Great tragedies of Shakespeare. Problems of the play "Hamlet"

In the history of art and literature, no play is more popular than the popularity of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. For more than 300 years, this tragedy has been played on the stages of theaters all over the world. People of different cultures look in it for answers to questions that trouble them. The secret of this tragedy lies in the philosophical depth and humanistic inspiration of this work, in the skill of Shakespeare the playwright, who embodied universal human problems into artistic grievances.

The image of Hamlet is central to Shakespeare's tragedy. Already at the beginning of the play it is determined

The main goal of this hero is revenge for the murder of his father. According to medieval ideas, this is his duty, but Hamlet is a man of modern times, he is a humanist, and cruel revenge is contrary to his nature. To make a decision, he needs to carefully weigh whether Claudius's death will change anything in the world. Around him he sees only treason and deceit. He is disappointed even in his love and remains lonely.

His thoughts about the purpose of man take on a tragic coloring (scene in the cemetery). Man is a very weak creature to resist evil, Hamlet believes. The events of the tragedy seem to confirm these reasonings of the hero: Ophelia dies innocently, and evil remains unpunished. Hamlet cannot come to terms with this, but he also does not find the strength to resist. If he becomes a murderer, he will go over to the side of evil and thereby strengthen it.

Shakespeare gives Hamlet several opportunities to kill Claudius: Hamlet sees the king praying alone and is given the opportunity. But the hero does not take a decisive step. In prayer, Claudius atones for his sins; death at such a moment was perceived by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as forgiveness of sins, and the person’s soul was believed to fly to heaven. To kill Claudius at such a moment meant to forgive the harm done to him. This is precisely what Hamlet cannot do. Before our eyes, the hero is going through a difficult struggle between a sense of duty and his own beliefs, this struggle leads to a sad conclusion: the whole world is a prison, where there is no place for human virtues, where every person is doomed to loneliness.

Hamlet's monologues reveal the internal struggle that the hero wages with himself. He constantly reproaches himself for inactivity, trying to understand whether he is capable of any action at all. He even thinks about suicide, but even here, thinking about whether the same problems await him in the other world stops him (“To be or not to be?”). Duty commands him to “be” and act. Shakespeare shows the consistent development of Hamlet's character. At the end of the tragedy, the king's killer is punished, but this happened as a result of a coincidence, and not from the will of the hero.

It is not by chance that Hamlet pretends to be crazy: only a very strong person can understand what Hamlet understood and not go mad.

The power of this character is not in the actions he takes, but in what he feels and makes his readers feel. Why a person cannot achieve happiness and harmony, what is the meaning of human life, is it possible to overcome evil - these are just the main philosophical problems that Shakespeare raises in his tragedy. He does not give a definitive answer to them; it is probably impossible. But his faith in man, in her ability to do good and resist evil, is the path to answering them.

In all time in the history of art, there is no more popular work than Shakespeare's Hamlet. For more than three hundred years, this brilliant tragedy has been staged in many theaters all over the planet.

An interesting fact is that people of different ages, religions and different mentalities learn to look for answers to questions that concern them using the example of this work.

The secret of such unquenchable interest in this play lies in the fact that eternal worldly problems are revealed in unsurpassed artistic images that the playwright skillfully depicts.

At the very beginning of the play, we observe Hamlet's main goal - he seeks revenge for the murder of his parent. We should not forget that we are talking about the Middle Ages, when blood feud was a pattern. But the main character is by nature a person of humanistic views and he is not capable of taking harsh revenge, because... this causes conflict with oneself.

Hamlet weighs all the pros and cons in order to resolve the current situation. What reality surrounds him? The main character's mother married his father's murderer... Friends of Hamlet himself, who in theory should be devoted to him, on the contrary, trip him up, betray him, and help Hamlet's sworn enemy in every possible way... And even a sublime feeling - love - dooms him to a lonely existence...

As we see from the scene in the cemetery, Hamlet completely loses faith that man is a strong creature; that we are not “puppets” in someone’s hands. In his opinion, evil is what rules the world and nothing can be done about it. As if to confirm his thoughts, the events in the play develop rapidly - Ophelia dies with impunity. Hamlet is in deep thought: if he becomes a murderer, he himself will become a villain and violate his principles.

Hamlet had several opportunities to take the life of his father's murderer. So he sees how, being alone, Claudius offers a prayer in which he confesses his sins. In Shakespeare's time, death at such a moment was perceived as a blessing; the soul seemed to automatically go to heaven. But how could Hamlet allow this to happen? The hero is overcome by terrible torment: on the one hand, a sense of duty, on the other, the principles by which Hamlet lives. A terrible conclusion comes to his head - we are all prisoners in this world where there is no place for justice.

"To be or not to be?" – Hamlet’s most frequently asked question to himself. He considers himself inactive, does not understand whether he is capable of taking any decisive steps at all?

We know all this from Hamlet’s monologues, where we see constant confrontation. He thinks that he is even ripe for taking his own life, but he immediately asks: what if after death, in another dimension, he will suffer in the same way and ask the same questions?..

At the end of the play, we still see that the king’s murderer received his punishment, but this did not happen the way Hamlet would have liked.

And it’s not for nothing that the main character considers himself insane. Everything that he had to realize, and at the same time without clouding his mind, can only be achieved by a person of enormous strength.

Shakespeare illuminates the problems of humanity of a philosophical nature: what is the meaning of existence, can evil be defeated? Of course, he does not answer unequivocally, but he firmly believes that, bringing good to the world, we will definitely find answers to these sacramental questions.

Issues

The problem of moral choice

One of the most striking problems of the work is the problem of choice, which can be considered a reflection of the main conflict of the tragedy. For a thinking person, the problem of choice, especially when it comes to moral choice, is always difficult and responsible. Undoubtedly, the final result is determined by a number of reasons and, first of all, by the value system of each individual person. If a person is guided in his life by higher, noble impulses, he most likely will not decide to take an inhumane and criminal step, will not violate the well-known Christian commandments: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, etc. However, in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet we become witnesses to a slightly different process. The main character, in a fit of revenge, kills several people, his actions evoke ambiguous feelings, but condemnation comes last in this row.

Having learned that his father fell at the hands of the villain Claudius, Hamlet faces the most difficult problem of choice. The famous monologue “To be or not to be?” embodies the spiritual doubts of a prince making a difficult moral choice. Life or death? Strength or powerlessness? An unequal struggle or a shame of cowardice? Hamlet tries to resolve such complex questions.

Hamlet's famous soliloquy shows the destructive mental struggle between idealistic ideas and cruel reality. The insidious murder of his father, the indecent marriage of his mother, the betrayal of friends, the weakness and frivolity of his beloved, the meanness of the courtiers - all this fills the prince’s soul with immeasurable suffering. Hamlet understands that “Denmark is a prison” and “the age is shaken.” From now on, the main character is left alone with a sanctimonious world ruled by lust, cruelty and hatred.

Hamlet constantly feels a contradiction: his consciousness clearly says what he must do, but he lacks will and determination. On the other hand, it can be assumed that it is not the lack of will that leaves Hamlet without action for a long time. It is not without reason that the theme of death constantly arises in his discussions: it is in direct connection with the awareness of the frailty of existence.

Finally Hamlet makes a decision. He is truly close to madness, since the sight of evil, which triumphs and dominates, is unbearable. Hamlet takes responsibility for the world's evil, all the misunderstandings of life, for all the suffering of people. The main character acutely feels his loneliness and, realizing his powerlessness, still goes into battle and dies like a fighter.

Search for the meaning of life and death

The monologue “To be or not to be” demonstrates to us that a huge internal struggle is taking place in Hamlet’s soul. Everything that happens around him weighs so much on him that he would commit suicide if it were not considered a sin. The hero is concerned about the mystery of death itself: what is it - a dream or a continuation of the same torments that earthly life is full of?

“That’s the difficulty;

What dreams will you have in your death sleep?

When we drop this mortal noise, -

This is what throws us off; that's the reason

That disasters are so long-lasting;

Who would bear the lashes and mockery of the century,

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

The pain of despised love, the slowness of judges,

The arrogance of the authorities and insults,

Performed by uncomplaining merit,

If only he could give himself a reckoning

With a simple dagger? (5, p.44)

Fear of the unknown, of this country from which not a single traveler has returned, often forces people to return to reality and not think about the “unknown land from which there is no return.”

Unhappy love

The relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet forms an independent drama within the framework of a great tragedy. Why can't people who love each other be happy? In Hamlet, the relationship between lovers is destroyed. Revenge turns out to be an obstacle to the unity of the prince and the girl he loves. Hamlet depicts the tragedy of giving up love. At the same time, their fathers play a fatal role for lovers. Ophelia's father orders her to break up with Hamlet, Hamlet breaks up with Ophelia in order to devote himself entirely to revenge for his father. Hamlet suffers because he is forced to hurt Ophelia and, suppressing pity, is merciless in his condemnation of women.

Ideological basis

"To be or not to be"

The amlet is filled with faith and love for people, life and the world in general. The prince is surrounded by loyal friends and the love of his parents. But all his ideas about the world dissipate like smoke when confronted with reality. Returning to Elsinore, Hamlet learns of the sudden death of his father and his mother's betrayal. In Hamlet’s soul, next to faith, a doubting thought arose. And both of these forces - faith and reason - wage a continuous struggle in him. Hamlet experiences deep pain, shocked by the death of his beloved father, who was in many ways an example for the prince. Hamlet becomes disillusioned with the world around him, the true meaning of life becomes unclear to him:

“How tiresome, dull and unnecessary

It seems to me that everything in the world!” (5, p. 11)

Hamlet hates Claudius, for whom there were no laws of kinship, who, together with his mother, betrayed the honor of his late brother and took possession of the crown. Hamlet is deeply disappointed in his mother, who was once his ideal woman. The meaning of life for Hamlet becomes revenge on his father’s murderer and restoration of justice. “But how should this matter be handled so as not to tarnish oneself.” Faced with the contradiction between dreams of life and life itself, Hamlet faces a difficult choice, “to be or not to be, to submit to the slings and arrows of furious fate, or, taking up arms on a sea of ​​turmoil, to defeat them with confrontation, to die, to sleep.”

To be - for Hamlet this means to think, believe in a person and act in accordance with one’s convictions and faith. But the deeper he knows people and life, the more clearly he sees triumphant evil and realizes that he is powerless to crush it with such a lonely struggle. Discord with the world is accompanied by internal discord. Hamlet's former faith in man, his former ideals are crushed, broken in a collision with reality, but he cannot completely renounce them, otherwise he would cease to be himself.

“The century has been shaken - and the worst thing is that I was born to restore it!”

As his father's son, Hamlet must avenge his family's honor by killing Claudius, who poisoned the king. The fratricide breeds evil around himself. Hamlet's trouble is that he does not want to be the continuer of evil - after all, in order to eradicate evil, Hamlet will have to use that same evil. It’s hard for him to take this path. The hero is torn apart by duality: the spirit of his father calls for revenge, but his inner voice stops the “action of evil.”

The tragedy for Hamlet lies not only in the fact that the world is terrible, but also in the fact that he must rush into the abyss of evil in order to fight it. He realizes that he himself is far from perfect, and, indeed, his behavior reveals that the evil that reigns in life, to some extent, stains him too. The tragic irony of life's circumstances leads Hamlet to the fact that he, acting as an avenger for his murdered father, also kills the father of Laertes and Ophelia, and the son of Polonius takes revenge on him.

In general, circumstances develop in such a way that Hamlet, carrying out revenge, finds himself forced to strike left and right. He, for whom there is nothing dearer than life, has to become the squire of death.

Hamlet, wearing the mask of a jester, enters into combat with a world filled with evil. The prince kills the courtier Polonius, who is watching him, reveals the betrayal of his university comrades, abandons Ophelia, who could not resist the evil influence, and is drawn into an intrigue against Hamlet.

“The century is shaken and worse than anything,

That I was born to restore it” (5, p.28)

The prince dreams not only of revenge for his murdered father. Hamlet's soul is stirred by thoughts about the need to fight the injustice of the world. The main character asks a rhetorical question: why exactly should he correct a world that is completely shaken? Does he have the right to do this? Evil lives within him, and he admits to himself that he is pompous, ambitious and vindictive. How can one overcome evil in such a situation? How to help a person defend the truth? Hamlet is forced to suffer under the weight of inhuman torment. It is then that he poses the main question “to be or not to be?” The resolution of this question lies the essence of Hamlet's tragedy - the tragedy of a thinking man who came into a disorderly world too early, the first of people to see the amazing imperfection of the world.

Having decided to avenge their fathers, to respond with evil to evil, the noble sons took revenge, but what was the result - Ophelia went crazy and died tragically, her mother became an unwitting victim of a vile conspiracy, drinking the “poisoned cup”, Laertes, Hamlet and Claudius are dead.

"..Death!

Oh, what kind of underground feast are you preparing?

Arrogant that so many of the world's mighty

Slayed at once? (5, p. 94)

“Something is rotten in our Danish state”

Already at the beginning of the tragedy, Marcellus casually remarks: “Something is rotten in the Danish state,” and, as the action develops, we become more and more convinced that “rot” has really started in Denmark. Betrayal and meanness reign everywhere. Treason replaces fidelity, insidious crime replaces brotherly love. Revenge, intrigue and conspiracies, this is how the people of the Danish state live.

