7. The Undiscovered Country: The Shape of the Aesthetic Conflict in Hamlet

Hamlet is probably Shakespeare's most enigmatic play. Founded on the metaphor of internal ‘eruption’, it explores the endeavour to find a container for the new and monstrous mystery which rears its beautiful and ugly head. Both the world of the play and the constitution of the hero are shaken by turmoil when it appears that the phenomenon of psychic growth is not a naturally-unfolding process but ‘shakes our disposition’ with ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’; and the structure of the play correspondingly expands or rather cracks and undermines the classical self-contained model of the revenge tragedy which is its anti-type.

The quality of ‘mystery’ which everyone recognises in Hamlet, is of its essence: not just in relation to the theme of not ‘plucking out the heart of the mystery’ as Hamlet describes it, but also in relation to the complex and ambivalent way in which the play takes hold of our imagination, as observers and in a sense participants in its emotional struggle: we who, like the puzzled crowd at the end, are ‘but mutes and audience to this act’. The play makes it clear that the experience of mystery is not a facile or passive one of wondering acceptance, but one which involves violent antagonism and ambivalence; its latent drama seems to exist in images beyond the reach of our thoughts — as in the oedipal conflict which lies, suggestively, always between the lines, and often grating against the overt drift of the revenge plot. As mutes and audience we follow the hero, with a peculiar mixture of adulation and irritation, as he attempts to disentangle the riddle of his ‘uncle-father's’ incestuous marriage and murder, from the mystery of the ‘undiscovered country’ from which no traveller returns. This is ultimately his own inner self, whose image hovers always out of reach, sometimes glimpsed beyond the images of his mother or