to give an unambiguous assessment of Shakespeare's images, but I hope that their understanding is formed over time in the minds of everyone who has read this majestic work, and will help to give their own answer to Shakespeare's eternal "to be or not to be?".

dedicated to Helga

A. Introduction

Shakespeare worked in that difficult era when, along with bloody civil strife and interstate wars, another world flourished in Europe, parallel to this, bloody one. In that inner world of consciousness, it turns out, everything was different than in the outer one. However, both of these worlds in some strange way coexisted and even influenced each other. Could the great playwright pass by this circumstance, could he simply look at what excites the minds of his contemporary philosophers, with whose works he was known to be well acquainted? Of course, this could not be, and therefore it is quite natural to expect in his works his own reflections on the subject of the inner life of man. The tragedy "Hamlet" is perhaps the most striking confirmation of this. Below we will try to develop this thesis. Moreover, we will try to show that the theme related to the subjective essence of a human being was not only important for the playwright, but thinking it over as the work was being created created a framework for the entire narrative, so that Shakespeare's deep resulting thought turned out to be a kind of matrix for the plot.

I must say that Shakespeare did not really try to encrypt the main idea of ​​the work. So, its main character Hamlet is constantly thinking, and the mention of this has already become a commonplace. It would seem that there is nothing to go further, that here it is - the general idea of ​​the play. But no, the entire critical guard is trying with all its might to do everything not to accept this. An infinite variety of schemes are created to construct your understanding of what exactly the master was trying to say. Here we are drawing numerous historical analogies, and building a value scale in the form of an overly general and therefore unproductive assertion of the power of good over evil, and so on. To prove their vision, researchers use a variety of methods, while skipping the main one, the use of which for any work of art can only give an extremely clear answer to the question of its meaning. I mean the method of revealing the artistic structure, which Yu. Lotman called for in his writings. Surprisingly, no one has resorted to this unmistakable resource in the four hundred years of the existence of the tragedy, and all critical activity has blurred into secondary, although interesting in its own way, details. Well, there is nothing left but to try to fill the existing gap and finally show that Shakespeare incorporated his main idea of ​​the subjectivity of a human being into his work not so much in the form of Hamlet’s “random” statements to a certain extent, but mainly in the form of clearly well-thought-out structure of the work (we insist on this approach, despite the popular belief that in the era of Shakespeare there were no works structured according to the plot).

B. Research

Let's start. Due to the complexity of our task, we have only one way to get the correct result - to begin with, walk through the work, peering into each of its atomic components. Further, on the basis of the material obtained (in chapter C of our study), it will be possible to make final constructions.

Act One Study of Hamlet

scene one(the division into acts and scenes is arbitrary, since, as you know, the author did not have them).

The guards and Horatio (a friend of Prince Hamlet) discover the ghost of the deceased King Hamlet. After he goes into hiding, a brewing war is reported between Denmark and the young Norwegian prince Fortinbras, whose father once died in a duel at the hands of the same King Hamlet, whose spirit had just passed by. As a result of that duel, the possessions of Fortinbras' father - the lands of Denmark - passed to Hamlet, and now, after the death of the latter, young Fortinbras desired to return them back. After this information, the spirit appears again, they seem to want to seize it, but in vain - it leaves freely and unharmed.

Obviously, in the first scene, an understanding is given of the connection between the appearance among the people of the ghost of the deceased King Hamlet and a possible war.

Scene two. We distinguish two parts (plot) in it.

In the first part, we are presented with the current king Claudius, the brother of the deceased king Hamlet. Claudius received the crown because he married the widow-queen Gertrude, and now he revels in his royal position: he thinks to establish peace with Fortinbras through a letter to the king of Norway (Fortinbras's uncle), and Laertes, the son of the noble Polonius, graciously lets go to France (obviously , have fun), and Prince Hamlet (the son of the deceased king and his nephew) is trying to butter up with his benevolent disposition towards him. In general, here we have a king who is “knee-deep in the sea”, who does not see problems in their volumetric complexity, but considers them to be something like a joke that should be quickly solved so that they do not interfere with his fun with the queen. Everything about him is quick and light, everything seems to him airy and fleeting. So the queen sings along with him: “This is how the world was created: the living will die / And after life it will depart into eternity.”

In the second part of the scene, the main character is Jr. Hamlet. He, unlike the king and his mother, looks at the world differently: "It seems to me that they are unknown." It is focused not on appearance and transience, but on the stability of existence. But, as A. Anikst quite rightly believes, his tragedy lies in the fact that he, aimed at stability, sees the collapse of all foundations: his father died, and his mother betrayed the ideals of fidelity (read - sustainability) and a little over a month after the funeral she left for my husband's brother. In this, he, a student at the progressive University of Wittenberg, sees not only the collapse of the moral foundations in his personal life, but also in the entire Danish kingdom. And now, having lost his grounds (external and internal), Horatio (his student friend) and two officers are invited to see the ghost of Hamlet-St. It turns out that at least initially Hamlet Jr. and appears before us deprived of vital foundations (the foundation of his being), but he is dissatisfied with this, reflects on this matter (“Father ... in the eyes of my soul”) and therefore immediately, at his own request, is plunged into the abyss of the unclear, into the realm of the ghost realm, into the ghost realm. It is clear that one can wish to go into the obscure only if one aims to get out of one's dead end in life: in the current position (as if the second person in the state) one does not see oneself. Therefore, perhaps, in a ghostly fog, he will be able to find for himself the purpose of life and the meaning of existence? This is the life position of a dynamic character, so when they talk about the immutability of Hamlet throughout the play, it becomes somehow embarrassing for such, so to speak, "analysts".

In general, in the second scene we see that Prince Hamlet found himself in a situation of lack of solidity both in his environment (i.e. in the world) and in himself, and, taking advantage of the opportunity (the expected meeting with the ghost of his father), decided to leave this position of no-foundation, at least having entered the position of a pseudo-foundation, which is the situation of being with a phantom (mirage) of the former foundation.

Scene three.

Laertes tells his sister Ophelia that she should not deal with Hamlet: he does not belong to himself (read - does not own his foundation) and therefore love affairs with him are dangerous. In addition, the prince must confirm his love with deeds: “Let him now tell you that he loves / Your duty is to trust words no more, / How can he in this position / Justify them, and he will confirm them, / As the general voice of Denmark wants ". Further, their common father Polonius instructs Laertes on how to behave in France (ordinary worldly wisdom), and after - Ophelia, like Laertes, advises not to believe Hamlet (see Note 1). She takes the advice of her brother and father: "I obey."

Here Laertes and Polonius betray their disbelief in the decency of Hamlet, and they have reasons for that - he has no reason. However, it is important that Ofelia easily accepts their arguments (especially her brother), thereby demonstrating that she lives in someone else's mind. Hamlet's love is less valuable to her than the opinion of her brother and father. Although, if you think about it, she might not agree with them. Indeed, Laertes and Polonius are men who have a rational attitude to life, and in their eyes Hamlet has no grounds (the grounds for his strength as a statesman), since he is clearly dependent on the king. Hamlet is politically suspended, only the people can change something here, which Laertes reports with the words: "... he will confirm them, / As the general voice of Denmark wants." Ophelia, as a woman, evaluates (should evaluate) Hamlet not from a political (rational) point of view, but from a spiritual (irrational) one. Of course, the prince has lost the grounds for both external and internal existence, and this may give Ophelia a formal right to distrust him. But such an approach, again, is absolutely rational and should not be characteristic of a woman who carries an irrational principle in herself. Hamlet loves her, and she could see it with the eyes of her soul. However, she easily abandoned her (female, internal) point of view and accepted someone else's (male, external).

Scene four.

Hamlet and his friends (Horatio and officer Marcellus) prepared to meet the ghost of Hamlet-st. Time - "About twelve." Hamlet Jr. denounces the bad manners that reign in the kingdom, and immediately after this a ghost appears.

Here, the prince traces the connection between the spirit of denial of the existing state of affairs and the spirit of his father that has arisen: the denial that sits in Hamlet Jr. pushes him from his location in the existing into the unknown. In addition, in this scene, time is given not simply as a certain chronological factor, a factor of some interval between events, but is designated as the entity that, through events, begins to shift itself. In this context, time ceases to be the number of seconds, minutes, days, etc., but becomes the density of the event flow. The latter will become clearer after our analysis of subsequent events.

Scene five. In it, we distinguish two parts.

In the first part of the scene, Prince Hamlet is talking to the ghost of his father. He begins with the message: "The hour has come, / When I must the flames of hell / betray myself to torment." It is a clear sin. Further, he reports that he was killed (poisoned) by the current king, and once again regrets that he died with sins, without having time to repent (“Oh horror, horror, horror!”). Finally, he calls on the prince to take revenge ("do not indulge"). Hamlet Jr. vows revenge.

In this plot, a connection is made between the sin of King Hamlet and everything connected with his murder. There is a feeling that it was his death that laid the blame on him. Paradox? Hardly. Soon everything will become clear.

Further, it should be noted that time, having shown its being in the previous scene, here confirms its special, non-everyday, essence. Namely, from the fourth scene we know that the conversation of Hamlet Jr. with the ghost began at midnight or a little later. The conversation itself, as it is presented by Shakespeare, could take no more than 10-15 minutes (and even then with a stretch), but at the end of it the ghost leaves, because it began to get light: “It's time. Look, firefly." It usually dawns at 4-5 o'clock in the morning, well, maybe at 3-4 o'clock, taking into account the Danish white nights - this is if it was in the summer. If, as is often believed in Shakespeare studies, the event took place in the month of March, then dawn should come at all at 6-7 o'clock. In any case, several astronomical hours had passed since the beginning of the conversation, but they were able to squeeze into a few minutes of stage action. By the way, a similar situation took place in the first act, when the time interval between twelve o'clock at night and the cock's crowing included no more than ten minutes of conversation between the characters. This suggests that in the play, time in the flow of the characters' actions has its own structure and density. It is their own time, the time of their activity.

In the second part of the scene, the prince tells his friends that after talking with the ghost he will behave strangely so that they are not surprised at anything and remain silent. He takes an oath from them. Ghost several times with his call "Swear!" reminds you of your presence. He monitors what is happening, wherever the heroes move. All this means that the location of the heroes does not matter, and that everything that happens is related to them, and even more than that - everything happens in themselves, i.e. in man, in every man.

Analysis of the first act. As a result of the first act, we can say the following. The young prince Hamlet has lost his foundation, he does not have a sense of the value of his being: "I do not value my life as a pin." He does not accept this position of his, denies it and plunges into the search for some new stability. To do this, Shakespeare provides him with a meeting with a ghost who is afraid to burn in fiery hell for his sins and asks the prince not to leave everything as it is. In fact, he asks not only to take revenge, but to make the situation such that behind him, behind the ghost, there are no more life mistakes. And here we come to an important question: what exactly is the sin of King Hamlet?

Since, on closer examination, this sin is seen in the suddenness of his death through murder - on the one hand, and on the other - after this murder, a confusion of morals went all over Denmark, the fall of all solidity of existence, and even, as an extreme manifestation of this, the threat of war, it seems that that the sin of King Hamlet is that he failed to provide the Danish people with a sustainable future. Having received the kingdom through a random duel, he introduced the kinship of chance into the life of the state, deprived it of stability. He should have thought about creating a mechanism for the succession of power, but did nothing for this. And now a new king sits on the throne, the legitimacy of which is debatable, the consequence of which are the claims of the young Fortinbras. Sin of Hamlet-v. is the growing chaos, and Hamlet Jr., in order to remove this sin, must stabilize the situation, obviously, through the seizure of power: in this case, power will have the property of family continuity, which in the eyes of the public of Europe at that time meant its legitimacy, stability, reliability . Power was supposed to be passed from father to son - this is exactly the ideal order of its succession was adopted in those days. Sudden murder of Hamlet and the interception of the crown by his brother made the situation pseudo-legitimate: it is as if a member of the family (genus) of Hamlet rules, but not that one. Hamlet Jr. it is necessary to reveal this deceit, and to open it openly, so that it becomes clear to everyone, and so that in the end his coming to the throne is accepted by everyone as natural, and therefore fair. Legitimacy, justice of power - such is the task of Prince Hamlet, which emerges at the end of the first act. In the case of its implementation, everything around will stabilize, get its foundation. As V. Kantor rightly believes, “Hamlet sets himself the task not of revenge, but of correcting the world ...”. A. Anikst expresses himself in the same vein: “Hamlet… elevates the private task of personal revenge to the stage when it outgrows narrow limits, becoming a noble deed of affirming the highest morality” (p. 85).

But this is only the first part of the matter. The second part is related to the fact that the movement of Hamlet Jr. to power is most closely correlated with his need to obtain an internal basis for his existence. Actually, he initially denied the groundlessness of all parts of the world - both the one inside him and the one outside. Therefore, the foundations must also receive both the inner world and the outer one. It can even be said that for him both these worlds are not separated by an impenetrable abyss, but are different sides of one whole, and differ relatively, like the right and the left. Consequently, the basis for them will be the same, but only, perhaps, differently expressed.

But where does this idea of ​​a single world of internal and external come from, more precisely, where and how is this shown in the play? This is shown through the phenomena of time and space - in scenes 4 and 5. Indeed, after Hamlet Jr. decided to get out of the deplorable state of total groundlessness, i.e. after he decided to act, the time of the course of external events (a conversation with a ghost) quite clearly became what it is for internal reflection in a situation of extremely heightened world perception, i.e. external time, as well as internal time (internally perceived), began to flow equally quickly, since this was required by the strongest tension of the prince's spirit. And since the situation was exactly the same at the beginning of the play, where the theme of growing chaos was clearly connected with the murder of Hamlet Sr., and where we see the characters’ feelings about a possible brewing war, it turns out that in the play the internal tension of the characters always accelerates not only their internally perceived time, but also external time, which in ordinary life, outside the play, does not depend on subjective moments. Thus, the fact that external time has become a function of the circumstances of the heroes' inner life, and in particular Hamlet, is proof of the unity of the world - internal and external - within the framework of the vision of the poetics of tragedy.

A similar proof is the situation with space. Well, in fact, the activities of Hamlet Jr. in the fifth scene, it turns out to be soldered into the place of residence next to the ghost, and if you free yourself from unnecessary mysticism, then - next to and even together with the memory of a ghost. When he reminds himself with the exclamation “Swear!”, he thereby asserts that the inner space of his stay in the memory of the prince does not differ from the outer space in which the prince himself resides.

However, our assertion that the ghost reminds of itself in the mind of Hamlet Jr., and not elsewhere, requires explanation. The fact is that all the appeals of the spirit “Swear!”, apparently, are heard only by the prince, and the rest of the heroes present here nearby do not hear this, because they keep deathly silence on this matter. After all, we know from previous scenes that when they actually saw a ghost, they did not hide their feelings, and spoke quite frankly. But that was before. Here they are silent. This clearly indicates that they do not hear the voice of the ghost, but only Hamlet Jr. hears and therefore reacts to it.

However, if the ghost refers only to the consciousness (in memory, in the mind) of Hamlet, then why does he use the plural “Swear”, and not the singular “Swear”, thereby referring to his friends? Moreover, by the very meaning of the requirement of the oath, it does not refer to the prince, who does not need to swear to himself in silence, but to his friends. Everything is correct! The ghost addresses through the consciousness of Hamlet to his companions, since Shakespeare thereby wants to speak about a single space penetrating the soul of the protagonist and the entire outside world, so that the voice in the mind of Hamlet must in fact be accepted in the outside world, while the oath must be voiced. She was voiced and taken for granted. Hamlet's friends did not hear the otherworldly voice, but carried out his command (of course, directly responding not to the demand of the ghost, but to the request of the prince).

However, Horatio nevertheless exclaimed: “O day and night! These are miracles!” At first glance, this refers to the voice of a ghost. But why, then, did he remain silent earlier, when before that the voice made itself felt three times, and spoke only after Hamlet's remark “You, old mole! How fast are you underground! Already dug up? Let's change the place? To understand this, it is enough to imagine the events from the point of view of Horatio: Hamlet asks him and Marcellus not to talk about the meeting with the ghost, they willingly promise, but then Hamlet begins to behave strangely, rushes from place to place and repeats the request for an oath. Of course, if Hamlet's comrades heard a voice from under the ground, then the prince's throwing would be clear to them. But we found that the adoption of such a point of view (generally accepted) leads to the inexplicability of the silence of Horatio and Marcellus when the voice itself sounded. If we accept our version that they did not hear the voice, and that only Hamlet heard it in his mind, then his throwing from side to side and numerous repetitions of the request for an oath look more than strange for them, so it would be quite natural to consider the exclamation Horatio "That's so miracles!" pertaining to this all of a sudden strange behavior of the prince for an external observer.