Hamlet talks about the corruption of morals. He notices the insincerity of people, flattery and sycophancy, degrading human dignity: “Here is my uncle - the King of Denmark, and those who made faces at him while my father was alive pay twenty, forty, fifty and a hundred ducats for his portrait in miniature. Damn it, there is something supernatural in this, if only philosophy could find out” (5, p. 32).

Hamlet sees that humanity is absent, and scoundrels triumph everywhere, corrupting everyone and everything around them, who “keep thought away from the tongue, and thoughtless thought from action.”

When Rosencrantz, in response to Hamlet’s question: “What news?” replies that there is no news, “except perhaps that the world has become honest,” the prince remarks: “So, it means that the day of judgment is near, but your news is wrong.”

"The world is a theater"

The figure of the jester and the clown, on the one hand, and the figure of the king, on the other, embody the idea of ​​theatricality in real life and express the hidden metaphor of the “world-theater”. Hamlet's remark, permeated with theatrical terms in the context of the stage and the entire tragedy, appears as a vivid but elusive example of the hidden world-stage metaphor. The parallel drawn in the work between Hamlet and the First Actor makes it possible to identify the hidden metaphor “world-stage” at the level of the deep subtext of the tragedy and to trace how masterfully one reality in Shakespeare passes into another, forming parallel semantic series. “The play within the play” “the murder of Gonzago” is the paradigm of the structure of the entire “Hamlet” and the key to understanding the deep ideas hidden in the subtext of the tragedy (6, p. 63). “The Murder of Gonzago” is one big metaphor “the world is a stage”, realized in the form of a theatrical device “a scene on a stage”.

Gorokhov P.A.

Orenburg State University

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

The article examines 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 thoughts about 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 become part of our flesh and blood.

I.S. TURGENEV

Four centuries have passed since Shakespeare (1564-1614) wrote the tragedy Hamlet. Meticulous scientists have seemingly examined everything in this play. The time when the tragedy was written has been determined with greater or less accuracy. This is 1600-1601. - the very beginning of the 17th century, which would bring England such profound upheavals. It is estimated that the play has 4,042 lines and has a vocabulary of 29,551 words. Thus, Hamlet is the playwright’s most voluminous play, running on stage for more than four hours without cuts.

Shakespeare's work in general and Hamlet in particular is one of those topics that any researcher would enjoy turning to. On the other hand, such an appeal is justified only in cases of extreme necessity, because the chance of saying something truly new is extremely small. The play seems to explore everything. Philologists and literary historians have done a wonderful job. This tragedy has long been called philosophical, thanks to the light hand of the great Goethe. 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 reputable encyclopedias and dictionaries on philosophy there are no articles covering Shakespeare specifically as a thinker who created an original and enduring philosophical concept, the mysteries 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 yet seen or defined) 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 ours

the task is more modest: to resolve some of the philosophical mysteries of the great tragedy, and most importantly, to understand how the main character of the play can be close and interesting to a person of the emerging 21st century.

For us, modern Russian people, Shakespeare's work is especially relevant. We can, like Hamlet, state with all justice: “There is some kind of rot in the Danish state,” for our country is rotting alive. In the era we are experiencing, for Russia the connection of times has once again broken down. Shakespeare lived and worked at a time that went down in Russian history under the epithet “troubled.” The turns of the historical spiral have their own mystical tendency to repeat themselves, and the Time of Troubles has come again in Russia. New False Dmitrys made their way into the Kremlin and opened the way to the very heart of Russia for new

Now to the American nobility. 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, civil strife, a merciless struggle for power, self-destruction, the “fencing” of England in the 17th century are similar to the Russian “great turning point,” “perestroika,” and the recent Gaidar-Chubais transition to the era of primitive accumulation. Shakespeare was a poet who wrote about eternal human passions. Shakespeare is timeless and ahistorical: his past, present and future are one. For this reason, it does not and cannot become obsolete.

Shakespeare created Hamlet at a turning point in his work. Researchers have long noticed that after 1600, Shakespeare’s previous optimism was replaced by harsh criticism and an in-depth analysis of the tragic contradictions in the soul and life of man. In the current

Over the course of ten years, the playwright has been creating 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 especially significant in this regard.

For four centuries now, Hamlet has attracted attention so much that you inevitably forget that the Danish prince is a literary character, and not a once-living person of flesh and blood. True, he had a prototype - Prince Amleth, who lived in the 9th century, who avenged the murder of his father and eventually reigned on the throne. The 12th-century Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, whose work “History of Denmark” was published in Paris in 1514, spoke about it. 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 spelling variants of the name Ham-net, and this was the name of Shakespeare’s son who died at the age of 11.

In his play, Shakespeare deliberately abandoned many persistent stereotypes in the presentation of the old story. It was said about Amleth that in his physical qualities and appearance he was “above Hercules.” Shakespeare's Hamlet 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 ordinariness of his appearance and the lack of originality in it. Since we're talking about this, let's say a few words about the appearance of the Danish prince.

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

century, first played this role in 1930 at the age of 26. Among the modern outstanding actors, it is worth noting Mel Gibson, who played this role in the film of the great Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branagh, 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 too too sallied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” (Literally: “Oh, if only this overly salted meat could melt and dissolve with dew!”). Yes, and Gertrude, during a mortal duel, gives her son a handkerchief and says about him: “He’s fat, and scant of breath.” Consequently, Hamlet is a man of rather heavy build, if the mother herself says about her own son: “He is fat and suffocating.”

Yes, most likely, Shakespeare did not imagine his hero to be beautiful in appearance. But Hamlet, while not being a hero in the medieval sense, that is, beautiful on the outside, is beautiful on the inside. This is a great man of the New Age. His strength and weakness take their origin 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 with a single glance the whole picture of human life, to answer the sacramental question about its meaning, to approach man from the position of God. No wonder G.V.F. Hegel believed that Shakespeare, through the means of artistic creativity, provided unsurpassed examples of analysis of fundamental philosophical problems: a person’s free choice of actions and goals in life, his independence in making decisions.

Shakespeare in his plays masterfully exposed human souls, forcing his heroes to confess to the audience. The brilliant reader of Shakespeare and one of the first researchers of the figure of Hamlet - Goethe - once said this: “There is no pleasure more sublime and pure than, closing your eyes, listening to a natural and faithful voice not recite, but read Shakespeare. So it is best to follow the harsh threads from which he weaves events. Everything that blows in the air when great world events take place, everything that fearfully withdraws 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 accurate judgment about the character of Hamlet and the 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 by both his contemporaries and future generations of researchers.

How have the researchers of the brilliant play interpreted the image of the Danish Prince! Gilbert Keith Chesterton, not without irony, noted the following about the efforts 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 things are different here. The scientist does not want to admit that this struggle tormented Hamlet, and replaces it with the struggle of consciousness with the subconscious. He gives Hamlet complexes so as not to give him a conscience. And all because he, a scientist, refuses to take seriously the simple, if you like, primitive morality on which Shakespeare’s tragedy stands. This morality includes three premises from which the modern morbid subconscious runs as if from a ghost. First, we must act justly, even if we really don’t want to; secondly, justice may require that we punish a person, usually a strong one; thirdly, the punishment itself can result in a fight 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 this way:

Father died with a swollen belly,

All swollen, like May, from sinful juices. God knows what other demand there is for this,

But overall, probably quite a lot.

(Translation 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 communicating with 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 visits of the ghost.

Hamlet's first soliloquy reveals his tendency to make the broadest generalizations based on 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 fair half of humanity. No wonder he says: “Frailty, you are called: woman!” In the original: frailty - frailty, weakness, instability. It is this quality for Hamlet that is now decisive for the entire female race. Hamlet's mother was the ideal woman, and it was all the more terrible for him to witness her fall. The death of his father and his mother’s betrayal of the memory of his 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 forces his impressionable and sensitive soul to 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 merely.

Boris Pasternak perfectly conveyed the meaning of these lines:

How insignificant, flat and stupid the whole world seems to me in its aspirations!

O abomination! Like an unweeded garden

Give free rein to the grass and it will become overgrown with weeds.

With the same completeness, the whole world was filled with rough principles.

Hamlet is not a cold rationalist and analyst. He is a man with a big heart capable of strong feelings. His blood is hot, and his senses are heightened and cannot be dulled. From reflections on his own life conflicts, 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: his father died, his mother hastily married his uncle, and this uncle, whom he once loved and respected, turns out to be his father's murderer! Brother killed brother! Cain's sin is terrible and testifies to irreversible changes in human nature itself. The ghost is absolutely right:

Murder is vile in itself; but this is the most disgusting and most inhuman of all.

(Translation by M. Lozinsky)

Fratricide indicates that the very foundations of humanity have rotted. Everywhere - betrayal and enmity, lust and meanness. You can’t trust anyone, not even the closest person. This torments Hamlet most of all, 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, of many aging women) look in his eyes only as manifestations of general corruption, evidence of the existence and triumph of world evil.

Many researchers reproached Hamlet for indecisiveness and even cowardice. In their opinion, he should have killed him as soon as he learned about his uncle’s crime. Even the term “Hamletism” appeared, which began to denote weakness of will prone to reflection. But Hamlet wants to make sure that the spirit who came from hell told the truth, that his 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 hell. That is why the prince comes up with a “mousetrap” for Claudius. Only after the performance, having seen his uncle’s reaction to the crime committed on stage, does Hamlet receive real earthly proof of the revealing news from the other world. Hamlet almost kills Claudius, but he is saved only by his 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 deterioration of morals, the destruction of human nature. No wonder he utters 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 by M. Lozinsky:

The century has been shaken - and worst of all,

That I was born to restore it!

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

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 is inclined to think that the entire human race is worthy of contempt, absolutizing particular cases. Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, with all their love for the prince, are not able to understand him. Therefore, Hamlet curses love itself. Horatio, as a scientist, cannot understand the mysteries of the other world, and Hamlet pronounces a verdict on learning in general. Probably, even in the silence of his Wittenberg existence, Hamlet experienced the hopeless pangs of doubt, the drama of abstract critical thought. After returning to Denmark, things escalated. He is bitter about the awareness of his powerlessness, he realizes all the treacherous instability of the idealization of the human mind and the unreliability of human attempts to think of the world according to abstract formulas.

Hamlet faced reality as it is. He has experienced all the bitterness of disappointment in people, and this pushes his soul to a turning point. Not every person’s comprehension of reality is accompanied by such shocks as the Shakespearean hero experienced. 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 hero’s once harmonious inner world collapses, and then is recreated before our eyes again. It is in the dynamism of the image of the main character, in the absence of statics in his character, that lies the reason for the diversity of such contradictory assessments of the Danish prince.

Hamlet's spiritual development 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 indecisiveness of the prince is “disintegration, a transition from infantile, unconscious harmony and self-pleasure 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 peaks of not only world literature, but also 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 of Hamlet’s other thoughts, including those about the eternal hardships of humanity:

Who would bear the lashes and mockery of the century,

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

The pain of despised love, the slowness of judges, the arrogance of authorities and insults,

Performed by uncomplaining merit,

If only he could give himself a reckoning with a simple dagger....

(Translation by M. Lozinsky) All these problems do not apply 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 existing existence and his position in it, but also the nature of his own thoughts. In the literature of the Late Renaissance, heroes often turned to the analysis of human thought. Hamlet also carries out his own criticism of the human “power of judgment” and comes to the conclusion: excessive thinking paralyzes the will. So thinking makes us cowards,

And so the natural color of determination fades under the pale patina of thought,

And beginnings that rose powerfully,

Turning aside your move,

Lose the action name.

(Translation by M. Lozinsky) The entire monologue “To be or not to be” is permeated with a grave awareness of the hardships of existence. 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 don’t want to live in the world that appears in the hero’s speech. But it is necessary to live, because it is unknown what awaits a person after death - perhaps even worse horrors. “The fear of a country from which no one has returned” forces a person to eke out an existence on this mortal earth - sometimes the most pitiful one. Note that Hamlet is convinced of the existence of the afterlife, because the ghost of his unfortunate father came to him from hell.

Death is one of the main characters not only in the monologue “To be or not to be,” but also in the entire play. She reaps a generous harvest in Hamlet: nine people pass away in that same mysterious country that the Danish prince is thinking about. About this famous monologue of Hamlet, our great poet and translator B. Pasternak said: “These are the most trembling and insane lines ever written about the anguish of the unknown on the eve of death, rising by 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” has broken down for him. For him, struggle began to mean life, being, and leaving 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 on himself. Let's see what choice curses he showers on himself! “Dumb and cowardly fool”, “mouthless”, “coward”, “donkey”, “woman”, “scullery maid”. The internal energy that overwhelms Hamlet, all his anger, for the time being, falls into his own personality. While criticizing the human race, Hamlet does not forget about himself. But, reproaching himself for slowness, he does not for a moment forget about 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 find out why he died. In his mother’s bedroom, he kills the lurking Polonius in full confidence that he has taken revenge and Claudius is already dead. The more terrible is his disappointment:

As for him,

(points to Polonius' corpse)

Then I mourn; but heaven commanded

They punished me and me him,

So that I become their scourge and servant.

