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In its 350-year-old history, Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet aroused endless commentary from literary critics (Bradley, 1904; Wilson, 1935; Hawkes, 1959; Knight, 1961), philosophers (Goethe, 1899), and psychoanalysts (Freud, 1900; Jones, 1949; Eissler, 1971). From their respective disciplinary orientations, students of the play have posed and attempted to answer certain basic questions that Wirtz (1966) summarized: Is Hamlet mad? Is Gertrude an adulteress? Does Hamlet vacillate? Why is Hamlet tragic? Why does he doubt the ghost? In this chapter, I comment on these timeless questions by reviewing the tragic history of Hamlet, the record of a self struggling to overcome a pervasive state of weakness and disharmony. In adopting this perspective, I will attempt to illuminate, within the idiom of psychoanalytic self psychology, Goethe's (1899) classic observation that Hamlet's tragedy is that of “… a great deed imposed upon a soul unequal to the performance of it” (p. 282).
At the outset of the drama, we confront a Hamlet suffering from the experience of his own futility. In the first of his seven soliloquies, he summarizes the various burdens contributing to this sense of futility. These burdens, which revolve around his uncle Claudius's usurpation of the throne of Denmark and his mother's sin of incest (from the standpoint of Elizabethan ecclesiastical law) with Claudius, are soon compounded by the appearance of his father's ghost, attempting to rouse Hamlet to action. Here are the terms in which