In addition, Horatio's words may have another subtext. It is possible that Shakespeare here addresses the audience of the play in this way, meaning that everything that happened in scenes 4 and 5, i.e. at night and at dawn, very wonderful. What is this wonder? On behalf of Hamlet, there is an explanation: “Horace, there are a lot of things in the world, / That your philosophy has never dreamed of.” It turns out that the miraculous thing that happened is the birth of a new philosophy, different from the one that was accepted earlier, and which was taught to students Hamlet and Horatio. Hamlet decided to break out of the shackles of previous ideas, since they did not allow him to live (have a basis) in this world, and form a system of new ones, in which the basis of human consciousness and the whole world is one. After all, before Hamlet, in the era of the worldview of Christian theologians, consciousness (the inner world) was not considered in the system of philosophical reflections as something independent. Undoubtedly, the world and man even then possessed a single foundation - God. However, a person was taken either as an object - and then he considered himself as if from the outside, without peering into his own soul and not allowing himself to examine it. on a par with the whole world, or as a subject - and then the subjective mind, although it was exceptionally important (so important that it often interrupted even the authority of the church), but was separated from the world, standing apart from it as something separate, accidentally incorporated into him, unequal to him. Hamlet, on the other hand, dared to equate the soul (mind) and the world in importance, as a result of which the outlines of a new philosophy began to be drawn in him, which the former sages "did not even dream of." Here one can clearly see the influence of new ideas on Shakespeare (in the form protest in relation to Catholic Christianity, by the end of the 16th century. corrupted and largely lost the moral spirit of Holy Scripture), which were saturated with the philosophical treatises of many of his contemporaries, and which were used by many rulers, including the rulers of the then England, to ensure their political independence. At the same time, against the background of such ideas, the theme of the relationship between the importance of reason and authority is imperceptibly introduced into the play. This theme, long-standing in scholastic literature (see the work of V. Solovyov on this matter), by the time of Shakespeare's life, was already represented by the works of many theological philosophers who asserted the primacy of reason over church authority (starting with John Erigena and so on). In the play we will see that Shakespeare clearly takes up this line, transforming it into a dispute between the mind of man and the authority of the state, (or monarch), at the end of the work with a clear preference towards reason: the monarch can act in his own, selfish interests, and the task of the mind is to discover it.

Thus, in the first act, Hamlet affirms the basis of his new philosophy, which lies in the fact that he puts his consciousness on a par with the world (in political terms, on a par with the opinion of the authorities), and in such a way that the space turns out to be the same for consciousness and for external world, and the time of the active consciousness determines the flow of time in the human environment. And this he does against the backdrop of the absolute rejection of Laertes, Polonius and Ophelia of his spiritual moments, when they see in him only a political figure. In fact, this means their adherence to the old philosophical principles. In the future, this will turn out to be a disaster for them.

Act of the second study of Hamlet

Scene one.

Polonius instructs his servant Reynaldo to convey the letter to Laertes who left for France, and at the same time to find out (“Sniff out”) about his life. At the same time, during instructions, he goes astray, and switches from a poetic style to a prose one. After that, Ophelia appears and informs her father about Hamlet's strange behavior against the background of his love for her.

The meaning of all these events can be the following. The main point in Polonius's instructions to Reynaldo seems to be that he goes astray. This happens when he is about to sum up his speech: “And then, then, then, then ...” and then his surprised muttering (in prose) goes on: “What did I want to say? ... Where did I stop ? This achieves the effect of zeroing out all that thoughtfulness that Polonius was winding up, clearly admiring himself and his intelligence. "Cleverness" after a hesitation burst, and only the former self-admiration of the hero remained the dry residue. In fact, the stupidity of this nobleman comes through here, which he tries to cover up with standard philosophizing, which is very characteristic of people of his warehouse - representatives of behind-the-scenes intrigues who are used to doing everything secretly. All the instructions of Polonius to his servant (however, like Laertes in the 3rd scene of the first act) are pure rules of the gray cardinal, self-confident, but not exposing himself; operating covertly rather than openly. This immediately implies the meaning of the figure of Polonius in the play - it is a symbol of behind the scenes, undercover intrigues, implicit actions.

And Hamlet enters this sphere of intrigue. He must act in it, and therefore, in order to hide his aspirations from prying eyes, he puts on appropriate clothes - clothes of play and pretense - so as not to differ from the surrounding background. Moreover, neither Ophelia nor Polonius know that he is pretending (we remember that he decided to play his oddities after meeting with the ghost of his father, i.e. after he decided to move towards legitimate authorities), and are inclined to attribute everything to his mental disorder, which happened to him after, at the instigation of his brother and father, Ophelia rejected his love. It turns out that Hamlet's mimicry was a success, he clearly outplayed the inveterate intriguer Polonius, and his newly created philosophy, which accepts the human soul, immediately surpassed the old philosophy, which did not take it seriously. By the way, Polonius immediately noticed this: he realized that he was “too smart” with a disregard for the emotional experiences of the prince, but he himself could not do anything here, and went to the king for advice.

In addition, in the story of Ophelia about the arrival of Hamlet to her, it is clear that our hero began to observe the world in a completely different way than before: “He studied me point-blank for a long time.” On the one hand, this is due to his game, and on the other hand, it is an indication that he began to become different in essence, as a result of which he began to look at those around him with new eyes, i.e. as something new, with interest and in "emphasis".

Scene two. We have six parts in it.

In the first part, the king instructs Hamlet's school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what happened to the prince, what caused his "transformations": "To put it differently, it's unrecognizable / He is internally and externally ...".

Here the king cocks the spring of undercover games and secret inquiries under the plausible pretext of wanting to heal Hamlet: "And do we have a cure for it (the secret of the prince - S.T.)." However, the very fact that the king initially calls a certain “mystery” the cause of the illness, and that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are charged with “force” to draw the prince into their society, speaks of the king’s disbelief in Hamlet’s accidental illness. Apparently, the king suspects him of something dangerous to himself, but since he does not yet have direct evidence to think so, he speaks more in hints than directly. However, everything is clear: this killer and throne grabber is not sure of the stability of his position, he is afraid of being discovered and therefore he gives the task to two of his subordinates to “try out” what the prince has in mind. In addition, it is clear from this that the king has no reason to exist in the same way as the main character. However, unlike the latter, our autocrat does not want to change anything, he is an adherent of existence without a foundation, existence as a case, outside the context of the global patterns of this world.

In the second part, Polonius appears and says, firstly, that "The ambassadors are safe, sovereign, / They returned from Norway", i.e. that the peace initiative of the king was a success, and there will be no war with the young Fortinbras, and secondly, that he "attacked the root of Hamlet's nonsense."

After the announcement of the peace, the king strengthened his opinion that just like that, effortlessly, through a simple letter, peace and order can be ensured, and that his mood for fun and an easy attitude to life is fully justified. He easily, through an insidious murder, got power, and now he thinks to rule the country with the same ease. So he invites the ambassador who returned with good news to the fun: “And in the evening, welcome to the feast.” Our king does not have a life full of difficult tasks, but a continuous holiday. The same applies to life and Polonius: "This is the case (with the war - T.S.) in the hat." Usually this kind of phrases are thrown by businessmen after they cook up their petty deeds. An attitude to an event as important as war should be different, and words for a satisfactory attitude to the peace achieved should also be chosen worthy. The lack of seriousness in the words of the king and Polonius speaks, firstly, of their ideological similarity (however, this is already clear), and secondly, of their unwillingness to meet the new Hamlet, whose attitude to the stability of existence is formed not simply in the form random opinion, but in the form of a deeply thought-out position.

And now, being in such a complacent, relaxed state, Polonius, the king, and, while the queen sharing their worldview, move on to the question of Hamlet's oddities (the third part of the scene). Polonius proceeds, and under the guise of scholastic-figurative arrogance, in which logic exists not to describe life, but for itself, he carries uniform boring nonsense, for example: “... Your son has gone mad. / Crazy, I said, because he is crazy / And there is a person who has gone crazy, ”or:“ Let's say he is crazy. It is necessary / To find the cause of this effect, / Or a defect, for the effect itself / Due to the cause is defective. / And what is needed is the need. / What follows? / I have a daughter, because the daughter is mine. / This is what my daughter gave me, out of obedience. / Judge and listen, I will read. He could simply say: I have a daughter, she had an amorous relationship with Hamlet, and so on. But he is not interested in saying it simply and clearly. With all his behavior, he demonstrates his adherence to the old, scholastic philosophy. However, unlike the geniuses of Duns Scotus, Anselm of Canterbury or Thomas Aquinas, Polonius' verbiage only in form resembles the scholastic elegance of the mind, but in reality it is empty, pseudo-intelligent, so that even the queen - so far his ally - cannot stand it, and in the middle of it chatter inserts: "Delney, but more artless." Thus, the author of the tragedy not only mocks scholasticism, as it is rightly believed in Shakespearean studies, but also puts an equal sign between philosophizing for the sake of philosophizing and outright stupidity, and through this brings the scholastic theme in the play to a systemic level, without paying attention to which it is impossible to completely understand the overall intent of the work.

Finally, Polonius reads Hamlet's letter to Ophelia, and, unlike the previous text of the play, he reads not in verse, but in prose, and right there, just starting, he goes astray - exactly as it happened to him in the previous scene, when he instructed his servant Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in France. And just as then this inconsistency blew away all his pretense, artificial and lifeless "cleverness", so the same thing happens here: well, he is not a philosopher, you know, not a philosopher. His thinking is absolutely not vital, and therefore he rejects everything normal, human in confusion. Here is the word from the letter of Hamlet "beloved", addressed to Ophelia, he does not accept: beaten, you see. Well, of course, we have a high mind, and a simple human word is not for him. Please give him on a silver platter a semblance of the science that he himself has just given out. A little further on, he reads a very remarkable quatrain, on which we will dwell. Recall that this is Hamlet addressing Ophelia:

"Don't trust daylight
Don't trust the star of the night
Do not believe that the truth is somewhere
But believe my love."

What is said here? The first line calls not to believe in obvious things (we associate daylight with the complete clarity of all things), i.e. not to believe what Ophelia's eyes see. In fact, here Hamlet tells her that his illness, which is so evident to everyone, is not real. In the next line, it is called not to believe in weak pointers (star) in the darkness of the night, i.e. - do not believe hints about the unclear essence of the matter. What business can be with young people? It is clear that this is either love or Hamlet's illness. Love will be directly spoken of in the fourth line, so here again we are talking about the prince's madness, but in a different vein - in the vein of some courtiers' opinions about its cause. Hamlet seems to be saying: all possible guesses about my strange behavior are obviously wrong. This means that the prince is very confident in the secrecy of his move. Further: "Do not believe that the truth is somewhere," i.e. somewhere, not here. In other words, the whole true reason for his changes is here in the kingdom. Finally, "But believe my love." Everything is clear here: the prince opens his heart and confesses his love. "What more?" Pushkin would say. In general, it turns out that Hamlet quite fully told Ophelia (albeit in the form of an encryption) about his situation, trying, especially through a direct declaration of love, to bring his beloved to spiritual conjugation with himself, therefore, to get an ally in her person and in terms of that so that she begins to share common worldview values ​​with him (accepting the soul as an equal part with this, the outside world), and in terms of political struggle to assert the stability of the state's existence (see Note 2).

Ophelia did not understand the meaning of the letter (she is generally stupid at first), moreover, she betrayed the very spirit of cordiality that dominates in it, because she gave it to her puppeteer father (does a decent girl give amorous letters to someone like that, easily? ).

After the poetic form, Hamlet's letter turns into prose. The main thing here is that in general the letter is built on the principle of prose-poetry-prose. The middle appeal is framed by ordinary human feelings. Our hero is not only smart and creates a new philosophy, but he is also human. Actually, this is his philosophy - in the acceptance of the human soul as equivalent to the world.

Neither Polonius nor the royal couple understood any such nuances in the letter, and taking into account the subsequent explanation of Polonius that he forbade his daughter to communicate with the prince because of his high nobility, they accepted Hamlet's strange behavior as a result of his unrequited love for Ophelia.

The fourth part of the scene is the conversation between Polonius and Hamlet, which is rendered in prose. The prose in the play always (with the exception of the Prince's letter to Ophelia, which we have just analyzed) indicates the presence of some kind of tension in comparison with the main verse text. The tension in this case is due to the fact that two pretenders came together. Odin, Polonius, is an old courtier, “gray eminence”, constantly playing games to promote small, momentary affairs, outside the context of a global and long-term strategy. The other, Hamlet, is a young, I'm not afraid of the word, patriot of his country, for its good he has ascended the dangerous path of political struggle for power and therefore is forced to pretend to be crazy.

Polonius was the first to ask the hidden question. We can say that he attacked: "Do you know me, my lord?". If we take this literally, then one may get the impression that the old courtier has lost all memory, and hence his mind, because Hamlet grew up in a royal family and who better than him to know everyone who is somehow close to the court, especially since he loves his daughter Ophelia. But the implication here can be twofold. Firstly, Polonius deliberately belittles his importance so that Hamlet, having lost his vigilance, opens up before him. And secondly, the question can be understood simultaneously in the opposite way, as “Do you know my real strength, what ideology is behind me, and do you overestimate your strengths, trying to create an alternative to the existing state of affairs?”. He replies: “Excellent,” and immediately attacks himself: “You are a fish merchant.” The conversation, seemingly harmless, actually turns out to be a serious duel. In fact, the “fish merchant” for a noble nobleman is the most insulting thing. Those. to the question of Polonius, “Do you know my strength,” Hamlet actually answers, “You have no strength, you are nobody, a petty businessman.”

Note that A. Barkov interprets the phrase "fish merchant" as "pimp", finding certain lexical and historical grounds for this. Perhaps this is true, but it still suggests that Hamlet places Polonius very low, does not see real strength in him, although he is the father of his beloved. However, "pimp", if taken literally, is hardly suitable for Polonius, simply because this low business does not correspond to his status as a secret chancellor. And even from a young age, at the start of his career, he, in principle, could not engage in brothels, since this business would impose such a stigma on him that would forever close his entrance to high spheres of influence. And it's not that there was no prostitution in Shakespeare's time, or that the then rulers had strict moral principles. Of course, debauchery was always and everywhere, but the power in those days rested not only on the power of arms, but also on the myth of its special honor. The word of honor of a nobleman was stronger than a contract certified by a lawyer. And now, if frankness, acceptable for sailors and fishermen, creeps into the system of this myth, then the myth itself, and hence the power, is instantly destroyed. Kings and princes (like Polonius, who "oh, how he suffered from love") could easily afford to use the services of pimps, but they were never brought closer to themselves, since this was disastrously dangerous for their position. Therefore, the translation "fish merchant" as "pimp", if it can be accepted, is not in the literal sense, but in the sense of a trader in human souls. This approach much better reflects the very essence of the whole play, which is, by and large, about the human soul. Polonius does not put it in anything and is quite ready, for the sake of selfish interests, to sell anyone who stands in his way. Hamlet throws this accusation in his eyes, and he can only, how weakly deny: "No, what are you, my lord."

After several interesting phrases, which we will omit due to their side relationship to the general line of our reasoning, Hamlet advises Polonius not to let his daughter (i.e. Ophelia) into the sun: “It is good to conceive, but not for your daughter. Don't yawn, buddy." It is clear that the sun means the king, the royal court, etc. Hamlet simply fights for his beloved, does not want her to receive ideological influence from a frivolous king. He continues the work that he began in his letter to Ophelia. She is like an empty vessel, she will have what is placed in her. Hamlet sees this and tries with all his might to prevent it from being filled with lifeless morality (see Note 3).

Hamlet's efforts are transparent, but not for Polonius. For him, the words of the prince are closed, just as a new philosophy is closed to those who are accustomed to the old one (or to whom it is more beneficial). However, he does not let up, does not lose his desire to understand what lies in the madness of the prince, and again attacks in a verbal duel: “What are you reading, my lord?”, Or, simply put, “What thoughts do you cling to, what is your philosophy?". He calmly replies: "Words, words, words." Here one can recall his oath to avenge his father's death in the fifth scene of the first act: "I will erase all signs / Sensitivity, all words from books from the memorial plaque ... I will write the whole book of the brain / Without a low mixture." Obviously, here and there we are talking about the same thing - he must erase from his "brain" everything that interferes with life, and, on the contrary, fill his "brain" with that purity ("without a low mixture"), which fully corresponds to high ideals with which he was fully nourished in Wittenberg.

Further, after explaining his attitude to the book with which he was met by Polonius, he says to him: “for you yourself, gracious sovereign, will someday grow old like me, if, like a cancer, you back away.” Here, apparently, Hamlet does not mean physical old age, to which his interlocutor O greater intimacy than himself, and old age in the sense of a certain numbness of consciousness from problems that have piled on. Hamlet, having recently received a huge stream of experiences, makes incredible intellectual efforts to overcome the difficulties that have piled up, and therefore is in a certain constraint of his behavior: he is limited by the game into which he was forced to plunge unexpectedly. This abruptly distanced him from the blissful stay in the university paradise with its humanitarian delights and a sense of endless youth, and, as it were, aged him. However, not even “as if”, but naturally aged, because, as follows from the first act, the inner work of his soul directly accelerates the flow of physical time in which the flesh lives. Therefore, the mature Hamlet suddenly calls on Polonius: so that an incredible mass of problems would not attack him at once, and would not make him old at once - do not back away, like a cancer, from problems, do not avoid them, do not look for pseudo-solutions, as happened with the military problem, but really solve them with a long-term perspective.

In addition, it is necessary to single out one more, parallel, subtext of Hamlet's words. Namely, one can recall how, in the previous act, Ophelia told Polonius that the prince visited her in a very strange way, examined her, and then left, "backing away." Perhaps Hamlet here recalls that incident, or rather, his state at that moment - the state of observing the world with new eyes. “Backing back” is a critique of the position of simple, passive observation, which is important at first, but only as a momentary moment. Simple observation (in relation to Polonius - peeping) is not enough. All this now cannot satisfy the prince, who, in order to solve all problems, needs the position of an active figure.

In general, we can say that the prince preaches his ideological position and seeks to win over Polonius to his side. Moreover, with this gentleman behind the scenes, he speaks in his own language - the language of hints and halftones. And Polonius, it seems, begins to understand what the matter is, he begins to see in Hamlet not a boy, but a husband: "If this is madness, then it is consistent in its own way." At the same time, he clearly does not intend to go over to the side of the prince and quickly retreats. As a result, Hamlet was left with a low opinion of his interlocutor: “Oh, those insufferable old fools!”, who not only wasted time asking questions, but in the end he himself was frightened of the conversation, and ran away with his tail between his legs.