(Translation by M. Lozinsky) Hamlet sees in chance a manifestation of the highest will of heaven. It was heaven that entrusted him with the mission of being a “scorge and minister” - serving

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

Claudius is furious at Hamlet’s “bloody trick,” because he understands at whom his nephew’s sword was really aimed. It is only by chance that the “fidgety, stupid busybody” Polonius dies. It is difficult to say what Claudius's plans were in relation to Hamlet. Whether he planned his destruction from the beginning or was forced to commit new atrocities by Hamlet’s very behavior, which hinted to the king about his awareness of his secrets, Shakespeare does not answer these questions. It has long been noted that Shakespeare’s villains, unlike the villains of ancient drama, are by no means just schemes, but living people, not devoid of germs of goodness. But these sprouts wither with each new crime, and in the souls of these people evil blooms magnificently. Such is Claudius, losing the remnants of humanity before our eyes. In the duel scene, he does not actually prevent the death of the queen who drinks poisoned wine, although he tells her: “Don’t drink wine, Gertrude.” But his own interests come first, and he sacrifices his newly acquired wife. But it was precisely the passion for Gertrude that became one of the reasons for Cain’s sin of Claudius!

I would like to note that in the tragedy Shakespeare confronts two understandings of death: religious and realistic. The scenes in the cemetery are indicative in this regard. While preparing the grave for Ophelia, the gravediggers unfold an entire philosophy of life before the viewer.

The real, and not poetic, appearance 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 tomfoolery? Your singing? Nothing left to make fun of your own antics? Has your jaw completely dropped? Now go into some lady’s room and tell her that even if she puts on a whole inch of makeup, she will still end up with such a face...” (translation by M. Lozinsky). Before death, everyone is equal: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander turns to dust; dust is earth; clay is made from earth; and why can’t they plug up a beer barrel with this clay into which he turned?”

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

Chinese people whose brains have not yet become completely dull from watching endless TV series that lull their minds to sleep. 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 on the outskirts 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 drama. Here, as if in a gene, the bundle already contained “Troilus and Cressida,” “King Lear,” “Othello,” and “Timon of Athens.” After all, all these things show the contrast between the world and man, the clash between human life and the principle of negation.

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

So many prospects.

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 a lot of things that burned his own soul. It has long been noted that Shakespeare's 66th sonnet strikingly coincides with the thoughts of the Danish prince. Probably, of all Shakespeare's heroes, only Hamlet could write Shakespearean works. It is not for nothing that 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 belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet, you have a difficult task ahead of you.”

There cannot be anything in creation that was not in the creator himself. Shakespeare may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the streets of London, but Hamlet was born from the depths of his soul, and Romeo grew from his passion. A person is least likely to be himself when he speaks for himself. Give him a mask and he will become truthful. Actor William Shakespeare knew this well.

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

di its impurities, awareness of the absurdity of existence and the thirst for overcoming it with the greatness of the spirit. With Hamlet, Shakespeare expressed his own attitude towards 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 be heard: “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?”), Posthumus (“Cymbeline”) are peculiar doubles of Hamlet.

The power of inspiration and the power of the brushstroke indicate 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 life. Apparently, under the influence of his own creation, the poet began to think about which part of his life is more real and complete - the poet or the person.

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

Very often, pitiful and ignorant people tried to try on Hamlet's tragedy. No civilized country has probably escaped this. In Russia, many people loved and still love to put on Hamlet’s cloak. This is especially true of various politicians and some representatives of the loud-mouthed and stupid tribe, called in Soviet times the “creative intelligentsia.”

Ligence". It was not for nothing that Ilf and Petrov in “The Golden Calf” created their Vasisual Lokhankin - an eerie and terrible in its truthfulness parody of the Russian intelligentsia, posing truly Hamlet-like questions, but forgetting to turn off the light in the communal toilet, for which he receives a cane from the indignant masses of the people. soft places. It is precisely these intellectuals A.I. Solzhenitsyn will call it “educationism,” and N.K. At the end of the 19th century, Mikhailovsky aptly dubbed them “Hamletized piglets.” The “Hamletized pig” is a pseudo-Hamlet, a proud nonentity, inclined to “poeticize and Hamletize himself.” Mikhailovsky writes: “The Hamletized pig must... convince himself and others of the 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 pig also on his own."

But the true Hamlet is the 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 of thinking and striving for high 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 achievements of the spirit. This is precisely the guarantee of the immortality of the great tragedy of Shakespeare and its main character, in whose wreath the most luxurious flowers of thought and stage art will never fade.

List of used literature:

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

3. Ibid. P. 1184.

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

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

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

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

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

10. Belinsky V. G. Complete works. T. II. M., 1953. S. 285-286.

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

12. Pasternak B. L. Favorites. In 2 volumes. T.11. M., 1985. P. 309.

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

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

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

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 coexisted in some strange way and even influenced each other. Could the great playwright ignore 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 topic of the inner life of man. The tragedy “Hamlet” is perhaps the most striking confirmation of this. Below we will try to reveal this thesis. Moreover, we will try to show that the theme associated with the subjective essence of the human being was not only important for the playwright, but thinking through it as the work was 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.

It must be said that Shakespeare did not really try to encrypt the main idea of ​​the work. So, his main character Hamlet constantly thinks, and mention of this has already become a common place. It would seem that there is nothing to go further, that this 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 is created to construct one’s understanding of what exactly the master was trying to say. Here we draw numerous historical analogies, and construct a value scale in the form of an overly general and therefore unproductive assertion of the power of good over evil, etc. To prove their vision, researchers use a variety of techniques, while missing the main one, the use of which for any work of art alone can give an extremely clear answer to the question of its meaning. I mean the method of revealing artistic structure, the use of which Y. Lotman called for in his works. Surprisingly, no one has resorted to this infallible resource in the four hundred years of the tragedy’s existence, and all critical activity was diffused into secondary, although interesting in its own way, details. Well, there is nothing left to do but try to fill the existing gap and finally show that Shakespeare laid down his main idea about the subjectivity of the human being in his creation not so much in the form of Hamlet’s “random” statements to a certain extent, but mainly in the form of clearly a well-thought-out structure of the work (we insist on this approach, despite the popular belief that in Shakespeare’s era there were no works structured by plot).

B. Research

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

Act one study of Hamlet

Scene one(the divisions into acts and scenes are arbitrary, since, as is known, the author did not have them).

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

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

Scene two. In it we distinguish two parts (of the plot).

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 revels in his royal position: he is thinking of establishing peace with Fortinbras through a letter to the king of Norway (Fortinbras's uncle), and he graciously releases Laertes, the son of the nobleman Polonius, to France (obviously , have fun), and Prince Hamlet (the son of the deceased king and his nephew) tries to butter up his good disposition towards him. In general, here we see a king who is “knee-deep in the sea,” who does not see problems in their voluminous complexity, but considers them something like a joke that should be quickly resolved so that they do not interfere with his and the queen’s fun. Everything about him is quick and light, everything seems airy and fleeting to him. So the queen sings along with him: “This is how the world was created: the living will die / And after life it will go 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: “I “seem” to be unknown.” It is focused not on appearances and fleetingness, 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 stability) and a little over a month after the funeral left for my husband's brother. In this he, a student at the progressive university in Wittenberg, sees not only the collapse of moral foundations in his personal life, but also in the entire Danish kingdom. And so, having lost his foundations (external and internal), Horatio (his student friend) and two officers invite him to see the ghost of Hamlet Sr. at night. It turns out that at least initially Hamlet Jr. and appears before us as having been deprived of his 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, of his own free will, plunges into the abyss of the unclear, into the realm of the realm of the ghost, into the ghostly area. It is clear that one can want to go into the unknown only if he is aiming to get out of his life’s impasse: in his current situation (as if he were the second person in the state) he does not see himself. Therefore, perhaps, in the 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 Hamlet’s invariability throughout the play, it becomes somehow awkward 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 (an expected meeting with the ghost of his father), decided to leave this position without a basis, at least having entered into a position of a pseudo-foundation, which is the situation of being with a ghost (mirage) of the previous foundation.

Scene three.

Laertes tells his sister Ophelia not to have anything to do 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 no more to trust the words / Than he is able in this situation / to justify them, and he will confirm them / As the common voice of Denmark wants " Further, their common father Polonius gives instructions to Laertes on how to behave in France (ordinary worldly wisdom), and then Ophelia, like Laertes, advises not to believe Hamlet (see Note 1). She accepts the advice of her brother and father: “I obey.”

Here Laertes and Polonius betray their disbelief in Hamlet's integrity, and they have reasons for this - he has no reason. However, it is important that Ophelia easily accepts their arguments (especially her brother’s), 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 carry a rational attitude towards life, and in their eyes Hamlet has no basis (the basis of his strength as a statesman), since he is clearly dependent on the king. Hamlet is politically suspended, only the people can change something here, as Laertes reports with the words: “... he will confirm them, / As the common 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) point of view. Of course, the prince has lost the foundations of both external and internal existence, and this may give Ophelia the formal right to distrust him. But this approach, again, is absolutely rational and should not be characteristic of a woman who carries an irrational principle within 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 Sr. The time is “Almost twelve.” Hamlet Jr. exposes the bad morals 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 emerging spirit of his father: the denial sitting 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 a certain gap between events, but is designated as that 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. We distinguish two parts in it.

The first part of the scene features a conversation between Prince Hamlet and the ghost of his father. He begins with the message: “The hour has come / When I must surrender myself to the flames of Gehenna / to be tormented.” There is a clear sin on him. 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 (“don’t condone”). Hamlet Jr. swears revenge.

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

Further, it should be noted that time, having manifested its existence in the previous scene, here confirms its special, extra-everyday essence. Namely, from the fourth scene we know that Hamlet Jr.’s conversation. with the ghost began at midnight or a little later. The conversation itself, as presented by Shakespeare, could take no more than 10-15 minutes (and that’s a stretch), but at the end of it the ghost leaves, because it has begun to get light: “It’s time. Look, firefly." It usually gets light 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 Shakespearean studies, the event occurred in the month of March, then dawn should arrive at 6-7 o’clock. In any case, several astronomical hours had passed since the conversation began, but they were able to squeeze in a few minutes of stage action. By the way, a similar situation occurred in the first act, when the time interval between twelve o’clock at night and the rooster’s crow included no more than ten minutes of conversations 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 theirs 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 will not be surprised by anything and remain silent. He takes an oath from them about this. The 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 moreover, everything happens in them, i.e. in a person, in every person.

Analysis of the first act. Based on the results of the first act, we can say the following. The young prince Hamlet has lost his foundation; he has no sense of the value of his existence: “I don’t value my life to a pin.” He does not accept this position, denies it and plunges into the search for some new stability. To do this, Shakespeare ensures that he meets a ghost who is afraid of burning 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 he, the ghost, no longer has any mistakes in life. And here we come to an important question: what exactly is the sin of King Hamlet?

Since, upon 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 began throughout Denmark, a decline in all solidity of existence, and even, as an extreme manifestation of this, the threat of war, it seems that that King Hamlet's sin is that he failed to provide a sustainable future for the Danish people. Having received the kingdom through a random duel, he introduced the kinship of chance into the life of the state and deprived it of stability. He should have thought about creating a mechanism for the succession of power, but did nothing about it. And now a new king sits on the throne, whose legitimacy is debatable, resulting in the claims of young Fortinbras. Hamlet's sin - v. there is 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 European public of that time meant its legitimacy, stability, reliability . Power had to be transferred from father to son - this is precisely the ideal order of its inheritance that was accepted in those days. The sudden murder of Hamlet Sr. and the seizure of the crown by his brother made the situation pseudo-legitimate: it is as if a member of Hamlet’s family (clan) is ruling, but not that one. Hamlet Jr. it is necessary to reveal this deception, and reveal 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, fairness of power - this is the task of Prince Hamlet, which emerges at the end of the first act. If it is carried out, everything around will stabilize and receive 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 spirit: “Hamlet...raises the private task of personal revenge to the level when it outgrows narrow boundaries, becoming the noble cause of establishing 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 closely related to 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, both the inner world and the outer world must also receive foundations. One can even say that for him both of these worlds are not separated by an impassable abyss, but are different sides of one whole, and differ relatively, like right and left. Consequently, the basis for them will be the same, but only, perhaps, expressed differently.

But where does this idea of ​​a single world of internal and external come from, or more precisely, where and how is it 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 flow of external events (conversation with a ghost) clearly became the same as 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 exactly the same situation was 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 impending war, it turns out that in the play the internal tension of the characters always accelerates 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 inner life of the heroes, 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 she finds herself sealed into a location next to a 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 of himself with the exclamation “Swear!”, he thereby asserts that the internal space of his presence in the memory of the prince is no different from the external space in which the prince himself resides.

However, our statement that the ghost reminds of itself precisely in the mind of Hamlet Jr., and not elsewhere, requires clarification. The fact is that all the appeals of the spirit “Swear!”, apparently, are heard only by the prince, and the other heroes present nearby do not hear this, since they remain deathly silent on this matter. After all, we know from previous scenes that when they actually saw the ghost, they did not hide their feelings and spoke out quite frankly. But that was earlier. 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 addresses only the consciousness (in memory, in consciousness) of Hamlet, then why does he use the plural “Swear” in his address, and not the singular “Swear,” thereby referring to his friends? Moreover, by the very meaning of the requirement of the oath, it does not apply to the prince, who does not need to swear to himself in silence, but specifically to his friends. Everything is correct! The ghost speaks through Hamlet's consciousness to his companions, since Shakespeare thereby wants to talk about a single space that permeates the protagonist's soul and the entire outside world, so that the voice in Hamlet's mind must in fact be accepted in the outside world, while the oath must be voiced. It 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 ghost's demand, but to the prince's request).

