A Clifton Waller Barrett professor brought new insight to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” to Honors College students and guests Friday at Michael J. Cemo Hall.
English professor Paul Cantor was invited to lecture as part of the Ross Lence Master Teacher Residency, a series of events including a luncheon, seminar and dinner. The residency was organized to honor Ross Lence, an Honors College professor from 1971 until his death in 2006.
“It’s an effort to celebrate (Lence’s) teaching and his life and to bring his former students back together,” said Honors College professor Terry Hallmark.
In his lecture, Cantor focused on tragedy and renaissance culture as the historical context for Hamlet’s struggle with revenge. He argued that the conflicting principles of Christianity and classical epic heroism are symbolic of the contradictions within the human impulse.
“Revenge is at the heart of antiquity, but Christianity forbids it,” Cantor said.
Cantor also argued that the geographical context of the story is symbolic of the inner ideological conflict — Norway representing classic heroism while the southern cities embrace modernity. Denmark and its people, he notes, are torn between the two, just like Hamlet.
“Hamlet is, at his core, a true Christian but with a strong classical side,” Cantor said. “If a Christian takes revenge, it must be more horrid than a classical hero’s act, because he must consider the enemy’s soul.”
The final argument of the lecture suggested the final act of the play represented a betrayal of Christian values deeper than revenge — suicide. Cantor ruled Hamlet’s intentional death as a “suicide in self-defense,” the same justification given for Ophelia’s burial.
“The lecture definitely brought attention to Hamlet’s self-hatred and raised questions on his will to live,” said political science freshman Emma Weathers.
Cantor closed the lecture by noting the irony in Hamlet’s choice of successor, Fortinbras, as the ultimate tragedy of the Danish legacy. He said Hamlet’s final actions served to undo everything that his father stood for.
“He presented a new perspective on Hamlet’s motives,” said chemical engineering freshman Sydnee Landry. “It was a whole different reading of the play.”
Hamlet in a Nutshell – Hamlet Is an Anti-War Play
The title says it all: “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Because he is Prince of Denmark he is not free to “carve for himself.” He is subject to the
“voice of Denmark” – and that voice “had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors.”
Hamlet, like all the other major characters, is untrue to himself. When he is himself, he is like Horatio, a student from Wittenberg. But as he said, “Horatio, or I do forget myself.” He does forget himself. He erases himself and his humanist education (“all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there”) from his own brain and there in the book and volume of his brain he writes his father’s commandment (the voice of Denmark, loosed out of Hell to speak of horrors, to breathe contagion, unfolding the secrets of his prison-house that he was forbid to tell to mortal ears). Hamlet is from himself taken away.
When he is not “from himself taken away,” Hamlet is a rational humanist scholar from Wittenberg. But Hamlet erases that side of himself from the
book and volume of his brain and replaces it with the commandment of his warlike father. Thereafter all of Hamlet’s soliloquies are really debates between the warring sides of his divided soul. Hamlet is a
valiant soldier of the spirit, fighting a desperate internal battle to defend the sovereignty of his soul.
In the “my thoughts be bloody” soliloquy: (4,4,38-68)
Hamlet the scholar says,
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
But Prince Hamlet, the soldier-son of a warlike king scoffs at thinking too precisely and concludes:
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
A gravedigger was hired on the very day that Hamlet emerged from his mother’s womb, which was the same day his father put old Fortinbras into the “womb of earth” (his grave), thus acquiring land “that was and is the question of these wars” and which was Hamlet’s inheritance, figuratively a graveyard, like the part of Poland not big enough to cover the dead from the impending war over that same land.
BERNARDO (1.1.121-124)
. . . . so like the king
THAT was and IS THE QUESTION of these wars.
That is Hamlet’s dilemma – whether “to be or not to be,” like the Ghost, “so like the king that was and is the question of these wars.”
In the end, Hamlet won that battle for the sovereignty of his soul.
(Please see The Rebirth of Hamlet – http://www.thyorisons.com/#Rebirth)
Then with his dying words Hamlet proved that he was not “so like the king THAT was and IS THE QUESTION of these wars.” He passed his inheritance of blood-soaked dirt along with the voice of Denmark to Fortinbras – without a war, thus saving the lives of thousands of his countrymen.
The arrogant and cowardly Prince Fortinbras, who had sent thousands of commoners to their graves for his “honour.” is shocked that, at the Danish court, “so many princes” have died. In contrast, Hamlet has just saved the lives of thousands of commoners by refusing to be so like the “honourable” Fortinbras.
Even to this day, we are still so conditioned to bow to the divine rights of princes and presidents that Hamlet’s concession to Fortinbras seems “dishonourable.” But why should the common people go to their graves by the thousands for a straw, for a piece of ground not big enough to bury the dead, for the “honour” of pampered princes and pompous presidents?
– http://www.thyorisons.com/#Nutshell