Laertes' Fear & Hypocrisy, 1.3: (Part 5) Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet
This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property). For more notes on the series and an index of previous posts in this series, see the end of this post.
[L: Julia Stiles as Ophelia, and Liev Schreiber as Laertes in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), which starred Ethan Hawke as the prince. R: Michael Maloney as Laertes, and Kate Winslet as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996).]
Overview/Introduction
Lewis Hyde’s idea of transformative gifts and labors of gratitude includes the understanding that gifts, however small or subtle, can sometimes change us, or change our course of direction. If we receive and are grateful for a gift, we sometimes labor to become like the gift or giver.
—In the case of Claudius, we see in 1.2 the king’s grandstanding and flattery regarding his debt of gratitude toward Polonius, which he hopes to repay in part by being generous to the son, Laertes.
—In 4.5 and 4.7, we will see Claudius continue to flatter Laertes and feign trust and honesty in order for Claudius to diffuse what may very well be an attempt by Laertes and a mob to take the throne of Denmark from Claudius. Near the start of 4.7, Claudius tells Laertes, “you must put me in your heart for friend” because Laertes has been shown that Claudius was not the immediate cause of Polonius’ death.
—But Claudius is a liar, deceiver, and poisoner as well as a murderous usurper. If gift dynamics hold, and as Laertes receives potentially transformational gifts from Claudius, we might expect to see Laertes begin to become a bit more like Claudius. In fact, this does happen, as Laertes enters in 4.5 as a passionate man ready to take his revenge, but even before he receives word of Ophelia’s death in 4.7, Claudius has convinced Laertes, his protege, to become a poisoner like himself.
—Laertes also becomes more like Claudius in that he becomes more like a flattering liar, when, in 5.2, after Hamlet offers him an apology before the duel, Laertes tells Hamlet, “I do receive your offer'd love like love, / And will not wrong it.” In fact he may be lying, or at least torn in two directions, as he does intend to wrong it, and will poison Hamlet before his own regret moves him to turn from revenge and turn against Claudius.
—So for Laertes, there are two diametrically opposed gift-forces at work: One is with Claudius, the King, a deceiving flatterer and poisoner, and his father’s worldly, somewhat selfish, unChristian, and perhaps hypocritical advice. Other gift-forces that pull him in another direction come from Ophelia in 1.3, 4.5, and perhaps 4.7; and from Hamlet in 5.1 and 5.2.
This week I’ll consider interactions between Laertes and Ophelia in 1.3. In the following weeks, I’ll consider his interactions with her in 4.5 and 4.7, and later, his interactions with Hamlet in 5.1 and 5.2., as well as Hamlet's exchanges with Gertrude and Ophelia.
~~~~~~~~~~
In Act 1, scene 3, Laertes advises Ophelia that she should regard Hamlet’s affection as sweet but passing, and strangely, he claims that, unlike “unvalued persons,” Hamlet is not free to chart his own path and decide for himself. This is interesting because one might think that a prince would be more powerful and free, and therefore to be feared. But no, Laertes claims Hamlet is less free, and therefore to be feared. (Apologies to those who read my blog regularly: There is some overlap between what I’m saying here and things I mentioned already last week regarding Laertes & Polonius and their advice to Ophelia at the time of Laertes’ departure to France.) Here is Laertes’ advice to Ophelia about Hamlet:
LAERTES
Perhaps he loves you now,
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch
The virtue of his will: but you must fear,
His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth:
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head.
Laertes is a less-valued person, or so he claims, so he can carve for himself and convince his father and Claudius to let him go back to France, and in that way enjoy certain freedoms; but Hamlet is not so free, at least in the mind of Laertes. Laertes is probably right on this point, as Hamlet comments to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern later (2.2) that “Denmark’s a prison”.
(Some may also suspect Polonius and Laertes of scheming with Claudius not only to murder King Hamlet, but also to set up Laertes as heir, and to keep Ophelia away from Hamlet and oblivious to their plot. But there is no evidence for this in the text, so rather than change the play we have into a different one with entirely new motivations and plot possibilities, I’d rather deal with the text we have from Shakespeare, tho’ adaptations and experiments certainly have their own value).