In the fifth part of the second scene, Hamlet's conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is given. These inseparable two act and think in exactly the same way. In general, the sameness, repetition in a play often means the absence of a living thought. For example, in the previous action, Hamlet, answering another question from Polonius about the book he is reading (obviously taken from his university era), says: “Words, words, words”, referring to the purely theoretical nature of what was written, without entering into reality. hence the absence of vital thought. Similarly, the same, repeating each other, Ronencrantz and Guildenstern, by definition, are adherents of stupidity, an old, obsolete, worldview paradigm, and, therefore, they are supporters of its political defense - the king.

And in fact, Hamlet, not having received Polonius as a political ally, at first was delighted with his old school friends in the hope that, perhaps, they could help him in something. He welcomes them cordially, and reveals himself a little to them, expressing his dissatisfaction with the order in the country: "Denmark is a prison." But they do not accept such a turn of affairs: "We do not agree so, prince." That's it, the dividing line has been drawn, the positions have been clarified, and it is only necessary to prove one's case. Twins: "Well, it's your ambition that makes it a prison: it's too small for your spirit." They remember the king's order to find out from the prince secret, dangerous for him (the king) thoughts, i.e. thoughts of seizing power, and act head-on, trying to push the interlocutor to frankness. Like, you, Hamlet, are great, you have great ambitions, so tell us about them. But he does not fall into such primitive traps, and answers: “Oh my God, I could close myself in a nutshell and consider myself the king of infinite space, if I didn’t have bad dreams” (translated by M. Lozinsky), i.e. he says that he personally does not need anything, no power, that he could be happy being in his inner world, if it were not for worries about chaos and groundlessness in the world (“if I didn’t have bad dreams”). The twins, on the other hand, insist: “And these dreams are the essence of ambition,” and then, attention, they switch to the language a la scholastic philosophy, to which they belong ideologically: “For the very essence of an ambitious person is just a shadow of a dream.” They hope that the way they talk about the problem, clouding their brains through excessively abstract images, will give them the opportunity to win the argument and convince Hamlet that they are right, i.e. that the existing worldview system makes it possible to live in this world, respond to it and think with dignity. But this is a cheap move: Hamlet therefore denies the existing system of thought, because he sees in himself the strength to overcome it, since he has completely studied it and knows it better than any of its adherents. Therefore, he easily picks up the proposed level of discussion, and this is what comes out of it:

Hamlet: And the dream itself is but a shadow.
Rosencrantz: That's right, and I find ambition so airy and light in its own way that it's nothing more than the shadow of a shadow.
Hamlet: Then our beggars are bodies, and our monarchs and pompous heroes are the shadows of the beggars. (translated by M. Lozinsky)

The twins are knocked over on the shoulder blades! Hamlet defeated them with their own weapons, which speaks doubly against their position, and therefore against the position of all supporters of the old system of thought, in which there are no grounds for man; politically - against the king.

After this verbal skirmish, it is quite clear to Hamlet what these two dummies are. A few more words, and he will state it directly (“You have been sent for”) - he realized that they were sent by the king to sniff out his plans. Should he be afraid of this? Is it necessary for him, who defeated both Polonius and these two, who already knows the power of the influence of his word, i.e. right, to hide the basis of changes in yourself? No, he no longer intends to hide this - as he did before - especially since he had the imprudence to open up a little (“Denmark is a prison”). He walks with his visor ajar and says that he sees no reason for this world. And since in any state the basis for life is power, in fact, he thereby declares his dissatisfaction with the existing power situation, in which the king fails to ensure the stability and reliability of the foundations of society. Moreover, after all, everyone knows that he, the king, by his hasty marriage to his brother's wife, was the first to violate the previously unshakable moral norms of behavior. Therefore, Hamlet, speaking of his lack of enthusiasm for the current state of affairs, speaks of the need to change the government to one that could give people ideals. Of course, he does not speak about it directly (his visor is not completely open), but he makes it known, so that "those who have ears, let them hear." He no longer disguises himself as before, and is quite confident in his abilities - that's what is important here.

The sixth part of the second scene is a practical preparation for unfolding the force of Hamlet's compressed spring. Here he meets with wandering artists who came to the castle to show performances and asks them to read a monologue from an ancient Roman tragedy. Hamlet, after a conversation with them, returns to poetic speech. Prior to this, starting with the conversation with Polonius, everything was conveyed in prose, as the backstage mood demanded. At the end of the scene, the tension began to subside, and the prince, when he was finally alone with himself, was able to relax. In public, it was impossible to completely relax: Polonius approached and the twins spoiled everything. The atmosphere was tense, although outwardly it was not noticeable, for example:

Polonius: Come, gentlemen.

Hamlet: Follow him, friends. Tomorrow we have a performance.

Such is, in appearance, a wonderful idyll. But behind it - a lot of experiences from the recent confrontation.

However, the main thing in this part of the scene is, firstly, the unity of Hamlet with the actors, i.e. with a cultural stratum of the people that forms public opinion (“It’s better for you to have a bad inscription on the tomb than a bad review of them during their lifetime”), and secondly, Hamlet’s inciting this part of the people to remove from their memory such scenes that describe horrors rulers (Pyrrhus), seizing power by force and falsehood. As a result, although Hamlet did not find support in power circles, he managed to find it among the people: the first actor, while reading a monologue, entered into such an experience that even Polonius noticed it. In addition, the actors agreed to play a play based on the Prince's script.

Finally, the following should be noted. Left alone, Hamlet says that “the actor is a visitor” “So he subordinated his consciousness to a dream, / That blood comes off his cheeks, his eyes / Tears cloud, his voice freezes, / And his face says with every fold, / How he lives ...”, i.e. e. he says that the dream changes the whole of human nature. In the following lines, he immediately relates this to himself. In other words, he means the following: I am quite ripe for the fight, my dream has changed me, so I have nothing to be afraid of and I have to go into battle, i.e. be active. Negative should be replaced with affirmation. But in order for this change to take place correctly, grounds are needed that he will receive through his active action-attack: “I will instruct the actors / To play a thing in front of my uncle according to the model / of Father's death. I will follow my uncle, - / Will he take it for a living. If so, / I know what to do.” Hamlet prepared to jump.

Analysis of the second act. Thus, according to the second act, we can say that in it Hamlet is busy looking for allies. In circles close to power, he does not find understanding, because there he is not able to understand anything due to his adherence to the old worldview system, which does not really accept the inner world of a person, which means that he does not see real power in the mind. As a result, consciousness takes revenge on them and does not unfold in them in full power, making them simply stupid, constantly losing in intellectual disputes with Hamlet. Ophelia remains the only hope among the wealth and nobility of our prince. He fights for her both in a letter to her and in a conversation with her father Polonius.

The real acquisition of Hamlet in this act was his alliance with the people in the person of itinerant actors. Having received support from them, he nevertheless decided to take his first step, not just in finding out who is who in his environment, but on removing all barriers to generating his activity, i.e. to obtain evidence of the king's guilt in the death of his father, and as a result - his complete guilt in the existing chaos and lack of foundation in the world.

Obviously, the appearance of actors and their subsequent performance was not an accident associated with the tradition of Shakespeare's time to insert performances within a performance. That is, of course, Shakespeare followed such a tradition, but this move does not occur from scratch, but as a result of the fact that Hamlet won in a verbal duel between Polonius and the twins, using their own language- the language of scholastic studies. Therefore, it is quite natural for him to use the same technique in relation to the king, and offer him as a bait something for which he shows a weakness - an entertainment action, a performance. The fact that this performance will not turn into a fun show at all will become clear in due time, but Hamlet set up such nets for the king, into which he simply could not help but please because of his character, more precisely, because of his corresponding worldview mood.

Finally, in the second act, the essence of Hamlet is clearly manifested: he is active. This should not be confused with the haste many critics of the play expect from him. Not finding it (haste), they themselves are in a hurry to declare the main character either a coward or someone else, not understanding at the same time what kind of figure is in front of them. Hamlet is pure activity itself. Activity, unlike simple spontaneity, thinks over all its acts. Hamlet moves towards fulfilling his task of creating the foundation of the world. Vengeance is far from the most important line in the list of his tasks. Moreover, as will become clear from our further analysis, its entire movement is similar both in form and content to the construction of a philosophical system, which is not only conclusions (results), but also the very process of achieving them. It would be extremely strange to expect only final maxims from a philosopher. Similarly, it is strange to expect instantaneous action from Hamlet to carry out his mission.

Act 3 of Hamlet's study

First scene. We distinguish two parts in it.

In the first part, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report to the king that they failed to find out from Hamlet the reason for his altered state, although they noticed something was wrong: "He escapes with the cunning of a madman." According to them, Hamlet is cunning. However, they reassured the king, saying that he loves entertainment, ordered the visiting actors to play a performance and invites the “August couple” to it. For the king, Hamlet's love of performances is a sign of his belonging to the worldview codenamed "fun". And if so, then he has nothing to be afraid of a coup and it is quite possible to respond to the invitation. This means that he took the bait. A little more, and the hook of exposure will plunge into him with the irreversibility of death.

In the second part of the scene, the authorities (the king, queen, Polonius and Ophelia) themselves tried, once again, to catch Hamlet in their snares. She does not know that she is already practically doomed, and initiates her imaginary activity. Ophelia turned out to be the decoy duck here - to her shame and to her death, she agrees to this treacherous role of hers in relation to the one who recently opened her heart to her. She had to do what Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern failed to do - find out the cause of the prince's illness. This whole camarilla cannot possibly accept that such an understanding is beyond them: after all, the strangeness of Hamlet can be represented in such a way that he left their system of views, but has not yet completely developed a new system. As a result, during almost the entire tragedy, he is "suspended" between the old and the new, having no reliable home - neither here nor there. To understand such a state, they themselves need to break out of the shackles of the former, and find themselves in an airless, supportless position. But they do not want this (after the second act, this is clear), but they are trying to break through the wall of misunderstanding with their foreheads. This once again speaks against their mental abilities, i.e. - against their worldview and philosophical position, which serves them as an unsuitable tool in the analysis of the whole situation.

But before they use the bait - Ophelia, we will hear Hamlet's central monologue in the whole play, his famous "To be or not to be ...". In it, he says that people live and are forced to fight, because they do not know what is on the other side of life, moreover, they are afraid of this unknown. The very thought of the possibility of getting there, to an unknown country, makes one “grunt under the burden of life,” so it turns out that “It is better to put up with a familiar evil, / Than to strive to escape to an unfamiliar one. / So thought turns us all into cowards. Hamlet, analyzing his failure to recruit Polonius and the twins, considers their fear of the unknown to be the cause of everything: the thought of the future, falling into the pit of nothingness, makes the weak-willed numb and turns them into cowards, unable to move forward. But, on the other hand, thought as such is always a kind of anticipation, a kind of peering beyond the edge, an attempt to see the invisible. Therefore, one who has refused to move forward is in principle incapable of thinking. Regarding Polonius, Hamlet has already spoken in this spirit (“Oh, those unbearable old fools”), but here he sums up the situation, concludes that he is on his way only with smart people capable of independent, forward-thinking thinking. Hamlet himself is not afraid of novelty, just as he is not afraid of death, and treats with sarcasm those who “thought turns into cowards.” He dotted all the i's, he just had to go forward. As A. Anikst correctly notes, to his question “To be or not to be”, he himself answers: it should be, i.e. to be in it, in being, to be, because to be is to live, to constantly aspire to the future. But the latter means not being afraid to think about this very future. It turns out that in this monologue there is a statement of the connection: to be means to think about the future, about life in it, i.e. think about this being. This is the formula of the subject. Hamlet formulated his idea, with which he intended to move towards the achievement of his goal. Again, the idea is this: be the subject, and don't be afraid of it! If in the first act he equated the importance of reason and power, now reason has outweighed power. This does not at all indicate his claim to some kind of genius. “Be a subject” is a philosophical formula, not a primitive everyday one, and means the ability and necessity to think in principle, which in the play turned out to be possible only with a respectful attitude towards the soul, i.e. to the inner qualities of a person.

Hamlet has made his discovery, and at this vulnerable moment, the bait is let in - Ophelia. She is greeted with joy: “Ophelia! Oh joy! Remember / My sins in your prayers, nymph. And what is she? Does she answer him the same? Not at all. She gives (yes, what she gives, in fact - throws) his gifts. He is shocked, but she insists, justifying this by the fact that "their smell is exhausted", i.e. by the fact that Hamlet allegedly fell out of love with her. Isn't this cunning: we know that it was Ophelia, at the instigation of her father and brother, who refused to love Hamlet, and here she accuses him of cooling off towards her, i.e. dumps everything from a sick head to a healthy one. And this she does with those who are considered mentally ill. Instead of pitying him, she seeks to finish him off. How low do you have to go to do something like this! After such statements, Hamlet immediately understands what kind of fruit is in front of him - a traitor to their joint harmony, who exchanged his love for a quiet life at court. He realized that her previous go-ahead in his direction was due to the fact that she had gone over to the side of the king, and her essence, so empty, was filled with the poisonous content of an empty life without reason. This does not mean at all that Hamlet saw a prostitute in Ophelia, as Barkov is trying to prove. Indeed, one can cite the words of Laertes in the third scene of the first act, when he urged her to avoid Hamlet: “... understand how honor will suffer, / When ... you open the treasure / Innocence(highlighted by me - S.T.) hot insistence. Rather, the harsh behavior of Hamlet means that he saw the spiritual depravity of Ophelia. And the root of this corruption lies in its focus not on the stability of existence, but on the momentary pleasantness of being at rest, when the closest (relatives) control it, and she agrees to this and completely surrendered to them. She is not a thinking subject who freely chooses her own life path, but an inanimate plasticine object from which puppeteers sculpt what they please.

Therefore, from now on, Hamlet treats Ophelia not as a beloved girl, but as a representative of a side hostile to him, so that the whole atmosphere of the subsequent conversation heats up, goes into the plane of behind-the-scenes intrigues, and is conveyed through the prose characteristic of this situation. At the same time, he repeats five times to her to go to the monastery: he is clearly disappointed with her and urges her to save her soul.

At the same time, the king, who overheard all this, did not see the manifestation of Hamlet's love for Ophelia. And in fact, what kind of “manifestations” are there for the one who betrayed you. But, please tell me, what else could be expected from the situation that the king and Polonius modeled? Any normal person will flare up and make a scandal when he is first rejected, and then he himself is declared a rejecter. This means that everything was pre-arranged, and the king just needed an excuse to turn his fear of Hamlet (the spark of which was already visible at the beginning of the scene during the king’s conversation with the twins) into a plausible motive for sending him to hell. And so, the pretext was received, and the decision to send the prince into exile for a clearly impossible job (to collect underpaid tribute from a distant land without serious troops is a hopeless business) was not long in coming: "He will immediately sail to England."

It turns out that the king nevertheless saw his rival in Hamlet, but not because he blabbed out (this did not happen), but because, in principle, that spirit of a serious attitude to the matter, to the soul of a person, which was revealed with all obviousness in just now, is dangerous to him. conversation that happened between young people. Hamlet carries a new ideologeme, which means that the issue of his power claims is a matter of time. Of course, he invited him to the performance, and this set our autocrat on a wave of blissful relaxation to his nephew. But then it became clear that "in his words ... there is no madness." One way or another, the cards are gradually revealed.

Scene two. In it, we distinguish two parts.

The first part is a play within a play; everything that concerns the performance of itinerant actors. In the second part we have the primary reaction of different characters to this performance. In the performance itself (“The Mousetrap”, or the murder of Gonzago), in general terms, the poisoning of Hamlet Sr. by Claudius is modeled. Before the action and during it, a conversation is given by Hamlet Jr. and Ophelia, where he refers to her as a fallen woman. Again, Barkov is here speculating about Ophelia's sexual promiscuity, but after our explanation of the previous scene, everything seems to be clear: the prince considers her spiritually fallen, and all his dirty attacks are just a way to highlight the problem. The performance itself is an open challenge of Hamlet to the king, his statement that he knows the true cause of his father's death. The king, interrupting the action and running away from the performance, thereby confirms: yes, indeed, that is exactly how it all happened. Here, with the reaction of the king, everything is extremely clear, and it can be said with confidence that the words of the spirit of the father-Hamlet were verified, the prince was convinced of their truth, so that the task of the "Mousetrap" was completely fulfilled.

It is important that the philosophical alignment of the play dictates its own rules. In this case, a play within a play was needed as Hamlet's next step in his movement towards building his philosophically significant position. After he had affirmed “be a subject!”, he should have been active, so that if not to fulfill, but to begin to fulfill this installation of his. The performance organized by him is his act of activity, the beginning of the assertion of his value (real value) in the eyes of the actors and spectators, i.e. in the eyes of society. After all, the subject does not just passively observe, but he himself actively creates new events and is already looking for truth in them. And the truth turned out to be that the king is the murderer of his father. So he has every right to revenge. But is it necessary for Hamlet? No, he needs to take power in a legitimate way. If he goes for a simple murder, then the situation in the kingdom will not calm down, and the world will not receive the desired foundation for its reliable existence. In the end, the repetition of his uncle's actions will give the same result - chaos, instability. In this case, the father's covenant will not be fulfilled, and he (the father) will be left to burn in hell with an eternal flame. Is this what Hamlet wants? Of course not. He needs to save his father from hellish torment, therefore, to ensure the stability of the state. Therefore, the spontaneous, out of revenge, murder of the king is out of the question. There must be other steps here.

Nevertheless, it is important that Hamlet revealed himself quite fully in the political struggle, and already openly gives out: “I need a promotion”, quite clearly asserting his power ambitions (however, no, it’s not true - not ambitions to seize power for its own sake, but for the benefit of all people). This openness is a consequence of his ideological self-confidence.

Scene three.

