Drama
The Tragic Effect of Oedipus Rex:
Oedipus Rex is a very significant play for the description of emotional impact of tragedy. In the words of Aristotle,
“The main purpose of tragedy is to evoke the feelings of pity and fear among audience.”
There is no doubt that the story of the fall of Oedipus Rex is full of pity and terror. The fate of Oedipus Rex who always wished for the welfare of the people inspires us with awe. We also wonder at mystery of human life in which one may suffer even with the best of intentions. We also get a feeling that fate is inexorable and no one can escape its decrees. The same idea is depicted by Sophocles in his Oedipus Rex through the characters of Jocaste and Oedipus, both of them try to evade the predictions of oracles. For a time, it seems to them that they have succeeded but in time they are sadly disillusioned. As Aristotle mentions:
“Oedipus is great not in the virtue of his worldly position for his worldly position is an illusion which will vanish like a dream but in the virtue of inner strength.”
We also wonder at the fact that even kindness and compassion sometimes create a very cruel effect. The same kindness is shown by the Theban shepherd to the infant who was given to him to destroy. As Theban shepherd states:
“I pitted the baby, my king!
And I thought that this man would take him far away.
To a own country.
He saved him but for what a fate.
For it you are what this man says you are
No man living is more wretched that Oedipus”.
The play arouses a deep sense of pity for Oedipus and it also inspires a feeling of terror at his sufferings which seems to the reader to be largely underserved.
There are many things in the play that create a deep sense of strong pity. The Priest of Zeus gives us a vivid description of the sufferings of poor Thebans.
“You too have seen out city’s afflictions caught
In a tide of death from which there is no escaping:
Death is fruitful flowering of our soil.”
Chorus too describes the miserable condition of poor Thebans. He appeals to gods to take pity on them.
“O gods, Descend like three streams leap against
The fires of grief, the fires of darkness
Be swift to bring us rest”
The sufferings of Jocaste and Oedipus also create terror in our hearts. Oedipus has been searching for the truth about the identity of Laius’ murderer as well as his own true identity but knowledge brings nothing but dismay and sufferings. Oedipus then makes sorrowful proclamation which creates terror in our hearts.
“Alas! All is out! All known, no more concealment!
O light may I never look on you again!
Revealed as I am sinful in my begetting
Sinful in marriage, sinful in shedding of blood.”
The tragedy of Oedipus Rex resembles that of King Lear for his misfortune, like Lear, seems largely undeserved. He has faults like rashness of temper and pride. He makes error of judgments but Sophocles does not present him as a guilty man. The slaying of his father was done in ambiguous circumstances and in ignorance of Laius’ identity. Nor does he know that Jocaste was his mother when he married her. The play presents mystery of undeserved suffering which is one of the chief attractions of the play Oedipus Rex.
We may sum up the above discussion in the words of Aristotle, who declares Oedipus Rex as one of the three best tragedies of his time,
“The plot of Oedipus Rex satisfies all the requirements of an ideal tragic plot in a very nice way.”
Hamlet's Soliloquies:
A Soliloquy is a discourse uttered by a speaker that is alone on the stage and oblivious to the listeners present. The dramatist employs it with of divulging the character’s innermost thoughts and plan of action in advance to the audience. In fact the practice of soliloquies became so popular with the Elizabethan writers that they banished chorus from their tragedies.
Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet earns an impregnable name and fame by employing this field. Hamlet’s soliloquies unfold the internal dilemma and mental obsession of the chief speaker. They lend an insight into Hamlet’s contemplative nature and the problem of procrastination. Most of all, they mark the movement from his inability to overcome his scholarly nature to his final resolution to become an avenger. The audience comfortably gets sundry approach to the psyche and mindset of Hamlet.
