Socrates: And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good—
need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Plato, The Phaedrus
(As translated by Robert Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

How should we read this line? At first blush it would appear that a somewhat exasperated Hamlet is scoffing at Rosencrantz’s irritating badinage—which he surely is—but I think there’s more than just mockery at stake here. As Harold Bloom reminds us, when it comes to understanding Hamlet and his motives we are “not permitted to know”, so we should take care when reading this line. All the same, other interpretations do seem to be available. The word “but”, for instance, is somewhat ambiguous; its usual meaning—as an exclusion or limit (there is nothing either good or bad, except for when thinking makes it so)—remains valid, but doesn’t feel as strong, or relevant, as the sense of conditional threshold: there is nothing either good or bad, unless or until thinking makes it so. [1]

I wonder whether Shakespeare is making a profound claim here—a claim that the Rosencrantzes of the world have never dared to understand—namely that morality supervenes on cognition [1a]—a radical idea whose consequences were, and sometimes still are, extremely dangerous: if morality cannot exist unless there is thought, do we still need God?

This is a question that goes back a long way. Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, in his Dialogue Theaetetus, Plato famously credits the sophist Protagoras with the line: “Man is the measure of all things.” [2] The comparison with Hamlet's line is both obvious and irresistible: are the qualities of "good" and "bad" purely human inventions, or do they exist independently of human minds? Protagoras was a relativist; he thought that right and wrong, good and bad, are contingent things. Is a man with a hundred dollars rich or poor? Is he wise or foolish if he gives it away? According to Protagoras, it all depends on who you ask, and when.

Plato, on the other hand, was an absolutist. He thought that ethical principles, like everything else, were governed by his beloved eternal forms. Perfect justice, perfect truth, or perfect goodness, cannot, he thought, be subject to the vagaries of human thought any more than a perfect circle. Not surprisingly, religious thinkers have long prefered Plato to Protagoras.

Accordingly, in echoing Protagoras's relativist position Hamlet not only suggests that moral values are contingent, perhaps even transitory, but he also calls into question the whole framework of moral absolutism that was, and remains, the foundation of religious thought—a decidedly risky thing to do in 16th century Europe, when the potentially lethal accusation of heresy was never far away.

But aside from this obvious danger, why does Hamlet insist that thinking is what determines, or at least reveals, good and bad? Why not feeling—which seems to be the usual way we value one thing above another? And what of revelation or law? Don't the world’s various religions, all (implicitly at least) claim a monopoly on morality? Is this really such a profound insight on Hamlet’s part, or is the young Prince as crazy as those around him suspect?

Or is it that when Hamlet says "thinking" we should read "wishing"? In other words, perhaps Protagoras was right after all; perhaps the valence of “good” or “bad” depends as much as anything on our somewhat arbitrary beliefs and desires. This certainly seems familiar enough: suffering is routinely justified as right, or at least necessary, by those who cause it or allow it, and no one—not even the most brutal despot—has ever claimed to have wrong on their side. Like Hamlet, we too want to feel that our actions—if not the beliefs and desires that motivate them—are right and good.

But when the right and good aren’t obvious, or if we are trying to stifle doubt, we often make the mistake of looking to nature or tradition for reassuring precedents that will placate our all too biddable consciences—a blunder the philosopher G.E. Moore famously called the Naturalistic Fallacy (Moore, 12). This is the argument that you can’t derive an “ought” from an "is", or put another way, just because something is (or has long been) the case, doesn’t mean that it ought to be. [3] Now, this might seem obvious to us as we look back on the grim catalogue of abuses that were long defended on the basis of tradition, but ours is a recent and decidedly minority view; the naturalistic fallacy—or perhaps we should call it the Divine Fallacy—was for centuries the trump card of justifications, and was certainly so in Shakespeare’s day. If you believe the world is divinely ordered, then precedent and tradition—especially scriptural tradition—aren't just useful moral guides, they are your primary sources of right and wrong.

Accordingly, when morality-obsessed Hamlet declares that nothing is inherently good or bad, we have strong evidence that he is deeply troubled; after all, not even a Prince could expect to get away with such flagrant heresy in the 16th century. But while Hamlet’s tact-smothering despair may have saved him from such a dangerous accusation (because he is assumed to be mad, not bad), it also compels him to face a terrifying possibility: that human nature—and perhaps even the very structure of reality itself—might be radically different from the familiar notions that he has been brought up to believe. Hamlet isn’t a procrastinator; the poor man is paralyzed.

