Hamlet, PTSD, & Entitlement (Part 4: Who am I to interpret Hamlet?)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the last in a four-part series of blog posts, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?”
June 16, 2019: To be or not? (Part 1: English Studies & Teaching)
June 23: How Literally Did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Part 2: Religious Studies & Assumptions)
July 30: Reading Hamlet through personal & national traumas (Part 3: Lies & PTSD)
August 6: Hamlet, PTSD & Entitlement (Part 4)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In act 1, scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an apparition claiming to be the ghost of Hamlet’s father explains to Hamlet that his brother poisoned him while he was sleeping in his garden, and the poison made his skin “Most lazar-like.” This is a reference to the Gospel of Luke (Luke 16:19–31), a tale of a rich man who acts selfishly, as if entitled to his riches, as if entitled to repeatedly ignoring the beggar Lazarus at his door, whose skin is covered with sores licked by dogs. This is a biblical reference I've commented on in the past. The traditional reading seems to have been that the poor Lazarus may have been a leper as well as being poor, hence “Lazar-houses” were places in Europe where people with skin afflictions were quarantined.

This is an ironic Biblical reference, because the rich and powerful king of Denmark has been betrayed by his brother and turned into a kind of Lazarus figure, a victim of another’s harmful action. But it also highlights a potential theme of entitlement, like that of the rich man: Acting too entitled and neglecting the needs of others may have been among the dead king’s sins, and in part may have kept him from an easy passage to eternal salvation without having to have his sins purged as he claims:

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

The ghost tells Hamlet he was cheated, robbed of the kind of good death he felt he deserved or was entitled to.  This sense of entitlement might lead us to consider more closely what entitlement is, what it seems to expect as a spiritual and psychological dynamic, and which characters in the play exhibit evidence of some sense of entitlement.


A Story
My interest in this topic stems in part from my experience. In the first part of this four-part series, I described my English studies and teaching experience, mentioning that I had taught night classes for a time and took care of our children during the day when they were very young.

During those years of being an at-home dad, I met other parents with children, and we would arrange play-dates where our children could play together, watched by the parent hosting the event in their home, while the other parent or parents dropping off their children did grocery shopping, went to work, or had a dentist appointment.

Over the years, I have known parents of children who were sexually abused, and people who themselves were sexually abused. I had a good friend in college who became pregnant by a Catholic priest who was also sleeping around with other younger women; I had a co-worker who had been the victim of incest, and among eight of my cousins (four male and four female), two of my female cousins from different families had been sexually abused as young children by a schizophrenic uncle.

So it might be observed that incest and madness ran in Hamlet's family, and in mine.

One of many challenges for parents of sexually abused children is that one might feel torn:
On the one hand, there can be a desire to pamper the victim, to compensate for the psychological wound (a wound which parents also feel, but in different ways than the child-victim herself). On the other hand, parents may not want to play favorites and distort the fabric of the family to compensate for the abuse.

Yet this may be exactly what happens. A therapist once explained to me that pampering a sexual abuse child-victim may seem at first a necessary crutch, but soon the whole family leans to compensate for the limp and the crutch.

Mothers who had not been overly concerned about keeping secrets or keeping up appearances may suddenly become obsessed with them: Keep up appearances, keep going to church, keep the abuse a secret so that the girls who were abused are not known by society to be "damaged goods."

A younger sister of a girl who was sexually abused may then grow up in a family where keeping secrets seems very important, as well as keeping up appearances. So perhaps a younger sister who did not suffer sexual abuse will then develop an eating disorder. 

Parents who are subtly pampering an abused daughter to compensate may develop a habit of pampering, and lying to themselves about it. The pampered daughter may grow up feeling entitled to be pampered, and may learn to believe that this is just what good parents who love their children must do: They must pamper them, because being loved means being entitled to pampering, sometimes at other's expense.

Many monarchs, princes, and members of royal courts probably also grow up feeling entitled to being pampered, perhaps not unlike Hamlet's remark when he sees the army of Fortinbras off in the distance: Hamlet calls Fortinbras a "delicate and tender" prince (4.4.51), which some critics and scholars take to be a compliment, but in fact it is a biblical phrase that is anything but a compliment:

—Deut 28:54-57 (Bishop’s bible) describes a “delicate and tender” man and woman who fail to follow Mosaic law, pamper themselves, neglect spouse and children, and who, if the city was under siege, would eat their own children:
"the man (that is tender and exceeding delicate among you) [...]
56 Yea, and the woman that is so tender and delicate [..]