Hamlet’s first soliloquy gives the first true insight into Hamlet’s inner turmoil. By beginning the soliloquy with, “O, that this too too flesh solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve into a dew”, Hamlet wishes that his physical self might cease to exit, expressing the gravity of his innermost grief. Hamlet’s words, “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world!” indicate his intense disgust with the world. He refers this world as “an unweeded garden”, in which “rank and gross” things grow in abundance. Hamlet’s grief over his father sudden death is intensified by his mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle whom he considers inferior and venomous naturally. He denounces her disloyalty in the words, “frailty thy name is woman”, and juxtaposes Claudius’ inferiority to his father’s greatness in the image of “Hyperion to a satyr”. Furthermore his allusion to Niobe and the contrast between her mother’s “galled eyes” and her “dexterity to incestuous sheets”, serve only to accentuate his tormented emotions. He scornfully protests: “O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer.” Nevertheless he conceals his great misery from the king and the queen: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”
Hamlet’s next soliloquy “What a rogue and peasant slave am I!” is delivered after the arrival of players and reveals the root of true conflict: his inability to act. By juxtaposing a player who “could force his soul to his own conceit”, to weep for Hecuba without any apparent reason, against him, who has “the motive and cue for passion” but cannot do anything for his godlike father “upon whose property and most dear life/A damned defeat was made.” Hamlet regards himself “a dull and muddy-mettled rascal” who has done nothing to avenge his father’s murder. He vents his anguish on his uncle by referring to him as “a bloody, bawdy villain!/Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”. Finally, We find Hamlet resolving to devise a mouse-trap play for Claudius in which he will closely watch his reaction and “catch the conscience of the king”.
Unlike Hamlet’s first two major soliloquies, Hamlet’s next and the most celebrated “To be or not to be” soliloquy is governed by intellect and not frenzied emotion. Hamlet sparks an internal philosophical debate on the advantages and disadvantages of his existence. Here Hamlet is shown to be on the horns of dilemma “Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer /The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or take arms against a sea of troubles.” He jumps to tentamount that death is no doubt a sleep but there are thousand dreadful visions that disturb and shock such sleep. Hamlet’s dilemma is that he cannot sure what death has in store; it may be a sleep but in “perchance to dream” he is speculating that it an experience perhaps worse than life. The death is called “undiscovered country” from where “no traveller returns”. Hamlet declines to the idea of suicide by saying “thus conscience doth make cowards of us/And thus native hue of resolution /Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.”
Hamlet’s next soliloquy is delivered after the players’ scene when he goes the queen’s closet and on the way finds the king at prayer. It is golden opportunity for Hamlet to carryout the revenge but his scholarly nature intervenes and he starting contemplating:
“Now might I do it pat now he is praying/And now I’ll do it and so he goes to heaven/I so am I revenged!”
Wisdom stands mighty resistance between him and his revenge. He consoles himself for another opportunity in which he must be in rage, intoxicated, gambling or busy in his incestuous pleasures of bed or about some other act that has “no relish of salvation in it”, and then to trip him so that “his soul may be as damned and black/As hell, whereto it goes”.
Hamlet’s last soliloquy is prompted by the passage of Fortinbras’ army through Denmark. It is another protest against the dullness of his passion and slow methodical march of his contemplative nature. Hamlet scolds himself by saying, “How all occasions do inform against me/And spur my dull revenge”. He ponders “whether it be bestial oblivion or, some craven scruple/Of thinking too precisely on the event”, that has thwarted his purpose. Remembering a power motive as “a father killed, a mother stained”, Hamlet now forms an ultimate resolve:“O, from this time forth/My thoughts be bloody, or nothing worth”
Besides Hamlet, Ophelia and Claudius also burst into soliloquies. Ophelia’s soliloquy is very significant as the audience is acquainted with the stately position of lord Hamlet:
Oh, what a noble mind is here overthrown/The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword/The expectancy and the rose of the fair state/The glass of fashion and the mould of form/The observed of all observers.”
In a nut-shell, the prince of Denmark without these soliloquies would be an elusive shadow, a character without personality.
Hamlet’s Delay:
Hamlet’s delay has been an issue of endless controversy. Hamlet’s soliloquies lend first true insight his contemplative nature and illustrate the problem of his procrastination. John Holloway says:
“Hamlet’s soliloquies are foremost in bringing the idea of his delay to our notice.”
Throughout reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is an underlying question at hand that has plagued the minds of many scholars that what took Hamlet so long to carry out the orders of his noble father who contacted him beyond the grave.
Regarding this question a number of theories have been advanced. Of course there are the critics like T.S.Eliot which refuse to take any notice of it. According to them it is certainly an artistic flaw. If Hamlet would have killed Claudius the play would have ended somewhere in Act-II. So Shakespeare was forced to delay the revenge. Still there are some other critics that argue that there was no delay at all on Hamlet’s part and everything that he does is deliberate and calculated. These are of course the extreme views. Shakespeare makes it clear to us that Hamlet does delay and he is acutely aware of it.
