Vygotsky Lev Semyonovich

The 120th anniversary of Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky is approaching. Lev Semyonovich was a very versatile person. In order to acquaint readers with different facets of his talent, it seems important to us to offer you his most interesting and little-known work:

The riddle of Hamlet. "Subjective" and "objective" decisions. Hamlet's character problem. The structure of the tragedy: plot and plot. Hero identification. Catastrophe.

All unanimously consider the tragedy about Hamlet mysterious. It seems to everyone that it differs from other tragedies of Shakespeare himself and other authors primarily in that the course of action in it is developed in such a way that it certainly causes some misunderstanding and surprise in the viewer. Therefore, research and critical works about this play are almost always interpretive, and they are all built on the same model - they try to solve the riddle posed by Shakespeare. This riddle can be formulated as follows: why Hamlet, who must kill the king immediately after speaking with the shadow, cannot do this in any way and the whole tragedy is filled with the history of his inaction? To solve this riddle, which really arises before the mind of every reader, because Shakespeare in the play did not give a direct and clear explanation of Hamlet's slowness, critics look for the reasons for this slowness in two things: in the character and feelings of Hamlet himself or in objective conditions. The first group of critics reduces the problem to the problem of Hamlet's character and tries to show that Hamlet does not immediately take revenge either because his moral feelings oppose the act of revenge, or because he is indecisive and powerless by his very nature, or, as Goethe pointed out, that too big a job is placed on too weak shoulders. And since none of these interpretations explains the tragedy to the end, we can say with confidence that all these interpretations have no scientific significance, since the completely opposite to each of them can be equally defended. Researchers of the opposite kind are gullible and naive to a work of art and try to understand Hamlet's slowness from the warehouse of his mental life, as if he is a living and real person, and in general their arguments are almost always arguments from life and from the significance of human nature, but not from artistic construction plays. These critics go as far as asserting that Shakespeare's goal was to show a weak-willed person and to unfold the tragedy that arises in the soul of a person who is called to accomplish a great deed, but who does not have the necessary strength for this. They understood "Hamlet" for the most part as a tragedy of powerlessness and lack of will, completely disregarding a whole series of scenes that depict features of a completely opposite character in Hamlet and show that Hamlet is a man of exceptional determination, courage, courage, that he does not waver in the least for moral reasons. etc.

- Another group of critics looked for the reasons for Hamlet's slowness in those objective obstacles that lie in the way of realizing the goal set before him. They pointed out that the king and the courtiers had a very strong opposition to Hamlet, that Hamlet did not kill the king right away, because he could not kill him. This group of critics, following in the footsteps of Werder, argues that Hamlet's task was not to kill the king, but to expose him, prove his guilt to everyone and only then punish him. Many arguments can be found to defend such an opinion, but an equally large number of arguments taken from the tragedy easily refute this opinion. These critics fail to notice two main things that make them cruelly mistaken: their first mistake boils down to the fact that we nowhere in the tragedy, either directly or indirectly, find such a formulation of the task facing Hamlet. These critics are inventing new complicating tasks for Shakespeare, and again they use arguments from common sense and everyday plausibility more than the aesthetics of the tragic. Their second mistake is that they miss a huge number of scenes and monologues, from which it becomes completely clear to us that Hamlet himself is aware of the subjective nature of his slowness, that he does not understand what makes him procrastinate, that he cites several completely different reasons for this and that none of them can withstand the burdens of serving as a support for the explanation of the whole action.

Both groups of critics agree that this tragedy is highly mysterious, and that this confession alone completely deprives all of their arguments from being convincing.

