You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The controversies about Hamlet have a way of repeating themselves generation after generation. But they are worth refighting not only because the play itself seems forever new but because — another tribute to its vitality — discussion of it so often raises exciting collateral issues.
An article by John Ashworth in the Atlantic, denouncing the Olivier movie version of Hamlet, provides a case in point. The article could be dismissed as no more than a restatement of the view that Hamlet's difficulties in avenging his father are entirely objective — a view given definitive expression more than forty years ago by the German Shakespearean scholar, Karl Werder. But the disciple at least takes cognizance of a view of which his predecessor knew nothing — the Freud-Ernest Jones thesis that Hamlet's delay stems from an internal unconscious conflict experienced, in some degree, by all men in our culture. To call attention to this thesis even in negative fashion is something of a service, for despite the interest it might be expected to have for our psychologically-oriented age it has been conspicuously ignored in contemporary Shakespearean criticism and honoreed by the general reader more in the breach than in the observance.
Not content with refuting Freud's views of Hamlet, the article challenges his right to have any — on the ground that he did not know enough about the cultural history of the Elizabethan age to stand any chance of reading Shakespeare “accurately”. Is it really true that one needs a Ph.D. — preferably acquired under Kittredge, who did not have one — to read Shakespeare with comprehension? The very success of the movie version of Hamlet casts doubt upon the assumption. Year after year thousands of people with no special literary training read Shakespeare, or respond