In it, the king instructs the twins to escort Hamlet to England, in fact, to the place of exile: "It's time to put this horror walking in the wild into stocks." The king understood the ideological superiority of Hamlet, and this is the whole "horror". Further, we see him penitent: he realized the "stench of villainy" of his, but he is not able to do anything to correct the situation. That is, he seems to be saying “Everything is fixable”, but he does not see the mechanism for implementing this. Indeed, true repentance, both in essence, and as Claudius rightly understands, is at least to give back what was taken dishonestly. But “What words / Pray here? "Forgive the murders to me"? / No, that's not possible. I didn't return the loot. / I have everything for which I killed: / My crown, land and queen. In short, the king here acts in his own role: let everything be as before, and then it may be done by itself. All of his stability is a hope for chance, in contrast to Hamlet, who seeks the foundation in the stable alignment of existence. Claudius needs immutability as such, in fact - non-existence in which he wants to stay (later Hamlet will say about him: "the king ... no more than zero"). This situation is absurd, since it is impossible to stay, and even more so to stay steadily, in non-existence. Therefore, he loses to Hamlet, who chose the sphere of meanings as the basis, the sphere of being, in which it is natural and stable to stay. In addition, it is important that if Claudius knew exactly about the hellish torments of sinners, i.e., in fact, if he truly believed in God not as some kind of abstraction, but as a formidable real force, then he would not have relied on chance but took real steps to atone for his sin. But he does not really believe in God, and his whole life is just a fuss about entertainment and momentary benefits. All this again makes him a direct opposite of Hamlet, who does not perceive the existence of hell as a joke, and builds his attitude to life on the basis of the desire for the good and his dead father (so that he does not burn in fiery hell), and his people (the desire for real reliability and stability in society). Therefore, Hamlet refuses (on the way to his mother, after the performance) to kill the king, when he prays that he does not need murder as such, but the fulfillment of his global task. Of course, this will automatically decide the fate of Claudius, since he does not fit into the world order created by Hamlet. But that will be later, not now, so he leaves his sword in its sheath: "Reign." Finally, there is another reason for Hamlet's "good nature", which is voiced by himself: killing the king during his prayer will guarantee that he will go to heaven. This seems unfair to such a villain: “So is it revenge if the villain / Gives up the spirit when he is clean from filth / And is all ready for a long journey?”.

Fourth scene.

Hamlet is talking to the mother-queen, and at the beginning of the conversation he kills the hidden Polonius. The whole scene is conveyed in verse: Hamlet stopped playing, he fully revealed himself to his mother. Moreover, he kills the backstage Mr. Polonius hiding behind the carpet (backstage), so that he no longer needs to hide his aspirations. The veils fell off, the positions of different sides are completely exposed, and Hamlet, without hesitation, accuses his mother of debauchery and so on. In fact, he tells her that she was an accomplice in the destruction of all the foundations of this world. In addition, he calls the king the center of all troubles, and regrets that it was not he who was killed, but Polonius: "I confused you with the highest."

It must be said that there is doubt whether the prince really hoped that he was killing the king standing behind the curtain. I. Frolov here cites the following considerations: on the way to his mother, just a few minutes ago, Hamlet saw the king, and had the opportunity to take revenge, but did not carry it out. The question is, why then should he kill the one he left alive just now? Besides, it seems incredible that the king could somehow break away from his prayers, get ahead of the prince and hide in the queen's chambers. In other words, if we imagine the situation in an everyday context, then it really seems that Hamlet, killing a man behind the curtains, could not even suspect that the king was there.

However, what we have before us is not an everyday story, but a play in which space and time do not live according to the usual laws, but according to completely special ones, when both temporal duration and spatial location-stay depend on the activity of Hamlet's consciousness. We are reminded of this by the appearance of a ghost, which at a critical moment cooled the prince's ardor towards his mother. The voice of the ghost is heard in the play in reality, but only Hamlet hears it: the queen does not perceive it in any way. It turns out that this is a phenomenon of Hamlet's consciousness (as in the fifth scene of the first act), and such that its essence affirms the peculiarity of space and time. Consequently, all other space-time transformations are natural for Hamlet, and the expectation that the king will be behind the carpet is quite acceptable. Let's repeat, admissible - within the framework of the poetics of the work so approved by Shakespeare. In addition, having received his mother as a witness, Hamlet was no longer afraid that the murder would turn out to be a secret, behind-the-scenes act. No, he acts openly, knowing that the mother will confirm the situation that has arisen, so that the murder in the eyes of the public will not look like an unauthorized seizure of power, but to a certain extent an accidental coincidence in which the fault lies entirely with the king himself: after all, the secret eavesdropper encroaches on honor Queen and Hamlet, and according to the laws of that time, this was quite enough to carry out tough actions on him. Hamlet defended his and his mother's honor, and if the murdered one really was the king, then the doors to power would open before our hero on a completely legal (in the eyes of the public) basis.

Analysis of the third act.

In general, the following can be said about the third act. Hamlet formulates the basis of his ideologeme: be a subject, and takes the first step to implement this attitude - he organizes a performance where he practically openly accuses the king of killing the former ruler (Hamlet Sr.) and usurping power. Moreover, the second step of his activation as a subject is the murder of Polonius by him, and by performing this act, the prince hopes to end the king. Hamlet is active! He became active when he understood the logical validity of this activity (“Be the subject”). But the situation is not quite ready yet: the subject does not act on his own, but surrounded by circumstances, and the result of his actions depends on them too. In our case, the fruit has not ripened, and Hamlet's attempt to solve all the problems at once is still naive, and therefore failed.

Act Four of Hamlet's Study

Scene one.

The king learns that Hamlet killed Polonius. He is clearly frightened, because he understands: "It would be so with us, if we found ourselves there." Therefore, the decision taken earlier to send Hamlet to England is being accelerated as much as possible. The king feels that it is not he who determines the situation, but the prince. If earlier the king was the thesis, and Hamlet was the antithesis, now everything has changed. The activity of the prince confirms the thesis, and the king only reacts secondarily to what happened, he is the antithesis. His “soul is in alarm and terrified,” because the people (obviously through wandering actors), having taken the side of Hamlet, are a real force that cannot be dismissed like an annoying fly. Changes are brewing in society in relation to the king, to his legitimacy, and this is a real threat to him. It is her that he is afraid of, calling her "The hiss of poisonous slander." But what kind of slander is this? After all, he himself recently, during prayers (act 3, scene 3), confessed to himself in the crimes he had committed. Calling the truth slander, the king is not just trying to hide his guilt before the queen, who, apparently, did not participate in the murder of Hamlet Sr. In addition, here, firstly, he clearly demonstrates that he has lost control over the situation (hoping for a chance: “The hiss of poisonous slander ... perhaps will pass us by”), and secondly, and this is the most important thing, he enters a state of full of lies. After all, calling the truth a lie, the king puts an end to the correctness of his position. Strictly speaking, if Hamlet moves towards his subjectivity, and as this movement intensifies (primarily ideologically, i.e. in influencing the people), then the king, on the contrary, is more and more immersed in lies, i.e. moves away from its subjectivity, and ideologically inevitably loses. Note that the ideological loss of the king became obvious even to himself after Polonius - this symbol of behind the scenes - died, exposing the situation, and everyone (the people) gradually began to understand what was happening.

Scene two.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet where he hid Polonius' body. He openly indicates his opposition to them, calling them a sponge, i.e. instrument in the hands of the king, which is "nothing more than zero". Hamlet moved public opinion to his side; the king, having no such support, turned into an empty place, into zero. Even before, he was almost zero passivity, only imitating activity (the murder of Hamlet Sr. and the seizure of the throne), but now everything is bare and his passivity has become obvious.

Scene three.

Hamlet tells the king that Polonius' body is "at supper" - at the worms' supper.

In general, one wonders, why does the king make so much fuss about the corpse of Polonius? Isn't that a lot of honor? That is, of course, Polonius was his friend and right hand in the production of all his vile things. It is not for nothing that even in the second scene of the first act, Claudius, turning to Laertes, says: “The head does not get along with the heart any more ... Than the Danish throne for your father.” Okay, but why does Shakespeare pay so much attention to the search for an inanimate body? The answer lies on the surface: the king entered a false situation (in the previous scene he called the truth a lie), moved away from his active subjectivity and moves towards its opposite - non-vital passivity. So far, he has not completely moved to this destination of his, but he is taking steps in this direction: he is looking for a dead man. In addition, the strength of the king was in behind-the-scenes intrigues, in secret machinations, when the truth was closed from the human eye. The death of Polonius personifies the removal of all veils from the real state of affairs. The king is naked, and without the usual embellishments, he is not a king, he is an empty place. Therefore, he frantically tries to restore his world behind the scenes, even if only through a simple search for the corpse of Polonius. The king did not yet understand that Hamlet, by his active position (arranging the performance), shifted the whole situation, and it began to irreversibly develop against him, against his ideological orientation towards fun: Hamlet's performance was by no means cheerful, and this non-gaiety helped to expose the situation. (By the way, by this very Shakespeare claims that tragedy as a genre has a higher artistic status than comedies, which he himself worked on in his youth).

And so, Hamlet betrays the king: the corpse is "at dinner." The once active-bustling Polonius with some signs of a subject (but only some signs: in addition to activity, a mind is needed here, which the deceased, by and large, did not possess, but possessed only a pseudo-mind - cunning and a standard set of rules for the gray cardinal) became an object for worms. But after all, the king is a strong analogy of Polonius, so Hamlet here simply informs him of his analogous fate: the pseudo-subject can only pretend to be real in the absence of a real subject, but when the original appears, the masks fall off, and the pseudo-subject becomes what he really is. in fact - an object, in the plot realization - a dead man.

In addition, the whole topic with worms (“We fatten all living creatures to feed ourselves, while we ourselves feed on worms to feed them,” etc.) shows the cycle of activity and passivity: sooner or later, activity will calm down, and passivity will become excited. And this is all the more so if the activity was with the prefix "pseudo", and passivity for the time being was in the dark about its real essence. But as soon as within passivity there was an awareness of the activity of oneself (the call “Be a subject!” in the monologue “To be or not to be ...”), then the whole world immediately began to move, true activity received its being, and at the same time - knocked out props from theatrical scenery from pseudo-activity, transferring it to the status of passivity.

In general, Hamlet behaves very frankly, and the king, defending himself, not only sends him to England, but gives the twins a letter with an order to the English authorities (who obeyed the Danish king and paid tribute to him) to kill the prince. Obviously, he would have killed him himself, but people are scared.

Scene four.

It describes how the young Fortinbras with his army goes to war against Poland. Moreover, the war is supposed because of a miserable piece of land that is worthless. The path of the troops passes through Denmark, and before sailing to England, Hamlet talks with the captain, from whom he learns all the important moments for him. What is important to him? Before exile to England, it is important for him not to lose heart, and he receives such moral support. The situation here is this. Having gathered an army for the war with Denmark, Fortinbras Jr. received a ban from his uncle - the ruler of Norway - on this campaign. But he and his entire guard went into a state of expectation of war, became more active, and it is already impossible for them to stop. As a result, they realize their activity even on a useless trip, but in it they express themselves. This is an example for Hamlet: once active, it cannot simply stop moving towards its goal. If obstacles happen on her life path, then she does not give up herself, but manifests herself, although, perhaps, a little differently than it was planned in advance. Hamlet fully accepts this attitude: “O my thought, from now on be in the blood. / Live in the storm or don't live at all. In other words: “O my subjectivity, from now on be active, no matter what it costs you. You are active only insofar as you attack and do not stop at any obstacles.

In addition, the appearance of young Fortinbras immediately after the statements in the previous scene about the cycle of passivity and activity (the topic of worms, etc.) makes one think that if everything is moving in a circle, then Fortinbras should also have a chance of success in the struggle for power in Denmark: once his father owned it (was active), then lost it (passed into the category of passivity - died), and now, if the law of circulation is correct, then Fortinbras Jr. has every chance of taking the throne. So far this is only a guess, but since we know that in the end it will all happen this way, then this guess of ours turns out to be justified in hindsight, and the very appearance of the Norwegian in the current scene, when the outlines of the end of the whole play are already somewhat visible, seems to be a skillful move by Shakespeare : it reminds us of where the roots of the whole story grow from, and hints at the upcoming denouement of events.

Scene five. Here we distinguish three parts.

In the first part, the mentally damaged Ophelia sings and says mysterious things in front of the queen, and then in front of the king. In the second part, Laertes, who has returned from France, bursts into the king with a crowd of rebels and demands an explanation about the death of his father (Polonia). He reassures Laertes and transfers him to his allies. In the third part, Ophelia returns and gives some strange instructions to her brother. He is shocked.

Now in more detail and in order. Ophelia went crazy. This was expected: she lived in the mind of her father, and after his death she lost this foundation of hers - the smart (reasonable) foundation of her life. But, unlike Hamlet, who only played madness and strictly controlled the degree of his "madness", Ophelia went crazy for real, because, we repeat, having lost her father's mind, she did not have her own. She demonstrated the latter throughout the play, refusing to resist her father's instigations against Hamlet. The absence of the spirit of resistance (the spirit of denial) for a long time distanced her from Hamlet, who, having lost his grounds, found the strength to move, because he knew how to deny. Denial is the capsule that undermines the charge of the cartridge (cocks the will), after which the movement of the hero becomes irreversible. Ophelia had none of that, no denial, no will. Actually, that’s why they didn’t have a full-fledged relationship with the prince, because they were too different.

At the same time, Ophelia's madness, among other things, means her departure from her former position of indulging the views of her father, and therefore the king. Here, we repeat, we have an analogy with the madness of Hamlet. And although the physiology and metaphysics of their insanity are different, the very fact of altered consciousness in both cases allows us to say that Ophelia in this scene appeared before us completely different than before. Ie, of course, she went crazy and already in this she is different. But the main thing is not this, but her new outlook on life, freed from the former royal attitudes. Now she "accuses the whole world of lies ... and here are traces of some terrible secret" (or, in Lozinsky's translation, "In this lies at least an obscure, but sinister mind"). Ophelia acquired a negation, and this is the mystery (“obscure but sinister mind”), the mystery of how negation appears in an empty vessel that has lost its foundation, i.e. something that (knowing from the example of Hamlet) is the basis for all new movements, for all true thinking, breaking through into the future. In other words, the question arises: how does the basis for thinking arise in that which is non-thinking? Or to put it another way: how does activity arise in passivity? This is clearly a continuation of the conversation about the circular movement of the world, which took place in the previous scenes. Indeed, it is still possible to somehow understand the calming of activity, but how to understand the activation of passivity when something arises from nothing? The scholastics had a formula: nothing comes from nothing. Here we see the opposite statement. This means that the new philosophy of Hamlet implicitly penetrated into many layers of society, that the ideology of the exiled prince lives on, and acts on the example of Ophelia. In principle, one can even say that Hamlet's efforts to set Ophelia in his own way, in the end, were crowned with success, although too late: she can no longer be saved. The reason for this state of affairs will be discussed later.

In any case, in her altered consciousness, Ophelia, like Hamlet, began to give out such pearls that make the most inquisitive minds of Shakespeare studies numb from misunderstanding. By the way, while Gertrude did not hear them (pearl), she, emotionally, and therefore ideologically, sided with her son, did not want to accept Ophelia: “I will not accept her,” because she considered her to be in the opposite, royal, camp. Up to a point, this was true. She herself stayed there until Hamlet opened her eyes to the essence of things in the kingdom. But already at the beginning of communication between two women, the situation changes radically and the attitude of the queen towards the girl becomes different. So, if her opening words were very strict: “What do you want, Ophelia?”, Then after the first quatrain of the song that she began to sing, the words followed completely different, much warmer: “Dove, what does this song mean?”. The changed consciousness of Ophelia in some way related her to Hamlet, brought them closer, and this could not go unnoticed by the queen.

Actually, here is the first song of Ophelia, with which she addresses Gertrude:

How to know who is your sweetheart?
He comes with a rod.
Pearl bar on crown,
Pistons with strap.
Oh, he's dead, mistress,
He is cold dust;
In the heads of green turf,
Stone in the legs.
The shroud is as white as mountain snow
Flower over the grave;
He descended into her forever,
Not mourned dear.
(Translated by M. Lozinsky)

It clearly refers to the king ("He walks with a staff," plus King Claudius is Queen Gertrude's sweetheart). Ophelia means that the situation in the state began to develop irreversibly not in favor of the existing government, and that the king is close to death, like that traveler going to God: we will all stand before Him someday. Moreover, in the second quatrain, she even says: oh, yes, he is already dead. In the third quatrain, it is announced that "he ... was not mourned by the dear", i.e. that the queen, apparently, is waiting for the same sad fate, and she will not be able to mourn her husband. We know that this is how it will all happen, and that Ophelia, based on her vision of the political situation, was able to correctly predict the fate of the royal couple. We can say that in her, through illness, the ability to think began to mature. (See Note 4).

Further, she gives out to the approaching king (by the way - in prose, like Hamlet, from a certain moment communicating with the king and his accomplices in the language of tension and behind the scenes - precisely in prose): “They say that the owl's father was a baker. Lord, we know who we are, but we don't know what we can become. God bless your meal!" (translated by M. Lozinsky). There is a clear reference here to Hamlet's idea of ​​a circuit. Indeed, the phrase “the owl’s father had a breadmaker” can and can be somehow remotely connected with some historical allusions in the life of England in Shakespeare’s time, as some researchers are trying to do, but much closer and more understandable here is the understanding that of one essence (at the owl) the beginning had another essence (bread-box), therefore "we know who we are, but we do not know who we can become." Ofelia says: everything is changeable, and the directions of change are closed to understanding. This is the same thing, but served under a different sauce than Hamlet's talk about worms and the king's journey through the beggar's intestines. That is why she ends her sentence with the sentence: “God bless your meal,” which clearly indicates that conversation between the prince and the king. In the end, this is again a statement about the imminent death of the monarch, who is about to become an object for someone's mass. But he does not hear all this due to his ideological disposition against the soul of a person, as a result - a disposition to stupidity, and believes that these conversations are her "thought about her father." Ophelia, trying to clarify her riddles, sings a new song, which tells that the girl came to the guy, he slept with her, and then refused to marry because she gave herself too easily, before marriage. Everything is clear here: it follows from the song that the cause of all troubles (including those of Ophelia herself) is a decline in morals. In fact, she again echoes Hamlet, who accused the king (even when he did not yet know about the murder of his father) of immorality. It turns out that in the scene under consideration, Ophelia resembles Hamlet at the beginning of the play.

