"Player"-Hamlet 7

Another peculiarity of Hamlet is that he really does not repress anything. Most heterosexuals repress their feminine side. Hamlet does not, but his unconscious is unusually structured and coherent. He is not afraid of going mad because he can always come back again or he thinks he can.

With Ophelia and others, he pushes all the wrong buttons. He is a player in a very negative sense. He basically calls Ophelia a whore, yet she cannot deny that it is not true. In the traditional construct of the female personality as equivalent to a boy's mentality, the female as a sort of fetish, deliberately kept juvenile as not to pose a threat to male order, such accusations were not common. It's just that Hamlet really means it and he also means that he has no sexual interest in her except as an amusement, mere dalliance, as a moment's high and nothing else. This leads to her suicide. It is curious how all the characters that Hamlet impresses himself upon become like Hamlet... depressed, sullen, prone to hallucinations, etc.

What a lonely, strange sad man Hamlet exposes Claudius to be. After Hamlet shows him what he is or what he has done, he goes in his room, trying to repent for his sins. Hamlet cannot kill him then either. There's something subconsciously touching about this scene, like the scenes in Dosteovsky in which a prostitute and the murderer are reading the Bible together. Hamlet perhaps feels pity?