Hamlet and Laertes

Some interesting ideas about Hamlet and Laertes can be found in an essay called 'O'ertopping Pelion; Hamlet, Laertes and the Revenge Tradition'' by a critic called Hardin L. Aasand. This is part of his analysis:
 

Hamlet deplores the histrionics of mourning, the performative engagement in a grief that Laertes rightfully possesses. His subsequent hyperbole is equally abusive and painfully intolerant of Laertes' passionate display. Hamlet appears to realize his dramatic relapse when he apologizes to Horatio for "forgetting himself." Indeed, Hamlet's problem is not the "forgetting of himself," a forgetting which allowed him to craft his trenchant eulogy for Yorick, but rather a constant remembering of himself and of his self-conscious language that threatens to conflate him and Laertes into an interlarded plot.

Like Yorick's skull, Laertes's hyperbole presents itself as a rhetorical shape that Hamlet characterizes by its "emphasis": "What is he whose griefe/ Beares such an emphesis, whose phrase of sorrow/ Coniures the wandering starres" (TLN 3449-51). Hamlet's prologue in the graveyard and his acceptance of the fine death to which we all return allows him this initial dismissal of Laertes's grief and its excessive melancholia, for it hauntingly evokes his own progress through the initial four acts of the play. Hamlet's recognition that Laertes is a dramatic counter becomes possible for him only in retrospect: "by the image of my Cause, I see/The Portraiture of his" (F1-only line).

If Shakespeare intended these graveside leaps - Laertes's followed by Hamlet's - it suggests a visual tableau of contrastive avengers rather than redundant mourners. Hamlet's violation of Laertes's physical space within Ophelia's grave serves only to contrast a mourning that, hyperbolic in its classical heaping of images, is inappropriate for a Hamlet whose deferred mourning has found its outlet in the wistful exposition upon Yorick's skull. If critics deplore Hamlet's insensitive leap as a malicious attack on Laertes's private grief, they ignore the historical significance of the motley drama in which comedy and tragedy struggle in a dialectical embrace. Laertes's desire for hatchments and trophes for his deceased family -- even if formed by his own physical and rhetorical efforts -- encounters Hamlet's tenacious acceptance of death's sardonic wit. Each avenger stands waist deep in the grave of the pathetically ignored Ophelia, struggling with the death encorpsed in a shroud, anticipating the imminent duel which will return them both to the same heaping grave.


If you liked this extract, the whole essay is available online--though you may find it difficult to understand at first, as it is very scholarly in its approach. Worth persisting with, though.


On this subject, if you want to find the whole text of 'Poisoned Ears and Parental Advice in Hamlet', where I got those quotations we considered last lesson, you can also find it online here.