It might be argued that Hamlet’s paralysis/depression is a combination of grief (for his father), rage (at his uncle), and disgust (for his mother), but I think there is more to his malaise than this. To be sure, he feels these things deeply (to the extent that even he thinks he might be going mad), but despite his turmoil he can still “tell a hawk from a handsaw”—at least some of the time (II.ii). What this triple whammy has done, however, is to knock the wind of certainty out of his sails. Hamlet is deeply uncertain. Perhaps for the first time in his life he doubts; he doubts his intuitions; he doubts what is true; he even doubts what is real—think of his interactions with the ghost. Doubt—existential, even ontological doubt—is both the centre of his crisis and the root of his paralysis, and this is why I don’t think his “nothing is either good or bad” line is a simple throw away to dispose of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet really is wondering whether there is a fundamental—and therefore divine—morality.

We shouldn’t underestimate the danger of questioning the religious foundation of morality in a medieval theocracy, as Europe effectively still was in Shakespeare’s time. [4] Many thousands of people were tortured or executed for supposed religious crimes—even in newly Protestant England—so any dissent had to be very carefully put. It was obvious that moral categories were eternal and divinely prescribed, and to suggest that the prevailing value system was contingent (or even worse, contrived), could only have been interpreted as the act of a heretic or madman—and in the former case at least the response was typically swift and brutal. So far from being a matter of mere psychological drama, it seems to me that Hamlet’s torment is symbolic of the plight of all those who come to doubt the most sacred truths of their time. No wonder he’s content to let those around him think that he’s mad.

Some critics still see Hamlet as mad—perhaps even clinically depressed (ref)—others see him as “morally flawed” [5], whatever that is supposed to mean; I see him as a kind of heretic—a heretic like Galileo—a man whose experience and intelligence lead him to realize that the world is not constituted in the way he has been led to (and was required to) believe. Galileo was an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare and was twice hauled before the Inquisition on account of his “Copernican heresy.” [6] But while he managed to escape the Vatican's flames (with the help of influential friends), many others were less fortunate. The noted philosopher (and fellow Copernican) Giordano Bruno, for instance, was put to the stake for “pernicious heresy” in 1600—about the time Hamlet was first performed. [7] Bruno spent several years in England and there is speculation that he was involved with the so-called School of Night—the free-thinking and reputedly atheistic group centred around Sir Walter Raleigh, whose members, according to Frederick Turner, included such figures as Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, Thomas Hariot and even Shakespeare's publisher Edward Blount (Ref). Whether any of Bruno's ideas ever reached Shakespeare we will probably never know, but news of his death may well have. Sharply aware of just how dangerous ideas can be, Shakespeare wisely put his metaphysical doubts into the deniable and recondite mouths of his troubled dramatis personae.

All of which suggests to me that Hamlet can be read as a dark allegory of apostasy. I don’t suppose this is a popular view among the literati, most of whom still seem to buy Coleridge’s Hamlet-as-procrastinator story, [8] but I think there’s something to it, because in addition to the provocative question of Hamlet’s doubt, there are other grounds for such a claim; not least the Great Metaphor of death.

As many critics have noted, the play is saturated in death. Hamlet contemplates suicide, and meditates on the morality and meaning of death, at length, and the body count is nothing short of appalling: with the exception of Horatio, just about everyone who comes into contact with the Prince dies. Hamlet’s father—the king—is murdered before the action begins; Hamlet eventually kills the murderer—his uncle—dispatching four of his acolytes in the process; and amid the carnage his mother, his beloved, and Hamlet himself all die too—a tragedy indeed. In light of all this death, including the momentous symbolism of royal patricide, is it really so far-fetched to suggest that Shakespeare is hinting at a metaphysical ending too?

The dilemma of the apostate is further hinted at in some of Hamlet’s most famous lines. Consider his phrase: “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (II.ii). Here Hamlet reminds us that human credulity is amazingly elastic: even a well-educated person like Hamlet could believe himself a god (a king of infinite space) despite such a ludicrous confinement, were it not for those nagging thoughts and intuitions (bad dreams) that forbid such beliefs. The implication being that our somewhat haphazard faculty for reason is all that prevents us from believing whatever nonsense we wish.

In another much quoted line Hamlet seems to come close to anticipating Pascal’s Wager. Again thinking of suicide, Hamlet laments: “conscience does make cowards of us all” (III.i), which we might read as: Although I doubt God’s existence, I dare not reject Him because I might be wrong, and the price of such a mistake—eternity in hell—is too awful to contemplate. But while Hamlet reluctantly toes the theological line and refrains from killing himself, his repeated juxtaposition of sleep and death in a kind of euphemistic traductio gives the lie to the idea that the death he wants is anything as fleeting as sleep. On the contrary, I think he’s suggesting, hoping even, that “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” (III.i) is not merely some new, heavenly world in which he’ll awaken to continue his miserable existence, but is, rather, undiscoverable—the unknowable vanishing point of utter finitude and annihilation.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Hamlet further hints at a secular worldview in his dust-filled reflections on the transience of life in the gravedigger scene (V.i), a motif Shakespeare returns to elsewhere—notably in Macbeth, when the Thane, realizing his end is imminent, expresses a most Hamlet-like sense of futility:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth V.v)  

Hamlet's final words resonate with this, and are among his most telling: "The rest is silence" (V.ii). And again Shakespeare gives us an ambiguity: does he mean "rest" as in remainder, or "rest" as in sleep? In either case, it doesn't sound as if he's expecting to meet or greet anyone.