However, Horatio still 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 his voice made itself felt three times, and spoke only after Hamlet’s remark “You, old mole! How fast you are underground! Have you dug in yet? Let's change the place"? To understand this, it is enough to imagine the events from Horatio’s point of view: Hamlet asks him and Marcella not to talk about meeting 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 underground, then the prince's throwing would be understandable to them. But we found out that accepting 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 will be quite natural to consider the exclamation Horatio “So miracles!” pertaining specifically to this all of a sudden the prince’s strange behavior for an outside observer.

In addition, Horatio's words may have another implication. 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, quite wonderful. What is this wonderfulness? On behalf of Hamlet, there is an explanation: “Horace, there are many things in the world / That your philosophy has never dreamed of.” It turns out that the miraculousness of what happened lies in the emergence of a new philosophy, different from the one that was accepted earlier, and which was taught to students by Hamlet and Horatio. Hamlet decided to break out of the shackles of previous ideas, since they did not allow him to live (have a foundation) in this world, and to 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. Of course, the world and man even then had a single foundation - God. However, a person was taken either as an object - and then he looked at himself as if from the outside, without peering into his own soul and not allowing himself to look at it on a par with the whole world, or as a subject - and then the subjective mind, although it was extremely important (so important that it often interrupted even the authority of the church), was separated from the world, standing apart from it as something separate, accidentally incorporated into him, unequal to him. Hamlet dared to equate the soul (mind) and the world in importance, as a result of which he began to draw the contours of a new philosophy, which the former sages “had never dreamed 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. decayed and had largely lost the moral spirit of the Holy Scriptures), which permeated 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 quietly introduced into the play. This topic, longstanding in scholastic literature (see the work of V. Solovyov on this subject), by the time of Shakespeare’s life was already represented by the works of many philosophical theologians who affirmed the primacy of reason over church authority (starting with John Erigena and so on). In the play we will see that Shakespeare clearly picks up this line, transforming it into a dispute between human reason and the authority of the state, (or monarch), at the end of the work - with a clear preference for reason: the monarch can act in his own, selfish interests, and the task of the mind is to reveal this.

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

Act II Study of Hamlet

Scene one.

Polonius instructs his servant Reynaldo to deliver a letter to Laertes, who has left for France, and at the same time find out (“Snoop”) about his life. At the same time, during instructions, he gets confused and switches from a poetic style to a prosaic one. After this, 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 may be as follows. The main point in Polonius's instructions to Reynaldo seems to be that he is confused. This happens when he is about to draw the conclusion of his speech: “And then, then, then, then, then...” and then comes his surprised muttering (in prose): “What did I want to say?... Where did I stop?” ?. This achieves the effect of nullifying all the profundity that Polonius put on, clearly admiring himself and his cleverness. After a hesitation, the “cleverness” burst, and the only dry residue left was the hero’s former narcissism. In fact, here the stupidity of this nobleman emerges, which he tries to cover up with standard reasoning, very characteristic of people of his type - representatives of behind-the-scenes intrigues, accustomed to doing everything secretly. All the instructions of Polonius to his servant (as well as to Laertes in scene 3 of the first act) are pure rules of a gray eminence, confident in himself, but not showing off himself; acting secretly rather than openly. This immediately follows the meaning of the figure of Polonius in the play - it is a symbol of behind the scenes, behind-the-scenes intrigues, and hidden actions.

And Hamlet enters this sphere of intrigue. He must act in it, and therefore, in order to hide his aspirations from annoying 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 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 hardened 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 clever” with his disregard for the prince’s emotional experiences, but he himself could not do anything here, and he went to the king for advice.

In addition, in Ophelia’s story about Hamlet’s coming to her, it is clear that our hero began to observe the world in a completely different way than before: “He studied me for a long time.” On the one hand, this is connected with his game, and on the other, 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 focus.

Scene two. We distinguish 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 was the reason for his “transformations”: “To say otherwise, he is unrecognizable / He is internally and externally...”.

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

In the second part, Polonius appears and says, firstly, that “The ambassadors have returned safely, sir, from Norway,” i.e. that the king’s peace initiative was a success, and there would be no war with young Fortinbras, and secondly, that he “attacked the root of Hamlet’s ravings.”

After the message about peace, the king’s opinion was strengthened that just like that, playfully, through a simple letter, peace and order could be ensured, and that his mood for fun and a light attitude towards life was completely justified. He easily gained power through treacherous murder, and now he thinks of ruling the country with the same ease. So he invites the ambassador, who has 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. Polonius has the same attitude towards life: “This thing (with war - T.S.) is in the bag.” Typically, these kinds of phrases are thrown around by businessmen after they have arranged their small affairs. To such an important event as war, the attitude should be different, and words for a satisfactory attitude towards the achieved peace should also be chosen worthy. The lack of seriousness in the words of the king and Polonius speaks, firstly, about their ideological similarity (however, this is already clear), and secondly, about their unwillingness to meet the new Hamlet, whose attitude to the stability of existence is formed not simply in the form a random opinion, but in the form of a deeply thought-out position.

And so, being in such a complacent, relaxed state, Polonius, the king and, for now, the queen who shares their worldview, move on to the question of Hamlet’s oddities (third part of the scene). Polonius begins, and under the guise of scholastic-figurative arrogance, in which logic exists not to describe life, but for itself, he utters boring nonsense, for example: “...Your son has gone crazy. / Crazy, I said, because crazy / And there is a person who has gone crazy,” or: “Let’s say he’s crazy. It is necessary / To find the cause of this effect, / Or defect, for the effect itself / Due to the cause is defective. / And what is needed is what is needed. / 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’s verbiage only in form resembles a scholastic elegance of mind, but in reality it is empty, pseudo-clever, so that even the queen - for now his ally - cannot stand it, and in the middle of it chatter inserts: “More efficient, but more artless.” Thus, the author of the tragedy not only mocks scholasticism, as is rightly customary to think in Shakespearean studies, but also equates speculation for the sake of speculation 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 fully understand the general idea of ​​the work.

Finally, Polonius reads Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia, and reads, unlike the previous text of the play, not in verse, but in prose, and immediately, just starting, he gets confused - exactly as happened to him in the previous scene, when he instructed his servant Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in France. And just as then this confusion blew away all his feigned, artificial and lifeless “smartness,” so the same thing happens here: well, he’s not a philosopher, you know, not a philosopher. His thinking is not at all vital, and therefore he rejects everything normal and human in confusion. This is the word from Hamlet’s letter to his “beloved,” addressed to Ophelia, that he does not accept: hackneyed, you see. Well, of course, he has a high mind, and a simple human word is not for him. Give him, on a silver platter, a semblance of the scientificism that he himself just gave out. A little further he reads a very remarkable quatrain, which we will dwell on. Let us remember that it is Hamlet who addresses Ophelia:

"Don't trust the daylight,
Don't trust the star of the night
Don't believe that the truth is out there,
But believe in my love."

What does it say here? The first line calls not to believe 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 obvious to everyone, is not real. The next line urges you not to trust weak pointers (stars) in the darkness of the night, i.e. - do not believe hints about the unclear essence of the matter. What business can young people have? It is clear that this is either love or Hamlet’s illness. Love will be directly discussed in the fourth line, so here again we are talking about the prince’s madness, but in a different key - in the key of certain courtier opinions about its cause. Hamlet seems to be saying: all possible guesses about my strange behavior are obviously incorrect. This means that the prince is very confident in the secrecy of his move. Further: “Don’t 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 in my love.” Everything is clear here: the prince opens his heart and confesses his love. “What else?” Pushkin would say. In general, it turns out that Hamlet told Ophelia quite fully (albeit in the form of encryption) about his situation, striving, especially through a direct declaration of love, to bring his beloved to spiritual union with himself, and therefore to receive an ally in her person and in terms of that , so that she begins to share common ideological values ​​with him (acceptance of the soul as an equal part with this, the outside world), and in terms of political struggle to establish the stability of the existence of the state (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 it, since she gave it to her puppeteer father (does a decent girl give amorous letters to someone just like that, easily? ).

After the poetic form, Hamlet's letter turns into prose. The main thing here is that in general writing 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 humane. Actually, this is his philosophy – 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 Polonius’s subsequent explanation 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 the unrequited love for Ophelia.

The fourth part of the scene consists of a conversation between Polonius and Hamlet, which is conveyed in prose. The prose in the play always (with the exception of the prince’s letter to Ophelia, which we just examined) indicates the presence of some kind of tension in comparison with the main, poetic text. The tension in this case stems from the fact that two pretenders came together. One, Polonius, is an old courtier, a “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, dare I say it, patriot of his country, who for its good has embarked on the dangerous path of political struggle for power and therefore is forced to pretend to be abnormal.

Polonius was the first to ask the hidden question. You could say 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 therefore his reason, because Hamlet grew up in the royal family and who else but him knows everyone who is in one way or another close to the court, especially since he loves his daughter Ophelia. But the implications here may be twofold. Firstly, Polonius deliberately belittles his importance so that Hamlet, having lost his vigilance, reveals himself to him. And secondly, the question can be understood at the same time in the opposite way, as “Do you know my real strength, what ideology is behind me, and are you not overestimating your strengths, trying to create an alternative to the existing state of affairs?” He replies: “Excellent,” and then immediately attacks: “You are a fishmonger.” A seemingly harmless conversation turns out to be a serious fight. In fact, “fish merchant” is the most insulting thing for a noble nobleman. Those. to Polonius’s question, “Do you know my strength,” Hamlet actually replies, “You have no strength, you are a nobody, a petty fussing businessman.”

Note that A. Barkov interprets the phrase “fishmonger” as “pimp,” finding certain lexical and historical grounds for this. Perhaps this is so, but this 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 we take the word 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 be involved in brothels, since this business would put such a stigma on him that would forever bar him from entering high spheres of influence. And it’s not that there was no prostitution in Shakespeare’s time, or that the rulers of that time had strict moral principles. Of course, debauchery was always and everywhere, but power in those days rested not only on the force of arms, but also on the myth of its special honor. A nobleman's word of honor was stronger than a contract certified by a lawyer. And if frankness, acceptable for sailors and fishermen, creeps into the system of this myth, then the myth itself, and therefore 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 them, since this was catastrophically dangerous for their position. Therefore, if the translation “fishmonger” as “pimp” can be accepted, it is not in the literal sense, but in the sense of a dealer in human souls. This approach much better reflects the very essence of the entire play, which, by and large, is about the human soul. Polonius does not value her at all and is quite ready, for the sake of selfish interests, to sell anyone who stands in his way. Hamlet throws this accusation in his face, and he can only weakly deny: “No, no, my lord.”

After several interesting phrases, which we will omit due to their irrelevant 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 refers to the king, the royal court, etc. Hamlet is simply fighting for his beloved, he does not want her to receive ideological influence from the frivolous king. He continues what he began in his letter to Ophelia. She, like an empty vessel, will possess whatever is placed in her. Hamlet sees this, and tries his best to prevent it from being filled with lifeless morality (see Note 3).

Hamlet's efforts are transparent, but not to Polonius. For him, the prince’s words 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). Nevertheless, he does not let up, does not lose the desire to understand what lies in the prince’s madness, and again makes an attack in a verbal duel: “What are you reading, my lord?”, or, simply put, “What thoughts are you clinging to, what is your philosophy?". He calmly replies: “Words, words, words.” Here we can recall his vow to avenge the death of his father in the fifth scene of the first act: “I will erase from the memorial plaque all the signs / Of sensitivity, all the words from the books... I will write the whole book of the brain / Without a low mixture.” Obviously, both 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 the high ideals with which he was fully imbued with in Wittenberg.

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

In addition, it is necessary to highlight another, parallel, subtext of Hamlet’s words. Namely, one can recall how in the previous act Ophelia told Polonius that the prince visited her very strangely, looked at her, and then left, “backing away.” Perhaps Hamlet here recalls that incident, or more precisely, his state at that time - the state of observing the world with new eyes. “Stepping Back” is a critique of the position of simple, passive observation, which is important at first, but only as a short-term 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 Polonius to his side. Moreover, he speaks with this gentleman behind the scenes in his own language - the language of hints and halftones. And Polonius, it seems, begins to understand what’s going on, 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 remained with a low opinion of his interlocutor: “Oh, these obnoxious old fools!”, who not only wasted his time asking questions, but in the end he himself was frightened by 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 exactly the same. In general, sameness and repetition in a play often means a lack of living thought. For example, Hamlet in the previous act, answering another question from Polonius about the book he was reading (obviously taken from his university era), says: “Words, words, words,” meaning the exclusively theoretical nature of what was written, without going into reality , therefore, the absence of vital thought. Likewise, the identical, repeating each other Ronencrantz and Guildenstern are by definition adherents of stupidity, an old, outdated worldview paradigm, and, therefore, they are supporters of its political champion - the king.