After all, if their considerations are correct, then one would expect that there will be no riddle in the tragedy. What a mystery, if Shakespeare deliberately wants to portray a hesitant and indecisive person. After all, then from the very beginning we would see and understand that we have slowness due to hesitation. A play on the theme of lack of will would be bad if this very lack of will was hidden in it under a mystery and if the critics of the second direction, that the difficulty lies in external obstacles, were right; then it would have to be said that Hamlet is some kind of a dramatic mistake by Shakespeare, because this struggle with external obstacles, which constitutes the true meaning of tragedy, Shakespeare was unable to present distinctly and clearly, and it is also hidden under a mystery. Critics try to solve the riddle of Hamlet by bringing in something from the outside, from the outside, some considerations and thoughts that are not given in the tragedy itself, and they approach this tragedy as an incidental life event, which must certainly be interpreted in terms of common sense. In Berne's beautiful expression, a veil is thrown over the picture, we are trying to raise this veil in order to see the picture; it turns out that the fleur is drawn on the picture itself. And this is absolutely true. It is very easy to show that the riddle is drawn in the tragedy itself, that the tragedy is deliberately constructed as a riddle, that it must be comprehended and understood as a riddle that defies logical interpretation, and if critics want to remove the riddle from the tragedy, then they deprive the tragedy of its essential part.

Let us dwell on the most enigmatic of the play. Almost unanimous criticism, despite all the differences of opinion, notes this darkness and incomprehensibility, incomprehensibility of the play. Gessner says Hamlet is a tragedy of masks. We are facing Hamlet and his tragedy, as Kuno Fischer expresses this opinion, as if before a veil. We all think that there is some kind of image behind it, but in the end we are convinced that this image is nothing but the veil itself. According to Berne, Hamlet is something incongruous, worse than death, not yet born. Goethe spoke about the grim issue of this tragedy. Schlegel equated it with an irrational equation, Baumgardt speaks of the complexity of the plot, which contains a long series of diverse and unexpected events. “The tragedy of Hamlet is really like a maze,” agrees Kuno Fischer. “In Hamlet,” says G. Brandes, “there is no“ general meaning ”or the idea of \u200b\u200bthe whole hovering over the play. Certainty was not the ideal that was worn before Shakespeare's eyes ... There are many mysteries and contradictions here, but the attractive power of the play is largely due to its very darkness ”(21, p. 38). Speaking about “dark” books, Brandes finds that such a book is “Hamlet”: “In places in the drama there is a kind of chasm between the shell of the action and its core” (21, p. 31). “Hamlet remains a secret,” says Ten-Brink, “but an irresistibly attractive secret due to our consciousness that it is not an artificially invented secret, but a secret that has its source in the nature of things” (102, p. 142). “But Shakespeare created a mystery,” says Dowden, “which has remained for thought an element that forever excites it and is never fully explained by it. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that any idea or magic phrase could solve the difficulties presented by the drama, or suddenly illuminate everything that is dark in it. Ambiguity is inherent in a work of art, which does not mean any task, but life; and in this life, in this story of the soul, which passed along the gloomy border between night darkness and daylight, there is ... much that escapes any study and confuses it ”(45, p. 131). The extracts could be continued indefinitely, since all decisive critics, with the exception of individual units, stop at this. Shakespeare's detractors like Tolstoy, Voltaire and others say the same thing. Voltaire, in the preface to the tragedy "Semiramis", says that "the course of events in the tragedy" Hamlet "is the greatest confusion", Rumelin says that "the play as a whole is incomprehensible" (see. 158, p. 74 - 97).

But all this criticism sees in the darkness a shell behind which the core is hidden, the veil behind which the image is hidden, the veil that hides the picture from our eyes. It is completely incomprehensible why, if Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is really what critics say about him, he is surrounded by such mystery and incomprehensibility. And I must say that this mystery is often infinitely exaggerated and even more often based simply on misunderstandings. This kind of misunderstanding should include the opinion of Merezhkovsky, who says: "To Hamlet, the shadow of his father appears in a solemn, romantic atmosphere, with thunder and earthquakes ... The shadow of his father tells Hamlet about secrets beyond the grave, about God, about revenge and blood" (73, p. 141). Where, apart from the operatic libretto, one can read this, remains completely incomprehensible. Needless to say, there is nothing like this in the real "Hamlet".