In the second part of the scene, a raging Laertes appears. He is outraged by the incomprehensible murder of his father and his equally incomprehensible, secret and speedy burial (however, all this is very much in line with his status as a gray eminence, who did everything secretly: how he lived, so he was buried). He is full of desire to take revenge, which repeats the situation with Hamlet: he is also moving towards revenge. But, if Laertes, not knowing either the causes of Polonius's death or the murderer, shows violent activity, then Hamlet, on the contrary, at first only seethed internally, did not throw his potential out in vain, but only clearly realizing the whole situation, began to act, confidently moving towards the goal. Moreover, his goal was connected not only and not so much with revenge, but with the salvation of the soul of his father and the calm (stabilization) of the situation in the state. Laertes, on the other hand, does not think about the welfare of the people, he is fixated exclusively on the idea of ​​​​revenge and he does not need anything else: “What is that, what is this light, I don’t care. / But, come what may, for my own father / I will avenge! He does not care about a philosophically verified position, he does not care about the foundation of the world (“What is that, what is this light, I don’t care”), he is pure spontaneity, activity, but without meaningfulness. If at the beginning of the play he read Ophelia's morals and thereby claimed some kind of intelligence, now he completely abandoned this, turning into an active non-subjectivity. And it is not surprising, therefore, that he enters into the influence of the king (although a few minutes ago he himself could have had power over him), which means that he signs a sentence for himself, like Polonius. The return of Ophelia informs him of this in the third part of the scene: “No, he died / And was buried. / And it's your turn. The scenery here is very well thought out. At first, before the appearance of her brother, Ophelia left, because she had hope for his independence, which he began to show when he burst into the king with a crowd. When he surrendered himself to the royal power, and it became clear that he had become an instrument of someone else's game, his fate became obvious, which she told about upon her return.

Scene six.

Horace receives a letter from Hamlet, in which he reports his flight to the pirates, asks to deliver the attached letters to the king and urgently rush to him. At the same time, he signs: “Yours, which you do not doubt, Hamlet,” or in the lane. M. Lozinsky: "The one about whom you know that he is yours, Hamlet."

All letters are in prose. This means that the prince is extremely excited, cocked to seize power (we remember how in the fourth scene he promises himself “live in a thunderstorm, or not live at all”) and therefore is extremely careful in his expressions. Actually, the text of the message does not allow doubting this: everything is said in it only in general, neutral terms - in that extreme case, if it suddenly falls into the hands of the king. Hamlet is going to tell a friend specific information only at a face-to-face meeting, because he only trusts him, and trusts him because he “knows” (or “does not doubt”) about it. For him, knowledge is the power that opens people to each other. Indeed, he is a subject!

Scene seven.

It tells that Laertes finally turned from a subject of activity into a kind of inanimate instrument, completely dependent on the king: "Sire ... control me, / I will be your instrument." At the same time, Laertes already knows from the lips of Claudius that the goal of his revenge - Hamlet - is supported by the people, so that, in fact, he rebels against the entire public. This is clearly a contradictory, erroneous position, since to oppose the people means to have a claim to leadership, with the hope that the people will eventually accept the defended point of view. Laertes missed his chance to be a leader. Moreover, he clearly put himself in the role of an instrument in the hands of others. It turns out that, on the one hand, he claims to be active (opposes the people), and on the other hand, he becomes passive (turns into an instrument). This contradiction must inevitably blow up his existence, lead him to a deep crisis. About this, even in the fifth scene, his sister warned him. Now we see that the situation is developing in this direction. Moreover, his logically contradictory position breaks out and becomes apparent after the king received Hamlet's message about his stay in Denmark and about his imminent visit to him. The king decided to act: to kill the prince at any cost, but by deceit (through a cleverly concocted pseudo-honest duel), by connecting Laertes here (in vain, perhaps, did he subdue him?). Laertes, having agreed to this, lost all moral grounds for his existence, and indicated his total fallacy.

It must be said that the action of the king can be understood as his activation and, in this sense, be regarded as worthy against the background of the active subject-Hamlet. But is it? I think not. The fact is that Hamlet acts openly: in his letter, the arrival is very clearly reported with a desire to explain the reasons for the quick return. Of course, he does not report on important details regarding his struggle for the truth in this life. However, he is "naked", i.e. naked, open and without embellishment - such as it is. What is he? He is the subject, in proof of which he attributes “one” to his signature. “One” is what, in the subsequent development of European philosophy, will result in Fichte's “pure I”. “One” is an assertion of its strength and significance, whose strength and significance lies in relying on one’s own activity… It is a mutual guarantee of force before activity and activity before force… This is what is in the subject, its almost absolute, emanating from itself (God willing), self-activation.

The king acts differently. He is secretive. His world is behind the scenes. After the death of Polonius, he did not understand anything, remained the same, passing off black for white, and white for black. The king is the most static character in the play. Can he have true activity? No, he can not. His activity is prefixed with "pseudo", his activity remains empty. And even more so then Laertes’ mistake is amplified, since he does not simply become a derivative of some force, but he becomes a derivative of pseudo-activity that leads nowhere, more precisely, leads to nowhere, to the emptiness, to the nothingness of death.

Laertes himself introduced himself into a practically doomed state, that he agreed in a dishonest way, at the instigation of Claudius, to kill Hamlet. At the same time, it is important that the whole flow of events of the play entered into an irreversible fall into the horror of darkness. It is already becoming clear that Hamlet is not a tenant, just as it is that Laertes is also not a tenant. The first must perish, because the application of the action of pseudo-activity (actually, anti-activity) to it cannot end in anything other than the nullification of its own activity: the “minus” of evil, superimposed on the “plus” of good, gives zero. The second (Laertes) must perish, because he lost all grounds for his existence, and he did not have the spirit of denial, which would give him the strength to get out of the existential vacuum that had arisen (as was the case with Hamlet in his time).

As a result, the drama focused on its denouement. It will finally take place in the fifth, final act, but already in the seventh scene of the fourth act we learn the gloomy news: Ophelia drowned. She drowned like something ephemeral, unearthly. There is nothing terrible in the description of her death, on the contrary - everything was very beautiful, in some ways even romantic: she almost did not drown, but seemed to dissolve in the river atmosphere ...

What happened was what was supposed to happen. Having lost one basis of consciousness in the form of a father, Ophelia embarked on the path of Hamlet. It would seem that the flag is in her hands. But now she is deprived of another basis of consciousness - Laertes, and even her beloved (yes, yes, that's right) Hamlet. What is her life for? A woman lives to love, and if there is no one to love, then why does she need all these flowers?

However, here is the question: we learn the description of the death of Ophelia from the queen, as if she herself observed what happened. Maybe it was she who was involved in this tragedy? If this is allowed, then, one asks, why did she need it? Her beloved son, after all, loves Ofelia, and this is important. In addition, after clarifying the relationship with Hamlet, when he killed Polonius, the queen obviously emotionally went over to his side, just as Ophelia went over to his side when she began, albeit figuratively, but to call a spade a spade. By and large, these two women became allies, as Gertrude later informs us in the first scene of the fifth act: "I dreamed of you / To introduce you as Hamlet's wife." Therefore, the queen was not at all interested in the death of Ophelia. There is no reason to suspect the king of the murder, despite his wary attitude towards her after she went crazy (after Hamlet, any madness, that is, dissent seems dangerous to him). Of course, we remember how in the fifth scene he ordered Horatio to “Look at her both ways”, but we don’t remember that he ordered or at least somehow hinted at killing her, especially since after the order to “look” we saw Ophelia and Horatio is separate from each other, so there was no surveillance or supervision from Horatio, and there could not be, since he was on the side of Hamlet, who loves Ophelia, and not on the side of the king. Finally, after the last appearance of Ophelia (in the fifth scene) and the news of her death (in the seventh scene), very little time passed - as long as necessary for the conversation between the king and Laertes, who had been together all this time, so that the king could not organize her murder: firstly, under Laertes it was impossible to do this, and secondly, he was busy organizing the murder of Hamlet, and her figure for him receded into the background or even more distant plan for this time.

No, Ophelia's death has not a political reason, but a metaphysical one, more precisely, this reason lies in the alignment of the artistic structure of the work, in which each move of the characters is conditioned by the internal logic of the development of events. There is no such thing in life, but what distinguishes an artistic creation from ordinary everyday life is that there is a certain creative idea here that serves as a boundary for possible and impossible action (as well as for any need). Ophelia died because the circumstances of her life, her being, developed in such a way. If the foundations (including the meaning of existence) have collapsed, then a scorched hole of nothingness remains in the place of being.

Analysis of the fourth act of studying Hamlet

Thus, on the fourth act it is necessary to say the following. Hamlet activated, and due to the unity of the inner and outer worlds, this subjective activation of his passed to the entire universe, moved everything off the ground, and exposed to the limit the essential basis of the heroes of the play. Hamlet is a subject from itself (“one”). The king is a cowardly murderer, doing evil with the wrong hands in undercover intrigues. Ophelia - a heroine who does not know herself, who does not see her goal - naturally dies. Laertes renounces himself and becomes an instrument in the hands of the king: the subject has become the object. Everything is clearing up. After the murder of Polonius, any "pseudo" is separated from its bearer: it is now clear that pseudo-activity is in fact non-activity, i.e. passivity. Here we have a chain of the following transformations:

activity (the original activity of the king to seize power) turns into pseudo-activity (the actions of the king become secondary to the actions of Hamlet), which turns into passivity (the guessed future of the king).

This chain was formed under the influence of Hamlet's movement:

the sum of passivity and negation transforms into self-knowing, and in this manifesting its activity, subjectivity, which becomes almost absolute, i.e. out of its borders. The latter is a subject that cognizes the world, and through cognition transforms it.

The true activity of Hamlet, which develops for good, drains vitality from the false activity of the king (who lives off the camouflage of his essence), providing that cycle of activity and passivity that Shakespeare constantly alludes to throughout the fourth act (see Note 5).

Act 5 of the study of Hamlet

Scene one. It can be divided into three parts.

In the first part, two gravediggers dig a grave and talk about the fact that it is intended for a drowned woman. In the second part, Hamlet and Horatio join them. In the third part, it is discovered that Ophelia is the drowned woman, and a struggle takes place between Hamlet and Laertes, who has approached with the funeral procession, in the grave.

The first part is probably the most mysterious of the entire scene. In general, the fact that this is happening in a cemetery evokes sad forebodings: the tragedy is approaching its climax. There is nothing cheerful, bright in the words of the gravediggers. In addition, the first gravedigger, who sets the tone for the whole conversation, clearly gravitates toward "philosophical" vocabulary. Everything must be said to him with excessive intricacy - in the same spirit in which Polonius and the twins once tried to express themselves, imitating the scholastics. For example, here is their conversation about the drowned woman:

Gravedigger 1: ...It would be nice if she drowned herself in a state of self-defense.

Second Gravedigger: State and decided.

First Gravedigger: The condition must be proven. Without it there is no law. Let's say I now drown myself with intent. Then this is a threefold matter. One thing - I did it, another - I brought it to fruition, the third - I did it. It was with intent that she drowned herself.

Where, please tell me, is there a logical connection in the words of the first gravedigger? Rather, it resembles the delirium of a madman who suddenly decided to be clever in front of his partner. But that's the whole point, that it was in this spirit that lawyers with a scholastic education, digging into verbal nuances, but not seeing real life, were scolded in courts. So here. An example is given: "Let's say I ... drown myself ...". In relation to oneself, it is exactly the same to say "brought into execution", "did" or "completed". But the gravedigger claims some differences. They, of course, are - lexical. And this is quite enough for our verbiage to argue about some kind of tripartite thing. At the same time, all this “tripleness” in an incomprehensible, fantastic way allows him to conclude: “It means that she drowned herself with intention.”

In other places, the delirium of the first gravedigger is no less refined. All this suggests that all that philosophical pseudo-intelligence that the faithful servants of the king tried to flaunt earlier, now, after Hamlet activated the entire Oikoumene and, consequently, introduced his own philosophy into it (which can now be called the philosophy of real life), has sunk to the very bottom. human society, to its very backyards, to the gravediggers, practically to the grave. At the same time, her apologists began to resemble madmen much more clearly than the playing (pretending) Hamlet.

After the first gravedigger gave out his pro-cholastic foams, he ended them with a song about the transience of life, about how everything dies. This is nothing more than a continuation of the thought of the king and queen, which they expressed at the beginning of the play (act 1, scene 2): “This is how the world was created: the living will die / And after life it will depart into eternity.” All this, again, reduces the royal ideologeme to ashes, the essence of which is to have fun while you live, and when you die, everything will end for you forever. This is the most perfect anti-Christian position of life-burners with unbelief in God and the life of the soul after the death of the flesh.

It turns out that the position of Hamlet is much closer to God than the position of the king. There are two moments here. The first is that the prince takes seriously the torment of the soul of the sinner (father) in hell, and the king treats this as an invention. The second point, which became prominent after the conversation of the gravediggers and has a direct connection with the first, is this: according to the king and his ideology, all movements in life are like a line with a beginning and an end, but according to Hamlet, all true movements are circular, when the beginning someday becomes its opposite. , and that, in due time, will also renounce itself, having become equal to the starting point from which the report went. And since man was created by God in his own image and likeness, and He himself contains both the beginning and the end, like any point of the circle, being Absolute activity, then a person must also be an activity with a circular nature of his essence, ultimately, he must see his life after death is the life of one's soul in God and with God. The subjective circularity turns out to be immanent to the divine plan, while the linear-monotonous movement according to the birth-life-death type reveals anti-divine, decadent features in itself. The burning of life turns out to be objectionable to the Higher, and that is why all representatives of this ideology are distant from Him, punished with mental retardation in the form of inability to think realistically, i.e. adequately connect their mental efforts with life as it is. Aiming at high ideas, on the contrary, is pleasing to God, as a result of which Hamlet, the main representative in the play of such a position, was rewarded by Him with the presence of a mind capable of cognition and thinking. We repeat that we are not talking about some special genius of the protagonist, which, in general, is not visible, but we are talking about the elementary ability to use one's mind for its intended purpose.

Hamlet is a subject because he feels (knows) God in himself (see Notes 6, 7). At the same time, it is obvious that the king and the company are anti-subjects, because there is no God in them.

But then, one asks, what is the connection between all the prince's mockery of scholasticism, on the one hand, and our affirmation of his vital and truly Christian worldview, on the other? After all, the best scholastics were great theologians, and they tried to bring a person closer to God. It seems that, in fact, Shakespeare was ironic not at scholasticism itself, but at the worthless practice of imitating it, when, hiding behind the great minds of mankind, they tried to push through their low deeds-deeds. Using that form of deep abstraction, without which it is impossible to clearly say anything about God, and which was used by true scholastic philosophers, many speculators of that time concealed the real content of their intentions - anti-divine, selfish intentions. Under the guise of belonging to the highest values, many lived in revelry and oblivion of the salvation of their souls, enjoying only today. As a result, the very idea of ​​God was blackened. And it was against such an anti-divine attitude that Hamlet (Shakespeare) fought. His entire project is the resuscitation of the divine commandments in their ultimate form, i.e. in the form of the fact that any one's act should be correlated with whether it is good (divine good) or not. In this regard, his idea of ​​the circulation of all movements can be understood as a return to Christian values ​​(Protestantism). He needs subjectivity not in itself, but as a mechanism by which he will refuse (with knowledge of the matter) from the unacceptable anti-divine bacchanalia, and return (also with knowledge of the matter) to the bosom of His truth, when the world is given naturally, as it is when any moments are explained not from themselves, but from their connection with His world.

All this is shown in the second part of the scene, where Hamlet is talking with the first gravedigger. To begin with, they measure their intellectual power in a topic that discusses who is intended for the prepared grave. The gravedigger speculates for the sake of speculation, and Hamlet brings him to the surface:

Hamlet: ... Whose grave is this ...?

First Gravedigger: Mine, sir.

Hamlet: It is true that you are, because you are lying from the grave.

Gravedigger 1: You are not from the grave. So it's not yours. And I am in it and, therefore, I do not lie.

Hamlet: How can you not lie? You stick around in the grave and say it's yours. And it is for the dead, not for the living. So you lie, that in the grave.

Hamlet sees everything in connection with the essential state of affairs, his reasoning is understandable, they are adequate to the true state of things, and are taken for granted. That's what he takes.

Then, finally, it turns out (also after breaking through the pseudo-scholastic reasoning of the gravedigger) that the grave is intended for a woman. The grave-digger scholastic does not want to talk about her in any way, since she (ie Ophelia) was not from his system of thought. In fact, we remember that Ophelia, before her death, embarked on the path of Hamlet, although she went on her own - having neither purpose nor strength. Therefore, her movement was marked only by the initial stroke of intentions, and then it ends in this terrible earthen pit. And yet, she died under the banner of subjectivity, i.e. under the banner of a new philosophy. And this is clearly not to the liking of the first gravedigger.