And in fact, Hamlet, not having received Polonius as a political ally, was at first glad to see his old school friends in the hope that perhaps they could help him with something. He greets them cordially and opens up a little to them, expressing his dissatisfaction with the order in the country: “Denmark is a prison.” But they do not accept this turn of events: “We do not agree, prince.” That's it, the dividing line has been drawn, positions have been clarified, and you just need to prove that you are right. 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 thoughts that are dangerous for him (the king), i.e. thoughts about seizing power, and act head-on, trying to push the interlocutor to be frank. 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 God, I could isolate 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 doesn’t need anything, no power, that he could be happy being in his inner world if it weren’t for his worries about chaos and groundlessness in the world (“if I didn’t have bad dreams”). The twins insist: “And these dreams are the essence of ambition,” and then, attention, they switch to the language a la scholastic philosophy, to which they ideologically belong: “For the very essence of an ambitious person is just a shadow of a dream.” They hope that the way of talking about the problem, clouding their brains through overly abstract images, will give them the opportunity to win the argument and convince Hamlet that they are right, i.e. that the existing ideological system makes it possible to live in this world, react to it and think with dignity. But this is a cheap move: Hamlet denies the existing system of thought because he sees in himself the strength to overcome it, since he has fully studied it and masters 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.
Rosenkrantz: That's right, and I think that ambition in its own way is so airy and light that it is nothing more than the shadow of a shadow.
Hamlet: Then our beggars are bodies, and our monarchs and pompous heroes are shadows of beggars. (translated by M. Lozinsky)

The twins are knocked over onto their 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 is no basis for man; politically - against the king.

After this verbal spat, Hamlet is completely clear what these two dummies are. A few more words, and he would directly state this (“They have sent for you”) - 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 influence of his word, i.e. being right, hiding 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 slightly open and says that he sees no reason for this world. And since in any state the basis for the order of life is power, then in fact he thereby declares his dissatisfaction with the existing power situation in which the king fails to cope with the responsibility of ensuring the stability and reliability of the foundations of society. Moreover, everyone knows that he, the king, by hastily marrying his brother’s wife, was the first to violate previously unshakable moral standards of behavior. Therefore, Hamlet, speaking about his lack of enthusiasm for the existing state of affairs, speaks of the need to change power to one that could give people ideals. Of course, he does not say this 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’s important here.

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

Polonius: Let's go, gentlemen.

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

This looks like a wonderful idyll. But behind it is a lot of emotions 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 layer of the people forming public opinion (“It is better for you to have a bad inscription on a tomb than a bad review of them during life”), and secondly, Hamlet’s incitement of this part of the people to remove from their memory such scenes that describe horrors rulers (Pyrrhus), seizing power by force and untruth. As a result, although Hamlet did not find support in power circles, he managed to find it among the people: the first actor, reading a monologue, entered into such an experience that even Polonius noticed it. In addition, the actors agreed to play the play according to the prince's script.

Finally, the following should be noted. Left alone, Hamlet says that “the visiting actor” “So subordinated his consciousness to a dream, / That the blood drains from his cheeks, his eyes / Tears cloud, his voice fades, / And his face says with every fold, / How he lives...”, i.e. e. he says that a dream changes the entire human nature. In the following lines he immediately attributes this to himself. In other words, he means the following: I am completely ripe for the fight, my dream has changed me, so I have nothing to fear and need to go into battle, i.e. be active. Denial should be replaced with affirmation. But in order for this change to occur correctly, reasons are necessary, which he will receive through his active action-attack: “I will instruct the actors / To play in front of my uncle a thing modeled / on the Father’s death. I’ll keep an eye on my uncle - / Will he take you to the quick? If yes, / I know what to do.” Hamlet prepared to jump.

Analysis of the second act. Thus, from 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 ideological system, which does not truly accept the inner world of a person, and therefore does not see real strength in consciousness. As a result, consciousness takes revenge on them and does not unfold in them to its full power, making them simply stupid, constantly losing in intellectual disputes with Hamlet. Among the wealth and nobility, our prince still has Ophelia as his only hope. He fights for her both in a letter to her and in a conversation with her father Polonius.

Hamlet's real gain in this act was his alliance with the people in the person of traveling actors. Having received support from them, he finally decided to take his first step, not just to find out who is who in his environment, but to remove all barriers to the generation of 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 the 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 did not arise out of nowhere, but as a consequence of the fact that Hamlet won the verbal duel between Polonius and the twins, using in their own language– in the language of scholastic studies. Therefore, it is completely natural for him to use a similar technique in relation to the king, and offer him as bait something for which he shows weakness - an entertainment act, 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 such a net for the king that he simply could not help but fall into because of his character, or more precisely, because of his corresponding ideological disposition.

Finally, in the second act, the essence of Hamlet is clearly revealed: he is active. This should not be confused with the haste that many critics of the play expect from him. Not finding it (haste), they themselves rush to declare the main character either a coward or something else, without understanding what kind of figure is in front of them. Hamlet is activity itself in its purest form. Activity, in contrast to simple spontaneity, thinks through all its acts. Hamlet moves towards fulfilling his task of creating the foundation of the world. Revenge is far from the most important line on his list of tasks. Moreover, as will become clear from our further analysis, his 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 from a philosopher only final maxims. In the same way, it is strange to expect immediate action from Hamlet to carry out his mission.

Act three study of Hamlet

First scene. We distinguish two parts in it.

In the first part, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report to the king that they were unable 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 a cunning man. However, they reassured the king, saying that he loved entertainment, ordered visiting actors to play the play and invited the “most august couple” to it. For the king, Hamlet's love of performances is a sign of his belonging to a worldview code-named "merriment." And if so, then he has nothing to fear from a coup and it is quite possible to respond to the invitation. This means 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 here - to her shame and to her death, she agrees to this treacherous role of hers in relation to the one who recently opened his 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 entire camarilla cannot accept the transcendence of such an understanding for them: after all, the strangeness of Hamlet can be imagined in such a way that he left their system of views, but has not yet fully developed a new system. As a result, throughout almost the entire tragedy he was “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, unsupported position. But they don’t want this (after the second act this is clear), but are trying to break through the wall of misunderstanding with their foreheads. This once again speaks against their mental abilities, i.e. - against their ideological and philosophical position, which serves them as an unsuitable tool in analyzing the entire situation.

But before they use the bait - Ophelia, we will hear Hamlet’s central monologue in the entire 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, into an unknown country, makes you “groan, trudge along under the burden of life,” so it turns out that “It is better to put up with familiar evil, / Than to strive for flight to the unfamiliar. / This is how thought turns us all into cowards.” Hamlet, analyzing his failure to recruit Polonius and the twins, considers the reason for everything to be their fear of the unknown: the thought of the future, falling into the pit of nothingness, makes the weak-willed numb and turns them into cowards incapable of moving 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, someone who has refused to move forward is, in principle, unable to think. Regarding Polonius, Hamlet has already spoken in this spirit (“Oh, those insufferable old fools”), but here he sums up the situation and concludes that he is on his way only with smart people capable of independent, forward-looking thinking. Hamlet himself is not afraid of novelty, just as he is not afraid of death, and treats with sarcasm those whom “thought turns into cowards.” He has dotted all the i's and all he has to do is move forward. As A. Anikst correctly notes, he himself answers his question “To be or not to be”: one should be, i.e. to be in it, in being, to exist, since to exist means to live, to constantly strive for 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 connection: to be means to think about the future, about life in it, i.e. think about this existence. This is the formula of the subject. Hamlet formulated his idea with which he intended to move towards achieving his goal. Let's repeat, this idea is: be a subject, and don't be afraid of it! If in the first act he equalized the importance of reason and power, now reason outweighs 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 respect for 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 was 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 away (what is she giving away, in fact, she throws away) his gifts. He is shocked, but she insists, justifying this by the fact that “their smell has fizzled out,” i.e. the fact that Hamlet allegedly stopped loving her. Isn’t this treachery: we know that it was Ophelia, at the instigation of her father and brother, who refused Hamlet’s love, and here she accuses him of cooling off towards her, i.e. shifts everything from a sick head to a healthy one. And she does this to those who are considered mentally ill. Instead of feeling sorry for him, she seeks to finish him off. How low you have to fall 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 dismissals in his direction were explained by the fact that she had gone over to the king’s side, and her essence, previously 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(emphasis added – S.T.) to ardent insistence.” Rather, Hamlet's harsh behavior means that he saw Ophelia's spiritual depravity. And the root of this depravity lies in its focus not on the stability of existence, but on the momentary pleasure of being in a state of peace, when her closest (relatives) control her, and she agrees with this and completely surrenders herself into their hands. She is not that thinking subject who freely chooses her own path in life, but an inanimate plastic object from which puppeteers mold what they want.

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 entire atmosphere of the subsequent conversation becomes heated, turns into the plane of behind-the-scenes intrigue, and is conveyed through prose characteristic of this situation. At the same time, he tells her five times to go to the monastery: he is clearly disappointed with her and calls on 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 really, what kind of “manifestations” are there to the one who betrayed you. But, please tell me, what else could be expected from the situation that the king and Polonius simulated? Any normal person will flare up and create a scandal when he is first rejected, and then he himself is declared a rejecter. This means that everything was arranged in advance, and the king simply needed an excuse to transform 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 (collecting underpaid tribute from a distant land without serious troops is a hopeless matter) did not take long to come: “He will sail to England immediately.”

It turns out that the king nevertheless saw his rival in Hamlet, but not because he spilled the beans (this did not happen), but because the spirit of a serious attitude to business, to the soul of a person, which was clearly revealed in just the conversation between the young people. Hamlet carries a new ideologeme, which means the question 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 towards his nephew. But then it became clear that “there is no madness in his words.” One way or another, the cards are gradually being revealed.

Scene two. We distinguish two parts in it.

The first part is a play within a play, i.e. everything that concerns the presentation of traveling actors. In the second part we have the initial reaction of various characters to this performance. In the play itself (“The Mousetrap,” or the murder of Gonzago), the poisoning of Hamlet Sr. by Claudius is loosely modeled. Before the action and during it, Hamlet Jr.’s conversation is given. and Ophelia, where he treats her like a fallen woman. Again, Barkov is speculating here about Ophelia's sexual promiscuity, but after our explanation of the previous scene, everything seems clear: the prince considers her spiritually fallen, and all his dirty attacks are just a way to highlight the problem. The performance itself is Hamlet's open challenge to the king, his declaration 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’s exactly how it all happened. Here, with the king’s reaction, everything is extremely clear, and we can say with confidence that the words of the spirit of Hamlet’s father have been verified, the prince has become convinced of their truth, so that the task of the “Mousetrap” has been completely fulfilled.

It is important that the philosophical structure of the play dictates its own rules. In this case, the play within the play was needed as Hamlet’s next step in his movement towards building his philosophically significant position. After he established himself “be a subject!”, he should have been active in order, if not to fulfill, but to begin to fulfill this directive of his. The performance he organizes is his act of activity, the beginning of the affirmation of his value (real value) in the eyes of 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 seeks the truth in them. And the truth turned out to be that the king was the murderer of his father. This means he has every right to revenge. But does Hamlet need this? No, he needs to take power through legitimate means. If he commits 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, repeating 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, and therefore ensure stability for the state. Therefore, there can be no talk of a spontaneous murder of the king out of revenge. There must be other actions here.

Nevertheless, it is important that Hamlet has revealed himself quite fully in the political struggle, and is already openly saying: “I need a promotion,” 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 accompany Hamlet to England, in fact, to his place of exile: “It’s time to put this horror walking in the wild in the stocks.” The king understood Hamlet’s ideological superiority, and this is where all the “horror” lies. Further, we see him repenting: he realized the “stench of villainy” of his own, but is unable to do anything to correct the situation. That is, he seems to be saying, “Everything can be fixed,” but he doesn’t see the mechanism for doing this. After all, true repentance in essence, and as Claudius correctly understands it, is at least to give back what was taken dishonestly. But “What words / Pray here? “Forgive me the murders”? / No, you can’t do that. I didn't return the spoils. / I have with me everything why I killed: / My crown, land and queen.” In short, the king here acts in his role: let everything be as before, and then maybe it will work itself out. All his stability is hope for chance, in contrast to Hamlet, who seeks foundation in the stable veracity of existence. Claudius needs immutability as such, in fact, nothingness in which he wants to remain (later Hamlet will say about him: “the king ... is nothing more than a zero”). This situation is absurd, since it is impossible to remain, and even more so to remain stably, in non-existence. Therefore, he loses to Hamlet, who chose as his basis the sphere of meaning, the existential sphere in which it is natural and stable to remain. In addition, it is important that if Claudius knew exactly about the hellish torment 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 hoped for , but took real steps to atone for his sin. But he doesn’t really believe in God, and his whole life is a simple fuss about entertainment and momentary benefits. All this again makes him the direct opposite of Hamlet, who does not perceive the existence of hell as a joke, and builds his attitude towards life on the basis of the desire for good both for his dead father (so that he does not burn in fiery hell) and for his people (the desire for real reliability and stability in society). That is why Hamlet refuses (on the way to his mother, after the performance) to kill the king when he prays that it is not murder as such that he needs, 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 happen later, not now, so he leaves his sword in its sheath: “Reign.” Finally, there is another reason for Hamlet’s “good nature,” which he himself voiced: killing the king during his prayer will guarantee that he will go to heaven. This seems unfair to such a villain: “Is this revenge if the scoundrel / Gives up the ghost when he is clean from filth / And all ready for a long journey?”

Scene four.

