Reddit reviews After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis

While it's an interesting take on those famous lines...I don't buy it.

To begin with, the author writes:

>Hamlet has been accused of being indecisive, excessively self-reflective, neurotic, genuinely insane, and suicidal, none of which diagnoses a close reading of the play bears out.

I tend to be extremely wary of authors who feel the need to not only slight theories that differ from their own but, in one single sentence, dismiss out of hand more than a century's worth of criticism that has dealt not only with this very issue, but these very lines. As a proponent of psychoanalytic criticism's application to literature, I can tell you that I've read no shortage of analyses about Hamlet - some wildly inventive and long-winded, some poignant and short (and none quite so beautiful as that little footnote in the Interpretation of Dreams that started it all). In particular, I find Kenneth and Julie Reinhard's work After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis quite convincing - more than half the book is dedicated to the play, and in great detail. To suggest, as the author of this article does, that a close-reading of Hamlet will demonstrate that Hamlet is neither neurotic or suicidal, is - and I hate to be so outright - absurd.

Her argument, in my opinion, hinges too much upon an interpretation of Hamlet's supposed Christian values...which she seems to take for granted. There are no shortage of lines to suggest that Hamlet is, of course, worried about the afterlife and his soul (or even to suggest that the play itself is a Christian play), but she goes further in her interpretations than I am willing to follow, as below:

>The “To be, or not to be” soliloquy is about whether the contemplated action (Hamlet’s execution of Claudius) is “to be”; the question is whether Hamlet is to bring the action into being. That is why Hamlet refers, at the end of the soliloquy, to “enterprises of great pitch and moment”; it is high and momentous enterprises which “lose the name of action” because of the possibility of judgment and damnation after death, which is Hamlet’s theme in this soliloquy (3.1.86–88). The Christian Hamlet, who is so very noble and possesses, as do all the greatest Shakespearean characters, a fully developed imagination, would never speak of suicide as an “enterprise of great pitch and moment”; only the most vain and deluded of men could so regard themselves and their own ultimate act of despair, and Hamlet is not among them.

Again, I take issue with anyone suggesting what a character would or would not do - it seems to me that our business, as literary critics, is to focus on what the character did. To suggest that Hamlet would not speak of suicide nobly is to discount the classical interpretation of suicide as a noble, dignified act (when it was justified): even Dante Alighieri, for Christ's sake, spared Cato from Hell and placed him as the guard of the gates of Purgatory! Remember that during Shakespeare's time an interest in the classics was re-emerging with a passion - Shakespeare himself even took part in the brief-lived tradition of the Elizabethan epyllion, which retold a popular tale of mythology (his being "Venus and Adonis") - and the poems were so popular they continued into the Jacobean era. As many allusions as Hamlet makes to the Christian God he makes to the gods of antiquity - like Cato, then, might not Hamlet see suicide as the noble option here, in the classical sense? She seems to make much ado about Hamlet being worried about the act of killing Claudius condemning his soul but fails to be more moderate in her argument: both suicide and homicide would be a fast ticket to Hell. Why not argue instead for a balanced interpretation instead of this all-or-nothing, deliberative provocative approach?

She writes:

>For the Christian Hamlet, the possibility of damnation is his dilemma. How does one, as a Christian, and not in self-defense or war, kill another human being? More especially, how does a Christian prince kill his uncle, his mother’s husband, and his king? Hamlet, with all his excellence of forethought, can imagine the chaos that will afflict Denmark if Claudius is killed.

I would argue that this is precisely why Hamlet is contemplating suicide in these particular lines, not homicide - the situation is so bleak that he knows his soul is damned if he becomes a murderer; worse, if he does not murder, he is an unfaithful son. Suicide becomes a noble option in this situation - "to be, or not to be," as it were, to recuse himself and not be forced to act.

After reading the article I became curious about the author, so I looked her up. Dr. Judith Shank works at the College of Saint Fisher More, of which she is one of the principle founders. The College describes itself as "a place of teaching and learning, dedicated to the study of the liberal arts, the humanities, and the scholastic tradition, faithful to the intellectual, moral, spiritual, and liturgical traditions of the Roman Catholic Church."

Ah.

It is possible that Dr. Shank has a slight case of tunnel vision - that is to say, she wants to perform a Catholic reading of Hamlet that pigeon-holes Hamlet as a devout, proper, not-deviant-in-the-least type of Catholic, and this article is the result. To me, it reads too much like someone trying to shove a square block through a circular hole - true, there are some clever analyses that spin on the turn of phrases of words, but I'm sorry: it just doesn't hold water for me.