So, we can discard all the criticism that tries to separate the mystery from the tragedy itself, remove the veil from the picture. However, it is curious to see how such criticism responds to the mysterious character and behavior of Hamlet. Berne says: “Shakespeare is a king who is not subject to rule. If he were like any other, one could say: Hamlet is a lyrical character that contradicts any dramatic treatment ”(16, p. 404). The same discrepancy is noted by Brandes. He says: “We must not forget that this dramatic phenomenon, the hero who does not act, was to a certain extent required by the very technique of this drama. If Hamlet had killed the king immediately after receiving the revelation of the spirit, the play would have to be limited to one act. Therefore, it was positively necessary to allow decelerations to arise ”(21, p. 37). But if this were so, it would simply mean that the plot is not suitable for tragedy, and that Shakespeare artificially slows down such an action that could be finished at once, and that he introduces four extra acts in such a play that could perfectly fit in one single. The same is noted by Montague, who gives an excellent formula: "Inaction and represents the action of the first three acts." Beck is very close to the same understanding. He explains everything from the contradiction between the plot of the play and the character of the hero. The plot, the course of action, belongs to the chronicle, where Shakespeare poured the plot, and the character of Hamlet - Shakespeare. There is an irreconcilable contradiction between the one and the other. “Shakespeare was not the complete master of his play and did not dispose of its individual parts quite freely,” the chronicle does. But this is the whole point, and it is so simple and true that you do not need to look for any other explanations around. This brings us to a new group of critics who are looking for clues to Hamlet either in terms of dramatic technique, as Brandes crudely put it, or in the historical and literary roots on which this tragedy grew up. But it is quite obvious that in this case it would mean that the rules of technology won over the writer's abilities or the historical nature of the plot outweighed the possibilities of its artistic processing. In either case, “Hamlet” would mean a mistake by Shakespeare, who failed to choose a suitable subject for his tragedy, and Zhukovsky is absolutely right from this point of view when he says that “Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet seems to me a monster. I don't understand its meaning. Those who find so much in Hamlet prove more of their own wealth of thought and imagination than the superiority of Hamlet. I cannot believe that Shakespeare, composing his tragedy, thought everything that Tieck and Schlegel thought while reading it: they see in it and in its striking oddities all human life with its incomprehensible riddles ... I asked him to read it to me "Hamlet" and so that after reading he would tell me in detail his thoughts about this monstrous freak. "

Goncharov was of the same opinion, who argued that Hamlet cannot be played: “Hamlet is not a typical role - no one will play it, and there has never been an actor who would play it ... He should be exhausted in it like an eternal Jew ... Hamlet's properties are phenomena that are elusive in an ordinary, normal state of mind ”. However, it would be a mistake to think that historical, literary and formal explanations, which seek the reasons for Hamlet's slowness in technical or historical circumstances, would invariably tend to the conclusion that Shakespeare wrote a bad play. A number of researchers also point to a positive aesthetic meaning, which consisted in the use of this necessary slowness. So, Volkenstein defends an opinion opposite to the opinion of Heine, Berne, Turgenev and others, who believe that Hamlet is a weak-willed being in itself. The opinion of these latter is perfectly expressed by the words of Goebbel, who says: “Hamlet is a carrion even before the start of the tragedy. What we see are roses and thorns that grow out of this fall. " Volkenstein believes that the true nature of the dramatic work, and in particular the tragedy, lies in the extraordinary tension of passions and that it is always based on the inner strength of the hero. Therefore, he believes that the view of Hamlet as a weak-willed person “rests ... on that blind trust in verbal material, which sometimes the most profound literary criticism was distinguished ... A dramatic hero cannot be trusted at his word, it is necessary to check how he acts. And Hamlet acts more than energetically, he alone leads a long and bloody struggle with the king, with the entire Danish court. In his tragic quest to restore justice, he decisively attacks the king three times: the first time he kills Polonius, the second time the king is saved by his prayer, the third time - at the end of the tragedy - Hamlet kills the king. Hamlet, with splendid ingenuity, dramatizes the "mousetrap" - a performance, checking the indications of the shadow; Hamlet cleverly removes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from his path. Indeed, he is waging a titanic struggle ... The flexible and strong character of Hamlet corresponds to his physical nature: Laertes is the best swordsman in France, and Hamlet defeats him, turns out to be a more agile fighter (as contradicts Turgenev's indication of his physical looseness!). The hero of the tragedy is the maximum of will ... and we would not feel the tragic effect of Hamlet if the hero were indecisive and weak ”(28, p. 137, 138). What is curious about this opinion is not that it indicates the features that distinguish Hamlet's strength and courage. This was done many times, just as many times the obstacles that faced Hamlet were emphasized. What is remarkable about this opinion is that it interprets in a new way all the material of the tragedy that speaks of Hamlet's lack of will. Volkenstein considers all those monologues in which Hamlet reproaches himself for lack of decisiveness, as self-whipping of the will, and says that they least of all testify to his weakness, if you like, on the contrary.