While Laertes claims that Hamlet as the heir is less free, Laertes also notes that Hamlet may not yet have mastered his own passions (and Hamlet will later praise Horatio for not being passion’s slave). For this reason, and perhaps because of his general fear of his king and father, Laertes counsels Ophelia to fear Hamlet, the very person she may be coming to love:
LAERTES
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain,
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmaster'd importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
Fear is the example and tainted gift that Laertes has received from authority figures, kings and father, so there is a sort of logic in the fact that fear is his advice to his sister. Yet as I’ve noted before, it confronts us with the strained contrast between love and fear. More than once every year, Elizabethan churchgoers heard the reading of 1 John 4:18: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear: for fear hath painfulness [anticipates pain or suffering, or fears the pain of punishment]: and he that feareth, is not perfect in love." So if we feel a bit odd about the contrast between Ophelia's love for Hamlet, on the one hand, and Laertes and Polonius counseling fear on the other, it's not without reason.
There is a kind of hypocrisy in these feared father-figures of Polonius, Claudius, and the late King Hamlet: Polonius will shortly counsel Laertes that if he is true to himself, he can’t be false to any man, but then Polonius will soon be distrustful, duplicitous, and false by sending the spy Reynaldo to follow his son and plant lies as bait to obtain information about his son's activities in France. Polonius is a hypocrite.
Claudius pretends to be mourning the death of his brother and to have married Gertrude only out of concern for the safety of the state, and yet we know he has killed his brother and married Gertrude perhaps after an adulterous and then-considered incestuous affair, in order to gain the throne. Claudius is a lying hypocrite.
Even the ghost of King Hamlet (if that’s who the ghost is) seems a hypocrite: He speaks of dying with sins on his conscience, “foul crimes,” and complains of being deprived by his murderous brother of the chance to be forgiven through the sacraments of the church. And yet that church, in its scriptures, teaches that the day may come like a thief in the night, so “be ye ready” (which Hamlet paraphrases as "the readiness is all [5.2], found in Mt 24:44). King Hamlet was ungenerous with his enemy Fortinbras, and is like the rich man who is ungenerous with the beggar Lazarus at his door (the ghost says the poison made his skin all “lazar-like”); the ghost says he died “full of bread,” a scripture allusion to the rich who eat well while neglecting the hungry and poor. The rich man of the gospel parable goes to hell and feels entitled perhaps to something more. The ghost acts the same way. If this is a Christian king, he’s a hypocrite.
So it makes sense that Ophelia would think her brother might turn hypocrite and not heed his own advice to her. Ophelia is exactly the kind of daughter that Polonius needs in this way, and exactly the sort of sister that Laertes needs. Here’s Ophelia, turning the tables on her brother:
OPHELIA
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
Great advice. If only Laertes and Polonius were more open to her gifts and to that advice.
Laertes tells her not to fear him, meaning not to fear that he would fail to follow his own advice, it seems. But his father still suspects otherwise.
It also makes sense that the hypocrite Polonius would suspect that Laertes might act like the prodigal son in France. After all, Polonius judges Hamlet to probably be the sort of sexual predator Polonius himself was in his youth, so why not expect that the apple won’t fall far from the tree, and that his son will get a bit wild in France? Expecting this, he sends the spy Reynaldo after him to plant lies and find the twisted truth regarding his son's sins, his straying from the righteous path Ophelia describes.
If Laertes received and internalized - as a sort of gift - the male authority figures as examples to fear, he may also have internalized some of their tendencies toward hypocrisy as well, and toward being the sort of man that would try to evoke fear in others. These are not the best of gifts, but the gifts we receive and internalize are never quite pure; the examples we follow not always good ones: They are often quite mixed in quality or even downright bad examples, so like Cinderella sorting ashes from rice thrown into the hearth by her stepmother, it's often left up to us to sort the good gifts (the rice, the potentially sustaining food) from what should be discarded (the ashes).