After that, Hamlet "communicates" with the skull of some Yorick. The main point of this action seems to be that the living hero holds the skull of the decayed hero in his hands. Here life is united with death, so that these two opposites (both physically and in the memory of the prince, when in the dead he sees echoes of the one who once lived) came together. The next moment has the same meaning, when Hamlet tells Horatio that the great Alexander the Great, through a series of transformations of his body after death, can become a not-so-great plug to the barrel. And here and there opposites converge. This is still the same theme of the circulation of motion, which Hamlet began to explore in the fourth act. It is already absolutely obvious to him that such dialectical constructions are necessary for an adequate description of the world; at the same time, he clearly follows in the footsteps of the then-famous scholastic philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, in whom the idea of ​​God implies that He is closed to Himself, when His beginning coincides with His end. This again confirms our idea that Hamlet, philosophically, sees his task in restoring scholasticism, but not in the form of form, but in the form of content - that is, an honest attitude towards God, and a vision of the human soul, which allows linking everything into a single whole, with a single foundation - God.

It is important that the information that the grave is intended for a woman (Ophelia) is adjacent to the theme that opposites converge. This suggests that Ophelia's death is somehow connected to her life. It seems that this connection lies in the assertion that along with the death of Ophelia's body, the opposite of this body - her soul - is alive. The dead body of the heroine is adjacent to her living soul - this is the main meaning of the second part of the first scene. But what does a living soul mean? Is it possible to say that the soul is alive when it burns in fiery hell? Hardly. But when she is in paradise, then it is possible, and even necessary. It turns out that Ophelia is in paradise, despite her (only in a certain sense) sinful death, since she repented of her former sins (she atoned for Hamlet's betrayal by joining his camp), and died not because she threw herself into the river, but because the ontological foundations of her life had dried up. She - as it is told by the queen - did not commit a volitional act of depriving herself of life, but accepted it as a natural dissolution in the nature of the river atmosphere. She did not drown herself on purpose, she simply did not resist her immersion in water.

Finally, it is interesting that during the conversation with the gravediggers, Hamlet is thirty (or even a little more) years old. At the same time, the whole play began when he was about twenty. The entire timing of the tragedy fits into a few weeks, well, maybe months. A. Anikst asks: how to explain all this?

Within the framework of the vision of the work developed in this study, this fact has already been practically explained by us. We affirm that the passage of time for Hamlet is determined by the inner workings of his spirit. And since, after his exile, very intense events took place with him, and he was in a strong tension of consciousness all this time, his strangely rapid aging is quite understandable. We have seen similar things before: when he spoke with a ghost in the first act, when he spoke with Polonius in the third act (when he advised him not to back away, like a cancer, from problems), when time for his flesh thickened in accordance with his inner work on himself. . The same is true in this case: Hamlet has grown old (more precisely, matured) because he had serious inner work. By astronomical standards this is impossible, but poetically it is possible, and even necessary. Necessary - from the point of view of the idea of ​​isolation and therefore completeness (and hence perfection) of the whole play. But more on that later.

In the third part of the scene, we see Ophelia's funeral. At first, Hamlet observes everything from the sidelines, but when Laertes jumps into the grave to the body immersed there and begins to lament: “Fill the dead with the living,” he comes out of hiding, jumps into the grave himself and fights with Laertes, shouting: “Learn to pray ... You, You're right, you'll be sorry." What is it about?

We remember that immediately before the funeral, Hamlet again refers to the idea of ​​the unity of opposites. And then he sees that Laertes rushes to the dead sister with the words “Fill up the dead with the living”, demonstrating a desire to identify the living and the dead in a single grave mess. It would seem that this is quite consistent with the mood of the prince, but only at first glance. After all, what was Laertes striving for? He rushed to the direct equating of opposites. Indeed, we know (or can guess) that the philosophy of Hamlet, through his allies-actors, is already hovering in the public minds of the kingdom, that information about it penetrates into all pores of public life, having obviously reached the king and his retinue. They would absorb its life-giving juices, but be that as it may, they act in their role, within their old paradigm, according to which the real, life philosophy should be replaced by pseudo-scholarship, and under this sauce (pseudo-scholastic) to justify the deception of everything and all, getting the basis of the possibility of their endless fun. They do it in the following way. They take the main provisions of real philosophy, tear them away from life, thereby mortifying them, and in such a lifeless form they use them for their intended purpose. For example: they take the thesis “opposites converge” in statics, and understand it not as that one will become another as a result of a complex dynamic process of transformation (this is exactly how Hamlet has it both in his views and in the very fact of his changes in within the framework of the play), but as a direct given. As a result, their left becomes equal to the right, black to white, and evil to good. The same thing happens with Laertes: wishing to identify life and death through their primitive alignment, he thereby wished to transfer Ophelia to the opposite state in relation to the one in which she began to be with an altered consciousness, immediately before death. And since she was already then, in fact, an ally of Hamlet, Laertes, at least at the last moment, wants to designate her in his, i.e. pro-royalty. This is what revolts Hamlet, makes him fight. Hamlet is fighting here for the bright memory of his beloved, so that she is not considered either his traitor or an accomplice to royal machinations.

Here one may ask: how did Hamlet and Laertes know (or understand) that Ophelia changed her outlook? The point is that philosophy has a substantive status in the play. It is a kind of ether, material insofar as it allows one or another activity to be carried out. Philosophy turns out to be the environment of action, and, at the same time, the tools that are used to obtain the desired result. Our entire analysis leaves no doubt about this. Therefore, in a poetic context, knowing the position of one or another hero who got involved in the flow of events is not a miracle for all other heroes, but the norm. The whole optics of the world is distorted around them according to their way of thinking, but the whole world begins to distort the perception of such heroes. There is a mutual change in the opinions of the characters about each other, as soon as they move a little in their thoughts regarding their previous position. And the closer the hero is drawn into the flow of events, the more this applies to him. We can say that through participation in events, he contributes his share to the distortion of the poetic space-time continuum. But by doing so, he opens his inner world to the outer world, and as a result, becomes visible to other players who are involved in the whirlwind of change. Therefore, Laertes sees the true situation with Ophelia and wants to deceitfully change it. Hamlet, in turn, sees this, and prevents such a deception, which in Laertes' lamentations somewhat resembles a prayer. But there is no truth in this prayer, hence the call of Hamlet, reinforced by the threat: "Learn to pray ... You really will regret it." Laertes will still regret that on the day of mourning he decided to become a fool. Laertes is a primitive liar, and Hamlet throws it in his face: “You lied(highlighted by me - S.T.) about the mountains?

The situation is stretched to the limit, like the string of a bow from which an arrow is about to fly out.

The second scene, the final one, in which we distinguish four parts.

In the first, Hamlet tells Horatio about how he replaced the king's letter, which was carried by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England, and according to which Hamlet was to be executed, with his own letter, according to which the twins themselves are sentenced to death. In the second part, Hamlet receives an invitation from the king to participate in a duel with Laertes. In the third part we see the duel itself, in which and around which the king, queen, Laertes and Hamlet perish. The latter, before his death, bequeaths power in the state to Fortinbras. He appears in the fourth part of the scene and orders Hamlet to be buried with honors.

In more detail, the matter is as follows. After the funeral of Ophelia, Hamlet says: “As if everything. Two words about something else. It seems that he has done some important work, and now he wants to start another. Since his business, by and large, is one thing - the assertion of reliability, therefore, the god-likeness of the existence of the world, then his “as if everything”, of course, should concern precisely this. In this context, the whole situation with the funeral, and first of all with his struggle with Laertes, seems to be part of his affirmation of the divine, i.e. closed (circular) structure of human relations. Specifically: Hamlet in that action returned good to good (returned the good name of Ophelia, who, before her death, embarked on the path of truth). Now he says “Two words about something else”, i.e. about another action, which, however, can in no way be completely different, divorced from his main business, since he simply has no others. The “other” action is the opposite of what was at the funeral, but within the framework of the previous intentions. And if then there was a return of good to good, now it is time to talk about the return of evil to evil. In this case, everything will close: abstract thought-forms about the unity of opposites in life are realized at the level of the interaction of good and evil, and in such a simple and clear form, when good responds with good, and evil turns into evil for the one who committed it (see Note 8). And as proof of this, he tells Horatio how he replaced the letter that Guildenstern and Rosencrantz were taking to England for his execution with a letter with the reverse content, according to which these two should be executed. The twins were bringing evil to England, which turned against them: "They did it themselves."

Thus, through the story of the return of evil to evil, Hamlet finally sharpens the theme of revenge. Previously, it was in the background, it was more important for him to build the entire system of relations based on the worldview of sustainability, and therefore on the philosophy of the divine circle. Now that all this is done, it is time for the next steps, when the abstract provisions are translated into specifics. And if the situation with the king, guilty of both the death of the prince's father and in an attempt to kill him, requires revenge, then so be it. And so, when the king, through Polonius's substitute - the wobbly and ornate Osric - in the same spirit, in the spirit of behind the scenes, challenges Hamlet to a duel with Laertes, he agrees, since the situation becomes extremely clear. In fact, he is confident in his abilities, because he "permanently exercised." We have seen that during the whole play Hamlet "practiced" in verbal fights with his rivals, building his new (however, well-forgotten old) ideologeme, so that the upcoming fight, having the form of rapier fencing, is in fact the last, already final statement. his rightness. The elasticity of his thought, due to the world he built (this became possible after he proclaimed "be a subject" and put the mind above power, and put the world depending on the mind) with a single space-time continuum, turned into the elasticity of the steel of that weapon, to which he intends to present his arguments. Moreover, during the funeral of Ophelia, he put on display some of them, and they were not parried. In that rehearsal of the upcoming fight, Hamlet won, and after that he had nothing to fear. On the other hand, he understood that all Osric's serpentine ornateness did not promise anything good, that the king was up to something in his spirit of secret games and dishonest moves. But since the duel must take place in public, any royal trick will become visible, and this will be the basis for killing the king. Hamlet knew that there would be a trick, and he also knew that this trick would give him legal grounds to return the evil to the original source. So he agreed to this strange duel because it gave him the chance to legally kill Claudius. Hamlet went to fencing with Laertes not for fencing, but to fulfill the promise to his father! And this is natural: after all, if you look at it, it was not Laertes who challenged him to battle, but the king. Well, the true attack with a rapier was intended for the king. Evil to evil and will return.

This is exactly what will happen. Of course, Hamlet's heart did not deceive when he sensed (anticipated) danger. Laertes' weapon was poisoned, and Hamlet could not escape death. But the main thing is that evil, nevertheless, received a portion of its own essence, and Laertes, as well as the king, were killed after discovering their dishonest actions. Hamlet killed the king, restoring justice not only for himself, but for everyone, because those who watched the duel saw everything with their own eyes: Gertrude drank the wine intended for Hamlet, poisoned herself and announced publicly that these were the tricks of the king. Similarly, Laertes, stabbed to death with his own poisoned sword, pointed to the king as the mastermind behind all the dishonor that had taken place. The king was doomed even before Hamlet plunged the poisoned blade into him. He, as the center of all secret machinations, was exposed. Evil is strong as long as it skillfully disguises itself as good. When its interior becomes exposed, it loses its existential power and naturally dies. So, when the prince returns to the poisonous snake in the royal guise of its own poisonous bite with a rapier, he simply puts an end to the history of its existence. At the same time, he crosses out the very idea of ​​the linear course of time and finally affirms its circular character: “What was, will be; and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9). Moreover, he affirms this not only in relation to the external situation in relation to himself, but also to himself: suspecting something bad, he still goes to a duel, trusting God, trusting that his possible death is a blessing that closes some kind of more global wave of changes than the one in which his life participated. Even at the end of the first act, our hero establishes the vector of his moods: “The connecting thread of the days has broken. / How can I connect their fragments! (early translation by B. Pasternak). At the end of the play, he fulfilled his task, connected the broken thread of time - at the cost of his life - for the sake of the future.

The life of Hamlet, like that of the king or other heroes of the tragedy, is ultimately a local plot in comparison with the entire history of the Danish state, in a metaphysical sense, in comparison with history as such. And when Hamlet dies, he closes this story on himself, bequeathing power to the young Fortinbras (see Note 9), who by that time had returned from Poland. Once his father lost his kingdom through Hamlet's father. Now, through Hamlet himself, he gets it back. The history of centuries closed in on itself. At the same time, the memory of the hero Hamlet did not dissolve into nothing. He ensured the continuity of power, the stability of existence and a God-like worldview, in which evil is punished by evil, and good breeds good through itself. He affirmed moral morality. "If he were alive, he would become king...". However, he became more than a deserved reigning monarch. He became a symbol of the good, consciously affirming the limitations of man, but the limitations not by himself for the sake of his selfish and momentary goals, but by God, and therefore having endless opportunities to overcome himself through the whirlwind of movements. In Shakespeare, he died not in order to die, but in order to pass into the category of great values ​​by which humanity lives.

Analysis of the fifth act.

According to the fifth act as a whole, we can say that it is about the fact that the good has the structure of a circular movement, and the evil has the structure of a linear movement. In fact, the very aspiration of Hamlet to the blissful stability of the kingdom, which is ensured by the introduction of a God-shaped, circular (self-closed) philosophy, speaks for itself. Besides, the good that symbolizes life, in order to be itself, must always repeat itself, just as life from generation to generation multiplies itself just as it is and was. On the contrary, evil has a needle-shaped character, like a stinging arrow, because it carries life-denial. Evil has a certain beginning - a beginning when deception occurs, and life unfolds from a circle into an arrow. However, in the end it kills itself, because it has no continuation, it breaks off. Salvation is seen in this cliff: someday evil will end, it is finite in itself. Evil has the definition of finite, and good has the definition of infinite, generating itself an innumerable number of times, as many times as God pleases. And when the deception is revealed, the evil goes away, and the story again turns into a circle - natural, logical, absolutely verified and correct. This circle is provided with subjective activity, so that through its activity the inner essence of a person passes into the God-like harmony of the world. Man turns out to be an accomplice of creation, His helper.

C. Conclusions

Now it's time to think about that dry, philosophically verified residue that constitutes the original skeleton of the entire drama. To get it, it is necessary from all that has been said in part IN of our research to remove the emotions that helped us to set the right guidelines when we were wading through the forest of mysteries nurtured by Shakespeare, but which are now becoming redundant. When the forest has been traversed, our own thoughts should serve as guides, and on their basis we should move on.

Briefly, the following is obtained. Prince Hamlet at the beginning of the play finds himself in a situation without reason, not seeing the meaning of his existence. He is that something in which there is nothing, but which denies this state of affairs. In an extremely schematic form, he is negation as such, or nothing. After all, nothing contains being in itself, does not contain any existence in itself (as the scholastics would say - there is neither essential nor existential being in it), and at the same time the fact of the impossibility of its being (the fact is that there is something that no) pushes itself out of itself, out of standing-in-itself, and forces it to move into the opposite area.

What is the opposite of nothingness? It is opposed to something that exists, and exists explicitly, as a kind of stability. This is what it is quite appropriate to designate as existential being, or, taking into account Heidegger's research, being. Thus, Hamlet rushed from non-existence to the existent. He does not regard this position as his final destination; this point is intermediate, and lies in the fact that he asserts himself as a subject. The reliability and solidity of subjectivity is due to the fact that this state depends only on the person himself, more precisely, it is based on the knowledge of one's subjectivity, on the acceptance of one's inner world as a certain significance. Further, starting from this position of standing-in-itself, he extracts from himself a worldview that takes into account the spirituality of the human being and, thus, brings into the world the same foundation on which his own self-confidence is based - the foundation of stability, eternity. existence. Thus, Hamlet not only affirms the unity of the inner and outer worlds, which now have a common basis, but he closes the very basis on itself and makes it a likeness of the Divine Absolute, in which any activity is generated by itself from itself in order to come to itself. Indeed, in the play, all Hamlet's actions proceed from him as a subject, give rise to an appropriate worldview, and focus on the need for him to obtain power, but not for himself personally, but in order for the ideologeme introduced into the world (which is such that it is beneficial for everyone) to be long, stable. Here, the prince's soul, tuned for good, spills over the entire Oikumene, becomes everything, as well as everything is focused into it. A closed structure appears, reflecting the true source of everything, which Hamlet constantly reminds himself and us, the audience of the play (readers of the play). This source is God. It was He who launched all movements, and therefore they are naturally such that they repeat in their structure His self-closed essence.

Hamlet ensured the security of existence through involvement in a self-repeating historical process, and ensured this by his death with the will of the throne to Fortinbras Jr. At the same time, our hero not only died, but became a symbol of the appreciation of human life. He received the status of a high, maximally generalized value, and this value turns out to be in a meaningfully lived life. Thus, his death allows us to treat him as some kind of meaningfulness, essential being, or that noematic sphere, which today can be called the being of being (being).

As a result, all the movements of Hamlet fit into the following scheme: nothing - being - being. But since the being of the existent is not the existent in the form of a direct given (after all, it is expressed through the death of the protagonist), then in a certain sense - in the sense of the current life process - it repeats the state in non-existence, so that this scheme turns out to be closed, God-like, and the whole project of Hamlet - expressing the truth in its divine incarnation. (Note that the idea of ​​equality of being and non-being was later used by Hegel in his "Science of Logic"). In addition, it is important to emphasize that the being of beings is a certain ultimate meaningfulness, in a sense, an all-collecting idea (Platonic Logos), so that it (being) exists outside of time, at all times, and is the foundation to which Hamlet aspired. And he got it. He received the basis of himself, and, at the same time, the basis of the world: the world evaluates him, and thereby gives him an existential basis, but he also gives the world a valuable environment for existence, i.e. gives him a reason. Both of these foundations have the same root, since they stem from the same god-like movement of Hamlet. In the end, these subjective movements turn out to be the formula of being in His truth.

And to emphasize the power of this conclusion, Shakespeare, against the backdrop of Hamlet, shows Ophelia and Laertes with completely different movements.

For Ophelia, we have a scheme:

Existing (an empty vessel for placing someone's ideas in it) - non-existence (a state of deep error) - being (Hamlet's assessment of her repentance).