The question of Hamlet’s delay has haunted the critics for about four centuries. Whereas the critics like Werder and Campbell have held Hamlet’s external circumstances responsible for his delay the majority of Shakespearean scholarship including Goethe, Schlegal, Coleridge and Bradley hold Hamlet himself responsible for his delay.
In Act-I the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to him and reveals the secret of his vile murder. It further imposes upon him the duty of avenging his “foul and the most unnatural murder.” The ghost’s injunctions are very clear:
“Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest”.
Hamlet’s mind is assailed with doubt whether or not this apparition is a demon sent from hell, or if it is truly his father’s spirit which has come from purgatory, to divulge the horrors of his murder, in the hope of revenge:
“The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil and the devil hath power/To assume a pleasing shape.”
To verify the truth of the ghost’s statement, Hamlet first feigns madness, and then gets enacted mousetrap play to “catch the conscience of the king”. After the Players’ scene Claudius’ guilt is confirmed but Hamlet finds him at prayer, confessing his sins:
“O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven/It hath primal eldest curse upon it/A brother’s murder.”
It is golden opportunity for Hamlet to accomplish the revenge. He pulls out his rapier but his scholarly nature intervenes and he starts contemplating:
“Now might I do it pat now he is praying/And now I’ll do it and so he goes to heaven/I so am I revenged!”
Many critics including Goethe have criticized Hamlet for delaying the revenge at this point. Goethe argued that the ghost’s injunctions comprised an unquestionable imperative to action.
“A voice from another world commissioned it would appear, by heaven demands vengeance for monstrous enormity.”
Goethe further proposed what is called the sentimental view of Hamlet that Shakespeare meant in Hamlet to “represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for performance of it.” In other words, “A lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms hero, sinks beneath a burden which he cannot bear and must not cast away.”
Goethe suggests that “Hamlet is called upon to do what is impossible, not impossible in itself but impossible to him. And as he turns and winds and torments himself still advancing and retreating, ever reminded and remembering his purpose; he almost loses sight of it completely without recovering his happiness.”
Goethe’s Hamlet is weighed down to inaction due to the sensitive soul of a poet as he reveals his disgust in the rhymed couplet: “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite/That I was born to set it right.”
According to Goethe the key to the entire Hamlet’s problem could be found in these lines. Hamlet the soldier son of a warlike father scoffs himself for his delay in wreaking vengeance: “I, the son of a dear father murdered/Prompted to my revenge heaven and hell/Must like a whore unpack my heart with words.”
Goethe’s sentimental picture of Hamlet as “a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of anything gross and earthly”, is outdated and certainly not fit for a hero of Hamlet’s stature.
In 19th century Schlegal and Coleridge proposed that Hamlet is rendered incapable of action because of his tendency to philosophize too much. Taking the cue from his own words, they proposed that Hamlet’s “native hue of resolution /Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.” According to Coleridge Hamlet had “great enormous intellectual activity and a consequent proportionate aversion to real action.” Hamlet’s excessive reflectiveness inhibits his action and he “loses himself in labyrinth of thought.”
The conscience theory of Ulrici suggests that Hamlet is incapable of wreaking vengeance because of his scrupulous nature as supported by Hamlet’s own statement, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” But the conscience theory was effectively refuted by Bradely.
In the start of 20th century A.C.Bradley in his famous “Shakespearean Tragedy” suggested that Hamlet was unable to accomplish the revenge because of his melancholic state of mind, which was sparked by the exceptional strain that faced him with the sudden death of his father and hasty remarriage of his mother. When the ghost gives him charge to set the disjointed times he is already deep in his melancholy and therefore cannot respond with normal vigour. For Bradley this “disgust at life which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy” explains the problem of Hamlet’s delay.
Summing up, the issue of Hamlet’s delay has provided critics with the food of conjecture and everyone has given his own interpretation of this problem.
Hamlet’s Madness:
The problem of madness is perhaps the most maddening problem in Hamlet. Critics are divided on this issue. Some critics are of the view that Hamlet is sane throughout but feigns insanity. Others hold the opinion that Hamlet’s madness is less than madness and more than feigned.