Laertes receives advice from his father before his departure for France. Scholars have noted that this advice resembles advice William Cecil gave to his son, which was actually published in Shakespeare's lifetime, but only after the play Hamlet had been published. Some scholars think perhaps Cecil's advice to his son was available in a pocket-manuscript form circulated perhaps among Shakespeare's patrons or their friends. (These may have included Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had married Cecil's daughter Anne. The character of Ophelia may have been created with Anne Cecil in mind inasmuch as Anne also died young under mysterious circumstances.)
In terms of biblical influences in Hamlet and its first audiences, we might note that while the gospels encourage generosity toward “the least of these,” giving and not asking in return, Polonius advises his son not to be a borrower or a lender at all. The gospels advice reconciliation and love of enemies; Polonius advises, "Beware / Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, / Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee." Not exactly the same as what the gospels recommend.
Polonius’ advice is worldly advice, the kind represented in catechisms as the Old Adam, to be replaced by putting on Christ and becoming more like the Jesus of the gospels and his teachings.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Continued Next Week
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTE ON THIS SERIES OF POSTS:
Hamlet quotes in this post are taken from the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare at mit.edu.
This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property).
- The more I examine characters in this way, the more I realize how the major characters in Hamlet are dynamic characters who change, becoming better or worse in one way or another. This approach goes against the grain of a great deal of scholarship that seems to reify (or thing-ify) too many characters (as foil, as Oedipal, as Machiavellian, etc.) and view them as more static, rather than as dynamic, fluid, interacting. For an index of previous posts in this series, see below.
- For Laertes, there are at least two diametrically opposed sets of gift-forces at work: One set involves Claudius & Polonius who pull him in a somewhat selfish direction. Other gift-forces that pull him in another direction come from Ophelia in 1.3, 4.5, and 4.7; and from Hamlet in 5.1 and 5.2.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Index of other posts in this series:
Part 1: Gifts & labors of gratitude in Hansel & Gretel - (prep. for Hamlet) - 8/12/19
Part 2: Hamlet's Descent & Arc Toward Mercy: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 8/19/19
Part 3: Polonius' Labor of Regret - 8/26/19
Part 4: Into Dad's Circle of Fear & Flattery: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 1.2 - 9/3/19
Part 5: Fear & Hypocrisy; Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, Hamlet 1.3 - 9/9/19
Part 6: Fearsome, Flattered, Glimpsing Transformation: Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 4.5 - 9/17/19
Part 7: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Toxic Masculinity Distrats While Ophelia Drowns, Hamlet 4.7 - 9/24/19
Part 8: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Laertes & Hamlet Fight at Ophelia’s Grave, Hamlet 5.1 - 10/01/19
Part 9: Gertrude as Recipient & Source of Gifts: Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet - 10/8/19
Part 10: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret: Laertes Turns, but Only When Facing Death, 5.2 - 10/15/19
Part 11: Does Hamlet & Ophelia’s Love Change Them? (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/21/19
Part 12: Claudius Resists Gift-Dynamics & Grace (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/29/19
Part 13: Does Fortinbras Benefit from Gratitude or Regret (or is he more a cipher for James VI & I)? - 11/05/19
Part 14: Horatio's Gift-Dynamics & Christ-Figures Shifting Ground in Hamlet 1.1 - 11/19/19
Part 15: Hamlet & Horatio's Friendship: Mutual, Reciprocal, Transformative, Free - 11/26/19
Part 16: WHY GIFT-DYNAMICS MATTER FOR HAMLET & THE BIBLE: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 12/19/19
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MY BOOK PROJECT:
My book project: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
RETROSPECTIVES:
Retrospectives of popular posts through March 0f 2019: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/03/hamlets-bible-2-year-anniversary.html
[L: Julia Stiles as Ophelia, and Liev Schreiber as Laertes in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), which starred Ethan Hawke as the prince. R: Michael Maloney as Laertes, and Kate Winslet as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996).]
Overview/Introduction
Lewis Hyde’s idea of transformative gifts and labors of gratitude includes the understanding that gifts, however small or subtle, can sometimes change us, or change our course of direction. If we receive and are grateful for a gift, we sometimes labor to become like the gift or giver.