(I have blogged about this in the past:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2018/11/to-hamlet-delicate-tender-isnt-about.html

Hamlet is saying that Fortinbras is a pampered and spoiled prince who, under pressure, would not act ethically.

Just as royals can be pampered and spoiled, acting entitled to pampering, parents of children who were sexually abused, and those children, can develop habits of entitlement, and this can expand the original wound and trauma from the child victim to the family and social fabric around them.

Lessons?
So what could I learn from all of this? First, that sometimes Christianity is abused as a weapon against victims. I grew up in a Catholic family, where there was strong pressure on the abuse victims (and their mothers) to forgive the uncle who had abused them. He was schizophrenic. Why should he be excluded from family gatherings just because he makes his victims feel very uncomfortable? If you don't forgive the uncle who committed the acts of abuse, then you are not acting as a good Christian, etc. Christianity was used as weapon against the victims. 

In Hamlet, Claudius does some similar victim-blaming with the prince: Instead of being respectful and patient with Hamlet’s desire to continue to wear black and morn the death of his father, Claudius insults him for not ending his mourning, questioning Hamlet’s manhood, claiming that Hamlet offends nature and God by continuing to mourn for more than a month or two:

CLAUDIUS: ...but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
'This must be so.'

Blame the victim. Claudius is impatient with Hamlet’s continued mourning after his scandalous marriage to his brother’s widow because it looks bad (and secretly, because Claudius killed his brother). He doesn’t want the son of that brother to go on reminding him of his crime.

Second, sometimes the victim of abuse later becomes a victimizer. Prince Hamlet is collateral damage in his father’s assassination, a victim, but in seeking revenge, Hamlet later accidentally kills Polonius, stabbing him through an arras, a heavy curtain. More collateral damage. Prince Hamlet, the victim, becomes a victimizer (foreshadowed by his cruelty toward Ophelia in 3.1, among other things).

And a third lesson: Certainly the rich man in the gospel story acts entitled and selfish; maybe his family was wealthy and acted entitled for generations, or maybe he became rich in his own lifetime and, perhaps resented those on the way up who held him back or tried to keep a heel of their boot on his neck. Such resentments can move people to embrace entitlement with a vengeance.

Sometimes when someone is a victim of some tragedy like sexual abuse, or like the loss of a loved one, they may feel, or be encouraged to feel, that that the universe is in their debt: Some grand scales of divine justice have gone out of balance, so the victim is owed something to make up for it. Especially if encouraged by pampering, victims may come to feel entitled, perhaps like the rich man in the gospel story “The rich man and Lazarus.”

Entitlement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

The Ghost & Claudius
The apparition that claims to be the ghost of King Hamlet seems to feel he was entitled to a different sort of death than the one he got (1.5): Entitled to have had a chance to receive the sacraments before dying, as if going through the mere mechanical motions of the sacraments would have fixed things, and he’d be in heaven.

[Patrick Stewart played both the Ghost (pictured here) and Claudius in the RSC production and the resulting film, implying perhaps that Claudius and King Hamlet may have had a strong resemblance as brothers, contrary to what Hamlet tells his mother in her closet about the pictures of her two husbands.] 


Even his brother Claudius who murdered him shows more insight at prayer (3.3) regarding how divine forgiveness works. Claudius in the prayer scene knows that he is not entitled to heaven's forgiveness and salvation. He knows that it’s not enough to go through the motions of prayer and forgiveness: One has to be truly sorry for one’s sins, and willing to repent, which includes giving up all one has gained by the sins. In the case of Claudius, this means giving up Gertrude and the throne of Denmark, both of which he obtained only by killing his brother. He’s not willing to give them up, so he knows by his own unwillingness that he is not forgiven by heaven, not due to heaven’s lack of mercy, but due to his own refusal to repent. Claudius feels entitled to keep Gertrude as his bride, and the throne he gained by murder, even if it costs him heaven.

His brother’s ghost does not show the same wisdom, but instead, feels he was entitled to a different death, and because he didn’t get it, he feels entitled to revenge, and to using his son, Prince Hamlet, to achieve it.