For Laertes we have:

Being (he is a certain significance, teaching Ophelia to doubt Hamlet's love) - being (that which does not think; a simple tool in the hands of the king) - non-being (death and obvious oblivion).

Both of these movements are wrong because they do not contribute to history, and therefore are not involved in its course. They did nothing for life, unlike Hamlet, and therefore their life should be considered a failure. It especially failed for Laertes, and as proof of this, his movement turns out to be not only different from Hamlet's, but it turns out to be directly opposite. In any case, the movements of brother and sister are not closed and therefore not god-like. For Ophelia this is obvious, but for Laertes we will explain: if Hamlet compares the initial non-being with the final being on the basis of the essential, Hamletian understanding of their dynamic unity, when one becomes others as a result of the successive conversion of consciousness to one form or another, then in Laertes, due to his static attitude towards opposites, these very opposites do not align, i.e. actions to align them turn out to be false.

Thus, a comparison of the movements of the three heroes allows us to more clearly show the only correct course of life - the one that was realized by Hamlet.

The truth of subjectivity has gone down in history, and Shakespeare's tragedy loudly heralded it.

2009 - 2010

Notes

1) It is interesting that Polonius hurries his son to leave for France: “On the road, on the road ... / Already the wind arched the shoulders of the sails, / And where are you yourself?”, Although recently, in the second scene, at the king’s reception, not I wanted to let him go: “He exhausted my soul, sovereign, / And, giving up after long persuasion, / I reluctantly blessed him.” What is the reason for the different position of Polonius at the reception of the king, and when seeing off his son? This fair question is asked by Natalya Vorontsova-Yuryeva, but she answers it completely wrong. She believes that the intriguer Polonius in troubled times decided to become king, and Laertes allegedly could be a rival in this matter. However, firstly, Laertes is completely devoid of power aspirations, and at the end of the play, when he surrendered himself completely to the power of the king (although he could seize the throne himself), this becomes quite clear. Secondly, becoming a king is not an easy task. Here it is extremely useful, if not necessary, help, and power. In this case, on whom should Polonius rely, if not on his son? With this approach, he needs Laertes here, and not in distant France. However, we see how he sends him off, apparently not caring about his power ambitions. It seems that the explanation for the contradiction of Polonius' behavior lies in the text itself. So, at the end of his instruction to his son before sending, he says: "Above all: be true to yourself." Polonius here urges Laertes not to change. It is very important! Against the background of the fact that Fortinbras Jr. declared his claims for the lands of Denmark, not recognizing the legitimacy of the current king Claudius, a general situation of instability of power arises. At the same time, Hamlet shows discontent, and there is a possibility that he will win over Laertes to his side. Polonius, on the other hand, needs a resource in the form of the force that would be on the side of the king, and which, if necessary, would help stabilize the situation. Laertes is a knight, a warrior, and his military abilities are just needed in case of a danger to royal power. And Polonius, as the right hand of Claudius, very interested in maintaining his high position at court, has his son in mind. So he hastily sends him to France in order to protect him from new trends and keep him there as a backup, just in case such a need arises. We know that at the end of the play, Laertes will indeed appear to serve as a "tool" for the king to kill Hamlet. At the same time, Polonius does not want to speak out about his fears about the stability of the existing state of affairs - so as not to escalate panic. Therefore, in front of the king, he pretends that he is not worried about anything, and that it is difficult for him to let go of his son.

2) We note that this quatrain, apparently, is more successfully translated by M. Lozinsky as follows:

Don't believe that the sun is clear
That the stars are a swarm of lights,
That the truth has no power to lie,
But believe my love.

Its difference from Pasternak's version comes down to a strong difference in the third line (otherwise, everything is similar or even exactly the same). If we accept such a translation, then the meaning of Hamlet's message does not fundamentally change, with only one exception: in the third line, he does not say that the reasons for his changes are "here", but that he is right, obviously - for the sake of good intentions, to be a lie. . Indeed, camouflage, even through madness, is quite justified and natural when the struggle for the common good begins.

3) It is about morality that we need to talk about here, and not about direct sexual games with the king, as various researchers often like to do lately. And in general - would Gertrude want to marry Claudius, if he were a goon and an outright traitor? Perhaps she was aware of his spiritual moods.

4) In general, in the play, the kinship of madness, even if it is feigned, like in Hamlet, with the ability to reason sensibly, is striking. This move, which has a deep metaphysical underpinning, would later be taken up by Dostoevsky and also by Chekhov. On stage, madness means the otherness of thinking in relation to the official system of thought. From an ontological point of view, this indicates that the hero is in search, he reflects on his life, on his being in it, i.e. this speaks of his existential fullness.

5) Studying the works of Shakespeare, we can confidently say that the idea of ​​life being closed in on itself, i.e. the idea of ​​the circulation of everything worried him for a long time, and in Hamlet it arose not by chance. So, similar motifs appear in some early sonnets. Here are just a few (translations by S. Marshak):

You ... combine stinginess with waste (sonnet 1)
You look at my children.
My former freshness is alive in them.
They are the justification for my old age. (sonnet 2)
You will live ten times in the world
Repeated ten times in children,
And you will have the right in your last hour
Triumph over conquered death. (sonnet 6)

Therefore, it can even be assumed that many ideas for the play were nurtured by the playwright long before its real appearance.

6) By the way, this could be guessed at the beginning of the play, when in the third scene of the first act in the speech of Laertes to Ophelia we hear: “As the body grows, in it, as in a temple, / The service of the spirit and mind grows.” Of course, in this phrase there is no direct reference to Hamlet himself, but since we are talking about him in principle, there is a clear association between the quoted words and the main character of the tragedy.

7) The Christian character of Hamlet was noticed a long time ago on the basis of only some of his statements, and without an obvious connection with the structure of the play. I would like to think that this shortcoming of the previous criticism is overcome in the present study.

8) Of course, such statements run counter to the well-known provision from the Gospel of Matthew, when it is called to turn one's cheek under a blow. But, firstly, this is the only case of such invocations of the Savior. Secondly, He himself behaved in a completely different way, and when it was necessary, he either walked away from dangers, or took a whip and whipped sinners with it. And thirdly, it is impossible to exclude the false nature of this appeal, inspired by the churchmen-traitors of Christianity, who have always been able to forge documents of the highest value for the sake of their own self-interest - the self-interest of managing people. In any case, the idea of ​​the return of evil to evil is just and in the highest degree corresponds to Christian morality, to which Hamlet is striving to affirm.

9) It must be said that Hamlet, apparently, knew in advance that the power would belong to Fortinbras. Indeed, if he is serious about stability and about the fact that everything should revolve in a circle, then this is exactly the result he should have come to.

What allows us to make such a statement? This allows us the sixth scene of the fourth act. Recall that there Horatio receives and reads a letter from the prince, which, among other things, says: “They (the pirates who attacked the ship on which Hamlet and the twins sailed to England - S.T.) treated me like merciful robbers . However, they knew what they were doing. For this, I will have to serve them.” The question is, what kind of service should Hamlet serve the bandits, defending the purity of human relations, honesty, decency, etc.? The play says nothing about it. This is rather strange, since Shakespeare could not have inserted this phrase, but he inserted it. This means that the service still existed, and it is spelled out in the text, but only one should guess about it.

The proposed version is the following. The robbers mentioned are not. They are the people of Fortinbras Jr. Indeed, before sailing to England, Hamlet talked with a certain captain from the army of a young Norwegian. This conversation has been transmitted to us and there is nothing special in it. However, since the whole presentation comes from the name of Horatio (his words at the end of the play: “I will publicly tell about everything / What happened ...”), who might not know all the ins and outs of that conversation, it can be assumed that Hamlet agreed with that captain and about the attack, and about the transfer of power to Fortinbras Jr. Moreover, a "heavily armed corsair" could well have been led by the same captain. In fact, under the heading "characters" the clearly land-based Bernardo and Marcellus are presented as officers, without specifying their rank (rank). The captain is presented as a captain. Of course, we meet him on the shore and we get the impression that the captain is an officer's rank. But what if this is not a rank, but the position of a ship commander? Then everything falls into place: just before the exile, Hamlet meets the commander of the Norwegian ship, negotiates with him about salvation, and in return promises Denmark, meaning, first of all, obviously, not so much saving himself as returning the whole historical situation back to normal. It is clear that this information quickly reaches Fortinbras Jr., is approved by him, and then everything happens as we know from the play itself.

Literature

1. The structure of a literary text // Lotman Yu.M. About art. SPb., 1998. S. 14 - 288.
2. Anikst A.A. Shakespeare's Tragedy "Hamlet": Lit. a comment. - M .: Education, 1986, 223.
3. Kantor V.K. Hamlet as a Christian warrior // Questions of Philosophy, 2008, No. 5, p. 32-46.
4. The Crisis of Western Philosophy // Solovyov V.S. Works in 2 volumes, 2nd ed. T. 2 / General. Ed. and comp. A.V. Gulygi, A.F. Losev; Note. S.A. Kravets and others - M .: Thought, 1990. - 822 p.
5. Barkov A.N. "Hamlet": the tragedy of mistakes or the tragic fate of the author? // In the book. Barkov A.N., Maslak P.B. W. Shakespeare and M.A. Bulgakov: unclaimed genius. - Kyiv: Rainbow, 2000
6. Frolov I.A. Shakespeare's equation, or "Hamlet", which we have not read. Internet address: http://artofwar.ru/f/frolow_i_a/text_0100.shtml
7. M. Heidegger. Basic problems of phenomenology. Per. with him. A.G. Chernyakov. St. Petersburg: ed. Higher Religious and Philosophical School, 2001, 445 p.
8. Vorontsova-Yurieva Natalya. Hamlet. Shakespeare's joke. Love story. Internet address:
9. http://zhurnal.lib.ru/w/woroncowajurxewa_n/gamlet.shtml

Gorokhov P.A.

Orenburg State University

OUR CONTEMPORARY PRINCE OF DANISH (philosophical problems of the tragedy "Hamlet")

The article deals with the main philosophical problems raised by the great playwright and thinker in the immortal tragedy "Hamlet". The author comes to the conclusion that Shakespeare in "Hamlet" acts as the greatest philosopher-anthropologist. He reflects on the essence of nature, space and time only in close connection with reflections on human life.

We Russians celebrate the memory of Shakespeare, and we have the right to celebrate it. For us, Shakespeare is not only one huge, bright name: he has become our property, he has entered into our flesh and blood.

I.S. TURGENEV

It has been four centuries since Shakespeare (1564-1614) wrote the tragedy Hamlet. Meticulous scientists, it would seem, have explored everything in this play. The time of writing the tragedy is determined with greater or lesser accuracy. This is 1600-1601. - the very beginning of the 17th century, which will bring such deep shocks to England. It is estimated that the play has 4,042 lines and a vocabulary of 29,551 words. Thus, "Hamlet" is the playwright's most voluminous play, running on stage without cuts for more than four hours.

The work of Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular is one of those topics that are sweet to address to any researcher. On the other hand, such an appeal is justified only in case of emergency, because the chance to say something really new is unusually small. Everything seems to be explored in the play. Philologists and literary historians have done a great job. This tragedy has long been, with the light hand of the great Goethe, called philosophical. But there are very few studies devoted specifically to the philosophical content of Shakespeare's masterpiece, not only in domestic, but also in world philosophical literature. Moreover, in solid encyclopedias and dictionaries on philosophy there are no articles that cover Shakespeare precisely as a thinker who created an original and enduring philosophical concept, the riddles of which have not been solved to this day. Goethe said this beautifully: “All his plays revolve around a hidden point (which no philosopher has seen or defined yet), where all the originality of our “I” and the daring freedom of our will collide with the inevitable course of the whole ... ".

It is by finding this "hidden point" that one can try to solve the riddle of genius. But our

the task is more modest: to solve some of the philosophical mysteries of the great tragedy, and most importantly, to understand how the protagonist of the play can be close and interesting to a person of the emerging XXI century.

For us, modern Russian people, Shakespeare's work is especially relevant. We can, like Hamlet, state with all fairness: “There is some rot in the Danish state,” because our country is rotting alive. In the epoch we are living through, for Russia, the connection of times has again “disintegrated”. Shakespeare lived and worked at a time that entered Russian history under the epithet "vague". The coils of the historical spiral have their own mystical tendency to repeat themselves, and the Time of Troubles has come again in Russia. The new False Dmitrys made their way to the Kremlin and opened the way to the very heart of Russia for new

Now to the American - to the gentry. Shakespeare is close to us precisely because the time in which he lived is similar to our terrible time and in many ways resembles the horrors of the recent history of our country. Terror, internecine strife, a merciless struggle for power, self-destruction, the "enclosure" of England in the 17th century are similar to the Russian "great turning point", "perestroika", the recent Gaidar-Chubais transition to the era of primitive accumulation. Shakespeare was a poet who wrote the eternal passions of man. Shakespeare is timelessness and ahistoricality: past, present and future are one for him. For this reason, it does not and cannot become obsolete.

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at a turning point in his work. Researchers have long noticed that after 1600, Shakespeare's former optimism was replaced by harsh criticism, an in-depth analysis of the tragic contradictions in the soul and life of a person. During-

For ten years, the playwright creates the greatest tragedies in which he solves the most burning questions of human existence and gives deep and formidable answers to them. The tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is particularly revealing in this respect.

For four centuries, Hamlet has attracted attention so much that you involuntarily forget that the Prince of Denmark is a literary character, and not a once-living man of flesh and blood. True, he had a prototype - Prince Amlet, who lived in the 9th century, avenged the murder of his father and eventually reigned on the throne. The Danish chronicler of the 12th century Saxo Grammatik told about him, whose work “History of Denmark” was published in Paris in 1514. This story subsequently appeared several times in various adaptations, and 15 years before the appearance of Shakespeare's tragedy, the famous playwright Kid wrote a play about Hamlet. It has long been noted that the name Hamlet is one of the spellings of the name Gamnet, and that was the name of Shakespeare's son, who died at the age of 11.

Shakespeare deliberately abandoned in his play many persistent stereotypes in the presentation of the old story. It was said about Amlet that he was "higher than Hercules" in his physical qualities and appearance. Hamlet in Shakespeare emphasizes precisely his dissimilarity with Hercules (Hercules) when he compares his father, the late king, and his brother Claudius (“My father, s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules”). Thus, he hints at the ordinaryness of his appearance and the lack of eccentricity in it. Since we are talking about this, let's say a few words about the appearance of the Danish prince.

Traditionally, on the stage and in the cinema, Hamlet is portrayed as a handsome man, if not very young, then at least middle-aged. But to make a forty-year-old man out of Hamlet is not always reasonable, because then the question arises: how old is his mother, Gertrude, then, and how could King Claudius be seduced by the old woman? Hamlet was played by great actors. Our Innokenty Smoktunovsky played him in the cinema when he himself was already over forty. Vladimir Vysotsky played Hamlet from the age of thirty until his death. Sir Laurence Olivier played Hamlet for the first time in 1937 at the age of 30, and at the age of forty directed the film, where he played the main role. Sir John Gielgud, perhaps the greatest Hamlet of the XX

century, first played this role in 1930 at the age of 26. Of the modern outstanding actors, it is worth noting Mel Gibson, who played this role in the film of the great Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branaud, who played Hamlet for the first time at the age of 32 on stage, and then staged the full film version of the play.

All the mentioned performers of this role represented Hamlet as a lean man in the prime of his life. But he himself says about himself: “Oh that this too too sallied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” (Literally: “Oh, if this too salty meat could melt and dissolve with dew!”). And Gertrude, during a deadly duel, gives her son a handkerchief and says about him: "He's fat, and scant of breath". Consequently, Hamlet is a man of a rather dense physique, if the mother herself says about her own son: "He is fat and suffocating."

Yes, most likely, Shakespeare did not imagine his hero as beautiful in appearance. But Hamlet, not being a hero in the medieval sense, that is, beautiful on the outside, is beautiful on the inside. This is the great man of the New Age. His strength and weakness originate in the world of morality, his weapon is thought, but it is also the source of his misfortunes.

The tragedy "Hamlet" is Shakespeare's attempt to capture the whole picture of human life with a single glance, to answer the sacramental question about its meaning, to approach a person from the position of God. No wonder G.V.F. Hegel believed that Shakespeare, by means of artistic creativity, gave unsurpassed examples of the analysis of fundamental philosophical problems: a person's free choice of actions and goals in life, his independence in the implementation of decisions.

Shakespeare in his plays skillfully exposed human souls, forcing his characters to confess to the audience. A brilliant reader of Shakespeare and one of the first researchers of the figure of Hamlet - Goethe - once said: “There is no pleasure more sublime and purer than, closing your eyes, listening to how a natural and true voice does not recite, but reads Shakespeare. So it is best to follow the harsh threads from which he weaves events. Everything that is in the air when great world events are taking place, everything that timidly closes up and hides in the soul, here comes to light freely and naturally; we learn the truth of life without knowing how.

Let us follow the example of the great German and read the text of the immortal tragedy, for the most correct judgment about the character of Hamlet and other heroes of the play can only be deduced from what they say, and from what others say about them. Shakespeare sometimes remains silent about certain circumstances, but in this case we will not allow ourselves to guess, but will rely on the text. It seems that Shakespeare in one way or another said everything that was needed both by contemporaries and future generations of researchers.

As soon as the researchers of the brilliant play did not interpret the image of the Prince of Denmark! Gilbert Keith Chesterton, not without irony, noted the following about the attempts of various scientists: “Shakespeare, without a doubt, believed in the struggle between duty and feeling. But if you have a scientist, then for some reason the situation is different. The scientist does not want to admit that this struggle tormented Hamlet, and replaces it with a struggle between the consciousness and the subconscious. He endows Hamlet with complexes, so as not to endow him with a conscience. And all because he, a scientist, refuses to take seriously the simple, if you will, primitive morality on which Shakespeare's tragedy rests. This morality includes three premises from which the modern morbid subconscious flees like a ghost. First, we must do what is right, even if we hate to; secondly, justice may require that we punish a person, as a rule, a strong one; thirdly, the punishment itself can take the form of a struggle and even murder.”