Hamlet talks to his 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 completely revealed himself before his mother. Moreover, he kills Mr. Polonius, who was hiding behind the carpet (behind the scenes), so that he no longer needs to hide his aspirations. The veils have fallen, the positions of different parties are completely exposed, and Hamlet, without hesitation, accuses his mother of debauchery and so on. In fact, he tells her that she was complicit in the destruction of all 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 gives 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 would he kill the one he just left alive? Moreover, it seems incredible that the king could somehow break away from the 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 the man behind the curtains, could not even suspect that the king was there.

However, before us is not an everyday story, but a play in which space and time live not according to the usual laws, but according to completely special ones, when both temporal duration and spatial location 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 reality in the play, but only Hamlet hears it: the queen does not perceive it at all. It turns out that this is a phenomenon of Hamlet’s consciousness (as in the fifth scene of the first act), and one that asserts with its essence 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 us repeat, what is permissible is 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 his 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 combination of circumstances, in which the blame lies entirely with the king himself: after all, a secret eavesdropper encroaches on his honor queen and Hamlet, and according to the laws of that time this was quite enough to carry out harsh actions against him. Hamlet defended his and his mother’s honor, and if the king had actually been killed, then the doors to power would have opened for 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 almost openly accuses the king of murdering the former ruler (Hamlet Sr.) and usurping power. Moreover, the second step of his activation as a subject is his murder of Polonius, and by committing this act, the prince hopes to put an end to the king. Hamlet is active! He became active when he understood the logical validity of this activity (“Be a subject”). But the situation is not yet completely ready: 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 Study of Hamlet

Scene one.

The king learns that Hamlet killed Polonius. He is clearly frightened, because he understands: “This is what would happen to us if we ended up there.” Therefore, the decision made even earlier to send Hamlet to England is 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 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 anxious and frightened,” since the people (obviously through traveling actors), having taken Hamlet’s side, are a real force that cannot be brushed aside like an annoying fly. Changes are brewing in society in the attitude towards the king, towards his legitimacy, and this is a real threat for him. It is precisely this that he fears, calling it “The Hiss of Poisonous Slander.” Although, what kind of slander is this? After all, he himself recently, during prayers (act 3, scene 3), admitted to himself the crimes he had committed. By calling the truth slander, the king is not simply trying to hide his guilt before the queen, who, apparently, did not participate in any way in the murder of Hamlet Sr. In addition, here he, firstly, clearly demonstrates that he has lost control of the situation (hoping at random: “The hiss of poisonous slander... perhaps it will pass us by”), and secondly, and this is the most important thing, he enters a state full of lies. After all, by 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, becomes more and more immersed in lies, i.e. moves away from its subjectivity, and ideologically inevitably loses. Let us note that the king’s ideological defeat became obvious even to himself after Polonius – this symbol of the behind-the-scenes – died, exposing the situation, and everyone (the people) gradually began to understand what was what.

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. an instrument in the hands of the king, who is "nothing more than zero." Hamlet moved public opinion to his side; the king, not having such support, turned into an empty place, into zero. Before, he had almost zero passivity, only imitating activity (the murder of Hamlet Sr. and the seizure of the throne), but now everything was laid bare and his passivity became obvious.

Scene three.

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

In general, one wonders, why does the king need to fuss so much about Polonius’ corpse? Isn't it a lot of honor? That is, of course, Polonius was his friend and right hand in the production of all his abominations. It is not for nothing that even in the second scene of the first act, Claudius, addressing Laertes, says: “The head is no more in harmony with the heart... Than the Danish throne is for your father.” Okay, but why should 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 moved towards its opposite - non-vital passivity. While he has not yet completely moved to this destination, he is taking steps in this direction: he is looking for a dead man. In addition, the king's strength lay in behind-the-scenes intrigue, in secret machinations when the truth was hidden from human eyes. The death of Polonius represents 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 simply searching for the corpse of Polonius. The king did not yet understand that Hamlet, with his active position (arranging the performance), shifted the entire situation, and it began to irreversibly develop against him, against his ideological orientation toward fun: Hamlet’s performance was not at all fun, and this non-gaiety helped expose the situation. (By the way, by this Shakespeare asserts that tragedy as a genre has a higher artistic status compared to comedies, which he himself practiced in his youth).

And so, Hamlet reveals to the king: the corpse is “at dinner.” The once actively 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 of the gray eminence) became an object for worms. But the king is a strong analogy of Polonius, so Hamlet here simply informs him of his similar 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 reality - an object, in the plot implementation - a dead man.

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

In general, Hamlet behaves very openly, and the king, in defense, 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 him tribute) to kill the prince. Obviously, he would have killed him himself, but people are scared.

Scene four.

It describes how young Fortinbras and his army go to war against Poland. Moreover, the war is supposed to be over a miserable piece of land that is worth nothing. The army’s route passes through Denmark, and before sailing to England, Hamlet talks with the captain, from whom he learns all the important points 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. This is the situation here. Having gathered an army for the war with Denmark, Fortinbras Jr. received a ban from his uncle, the ruler of Norway, for this campaign. But he and his entire guard went into a state of anticipation of war, became more active, and it was no longer possible for them to stop. As a result, they realize their activity, even if it is a useless campaign, but in it they express themselves. This is an example for Hamlet: activity, having been cocked, cannot easily stop moving towards its goal. If there are obstacles on her life path, then she does not give up on 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 blood. / Live in a thunderstorm or don’t live at all.” In other words: “Oh my subjectivity, from now on be active, no matter what the cost. You are active only insofar as you attack and do not stop at any obstacles.”

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

Scene five. Here we highlight three parts.

In the first part, Ophelia, mentally damaged, 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 (Polonius). He calms Laertes and transfers him to his allies. In the third part, Ophelia returns and makes some strange instructions to her brother. He is shocked.

Now in more detail and in order. Ophelia has gone crazy. This was expected: she lived by her father’s mind, 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 truly went crazy 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 (spirit of denial) for a long time alienated her from Hamlet, who, at one time, having lost his foundations, 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 hero’s movement becomes irreversible. Ophelia had none of this - neither denial, nor will. Actually, that’s why she and the prince didn’t have a full-fledged relationship, because they were too different.

At the same time, Ophelia's madness, among other things, means her departure from her previous position of indulging the views of her father, and therefore the king. Here, we repeat, we have an analogy with Hamlet’s madness. And although the physiology and metaphysics of their insanity are different, the very fact of a change in consciousness in both cases allows us to say that Ophelia in this scene appeared before us completely different than before. That is, of course, she has gone crazy and in this she is already different. But the main thing is not this, but her new outlook on life, freed from previous royal attitudes. Now she “accuses the whole world of lying... and here are traces of some terrible secret” (or, in Lozinsky’s translation, “In this lies an obscure, but sinister mind”). Ophelia acquired denial, and this is the secret (“unclear but sinister mind”), the secret of how denial 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 that makes its way into the future. In other words, the question arises: how does the basis for thinking arise in that which is non-thinking? Or another way: how does activity arise from passivity? This is clearly a continuation of the conversation about the circular movement of the world that 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 to this. This means that Hamlet’s new philosophy has latently 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 customize Ophelia in his own way were ultimately crowned with success, although it was too late: she could no longer be saved. The reason for this state of affairs will be discussed a little later.

In any case, in an altered consciousness, Ophelia began, like Hamlet, to produce such pearls that make the most inquisitive minds of Shakespearean studies freeze with misunderstanding. By the way, while Gertrude (pearl) did not hear them, she, emotionally, and therefore ideologically, took the side of 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 certain 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 the communication between the two women, the situation changes radically and the queen’s attitude towards the girl becomes different. So, if her opening words were very stern: “What do you want, Ophelia?”, then after the first quatrain of the song that she began to hum, the words followed were completely different, much warmer: “Dear, what does this song mean?” Ophelia's altered consciousness in some way made her related to Hamlet, brought them closer, and this could not go unnoticed by the queen.

Actually, here is Ophelia’s first song, with which she addresses Gertrude:

How to find out who is your sweetheart?
He comes with a staff.
Perlovitsa on the crown,
Pistons with strap.
Oh, he's dead, lady,
He is cold dust;
There is green turf in our heads,
A pebble in my feet.
The shroud is white as mountain snow
Flower over the grave;
He descended into it forever,
Not mourned dear.
(Translated by M. Lozinsky)

It is clearly about the king (“He comes with a staff,” plus Queen Gertrude’s sweetheart is King Claudius). 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 someday appear before Him. Moreover, in the second quatrain she even says: oh, yes, he’s already dead. In the third quatrain it is announced that “he... is not mourned by his dear one,” i.e. that the queen, apparently, will face 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, through illness, the ability to think began to mature in her. (See Note 4).

Further, she tells the approaching king (in prose, by the way, like Hamlet, who from a certain moment communicates with the king and his accomplices in the language of tension and behind the scenes - namely 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 ​​the circuit. Indeed, the phrase “the owl’s father was a baker” can and can be somehow remotely associated with some historical allusions in the life of England in Shakespeare’s time, as some researchers are trying to do, but much closer and understandable here is the understanding that One essence (the owl) had the beginning of another essence (the breadgrower), so “we know who we are, but we do not know who we can become.” Ophelia says: everything is changeable, and the directions of change are closed to understanding. This is the same thing, but served with a different sauce, as Hamlet’s conversations about worms and the king’s journey through the guts of a beggar. That’s why she ends her sentence with the sentence: “God bless your meal,” which clearly points to that conversation between the prince and the king. In the end, this is again a statement about the imminent death of a monarch who is about to become the object of someone's mass. But he does not hear all this due to his ideological disposition against the human soul, as a result of his disposition towards 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 due to the fact that she gave herself to him too easily, before marriage. Everything is clear here: from the song it follows that the cause of all troubles (including Ophelia herself) is the decline of 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 in question, 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 the equally incomprehensible, secret and quick burial of him (however, all this is very consistent with his status as a gray eminence, who did everything secretly: both he lived and he was buried). He is full of desire for revenge, which repeats the situation with Hamlet: he is also moving towards revenge. But, if Laertes, not knowing either the reasons for the death of Polonius 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 after 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 his father’s soul and the calming (stabilization) of the situation in the state. Laertes doesn’t even think about the good of the people, he is fixated solely on the idea of ​​vengeance and doesn’t need anything else: “Whether this one or this light, I don’t care. / But, come what may, for my own father / I will take revenge!” He doesn’t care about a philosophically verified position, he doesn’t care about the foundation of the world (“What this light is, I don’t care”), he is pure spontaneity, activity, but without meaningfulness. If at the beginning of the play he read Ophelia’s moral teachings and thereby claimed some kind of intelligence, now he has completely abandoned this, turning into an active lack of subjectivity. And it is not surprising, therefore, that he comes under the influence of the king (although a few minutes ago he himself could have had power over him), which means he signs his own death sentence, just like Polonius. The returning Ophelia informs him of this in the third part of the scene: “No, he died / And was buried. / And it’s your turn.” Everything here is very well thought out. At first, before her brother appeared, 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 to the royal power, and it became clear that he had turned into an instrument of someone else’s game, his fate became obvious, which she told about upon his return.

Scene six.

Horace receives a letter from Hamlet, in which he reports his flight to the pirates, asks him to deliver the enclosed letters to the king and urgently rush to him. At the same time, it is signed: “Yours, of which you have no doubt, Hamlet,” or in the translation. M. Lozinsky: “The one you know is yours, Hamlet.”

The entire letter is written in prose. This means that the prince is extremely excited, excited to seize power (we remember how in the fourth scene he promises himself “live in a thunderstorm, or don’t live at all”) and therefore is extremely careful in his expressions. Actually, the text of the message does not allow any doubt about 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 his friend specific information only during a face-to-face meeting, since he only trusts him, and he trusts him because he “knows” (or “does not doubt”) about it. For him, knowledge is the power that opens people to each other. And in fact, he is a subject!

Scene seven.

It tells that Laertes has finally turned from a subject of activity into a kind of inanimate instrument, completely dependent on the king: “Sovereign... rule 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 speaking against the people means having a claim to leadership, with the hope that the people will ultimately accept the point of view being defended. Laertes missed his chance to be a leader. Moreover, he clearly put himself in the role of a tool in the hands of others. It turns out that, on the one hand, he pretends to be active (opposes the people), and on the other, he becomes passive (turns into an instrument). This contradiction must inevitably explode his existence, leading him to a deep crisis. His sister warned him about this, back in the fifth scene. Now we see that the situation is developing in this direction. Moreover, his logically contradictory position breaks out and becomes obvious after the king received Hamlet's message about his presence in Denmark and about his imminent visit to him. The king decided to act: kill the prince at any cost, but by deception (through a cleverly concocted pseudo-honest duel), involving Laertes here (in vain, perhaps, he pacified him?). Laertes, by agreeing to this, lost all moral foundations for his existence and indicated his total mistakenness.

It must be said that the king’s action can be understood as his activation and in this sense considered as worthy against the background of the active subject-Hamlet. But is it? I think not. The fact is that Hamlet acts openly: his letter very clearly announces his arrival with the desire to explain the reasons for his quick return. Of course, he does not report important details regarding his struggle for the truth in this life. However, he is “naked”, i.e. bare, open and unadorned – just the way it is. What is he like? He is a subject, as proof of which he adds “one” to his signature. “One” is what, in the subsequent development of European philosophy, will result in Fichte’s “pure Self.” “One” is an affirmation of one’s strength and significance, whose strength and significance lies in relying on one’s own activity... This is the mutual guarantee of strength 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's secretive. His world is behind the scenes. After the death of Polonius, he never understood anything, he remained the same, passing off black as white, and white as 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 intensifies, since he not only becomes a derivative of some force, but he becomes a derivative of pseudo-activity, which leads nowhere, or rather, leads to nowhere, into emptiness, into the nothingness of death.