—In the case of Claudius, we see in 1.2 the king’s grandstanding and flattery regarding his debt of gratitude toward Polonius, which he hopes to repay in part by being generous to the son, Laertes.
—In 4.5 and 4.7, we will see Claudius continue to flatter Laertes and feign trust and honesty in order for Claudius to diffuse what may very well be an attempt by Laertes and a mob to take the throne of Denmark from Claudius. Near the start of 4.7, Claudius tells Laertes, “you must put me in your heart for friend” because Laertes has been shown that Claudius was not the immediate cause of Polonius’ death.
—But Claudius is a liar, deceiver, and poisoner as well as a murderous usurper. If gift dynamics hold, and as Laertes receives potentially transformational gifts from Claudius, we might expect to see Laertes begin to become a bit more like Claudius. In fact, this does happen, as Laertes enters in 4.5 as a passionate man ready to take his revenge, but even before he receives word of Ophelia’s death in 4.7, Claudius has convinced Laertes, his protege, to become a poisoner like himself.
—Laertes also becomes more like Claudius in that he becomes more like a flattering liar, when, in 5.2, after Hamlet offers him an apology before the duel, Laertes tells Hamlet, “I do receive your offer'd love like love, / And will not wrong it.” In fact he may be lying, or at least torn in two directions, as he does intend to wrong it, and will poison Hamlet before his own regret moves him to turn from revenge and turn against Claudius.
—So for Laertes, there are two diametrically opposed gift-forces at work: One is with Claudius, the King, a deceiving flatterer and poisoner, and his father’s worldly, somewhat selfish, unChristian, and perhaps hypocritical advice. Other gift-forces that pull him in another direction come from Ophelia in 1.3, 4.5, and perhaps 4.7; and from Hamlet in 5.1 and 5.2.
This week I’ll consider interactions between Laertes and Ophelia in 1.3. In the following weeks, I’ll consider his interactions with her in 4.5 and 4.7, and later, his interactions with Hamlet in 5.1 and 5.2., as well as Hamlet's exchanges with Gertrude and Ophelia.
~~~~~~~~~~
In Act 1, scene 3, Laertes advises Ophelia that she should regard Hamlet’s affection as sweet but passing, and strangely, he claims that, unlike “unvalued persons,” Hamlet is not free to chart his own path and decide for himself. This is interesting because one might think that a prince would be more powerful and free, and therefore to be feared. But no, Laertes claims Hamlet is less free, and therefore to be feared. (Apologies to those who read my blog regularly: There is some overlap between what I’m saying here and things I mentioned already last week regarding Laertes & Polonius and their advice to Ophelia at the time of Laertes’ departure to France.) Here is Laertes’ advice to Ophelia about Hamlet:
LAERTES
Perhaps he loves you now,
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch
The virtue of his will: but you must fear,
His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth:
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head.
Laertes is a less-valued person, or so he claims, so he can carve for himself and convince his father and Claudius to let him go back to France, and in that way enjoy certain freedoms; but Hamlet is not so free, at least in the mind of Laertes. Laertes is probably right on this point, as Hamlet comments to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern later (2.2) that “Denmark’s a prison”.
(Some may also suspect Polonius and Laertes of scheming with Claudius not only to murder King Hamlet, but also to set up Laertes as heir, and to keep Ophelia away from Hamlet and oblivious to their plot. But there is no evidence for this in the text, so rather than change the play we have into a different one with entirely new motivations and plot possibilities, I’d rather deal with the text we have from Shakespeare, tho’ adaptations and experiments certainly have their own value).
While Laertes claims that Hamlet as the heir is less free, Laertes also notes that Hamlet may not yet have mastered his own passions (and Hamlet will later praise Horatio for not being passion’s slave). For this reason, and perhaps because of his general fear of his king and father, Laertes counsels Ophelia to fear Hamlet, the very person she may be coming to love:
LAERTES
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain,
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmaster'd importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
Fear is the example and tainted gift that Laertes has received from authority figures, kings and father, so there is a sort of logic in the fact that fear is his advice to his sister. Yet as I’ve noted before, it confronts us with the strained contrast between love and fear. More than once every year, Elizabethan churchgoers heard the reading of 1 John 4:18: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear: for fear hath painfulness [anticipates pain or suffering, or fears the pain of punishment]: and he that feareth, is not perfect in love." So if we feel a bit odd about the contrast between Ophelia's love for Hamlet, on the one hand, and Laertes and Polonius counseling fear on the other, it's not without reason.