Tragedy begins with murder and ends with murder. Claudius kills his brother in his sleep by pouring a poisonous infusion of henbane into his ear. Hamlet imagines the terrible picture of his father's death in this way:

Father died with a bloated belly

All swollen, like May, from sinful juices. God knows what else for this demand,

But all around, probably a lot.

(Translated by B. Pasternak) The ghost of Hamlet's father appeared to Marcello and Bernardo, and they called Horatio precisely as an educated person, capable of, if not explaining this phenomenon, then at least explaining himself to the ghost. Horatio is a friend and close associate of Prince Hamlet, which is why the heir to the Danish throne, and not King Claudius, learns from him about the ghost's visits.

Hamlet's first monologue reveals his tendency to make the broadest generalizations on the basis of a single fact. The shameful behavior of the mother, who threw herself on the “bed of incest,” leads Hamlet to an unfavorable assessment of the entire beautiful half of humanity. No wonder he says: “Frailty, you are called: a woman!”. Original: frailty - frailty, weakness, instability. It is this quality for Hamlet that is now decisive for the entire feminine gender. Mother was for Hamlet the ideal of a woman, and it was all the more terrible for him to contemplate her fall. The death of his father and the betrayal of his mother in memory of the late husband and monarch mean for Hamlet the complete collapse of the world in which he had happily existed until then. The father's house, which he remembered with longing in Wittenberg, collapsed. This family drama makes his impressionable and sensitive soul come to such a pessimistic conclusion: How, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't, ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature

Possess it only.

Boris Pasternak perfectly conveyed the meaning of these lines:

How insignificant, flat and stupid The whole world seems to me in its strivings!

O abomination! Like an unweeded garden

Give free rein to the herbs - overgrown with weeds.

With the same indivisibility, the whole world was filled with rough beginnings.

Hamlet is not a cold rationalist and analyst. He is a man with a large heart capable of strong feelings. His blood is hot, and his senses are sharpened and unable to dull. From reflections on his own life collisions, he extracts truly philosophical generalizations concerning human nature as a whole. His painful reaction to his surroundings is not surprising. Put yourself in his place: your father died, your mother hurriedly jumped out to marry an uncle, and this uncle, whom he once loved and respected, turns out to be the murderer of his father! Brother killed brother! Cain's sin is terrible and testifies to irreversible changes in human nature itself. Ghost is absolutely right:

Murder is vile in itself; but this is more vile than all and more inhuman than all.

(Translated by M. Lozinsky)

Fratricide testifies that the very foundations of humanity have rotted away. Everywhere - treason and enmity, lust and meanness. No one, not even the closest person, can be trusted. This torments Hamlet the most, who is forced to stop looking at the world around him through rose-colored glasses. The terrible crime of Claudius and the lustful behavior of his mother (typical, however, for many aging women) look in his eyes only manifestations of universal corruption, evidence of the existence and triumph of world evil.

Many researchers reproached Hamlet with indecision and even cowardice. In their opinion, he should have slaughtered him as soon as he found out about his uncle's crime. Even the term "Hamletism" appeared, which began to denote weak-willedness prone to reflection. But Hamlet wants to make sure that the spirit that came from hell told the truth, that the father's ghost is really an "honest spirit". After all, if Claudius is innocent, then Hamlet himself will become a criminal and will be doomed to hellish torment. That is why the prince comes up with a "mousetrap" for Claudius. Only after the performance, having seen the uncle's reaction to the villainy committed on the stage, Hamlet receives real earthly proof of the revealing news from the other world. Hamlet almost kills Claudius, but he is saved only by the state of immersion in prayer. The prince does not want to send his uncle's soul cleansed of sins to heaven. That is why Claudius is spared until a more favorable moment.

Hamlet seeks not just to avenge his murdered father. The crimes of the uncle and mother only testify to the general corruption of morals, the death of human nature. No wonder he says the famous words:

The time is out of joint - o cursed spite.

That ever I was born to set it right!

Here is a fairly accurate translation of M. Lozinsky:

The century was shaken - and worst of all,

That I was born to restore it!

Hamlet understands the viciousness not of individual people, but of all mankind, of the entire era, of which he is a contemporary. In an effort to take revenge on the killer of his father, Hamlet wants to restore the natural course of things, revives the destroyed order of the universe. Hamlet is offended by the crime of Claudius, not only as the son of his father, but also as a person. In the eyes of Hamlet

the king and all the court brethren are by no means isolated random grains of sand on the human shore. They are representatives of the human race. Despising them, the prince tends to think that the whole human race is worthy of contempt, absolutizing particular cases. Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, for all their love for the prince, are unable to understand him. Therefore, Hamlet sends curses to love itself. Horatio, as a scientist, cannot understand the mysteries of the other world, and Hamlet pronounces a sentence on learning in general. Probably, even in the silence of his Wittenberg existence, Hamlet experienced the hopeless torment of doubt, the drama of abstract critical thought. After returning to Denmark, things escalated. He is bitter from the consciousness of his impotence, he is aware of all the treacherous fragility of the idealization of the human mind and the unreliability of human attempts to think the world according to abstract formulas.

Hamlet faced reality as it is. He experienced all the bitterness of disappointment in people, and this pushes his soul to a turning point. Not for every person, the comprehension of reality is accompanied by such upheavals that fell to Shakespeare's hero. But it is precisely when faced with the contradictions of reality that people get rid of illusions and begin to see true life. Shakespeare chose an atypical situation for his hero, an extreme case. The once harmonious inner world of the hero is collapsing, and then recreated before our eyes again. It is precisely in the dynamism of the image of the protagonist, in the absence of static in his character, that the reason for the diversity of such contradictory assessments of the Danish prince lies.

The spiritual development of Hamlet can be reduced to three dialectical stages: harmony, its collapse and restoration in a new quality. V. Belinsky wrote about this when he argued that the so-called indecision of the prince is “disintegration, the transition from infantile, unconscious harmony and self-enjoyment of the spirit into disharmony and struggle, which are a necessary condition for the transition to courageous and conscious harmony and self-pleasure of the spirit.

The famous monologue "To be or not to be" is pronounced at the peak of Hamlet's doubts, at the turning point of his mental and spiritual development. There is no strict logic in the monologue, because it is pronounced at the moment of the highest discord in his

consciousness. But these 33 Shakespearean lines are one of the pinnacles not only of world literature, but also of philosophy. Fight against the forces of evil or avoid this battle? - this is the main question of the monologue. It is he who entails all other thoughts of Hamlet, including those about the eternal hardships of mankind:

Who would take down the whips and mockery of the century,

The oppression of the strong, the mockery of the proud,

Pain of contemptible love, slowness of judges, Arrogance of authorities and insults,

Made to meek merit,

If he himself could give himself a calculation with a simple dagger ....

(Translated by M. Lozinsky) All these problems do not belong to Hamlet, but here he again speaks on behalf of humanity, for these problems will accompany the human race until the end of time, for the golden age will never come. All this is “human, too human,” as Friedrich Nietzsche would later say.

Hamlet reflects on the nature of the human tendency to think. The hero analyzes not only the present being and his position in it, but also the nature of his own thoughts. In the literature of the Late Renaissance, characters often turned to the analysis of human thought. Hamlet also carries out his own critique of the human "faculty of judgment" and comes to the conclusion that excessive thinking paralyzes the will. So thinking makes us cowards,

And so the natural color of determination grows weak under a touch of pale thought,

And undertakings, ascending powerfully,

Turning aside your move,

Lose the action name.

(Translated by M. Lozinsky) The whole monologue "To be or not to be" is permeated with a heavy awareness of the hardships of life. Arthur Schopenhauer, in his thoroughly pessimistic Aphorisms of Worldly Wisdom, often follows the milestones that Shakespeare left in this heartfelt monologue of the prince. I do not want to live in the world that appears in the hero's speech. But it is necessary to live, because it is not known what awaits a person after death - perhaps even worse horrors. “Fear of a country from which no one has returned” makes a person drag out an existence on this mortal earth - sometimes the most miserable. Note that Hamlet is convinced of the existence of the afterlife, for the ghost of his unfortunate father appeared to him from hell.

Death is one of the main characters not only of the monologue "To be or not to be", but of the entire play. She collects a generous harvest in Hamlet: nine people die in that very mysterious country that the Prince of Denmark reflects on. About this famous monologue of Hamlet, our great poet and translator B. Pasternak said: “These are the most tremulous and crazy lines ever written about the anguish of the unknown on the eve of death, rising with the power of feeling to the bitterness of the Gethsemane note.”

Shakespeare was one of the first in the world philosophy of modern times to think about suicide. After him, this topic was developed by the greatest minds: I.V. Goethe, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.A. Berdyaev, E. Durkheim. Hamlet reflects on the problem of suicide at a turning point in his life, when the “connection of times” broke up for him. For him, the struggle began to mean life, being, and the departure from life becomes a symbol of defeat, physical and moral death.

Hamlet's instinct for life is stronger than the timid sprouts of thoughts about suicide, although his indignation against the injustices and hardships of life often turns back on himself. Let us see with what choice curses he heaps upon himself! "Stupid and cowardly fool", "rotozey", "coward", "donkey", "woman", "dishwasher". The internal energy that overwhelms Hamlet, all his anger falls for the time being into his own personality. Criticizing the human race, Hamlet does not forget about himself. But, reproaching himself for slowness, he never for a moment forgets the suffering of his father, who suffered a terrible death at the hands of his brother.

Hamlet is by no means slow to take revenge. He wants Claudius, dying, to know why he died. In his mother's bedroom, he kills the lurking Polonius in full confidence that he has committed revenge and Claudius is already dead. The more terrible his disappointment:

As for him

(points to the corpse of Polonius)

Then I mourn; but heaven said

They punished me and me him,

So that I become their scourge and servant.

(Translated by M. Lozinsky) Hamlet sees in chance a manifestation of the higher will of heaven. It was heaven that entrusted him with the mission of being a "scorge and minister" - a servant

goy and the executor of their will. This is how Hamlet views the matter of revenge.

Claudius is enraged by Hamlet's "bloody trick", for he understands who the sword of his nephew was really aimed at. Only by chance does the “fidgety, stupid troublemaker” Polonius die. It is difficult to say what were the plans of Claudius in relation to Hamlet. Whether he planned his destruction from the very beginning, or whether he was forced to commit new atrocities by the very behavior of Hamlet, hinting to the king about his awareness of his secrets, Shakespeare does not answer these questions. It has long been noticed that the villains of Shakespeare, unlike the villains of ancient drama, are by no means just schemes, but living people, not devoid of sprouts of goodness. But these sprouts wither away with each new crime, and evil flourishes in the soul of these people. Such is Claudius, who is losing the remnants of humanity before our eyes. In the duel scene, he actually does not prevent the death of the queen drinking poisoned wine, although he tells her: "Do not drink wine, Gertrude." But his own interests are above all, and he sacrifices his newly acquired spouse. But it was precisely the passion for Gertrude that became one of the causes of Cain's sin of Claudius!

I would like to note that in the tragedy Shakespeare collides two understandings of death: religious and realistic. The scenes in the cemetery are indicative in this respect. Preparing the grave for Ophelia, the gravediggers unfold before the viewer a whole philosophy of life.

The real, and not the poetic image of death is terrible and vile. No wonder Hamlet, holding in his hands the skull of his once beloved jester Yorick, reflects: “Where are your jokes? Your foolishness? your singing? Nothing left to poke fun at your own antics? Jaw dropped completely? Now go into the room to some lady and tell her that even if she puts on a whole inch of makeup, she will still end up with such a face ... ”(translated by M. Lozinsky). Everyone is equal before death: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander turns to dust; dust is earth; clay is made from the earth; and why can't they plug a beer barrel with this clay into which he has turned?

Yes, Hamlet is a tragedy about death. That is why it is extremely relevant for us, citizens of dying Russia, modern Russians.

sky people, whose brains have not yet completely become dull from watching endless serials that lull consciousness. The once great country perished, as did the once glorious state of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire. We, once its citizens, are left to drag out a miserable existence in the backyards of world civilization and endure the bullying of all kinds of Shylocks.

The historical triumph of "Hamlet" is natural - after all, it is the quintessence of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Here, as in a gene, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Othello, Timon of Athens were already in the bundle. For all these things show the contrast between the world and man, the clash between human life and the principle of negation.

There are more and more stage and film versions of the great tragedy, sometimes extremely modernized. Probably, "Hamlet" is so easily modernized because it is all-human. And although the modernization of Hamlet is a violation of the historical perspective, there is no escape from this. In addition, the historical perspective, like the horizon, is unattainable and therefore fundamentally inviolable: how many epochs

So many perspectives.

Hamlet, for the most part, is Shakespeare himself, it reflects the soul of the poet himself. Through his lips, wrote Ivan Franko, the poet expressed many things that burned his own soul. It has long been noted that Shakespeare's 66th sonnet coincides strikingly with the thoughts of the Danish prince. Probably, of all the heroes of Shakespeare, only Hamlet could write Shakespearean works. No wonder Bernard Shaw's friend and biographer Frank Garrick considered Hamlet to be a spiritual portrait of Shakespeare. We find the same in Joyce: "And, perhaps, Hamlet is the spiritual son of Shakespeare, who lost his Hamnet." He says: "If you want to destroy my conviction that Shakespeare is Hamlet, you have a difficult task ahead of you."

There can be nothing in creation that was not in the creator himself. Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the streets of London, but Hamlet was born from the depths of his soul, and Romeo grew out of his passion. A man is least of all himself when he speaks for himself. Give him a mask and he will become truthful. The actor William Shakespeare knew this well.

The essence of Hamlet lies in the infinity of the spiritual quest of Shakespeare himself, all his “to be or not to be?”, the search for the meaning of life in the middle

di its impurities, awareness of the absurdity of being and the thirst to overcome it with the greatness of the spirit. With Hamlet, Shakespeare expressed his own attitude to the world, and, judging by Hamlet, this attitude was by no means rosy. In Hamlet, for the first time, a motif characteristic of Shakespeare “after 1601” will sound: “Not one of the people pleases me; no, not even one."

The closeness of Hamlet to Shakespeare is confirmed by numerous variations on the theme of the Prince of Denmark: Romeo, Macbeth, Vincent (“Measure for measure”), Jacques (“How do you like it?”), Postumus (“Cymbeline”) are peculiar twins of Hamlet.

The power of inspiration and the power of the stroke testify that Hamlet became an expression of some personal tragedy of Shakespeare, some of the poet's experiences at the time of writing the play. In addition, Hamlet expresses the tragedy of an actor who asks himself which role is more important - the one he plays on stage or the one he plays in real life. Apparently, under the influence of his own creation, the poet also thought about which part of his life is more real and complete - a poet or a person.

Shakespeare in "Hamlet" appears as the greatest philosopher-anthropologist. Man is always at the center of his thoughts. He reflects on the essence of nature, space and time only in close connection with reflections on human life.

Very often, miserable and ignorant people tried to try on the tragedy of Hamlet. No civilized country has probably escaped this. In Russia, many people loved and still love to pull on Hamlet's cloak. This is especially the fault of various politicians and some representatives of the vociferous and stupid tribe, which in Soviet times was called the "creative intel-

ligence." It was not for nothing that Ilf and Petrov in The Golden Calf created their Vasisual Lokhankin - a terrible and terrible in its veracity parody of the Russian intelligentsia, posing truly Hamlet questions, but forgetting to turn off the light in the communal closet, for which he receives a cane from the indignant masses of the people. soft places. It is precisely such intellectuals A.I. Solzhenitsyn will call "education", and N.K. Mikhailovsky at the end of the 19th century aptly dubbed them "hamletized piglets." The "Hamletized Piglet" is a pseudo-Hamlet, a selfish nonentity, inclined to "poeticize and hamletize himself." Mikhailovsky writes: “The Hamletized pig must ... convince himself and others of the presence of enormous virtues that give him the right to a hat with a feather and black velvet clothes.” But Mikhailovsky does not give him this right, as well as the right to tragedy: “The only tragic feature that can, without betraying artistic truth, complicate their death is dehamletization, the consciousness at the solemn moment of death that Hamlet is in itself, and the piglet also on its own."

But the real Hamlet is a living embodiment of the eternal world drama of the Thinking Man. This drama is close to the hearts of all who have experienced the ascetic passion to think and strive for lofty goals. This passion is the true purpose of man, which contains both the highest power of human nature and the source of inescapable suffering. And as long as man lives as a thinking being, this passion will fill the human soul with energy for ever new accomplishments of the spirit. This is precisely the guarantee of the immortality of the great tragedy of Shakespeare and its protagonist, in whose wreath the most luxurious flowers of thought and stage art will never wither.

List of used literature:

1. Goethe I. V. Collected works in 10 volumes. T. 10. M., 1980. S. 263.

3. Ibid. P. 1184.

4. Hegel G. V. F. Aesthetics: In 4 vols. M., 1968 - 1973. T. 1. S. 239.

5. Goethe I. V. Collected works in 10 volumes. T. 10. M., 1980. S. 307 - 308.

6. Shakespeare V. Tragedies translated by B. Pasternak. M., 1993. S. 441.

8. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. M., 1960. S. 34.

9. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. S. 40.

10. Belinsky VG Complete Works. T. II. M., 1953. S. 285-286.

11. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. S. 71.

12. Pasternak B. L. Favorites. In 2 vols. T.11. M., 1985. S. 309.

13. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. S. 100.

14. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. S. 135-136.

15. N. K. Mikhailovsky. Works, vol. 5. St. Petersburg, 1897. pp. 688, 703-704.