Before the play begins Hamlet is clearly a sensitive and idealistic young man. He is a scholar, a philosopher, and a poet too, who conceives the finest thoughts and exhibits great intellectual quality. We get a vivid picture of Hamlet as he was in the words of Ophelia:
“The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword/Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state/The glass of fashion, and the mould of form/Th’ observed of all observes”
This shows that Hamlet was once a master of his own self and had full command over his mind and sense. But as the play proceeds we can find the traces of madness in him. After his mother’s hasty marriage and the Ghost’s revelation, Hamlet’s “noble and most sovereign reason” is all “out of tune and harsh”.
Some critics are of the opinion that under the pressure of these two circumstances – his mother’s hasty marriage ,and the Ghost’s revelation – Hamlet lost his reason. We tend to agree with “Deighton” when he says:
“In every single instance in which Hamlet’s madness is manifested , he has good
reason for assuming that madness: while, on the other hand , whenever there was no need to hoodwink anyone, his thought, language and action, bear no resemblance to unsoundness of intellect”
He talks rationally and shows great intellectual power in his conversations with Horatio. He receives the players with kind courtesy and his refinement of behaviour towards them shows that he is not mad.
In the first act we are told by Hamlet himself that he is going to feign madness to carry out his entrusted task of avenging his father’s murder.
“I perchance hereafter shall think meet/To put an antic disposition on.”
In his talk with Polonius, where he calls him a “ fishmonger” and insults him further with the satirical remark, “O Japhtha, Judge of Israel” , Polonius observes:
“Though this be madness/Yet there is method in it.
When Polonius wants to pluck out some information from him, Hamlet distracts him by his witty remarks as, “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?”
However, as he is a fool by nature he is easily deceived by Hamlet’s feigned madness and comments:
“How pregnant sometimes his replies are!”
Then there is Claudius, the shrewd man, who suspects the authenticity of Hamlet’s madness. When Polonius reveals the ‘very ecstasy of love’ as the cause of his madness, Claudius after observing Hamlet closely comments:
“Love? His affections do not that way tend/Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little/Was not like madness.”
So Claudius strongly suspects, as we all do, that Hamlet’s madness is feigned and not real. Nevertheless he remarks:
“Madness in great one’s must not unwatched go.”
Gertrude, the Queen mother of Hamlet though not believes in Polonius’ version of Hamlet’s madness, she too suspects that Hamlet is insane. After the ghost’s second appearance in the closet scene she is truly amazed at Hamlet’s actions. She exclaims with wonder:
“How is it with you/That you bend your eye on vacancy/And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?”
Hamlet upon her amazement reveals truth to her:
“I essentially am not in madness/But mad in craft.”
The next to suspect the real nature of his madness is his own school fellows Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Guildenstern finds crafty madness in him and Hamlet himself reveals the truth to them:
“I am but mad north-north west/When the wind is southerly/I know a hawk from a handsaw”
He tells Guildenstern that he cannot make him a “wholesome answer”, as his “wits are diseased”, and it is of no use if he expected to “ pluck out the heart of his mystery/ And sound him from the lowest note to the top of his compass.” When Rosencrantz is unable to comprehend his witty remarks, Hamlet simply states:
“A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.”
Hamlet enacts the ‘Mousetrap’ play to confirm Claudius’ guilt. This does not sound like a mad man’s action. Only a man of wisdom could plan everything systematically and arrive at the expected conclusion. Harley Granville Barker points out:
“When he is alone, we have the truth of him , but it is his madness which
is on public exhibition”
When Hamlet confronts Ophelia in Act-III, his rational thoughts slip away and he curses and bashes her: “If thou dost marry I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry/Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny/Get thee to a nunnery.”
He lashes out at her calling her two-faced: God has given you one face and you make yourselves another”. The poor Ophelia is no judge of Hamlet’s crafty madness and regretfully comments: “O, What a noble mind is here overthrown.” He curses herself who has “sucked the honey of his music vows.”
One can trace the glimpses of true insanity in Hamlet’s actions. For example his action of rushing headlong towards a beckoning ghost, rashly running his rapier through Polonius without seeing him, speaking to Yorick’s skull, and leaping into Ophelia’s grave to grapple with Laertes hardly fits the description of one within the control of his senses.
We can sum up above discussion in the words of Bradley:
"Hamlet is not mad, he is fully responsible for his actions. But he suffers from melancholia a pathological state which may develop into lunacy. His melancholy accounts for his nervous excitability, his longing for death, his irresolution and delay.”