There is a kind of hypocrisy in these feared father-figures of Polonius, Claudius, and the late King Hamlet: Polonius will shortly counsel Laertes that if he is true to himself, he can’t be false to any man, but then Polonius will soon be distrustful, duplicitous, and false by sending the spy Reynaldo to follow his son and plant lies as bait to obtain information about his son's activities in France. Polonius is a hypocrite.
Claudius pretends to be mourning the death of his brother and to have married Gertrude only out of concern for the safety of the state, and yet we know he has killed his brother and married Gertrude perhaps after an adulterous and then-considered incestuous affair, in order to gain the throne. Claudius is a lying hypocrite.
Even the ghost of King Hamlet (if that’s who the ghost is) seems a hypocrite: He speaks of dying with sins on his conscience, “foul crimes,” and complains of being deprived by his murderous brother of the chance to be forgiven through the sacraments of the church. And yet that church, in its scriptures, teaches that the day may come like a thief in the night, so “be ye ready” (which Hamlet paraphrases as "the readiness is all [5.2], found in Mt 24:44). King Hamlet was ungenerous with his enemy Fortinbras, and is like the rich man who is ungenerous with the beggar Lazarus at his door (the ghost says the poison made his skin all “lazar-like”); the ghost says he died “full of bread,” a scripture allusion to the rich who eat well while neglecting the hungry and poor. The rich man of the gospel parable goes to hell and feels entitled perhaps to something more. The ghost acts the same way. If this is a Christian king, he’s a hypocrite.
So it makes sense that Ophelia would think her brother might turn hypocrite and not heed his own advice to her. Ophelia is exactly the kind of daughter that Polonius needs in this way, and exactly the sort of sister that Laertes needs. Here’s Ophelia, turning the tables on her brother:
OPHELIA
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
Great advice. If only Laertes and Polonius were more open to her gifts and to that advice.
Laertes tells her not to fear him, meaning not to fear that he would fail to follow his own advice, it seems. But his father still suspects otherwise.
It also makes sense that the hypocrite Polonius would suspect that Laertes might act like the prodigal son in France. After all, Polonius judges Hamlet to probably be the sort of sexual predator Polonius himself was in his youth, so why not expect that the apple won’t fall far from the tree, and that his son will get a bit wild in France? Expecting this, he sends the spy Reynaldo after him to plant lies and find the twisted truth regarding his son's sins, his straying from the righteous path Ophelia describes.
If Laertes received and internalized - as a sort of gift - the male authority figures as examples to fear, he may also have internalized some of their tendencies toward hypocrisy as well, and toward being the sort of man that would try to evoke fear in others. These are not the best of gifts, but the gifts we receive and internalize are never quite pure; the examples we follow not always good ones: They are often quite mixed in quality or even downright bad examples, so like Cinderella sorting ashes from rice thrown into the hearth by her stepmother, it's often left up to us to sort the good gifts (the rice, the potentially sustaining food) from what should be discarded (the ashes).
Laertes receives advice from his father before his departure for France. Scholars have noted that this advice resembles advice William Cecil gave to his son, which was actually published in Shakespeare's lifetime, but only after the play Hamlet had been published. Some scholars think perhaps Cecil's advice to his son was available in a pocket-manuscript form circulated perhaps among Shakespeare's patrons or their friends. (These may have included Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had married Cecil's daughter Anne. The character of Ophelia may have been created with Anne Cecil in mind inasmuch as Anne also died young under mysterious circumstances.)