What unrepented sins might King Hamlet had on his soul that kept him from heaven? Having killed his enemy King Fortinbras in single combat, instead of finding a way to love and be more diplomatic toward an enemy? His having gambled with his life to triumph over Fortinbras on the very day when his son Hamlet was born? Or his selfish pride and general sense of entitlement?

Did he feel that, because he accepted the challenge of Fortinbras and gambled with his life, prevailing in single combat, sparing other soldiers’ lives in war, he therefore was entitled to honors and special treatment as a hero?

Claudius seems to feel that he is entitled to Hamlet’s affection as a father figure, though affection is better treated as a gift, or as something that must be earned. When it seems to Claudius that affection and respect are not forthcoming, Claudius resorts to insulting Hamlet’s masculinity for continuing to mourn the death of his father, as quoted above.

Polonius
Polonius shows a sense of entitlement (2.2), believing that he is better than the players, who in his eyes should receive only the most humble sort of lodgings in the castle that he judges them worthy of. Polonius seems to feel he can preach advice to his son about being true to himself so as to avoid being false to any man, but then he can hire Reynaldo to spy on and plant false rumors about his son. He feels entitled, as a father, to spy on his son. He and Claudius feel they are entitled to spy on Hamlet (“lawful espials”).

Prince Hamlet
Some may feel Hamlet is a spoiled and entitled prince, expecting others around him in the halls of power to act only with virtue, not to have incestuous, scandalous marriages, not to scheme against him, not to be dishonest, not to try to play him like a pipe. There may be some truth to that. Yet Hamlet also is frequently humble, referring to himself as poor, as a beggar, and insisting that servants consider him a friend instead of their lord. Is this sincere, or simply an act played by a proud and entitled prince who didn't get his way, whose ambition to be king was disappointed? I tend to think it's sincere, but also that the prince is a complicated character.

Laertes
Laertes seems to feel entitled to revenge until Hamlet makes a public apology, and Gertrude is accidentally poisoned in the poison plot Laertes and Claudius designed. Yet while Claudius tells Gertrude not to drink of the cup she may or may not suspect of being poisoned, he does not want to reveal his poison plot, so he does not confess to it to stop her, but lets her drink to protect himself. Then Laertes' sense of entitlement begins to turn toward regret. In spite of his reservations, he kills Hamlet with the poison sword, but he later confesses to Hamlet of his guilt and that of Claudius, and they exchange forgiveness before dying. In some ways, this is a good death, a better death than the Ghost received.

Entitlement & Revenge: Contrast with Gratitude & Regret
The dynamics of entitlement and revenge in Hamlet seem quite opposite the dynamics of gratitude and regret: With revenge and entitlement, people feel others owe them something; yet with gratitude and regret, we feel that we owe a debt to others.

Critics have often noted the code of honor that King Hamlet seems to live by, which made him feel obligated to take up a challenge to single combat from King Fortinbras of Norway. They have also noted that this old code of honor was in stark contrast, not only to the Machiavellian scheming of Claudius, a secret (and cowardly, dishonorable) poisoner, but also in stark contrast to a Christianity that calls people to forgiveness and love of enemies.

The underlying assumption in the Christian worldview is that we don’t create ourselves (no one is a ‘self-made man’), and that our lives come to us as if gifts from an unseen giver. The debts we owe to the universe by far outweigh any of our grudges or the debts others may have to us, so following the gospel command to love our enemies is part of the labor of gratitude that all people owe to a generous God. This basic dynamic inspired Thoreou, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to acts of nonviolence in order to confront and turn the hearts of their enemies. And to some extent, this dynamic of owing a debt to heaven was a basic underlying belief in Elizabethan Christianity.

Revenge and entitlement seem blind to the magnitude of the larger debt each of us owes to the universe, and stuck on the assumption that a debt is owed to us. But perhaps it is hardest for those who have been habitually oriented to feeling entitled all their lives, hardest for them to overcome those habits of entitlement, and to consider that the debts we owe others and the universe are far greater than the debts owed to us.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Next 2 weeks:
- Lewis Hyde on "The Labor of Gratitude" (in the context of gift economies), and
- Characters in Hamlet Transformed by Gratitude and Regret