Hamlet: An Interpretation 1

To attempt an interpretation of a text is an attempt to deconstruct the cultural context of a text and to understand the underlying causes of the culture itself. In the case of Hamlet, first we must trace back Hamlet and Shakespeare to the idea of the perfect garden. This idea could come from the Old Testament or the plays of Sophocles. In Hamlet's case, the garden idea is from Sophocles. Then, it is in the ideal pruning of the garden that the ideal of the culture is met, sutured, and deconstructed in a mode that is a projection of individual ideation. Hamlet, then, is the unweeded garden. He is overfecundated. He cannot act because there is too much going on inside of him.

On the cultural level, Hamlet must bring back the culture to the condition of ideal pruning. Denmark is filled with festivities but it knows not how to grieve, lament, or feel pain. It is an absence, a structure lost in time, not knowing closure. Not only that, it is a shameless culture. It is a guiltless culture. The past is erased. The crime is a minutiae, a demarcation, a mirror.

On another level, Hamlet is going through an Oedipal struggle or rather reliving the Oedipal struggle of early youth. He wants to kill his father and marry his mother which will curse him as it did Oedipus. So the solution of killing his Uncle-Father and marrying his mother which is the solution his real father, Hamlet, proposes is actually a solution that will cause another problem. Incest taboos exist all around the world for this reason. Despite the paradoxical nature of his dilemna, he tries to go through with his plan. Death is a deconstruction of an absence, a mirror of the alterego, one and the other. You are your worst enemy.