***

Despite the political upheavals of the Renaissance and Reformation, the straightjacket of religious authority that had constrained European thought for centuries was agonizingly slow to loosen. The reliable strictures of guilt, persecution, alienation, and even execution continued to ensure that any religious dissent (an offence that covered a lot of territory) was rare and well camouflaged, even in the early years of the 17th century—a period in which thousands were killed for supposed witchcraft and heresy. Nevertheless, despite such brutal disincentives, a few dissenting voices were heard, and the centuries since have seen a steady rise in the phenomenon of apostasy, both personal and cultural—a phenomenon that cannot be entirely unconnected with the spectacular rise of science over the same period.

It might be argued that the erosion of religious authority that accompanied the rise of science was largely self-inflicted by the church. Certainly, the relentlessly violent denial of ideas imposed by the prelates (in the face of often excellent evidence) eventually began to call the basis of ecclesiastical authority into question, and by martyring intellectuals the church may well have unwittingly bolstered the rationalist program. Moreover, with the upstart science in the spotlight, the epistemological incongruity between the two systems must have been newly, and increasingly, glaring, for while religious claims rely on testimony, tradition and authority, science is a mode of enquiry predicated on doubt, and in which evidence is always queen—a distinction with obvious relevance to Hamlet’s search for truth [9]

The cultural significance of evidence and doubt—the two central pillars of the scientific method—is now very much greater than it was in Shakespeare’s day. In a sense we are all sceptics now—all of us doubtful about some claim or other. The primacy of evidence—arguably our primary alethic tool—reflects one of the major differences in world-view between our time and Shakespeare’s. A telling consequence of this shift (towards a more forensic notion of truth) is revealed when we reflect on that most bittersweet of experiences: the realization that we were right to doubt.

Whether it is the story of Father Christmas or something more pernicious, most of us have had the experience of discovering that something once taught (and duly believed) as right and true was in fact absurdly or even egregiously wrong. This kind of experience may be inevitable, amusing even, in our world, but in a culture of rigid ideological certainty such as Hamlet's (or the Taliban's, Stalin’s, Mao's, etc) it is quite different, because in such a world the authorities cannot be wrong; their pronouncements are necessarily synonymous with truth. Nevertheless, no ideology yet devised is completely watertight. Even in a tightly controlled world of Doublethink and Thought Police and torture, there comes a point when evidence outweighs ideology, and Hamlet experiences precisely this kind of shift in worldview while he is at sea (no pun intended), when he discovers compelling evidence that he has been betrayed by those closest to him—something he had previously suspected. Certain of something at last, his paralysis evaporates and the final bloody showdown ensues.

And if we read Hamlet’s change in consciousness as an allegory of the loss of faith, there is a final, bitter irony: apostasy can be tragic too. The loss of certainty—even the loss of the illusion of certainty—often means the loss of comfort, security and purpose too. And as any psychotherapist will confirm, the catharsis that accompanies such grief can be every bit as painful as it is profound. Worse, the world one encounters after such a transformation can seem horribly bleak and pitiless—especially when it's business as usual for everyone else.

By these lights then, Hamlet’s travails are both an object lesson in how difficult it can be to relinquish longstanding beliefs, as well as a stark reminder that when events do finally eject us from the warm bath of delusion, we shouldn’t expect the bathroom floor of reality to be anything other than cold and hard. And it does seem to take experience—that most brutal of teachers [10]—to prise us from our habits and beliefs; for while we cling to our preferred certainties, not even the genius of Shakespeare can expose our confabulations. We’d rather see the Prince as a mad procrastinator.

 RSP 2002 - 2005

Works Cited and Notes

Bloom, H. Introduction to: Cervantes, M. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. London: Secker & Warburg. 2004; reprinted (abridged) as: “The Knight in the Mirror”. London Guardian. Saturday December 13, 2003.
URL=http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ics/story/0,6000,1105883,00.html

Moore, G.E, Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1903, (second edition, 1993) 

[1] And with the addition of a single comma a further, intriguing possibility emerges: “for there is nothing, either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

[1a] C.f. the debate on linguistic determinism (also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) - this is the claim that language gives rise to thought (see here). It may be argued that many animals with complex nervous systems perform some kind of cognition, especially if we include emotions as bona fide cognitive phenomena, which begs the question: which aspects of cognition give rise to morality? Is there, in other words, a naturalistic account of ethics?—a question that is beyond the scope of this paper. For more on this see e.g. Dennett, D. Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking Press. 2003, and: May, L., Friedman, M., & Clark, A., Eds. Mind and Morals: Essays on Cognitive Science and Ethics. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1996. See also note 3 below.

