Hamlet: An Interpretation 2

Hamlet is not a character, a player who cannot act. "The name of action" is not something which is unfamiliar to Hamlet. He is the prime mover of the play as all protagonists are. He is an anti-actor or anti-charactor. He forces others to act in reaction to him. This is driven by the Oedipal disgust and sexual attraction to his mother (as Lacan states, the child is disappointed by the fact that the mother has no phallus in the mirror stage) and his desire to kill his Uncle-Father ,and, in essence, his real father. So, Hamlet does not see war against other countries as the solution to the schizophrenia in his own culture. But the internal solution that he finds is actually a solution of default (neither this or that/ neither Either Or or Neither Nor)... essentially a a nihilistic solution to the problem evinced in American writers like Hermann Melville. In some ways, these solutions can be seen as the beginning of deconstructionism. Deconstructionism has its roots in Puritanism, Kristnamurti, Melville, German-Jewish thinkers, French-Jewish thinkers, Samuel Beckett, etc.

To say a thing is a thing is to ignore the fact that meaning is culturally constructed. A thing is a thing in so much as it is a construction of atoms arranged in a certain manner. And atoms in a subatomic level are not really things but energies turned into matter in asymmetrical balance. There is no equilbrium in an ideal sense. You never step in the same river twice. So is Hamlet the same Hamlet in each of his scenes or is he a different person altogether? What happens when the persona breaks down? Is there really one unified personality or is Hamlet a multiplicity, a mirror of those around him, an anti-mirror?

Joseph Campbell speaks of the anti-thetical mask that artists wear and Shakespeare produced many plays which almost seem to be written by different playwrights mirroring society. Must the artist mirror his society? But the society is constantly changing? Can the artist change with the society? What if the society is going to hell?