In terms of biblical influences in Hamlet and its first audiences, we might note that while the gospels encourage generosity toward “the least of these,” giving and not asking in return, Polonius advises his son not to be a borrower or a lender at all. The gospels advice reconciliation and love of enemies; Polonius advises, "Beware / Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, / Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee." Not exactly the same as what the gospels recommend.
Polonius’ advice is worldly advice, the kind represented in catechisms as the Old Adam, to be replaced by putting on Christ and becoming more like the Jesus of the gospels and his teachings.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Continued Next Week
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTE ON THIS SERIES OF POSTS:
Hamlet quotes in this post are taken from the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare at mit.edu.
This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property).
- The more I examine characters in this way, the more I realize how the major characters in Hamlet are dynamic characters who change, becoming better or worse in one way or another. This approach goes against the grain of a great deal of scholarship that seems to reify (or thing-ify) too many characters (as foil, as Oedipal, as Machiavellian, etc.) and view them as more static, rather than as dynamic, fluid, interacting. For an index of previous posts in this series, see below.
- For Laertes, there are at least two diametrically opposed sets of gift-forces at work: One set involves Claudius & Polonius who pull him in a somewhat selfish direction. Other gift-forces that pull him in another direction come from Ophelia in 1.3, 4.5, and 4.7; and from Hamlet in 5.1 and 5.2.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Index of other posts in this series:
Part 1: Gifts & labors of gratitude in Hansel & Gretel - (prep. for Hamlet) - 8/12/19
Part 2: Hamlet's Descent & Arc Toward Mercy: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 8/19/19
Part 3: Polonius' Labor of Regret - 8/26/19
Part 4: Into Dad's Circle of Fear & Flattery: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 1.2 - 9/3/19
Part 5: Fear & Hypocrisy; Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, Hamlet 1.3 - 9/9/19
Part 6: Fearsome, Flattered, Glimpsing Transformation: Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 4.5 - 9/17/19
Part 7: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Toxic Masculinity Distrats While Ophelia Drowns, Hamlet 4.7 - 9/24/19
Part 8: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Laertes & Hamlet Fight at Ophelia’s Grave, Hamlet 5.1 - 10/01/19
Part 9: Gertrude as Recipient & Source of Gifts: Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet - 10/8/19
Part 10: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret: Laertes Turns, but Only When Facing Death, 5.2 - 10/15/19
Part 11: Does Hamlet & Ophelia’s Love Change Them? (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/21/19
Part 12: Claudius Resists Gift-Dynamics & Grace (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/29/19
Part 13: Does Fortinbras Benefit from Gratitude or Regret (or is he more a cipher for James VI & I)? - 11/05/19
Part 14: Horatio's Gift-Dynamics & Christ-Figures Shifting Ground in Hamlet 1.1 - 11/19/19
Part 15: Hamlet & Horatio's Friendship: Mutual, Reciprocal, Transformative, Free - 11/26/19
Part 16: WHY GIFT-DYNAMICS MATTER FOR HAMLET & THE BIBLE: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 12/19/19
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MY BOOK PROJECT:
My book project: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
RETROSPECTIVES:
Retrospectives of popular posts through March 0f 2019: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/03/hamlets-bible-2-year-anniversary.html
Shakespeare had much advice probably given and displayed in through his plays. We are able to compare, seeing the differences between Biblical, Godly world views, and those of the world's worldly worldviews. Choose today as long as it is day whom to serve. Our God.s and Joshua's challenge comes to the fore. Choose this day whom to serve? Our Lord challenges us to choose between life or death , blessing or cursing; therefore choose Life!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response, Eltekon. One of the things I find remarkable about the play is that a number of characters (including at least Hamlet & Laertes, perhaps Gertrude & Ophelia) undergo certain changes which in some cases are clearly a kind of moral repentance of wrongdoing, in other cases (Gretrude & Ophelia) maybe more ambiguous, but are still perhaps promising. The ambiguity is important: Sometimes we can't and should not assume to pluck the heart of certain mysteries, especially in our judgment of others ("judge not that ye be not judged"), because the mystery is often a manifestation of God, aka transcendent mystery incarnate in the world: "My ways are as far above your ways as the heavens are above the earth." That assumes mystery....
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