The Rationalization of Despair

I have read Hamlet in its entirety once before*, and most of my memories of the text are of a lot of jumbled drama and angst. Of course, those elements are as prominent as ever as I read it for the second time, but the semester's discussions have given me an entirely new view of it as a supernatural story, and how that relates to emotionality.

Throughout history, we have attributed to the supernatural what current science cannot explain. My personal research on Renaissance fairy belief has verified this fact again and again. However, most believers in fairy stories were of the peasant class, and the physical phenomena they could not understand (circular mushroom formations, disabled children, etc.) were probably at least partially explainable by the science of the time; it was simply barred to them from lack of education. The more we can explain rationally, the less room we retain for supernatural superstition. Useful as this may be to the advancement of logic, it is unfortunate for storytellers, who must work with a continually limited sphere of imagination to suspend disbelief. The class for which Shakespeare wrote was probably unconvinced by his fairies, and intentionally so. However, even they may have found the ghost of Hamlet's despair less easy to reject.

I have never experienced the death of a close family member, but I have dealt with depression in its milder forms. If there is anything to bring the possibility of a malevolent "something else" within grasping distance, that is it. It is like developing a parisitic twin in one's spirit, something not quite human that leeches away at reason and goodness. Even understanding the psychology of it, it is confounding, and psychology as we know it it is one of the newest forms of science. It is likely that the elite Shakespearean audience would have been at least as troubled by these emotional extremities as those who face them today.

Can we really blame the ghost for Hamlet's madness? After all, he shows signs of a deep disturbance before ever laying eyes on what he believes to be his murdered father's spirit. But it is the ghost justifies what ensues, providing some semblance of redemption for Hamlet's unnatural mania. It is hard to comprehend what inspires a human being to trigger a bloodbath, even as an act of retaliation, but it happens, and not entirely infrequently. It is both easier and safer to believe that these unfortunates are prompted, than to cope with the possibility that such potential could lie within all of us.

*I have, however, read the famous soliloquy about a thousand times, as my former roommate had an obsession with Shakespeare and a penchant for memorization, and developed a habit of scribbling it on all available surfaces as a sort of nervous habit.