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

As a result, the drama focused on its denouement. It will finally happen in the fifth and final act, but already in the seventh scene of the fourth act we learn the grim news: Ophelia has 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 foundation of consciousness in the form of her father, Ophelia took 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 lover (yes, yes, that’s right) Hamlet. What does she need to live for? A woman lives to love, and if there is no one to love, then why does she need all these flowers?

However, here’s the question: we learn the description of Ophelia’s death from the queen, as if she herself witnessed what happened. Maybe she is the one involved in this tragedy? If we allow this, then, one wonders, why did she need it? Her beloved son, after all, loves Ophelia, and this is important. In addition, after clarifying her relationship with Hamlet, when he killed Polonius, the queen clearly emotionally switched to his side, just as Ophelia switched to his side when she began, albeit figuratively, to call a spade a spade. By and large, these two women became allies, as Gertrude will later tell 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 Ophelia's death. There is no reason to suspect the king of murder, despite his wary attitude towards her after she went crazy (after Hamlet, any madness, i.e. dissent, seems dangerous to him). Of course, we remember how in the fifth scene he ordered Horatio to “Keep an eye on her,” but we don’t remember that he ordered or even somehow hinted at killing her, especially since after the order to “watch” we saw Ophelia and Horatio separately from each other, so there was no surveillance or supervision on Horatio’s part, and there could not have been, 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 much as was necessary for a conversation between the king and Laertes, who were together all this time, so 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 at this time.

No, Ophelia’s death does not have a political reason, but a metaphysical one; more precisely, this reason lies in the alignment of the artistic structure of the work, in which every move of the characters is determined by the internal logic of the development of events. There is no such thing in life, but this is what distinguishes an artistic creation from ordinary everyday life, that there is some creative concept that serves as a boundary for possible and impossible action (as well as for any necessity). Ophelia died because this was the circumstances of her life, her existence. If the foundations (including the meaning of existence) have collapsed, then in the place of existence there remains a scorched hole of nothingness.

Analysis of the fourth act of the study of Hamlet

Thus, regarding the fourth act, the following must be said. Hamlet became more active, and due to the unity of the internal and external worlds, this subjective activation of his spread to the entire universe, moved everything from a dead point, and exposed to the utmost the essential basis of the characters in the play. Hamlet is a subject from himself (“one”). The king is a cowardly killer who does evil with the hands of others in behind-the-scenes intrigues. Ophelia, a heroine who does not know herself and does not see her goal, naturally dies. Laertes abandons himself and becomes a tool in the hands of the king: the subject has become an object. Everything is becoming clearer. After the murder of Polonius, every “pseudo” is separated from its carrier: now it is definitely clear that pseudo-activity is in fact non-activity, i.e. passivity. Here we have a chain of the following transformations:

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

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

the sum of passivity and negation turns into a subjectivity that knows itself, and in this manifests its activity, which becomes almost absolute, i.e. going beyond its boundaries. The latter is a subject who cognizes the world and, through knowledge, transforms it.

Hamlet's true activity, developing for good, drains the vitality from the false activity of the king (who lives by camouflaging his essence), providing that cycle of activity and passivity that Shakespeare constantly hints at throughout the fourth act (see Note 5).

Act five study of Hamlet

Scene one. It can be divided into three parts.

In the first part, two gravediggers are digging a grave and talking about how it is intended for a drowned woman. In the second part, Hamlet and Horatio join them. In the third part, it is discovered that the drowned woman is Ophelia, and a struggle takes place in the grave between Hamlet and Laertes, who came up with the funeral procession.

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 premonitions: the tragedy is approaching its climax. There is nothing cheerful or bright in the words of the gravediggers. In addition, the first gravedigger, who sets the tone for the entire conversation, clearly gravitates toward “philosophical” vocabulary. Everything needs to 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:

First gravedigger: ...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 intention. Then this matter is threefold. One - I did it, the other - I carried it out, the third - I accomplished. It was with intention that she drowned herself.

Where, please tell me, is there a logical connection in the words of the first gravedigger? Rather, it resembles the ravings of a madman who suddenly decided to get smart in front of his partner. But that’s the whole point: it was in this spirit that lawyers with a scholastic education were scolded in the courts, delving into verbal nuances, but not seeing real life. So it is here. An example is given: “Say I... drown myself...”. When applied to oneself, it is absolutely the same to say “carried out,” “did,” or “committed.” But the gravedigger claims some differences. Of course, they exist – lexical ones. And this is quite enough for our verbiage to assert some kind of triple nature of the matter. At the same time, all this “threefoldness” in an incomprehensible, fantastic way allows him to conclude: “It means she drowned herself with intention.”

Elsewhere, the ravings of the first gravedigger are no less refined. All this suggests that all that philosophical pseudo-intelligence that the king’s faithful servants tried to flaunt earlier, now, after Hamlet’s activation of the entire Ecumene and, consequently, the introduction of his philosophy into it (which can now be called the philosophy of real life), has sank to the very bottom of human society, to its very outskirts, 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-scholastic foam, he ended it with a song about the transience of life, about the fact that 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 go into eternity.” All this, again, turns into dust the royal ideologeme, 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 complete anti-Christian position of those who live their lives with disbelief in God and the life of the soul after the death of the flesh.

It turns out that Hamlet’s position is much closer to God than the king’s position. There are two points here. The first is that the prince takes seriously the torment of the soul of a sinner (father) in hell, and the king treats this as a fiction. 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 she, in due time, will give up herself, becoming equal to the starting point from which the report began. 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 on a circle, being an Absolute activity, then man must also be an activity with the circular nature of his essence, ultimately, he must see his life after death is the life of your soul in God and with God. Subjective circularity turns out to be immanent in the divine plan, while linear and monotonous movement of the birth-life-death type reveals anti-divine, decadent features. Wasting one’s life turns out to be displeasing to the Highest, and that is why all representatives of this ideology are alienated from Him, punished with mental retardation in the form of the inability to really think, i.e. adequately connect your mental efforts with life as it is. The focus on high ideas, on the contrary, is pleasing to God, as a result of which Hamlet - the main representative of such a position in the play - is awarded by Him with the presence of a mind capable of cognition and thinking. Let us repeat that we are not talking here 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 within himself (see Notes 6, 7). At the same time, it is obvious that the king and company are anti-subjects because there is no God in them.

But then, one wonders, what is the connection between all the prince’s ridicule 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 tried to bring man 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 base 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 hid the real content of their intentions - anti-divine, selfish intentions. Under the guise of adherence to higher values, many lived in revelry and oblivion about the salvation of their souls, enjoying only today. As a result, the very idea of ​​God was denigrated. 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 act of yours 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 with the help of which he will refuse (with knowledge of the matter) 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 based on themselves, but based on their connection with His world.

All this is shown in the second part of the scene, where Hamlet’s conversation with the first gravedigger takes place. To begin with, they measure their intellectual strength in a topic that discusses who the grave being prepared is intended for. The gravedigger speculates for the sake of speculation, and Hamlet brings him to light:

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

First gravedigger: Mine, sir.

Hamlet: It is true that it is yours, for you lie from the grave.

First gravedigger: And you are not from the grave. Therefore, she is not yours. And I am in it and, therefore, I am not lying.

Hamlet: How can you not lie? You hang around in the grave and say it's yours. And it is for the dead, not for the living. So you are lying, that you are 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 affairs, and are taken for granted. That's what he takes.

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

After this, Hamlet “communicates” with the skull of some Yorick. The main point of this action seems to be that the living hero is holding in his hands the skull of the decayed hero. Here life 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 once living) 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 at all great plug to the barrel. And here and there the opposites converge. This is 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, whose idea of ​​God presupposes that He is closed to Himself, when His beginning coincides with His end. This again confirms our idea that Hamlet, in philosophical terms, 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 us to link everything into one 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 meet. This suggests that Ophelia's death is somehow connected to her life. It seems that this connection lies in the statement that along with the death of Ophelia’s body, the opposite of this body - her soul - is alive. The heroine’s dead body 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? Can we say that the soul is alive when it burns in fiery hell? Hardly. But when she is in heaven, then it is possible, and even necessary. It turns out that Ophelia is in heaven, despite her (only in a sense) sinful death, since she repented of her previous 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 have dried up. She - as told by the queen - did not commit a volitional act of taking her own 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 the water.

Finally, it is interesting that during the conversation with the gravediggers, Hamlet turns out to be 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 several 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 argue that the passage of time for Hamlet is determined by the internal work of his spirit. And since very intense events happened to him after his exile, and all this time he was in a strong state of consciousness, his strangely rapid aging is quite understandable. We met similar things before: during his conversation with the ghost in the first act, during his conversation with Polonius in the third act (when he advised him not to back away from problems like a cancer), when the time for his flesh thickened in accordance with his internal work on himself . The same thing happens in this case: Hamlet grew old (more precisely, matured) because he had serious internal work. By astronomical standards this is impossible, but poetically it is possible and even necessary. It is necessary - from the point of view of the idea of ​​closure and therefore completeness (and therefore perfection) of the entire 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 side, but when Laertes jumps into the grave to the body buried 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, “Really, you’ll regret it.” What is he talking about?

We remember that immediately before the funeral, Hamlet again turns to the idea of ​​the unity of opposites. And then he sees that Laertes rushes to his 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 prince’s mood, but only at first glance. After all, what was Laertes aiming for? He aimed at direct equating opposites. Indeed, we know (or can guess) that Hamlet’s philosophy, 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, apparently reaching the king and his retinue. They would like to absorb its life-giving juices, but no matter how it is - they act in their role, within the framework of their old paradigm, according to which real, life philosophy should be replaced with pseudo-scholarship, and under this sauce (pseudo-scholastic) justify the deception of everything and all, receiving the basis for the possibility of endless fun. They do this as follows. They take the main provisions of real philosophy, tear them away from life, thereby deadening them, and in such an unlife form they use them for their intended purpose. For example: they take the thesis “opposites converge” in static terms, and understand it not as the fact that one thing will become another as a result of a complex dynamic process of transformation (this is exactly how it is in Hamlet, both in his views and in the very fact of his changes in within the play), but as an immediate reality. As a result, for them, left becomes equal to right, black becomes equal to white, and evil becomes equal to good. The same thing happens with Laertes: having wished to identify life and death through their primitive alignment, he thereby wished to transfer Ophelia into 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, in fact, Hamlet’s ally, then Laertes, at least at the last moment, wants to designate her in his own, i.e. pro-royal camp. This is what outrages Hamlet and forces him to fight him. Hamlet here is fighting for the bright memory of his beloved, so that she is not considered either his traitor or an accomplice to the royal machinations.

Here we can ask: how did Hamlet and Laertes know (or understand) that Ophelia had changed her worldview? The fact is that in the play philosophy has a substantial status. It is a kind of ether, material insofar as it allows one or another activity to be carried out. Philosophy turns out to be a medium of action, and, at the same time, the tool that is used to obtain the desired result. Our entire analysis leaves no doubt about this. Therefore, in a poetic context, knowledge of the position of one or another hero involved in the flow of events is not a miracle for all other heroes, but the norm. The entire optics of the world is distorted around them in accordance with their way of thinking, but the whole world begins to distort the perception of such heroes. There is a mutual change in the characters' opinions about each other, as soon as they move a little in their thoughts relative to their previous position. And the closer the hero is drawn into the flow of events, the more strongly this applies to him. We can say that through participation in events he contributes to the distortion of the poetic space-time continuum. But by doing this, he opens his inner world to the outside world, and as a result, becomes visible to other players who are involved in the whirlwind of changes. Therefore, Laertes sees the true situation with Ophelia and wants to change it fraudulently. Hamlet, in turn, sees this and prevents such deception, which in Laertes’ lamentations somewhat resembles a prayer. But there is no truth in this prayer, hence Hamlet’s call, reinforced by the threat: “Learn to pray... You will truly regret it.” Laertes will still regret that on the day of mourning he decided to act like a fool. Laertes is a primitive liar, and Hamlet throws this in his face: “You lied(emphasis added – 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 is the final one, in which we distinguish four parts.

In the first, Hamlet tells Horatio about how he replaced the king’s letter, which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were taking to England, and according to which Hamlet was to be executed, with his own letter, according to which the twins themselves were 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 and around which the king, queen, Laertes and Hamlet die. The last one 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.

The situation is as follows in more detail. After Ophelia’s funeral, Hamlet says: “As if that’s all. Two words about something else." It feels like he has done some important work and now wants to move on to something else. Since he has, by and large, one thing to do - the affirmation of the reliability, therefore, the God-likeness of the existence of the world, then this “as if everything”, of course, should concern precisely this. In this context, the whole situation with the funeral, and first of all with his fight 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 took the path of truth). Now he says “Two words about something else,” i.e. about another action, which, however, cannot be completely different, divorced from his main task, since he simply has no others. The “other” action is the opposite of what happened at the funeral, but within the framework of previous intentions. And if then there was a return of good to good, now the time has come to talk about the return of evil to evil. In this case, everything will come full circle: abstract thought-forms about the unity of opposites in life are realized at the level of interaction between good and evil, and precisely 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 to prove 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 opposite content, according to which these two should be executed. The twins brought evil to England, which turned against them: “They achieved it themselves.”

