Shakespeare – Hamlet’s Identity

Resource Description

Shakespeare characterises Hamlet’s identity as being shaped by Elizabethan paradigms and his relationships with others, highlighting how one’s identity is interdependent and ever evolving with contextual influences and one’s environment. The ghost serves as a dramatic convention that shakes Hamlet’s disposition, ‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of [his] soul?’. This portrays the influence of external occurrences on Hamlet’s psyche as Horatio states that it may ‘draw [him] into madness’, eventually developing his dual persona. Hamlet is also caught in Denmark’s’ unstable political and societal situation as captured by Hamlet’s criticism, ‘Denmark’s a prison’, illustrating how his identity is constrained by the court, underlining how one’s identity is largely a construct of the relationships surrounding them. In addition, Shakespeare’s characterisation of Ophelia is captured by her submissive tone to her father, ‘I shall obey you’ portrays how her identity is circumscribed by the men that surround her, which upon their deaths, she descends into a state of madness, exhibiting her inner division with a shocking emancipation from previous trappings, further highlighting the dependence of one’s identity upon relationships with others. The evolving nature of human psyche becomes evident through Hamlet’s encounter with Gertrude in the Closet Scene, where the setting of a ‘private room’ results in the spontaneous murder of Polonius, contrasting Hamlet’s deeply ruminative alter persona. Thus, John Bell’s statement of ‘Hamlet is, and must remain, an enigma’ portrays how contextual shifts facilitate varied interpretations of one’s character. Thus the play explores the influence of the world on one’s identity and ultimately it is this contrast between Hamlet’s ruminative self and instinctive being that cements the transformative effect of one’s surroundings on their individual psyche. 

Through its eponymous protagonist, Hamlet therefore underlines the belief that identities are not autonomous, but rather shaped by one’s contextual values and societal conventions. Hamlet’s reflective truism “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” is not only a desire for blissful ignorance, but an evident preoccupation with meta-ethical relativism where everything is judged and measured by the self (this is the precept of humanist subjectivity). Hamlet’s soliloquies are a dramatic convention which juxtapose the ‘private’ and ‘public’ identities of Hamlet, and highlight the distinctions between his reactions to different social situations. Furthermore, the play highlights the effect of language over identity and, ultimately, reality – Hamlet cannot escape the signified confines of “words, words, words”, and thus resorts to attempting to subvert them through wit (“a little more than kin…”) and double entendres. Additionally, Hamlet is riddled with epistolary references (the book read by Hamlet; the letters sent by Claudius ordering Hamlet’s death). For Shakespeare’s audience, tragedy can derive from that characteristic of the written work which also preoccupied Saussure; its capacity for redirection, for interception, and for misrepresentation. Thus, the play explores the complex interactions between the self and the world, and the inevitable impact this has upon the individual’s identity.