[2] Plato, Theaetetus, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/theatu.html

[3] Moore’s position is of course central to the claim that a naturalistic account of ethics is not possible—a position that is coming under attack from various quarters (see http://www.evolutionaryethics.com for an extensive list of papers and reviews). I use Moore’s term in a slightly weaker sense – that justifying the morality of an action on the grounds of tradition alone is untenable.

[4] E.g. Zagorin, P, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton University Press. 2003

[5] E.g. Gardner, H. “Hamlet and the Tragedy of Revenge” in: Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism. (Ed. Leonard F. Dean). New York: OUP. 1972

[6] Of the many accounts of Galileo’s travails with the Inquisition, Dava Sobel’s is excellent: Sobel, D. Galileo’s Daughter: An Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love. London: Penguin. 2000

[7] The first performance of Hamlet is thought to have taken place around 1600, although the play did not appear in print, or the Stationer’s Register, until 1603. The text of the play evolved over the following twenty years and is widely believed to be the work of more than one person. The texts of the four published quartos (between 1603 and 1611) differ considerably, and the first folio edition of 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare’s death) has yet more changes (see British Library - http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/hamlet.html, also
http://ise.uvic.ca/Annex/DraftTxt/Ham/index.html and http://faculty.valpo.edu/bflak/seminar/hamlet.html#learversions).
For instance, between the first and second quartos, the author(s) seems to have acquired some knowledge of Danish nomenclature, geography, and the court at Elsinore, which has led to speculation that Roger Manners, the young Earl of Rutland, might have had a hand in it. Not only was Rutland briefly an Ambassador to Denmark during this period, but he had also previously studied at the University of Padua, where two of his fellow students were, astonishingly, named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. (http://www.shakespeareidentity.co.uk/roger-manners.htm) See also http://www.princeton.edu/~rbivens/shakespeare/

[8] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Lecture on Hamlet”, from Lectures and Notes on Shakspere [sic] and Other English Poets. 1883. URL= http://shakespearean.org.uk/ham1-col.htm
Voltaire also hints at Shakespeare's secularist leanings: in his translation of Hamlet's act III soliloquy, he gives Hamlet the line: "Just gods, if gods there be, instruct my soul." Philosophical Letters, Part II, 1733
See: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Voltaire0265/Works/Vol19-HTMLs/0060-
19_Pt02.html#hd_lf060.19p2.label.042

[9] Peter Usher of Pennsylvania State University has suggested that Hamlet is “an allegory for the competition between the cosmological models of Thomas Digges of England and Tycho Brahe of Denmark.” Paper online at: http://solar-center.stanford.edu/art/Hamlet.html See also his (more comprehensive) 1999 paper "Hamlet's Transformation" published in Elizabethan Review Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 48-64. Available online URL=http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/usher/er.html

[10] Widely attributed to CS Lewis. I do not have the original reference.

Links

Basel University (links to criticism)
Voltaire on Hamlet
Shakespearean.org (Including Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1818 Lecture on Hamlet)
Alfred Barkov (Russian scholar)
Hamlet Haven
Hamlet Online
PrinceHamlet.com
Essay by Ian Johnston of Malaspina-University College, Nanaimo, Canada
Alan Baragona's Hamlet Bibliography
Some thoughts on the question of authorship - who wrote the works we attribute to Shakespeare?

Questions:  

Why is Hamlet a tragedy? What is literary or dramatic tragedy, and how does it differ from ordinary human tragedy? Who says?

Literary tragedy isn't quite the same thing as normal, human tragedy. As we all know, dreadful things occasionally happen. Worse, they often happen unnecessarily. We call these events tragedies - quite rightly - but in literature there's a bit more to it than that.

About 2,350 years ago Aristotle wrote the Poetics - part of which (section one, part vi) established the dramatic/literary form of tragedy. Text available here.

As for other definitions, Thinkquest say:

In general, [a tragedy is] a literary work in which the central character meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, which often portrays a central character of weak nature, tragedy often involves the problems of a central character of dignified or heroic stature. Through a related series of events, this main character, the tragic hero or heroine, is brought to a final downfall. The causes of the character’s downfall vary. In traditional dramas, the cause is often an error in judgement or a combination of inexplicable outside forces that overwhelm the character. In modern dramas, the causes range from moral or psychological weaknesses to the evils of society. The tragic hero or heroine, though defeated, usually gains a measure of wisdom and/or self-awareness.

Do you agree with this strong-weak analysis? How would you characterize literary tragedy? What do you think are the key elements? Catharsis is often said to be essential to tragedy. Aristotle thought so. But does there have to be catharsis, and if so, whose? Why?

More on tragedy here and here