Thus, through the story of evil returning to evil, Hamlet finally sharpens the theme with vengeance. Previously, she was in the background; it was more important for him to build an entire system of relationships based on the worldview of sustainability, and therefore on the philosophy of the divine circle. Now that all this has been done, it is time for the next steps, when abstract provisions are translated into specifics. And if the situation with the king, who is guilty of both the death of the prince’s father and the attempt to kill him himself, requires revenge, then so be it. And so, when the king, through the substitute of Polonius - the wobbling and florid Osric - in the same spirit, in the spirit of the backstage, 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 “practised constantly.” We saw that throughout the entire play Hamlet “practised” in verbal duels with his rivals, building his new (however, well-forgotten old) ideologeme, so that the upcoming battle, having the form of rapier fencing, is in fact the last, already final statement of being right. The elasticity of his thought, due to the world he built (this became possible after he proclaimed “be a subject” and put reason 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 whom he intends to present his arguments. Moreover, during Ophelia’s funeral he put some of them on display, and they turned out to be unparried. In that rehearsal for the upcoming fight, Hamlet won, and after that he had nothing to fear. On the other hand, he understood that all of Osric’s serpentine ornateness did not promise anything good, that the king had come up with 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 grounds for killing the king. Hamlet knew that there would be a catch, and he also knew that this catch would give him legal grounds to return evil to the original source. Thus, he agreed to this strange duel because it gave him a chance to legally kill Claudius. Hamlet went to fencing with Laertes not for fencing, but to fulfill a 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 king was destined for his true rapier attack. Evil will return to evil.

This is exactly what will happen. Of course, Hamlet’s heart did not deceive him 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 their dishonest actions were discovered. Hamlet killed the king, restoring justice not only for himself, but for everyone, since those who watched the duel saw everything with their own eyes: Gertrude drank the wine intended for Hamlet, poisoned herself and publicly announced that this was the king’s tricks. Likewise, Laertes, stabbed to death with his own poisoned sword, pointed to the king as the planner of all the dishonor that had happened. 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 camouflages itself as good. When its insides become exposed, it loses its existential power and naturally dies. So, when the prince returns to the poisonous snake in royal guise its own poisonous rapier bite, he simply puts an end to the history of its existence. At the same time, he crosses out the very idea of ​​​​the linear passage of time and finally affirms its circular nature: “What was, that will be; and what has been done will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9). Moreover, he asserts this not only to a situation external to himself, but also to himself: suspecting something bad, he still goes to a duel, trusting God, trusting that his possible death is a good thing that closes some a more global wave of change than the one in which his life took part. Even at the end of the first act, our hero establishes the vector of his moods: “The connecting thread of 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 times - at the cost of his life - for the sake of the future.

The life of Hamlet, like the king or other heroes of the tragedy, is a plot that is ultimately local 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 returns from Poland. Once upon a time, his father lost his kingdom through Hamlet's father. Now, through Hamlet himself, he gets it back. The history of centuries has closed in on itself. At the same time, the memory of the hero Hamlet did not dissolve into nothing. He ensured continuity of power, stability of existence and a God-like worldview in which evil is punished by evil, and good produces good through itself. He established moral morality. “If he had lived, he would have become king...” However, he became more than justly a reigning monarch. He became a symbol of good, consciously affirming man’s limitations, but limitations not of himself in the name of his own selfish and momentary goals, but of 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 move into the category of great values ​​by which humanity lives.

Analysis of the fifth act.

Regarding the fifth act as a whole, we can say that it is about the fact that good has a circular structure, and evil has a structure of linear movement. In fact, Hamlet’s very aspiration for the blissful stability of the kingdom, which is ensured by the introduction of a god-shaped, circular (self-closed) philosophy, speaks for itself. In addition, after all, the good that symbolizes life, in order to be itself, must always repeat itself, just as life multiplies itself from generation to generation, just as it is and was. On the contrary, evil has a needle-shaped character, like a stinging arrow, since it carries within itself the negation of life. Evil has a certain beginning - the beginning when deception occurs, and life turns 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 – infinite, generating itself countless times, as many times as God pleases. And when the deception is revealed, the evil goes away, and history again collapses into a circle - natural, logical, absolutely verified and correct. This circle is ensured by 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 a partner in creation, His helper.

C. Conclusions

Now the time has come to think about that dry, philosophically verified remainder, which constitutes a kind of skeleton of the entire drama. To get it, you need from everything said in part IN of our research, to remove the emotions that helped us set the right guidelines when making our way through the forest of mysteries cultivated by Shakespeare, but which are now becoming superfluous. When the forest has been passed, our own thoughts should serve as guidelines, and on their basis we should move on.

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

What area is the opposite of nothing? Opposite to it is something that exists, and exists clearly, as a kind of stability. This is what is quite appropriate to designate as existential being, or, taking into account the research of Heidegger, being. Thus, Hamlet rushed from non-existence to existence. He does not consider this position his final destination; this point is intermediate, and consists 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 knowledge of his subjectivity, on the acceptance of his 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 basis of stability, eternity existence. Thus, Hamlet not only affirms the unity of the internal and external worlds, which now have a common foundation, but he closes the foundation itself on itself and makes it a semblance of the Divine Absolute, in which any activity is generated by itself in order to come to itself. Indeed, in the play, all of Hamlet’s actions proceed from him as a subject, give rise to a corresponding worldview, and are focused on the need for him to gain power, but not for himself personally, but so that the ideologeme introduced into the world (which is such that it is beneficial for everyone) is long, sustainable. Here the prince’s soul, tuned for good, spreads throughout the Ecumene, becomes everything, just as everything is focused into it. A closed structure emerges, reflecting the true primary source of everything, which Hamlet constantly reminds himself and us, the audience of the play (readers of the play). This primary source is God. It was He who launched all the 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 with his death and bequeathed the throne to Fortinbras Jr. At the same time, our hero not only died, but became a symbol of the value of human life. It has received the status of a high, maximally generalized value, and this value is found 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 beings (being).

As a result, all of Hamlet’s movements fit into the following scheme: nothing – existing – being. But since the existence of a being is not a being in the form of an immediate given (after all, it is expressed through the death of the main character), 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 Hamlet's entire project - expressing truth in its divine embodiment. (Note that the idea of ​​equality of being and non-being is subsequently used by Hegel in his “Science of Logic”). In addition, it is important to emphasize that the being of a being is a certain ultimate meaningfulness, in a sense, an all-gathering idea (Platonic Logos), so that it (being) exists outside of time, at all times, and is the basis to which Hamlet strived. And he got it. He received the foundation of himself, and, at the same time, the foundation of the world: the world evaluates him, and thereby gives him an existential foundation, but he also gives the world a valuable environment of existence, i.e. gives him a reason. Both of these reasons 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 strength of this conclusion, Shakespeare, against the backdrop of Hamlet, shows Ophelia and Laertes with completely different movements.

For Ophelia we have the following diagram:

Existence (an empty vessel for placing someone’s ideas into 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) – existence (that which does not think; a simple tool in the hands of the king) – non-existence (death and obvious oblivion).

Both of these movements are incorrect because they do not contribute to history, and therefore are not involved in its course. They have done nothing for their lives, unlike Hamlet, and therefore their lives should be considered failures. 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 the exact opposite. In any case, the movements of the brother and sister are not closed and therefore not god-like. For Ophelia this is obvious, but for Laertes let us explain: if Hamlet compares initial non-existence with finite existence on the basis of the essential, Hamletian understanding of their dynamic unity, when one becomes others as a result of the sequential turning of consciousness to one and another form, then in Laertes, due to his static attitude towards opposites, these same opposites are not aligned, i.e. actions to align them turn out to be false.

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

The truth of subjectivity entered history, and Shakespeare's tragedy loudly announced this.

2009 – 2010

Notes

1) It is interesting that Polonius hurries his son to leave for France: “On the road, on the road... / The wind has bent the shoulders of the sails, / And where are you?”, although recently, in the second scene, at the reception with the king, wanted to let him go: “He exhausted my soul, sir, / And, giving in after much convincing, / I reluctantly blessed him.” What is the reason for the different position of Polonius at the reception of the king and at the send-off of his son? This fair question is asked by Natalya Vorontsova-Yuryeva, but she answers it completely incorrectly. She believes that the intriguer Polonius, in troubled times, planned to become king, and Laertes allegedly could turn out to 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 completely to the power of the king (although he could have seized the throne himself), this becomes completely clear. Secondly, becoming a king is not an easy task. Here it is extremely useful, if not absolutely necessary, to have help, and forcefully. In this case, who should Polonius rely on if not his son? With this approach, he needs Laertes here, and not in distant France. However, we see how he sees him off, apparently not at all concerned about his power ambitions. It seems that the explanation for the contradiction in Polonius’ behavior lies in the text itself. So, at the end of his instructions to his son before departure, he says: “Above all: be true to yourself.” Polonius here urges Laertes not to change. It is very important! Against the backdrop of the fact that Fortinbras Jr. declared his claims for the lands of Denmark, without recognizing the legitimacy of the current king Claudius, a general situation of instability of power arises. At the same time, Hamlet shows dissatisfaction, and there is a possibility that he will win Laertes over to his side. Polonius needs a resource in the form of a 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 precisely needed in the event of a danger to royal power. And Polonius, as the right hand of Claudius, very interested in maintaining his high position at court, has a son in mind. Thus, he hastily sends him to France in order to protect him from new trends and keep him there as an aid, just in case such a need arises. We know that at the end of the play Laertes will actually appear to serve as the king's "instrument" to kill Hamlet. At the same time, Polonius does not want to speak out about his concerns about the sustainability of the existing state of affairs - so as not to create 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 his son go.

2) Let us note that this quatrain was apparently 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 the strong difference in the third line (otherwise everything is similar or even strictly the same). If we accept this translation, then the meaning of Hamlet’s message does not fundamentally change, with only one exception: in the third line he says not that the reasons for his changes are “here”, but about his rightness, obviously - for the sake of good intentions, to be in a lie . And in fact, camouflage, even through madness, is completely 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 have wanted to marry Claudius if he had been a debauchee and an outright traitor? She was probably aware of his emotional moods.

4) In general, what is striking in the play is the kinship between madness, even if feigned, like in Hamlet, with the ability to reason sensibly. This move, which has a deep metaphysical background, would later be taken up by Dostoevsky, as well as Chekhov. In stage terms, madness means a different way of thinking in relation to the official system of thought. From an ontological point of view, this suggests that the hero is in search, he reflects on his life, on his being in it, i.e. this speaks of its existential completeness.

5) Studying Shakespeare’s work, we can confidently say that the idea of ​​\u200b\u200blife being closed to itself, i.e. The idea of ​​the circulation of everything worried him for a long time, and in Hamlet it did not arise by chance. Thus, similar motifs appear in some early sonnets. Here are just a few (translations by S. Marshak):

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

Therefore, one can even assume that many of the ideas for the play were hatched by the playwright long before its actual appearance.

6) By the way, this could have been guessed at the beginning of the play, when in the third scene of the first act, in Laertes’ speech 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, in principle, talking about him, a clear association arises of the connection between the quoted words and the main character of the tragedy.

7) The Christian character of Hamlet was noticed long 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 in the present study this flaw of previous criticism has been overcome.

8) Of course, such statements contradict the well-known position from the Gospel of Matthew, when it is called to turn one’s cheek to the blow. But, firstly, this is the only case of such invocations of the Savior. Secondly, He himself behaved completely differently, and when necessary, he either walked away from danger, or took a whip and lashed sinners with it. And thirdly, it is impossible to exclude the false nature of this appeal, inspired by the clergy-traitors of Christianity, who always knew how 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 ​​​​returning evil to evil is fair and highly consistent with Christian morality, towards the establishment of which Hamlet strives.

9) It must be said that Hamlet, apparently, knew in advance that power would belong to Fortinbras. Indeed, if he is seriously talking about stability and 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? The sixth scene of the fourth act allows us to do this. Let us 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 his twins were sailing to England - S.T.) treated me like merciful robbers . However, they knew what they were doing. For this I will have to do them a service.” The question is, what service should Hamlet serve the bandits, defending the purity of human relations, honesty, decency, etc.? The play doesn't say anything about this directly. This is quite strange, since Shakespeare could not have inserted this phrase, but he did. This means that the service did take place, and it is written in the text, but you just have to guess about it.

The proposed version is as follows. The bandits mentioned are not such. They are Fortinbras Jr.'s men. Indeed, before sailing to England, Hamlet talked with a certain captain from the army of a young Norwegian. This conversation was given to us and there is nothing special in it. However, since the entire presentation is on behalf of Horatio (his words at the end of the play: “I will publicly tell about everything / What happened ...”), who may not have known all the ins and outs of that conversation, we can assume that in it Hamlet came to an agreement with that captain both about the attack and the transfer of power to Fortinbras Jr. Moreover, the “strongly armed corsair” could well have been led by that same captain. In fact, in the “characters” section, the clearly land-based Bernardo and Marcellus are presented as officers, without specifying their rank (rank). The captain is presented precisely as a captain. Of course, we meet him on the shore and we get the impression that captain is an officer’s rank. But what if this is not a rank, but the position of ship commander? Then everything falls into place: just before his 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 entire historical situation 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.

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