Thus, according to this view, it turns out that all of Hamlet's self-accusations of lack of will serve as further evidence of his extraordinary willpower. Leading a titanic struggle, showing maximum strength and energy, he is still dissatisfied with himself, demands even more from himself, and thus this interpretation saves the situation, showing that the contradiction was introduced into the drama for a reason and that this contradiction is only apparent. Words about lack of will should be understood as the strongest proof of will. However, this attempt does not solve the problem either. Indeed, it gives only a visible solution to the question and repeats, in essence, the old point of view on the character of Hamlet, but, in essence, it does not explain why Hamlet hesitates, why he does not kill, as Brandes demands, the king in the first act , immediately after the message of the shadow, and why the tragedy does not end with the end of the first act. With such a view, willy-nilly, one must adhere to the direction that comes from Werder and which points to external obstacles as the true reason for Hamlet's slowness. But that means clearly contradicting the direct meaning of the play. Hamlet is waging a titanic struggle - one can still agree with this if we proceed from the character of Hamlet himself. Let us assume that it really contains great forces. But with whom is he waging this struggle, against whom is it directed, in what way is it expressed? And as soon as you raise this question, you will immediately discover the insignificance of Hamlet's opponents, the insignificance of the reasons that keep him from killing him, his blind yielding to the machinations directed against him. Indeed, the critic himself notes that the king is saved by prayer, but are there any indications in the tragedy that Hamlet is a deeply religious person and that this reason belongs to the spiritual movements of great strength? On the contrary, it pops up quite by accident and seems incomprehensible to us. If, instead of the king, he kills Polonius, thanks to a simple accident, it means that his resolve was ripe immediately after the performance. The question is, why does his sword fall on the king only at the very end of the tragedy? Finally, no matter how planned, accidental, episodic, the struggle that he wages is always limited by local meaning - for the most part it is a parrying of blows directed at him, but not an attack. And the murder of Guildenstern and everything else is only self-defense, and, of course, we cannot call such a human self-defense a titanic struggle. We will still have the opportunity to point out that all three times when Hamlet tries to kill the king, which Volkenstein always refers to, that they indicate exactly the opposite of what the critic sees in them. The production of "Hamlet" at the 2nd Moscow Art Theater, which is close in meaning to this interpretation, also gives little explanation. Here, in practice, we tried to implement what we just got acquainted with in theory. The directors proceeded from the clash of two types of human nature and the development of their struggle with each other. “One of them is a protester, heroic, fighting to assert what constitutes his life. This is our Hamlet. In order to more clearly reveal and emphasize its overwhelming significance, we had to greatly shorten the text of the tragedy, throw out from it everything that could stop the whirlwind… From the middle of the second act, he takes the sword in his hands and does not release it until the end of the tragedy; We also emphasized the activity of Hamlet by the concentration of the obstacles that are encountered on Hamlet's path. Hence the interpretation of the king and his associates. The King of Claudia personifies everything that hinders the heroic Hamlet ... And our Hamlet is constantly in a spontaneous and passionate struggle against everything that personifies the king ... In order to thicken the colors, it seemed to us necessary to transfer the action of Hamlet to the Middle Ages. "

This is what the directors of this play say in the art manifesto, which they released about this production. And with all their frankness they point out that they had to perform three operations on the play in order to realize the stage, to understand the tragedy: first, to throw out of it everything that hinders this understanding; the second is to thicken the obstacles that oppose Hamlet, and the third is to thicken the colors and transfer the action of Hamlet to the Middle Ages, while everyone sees in this play the personification of the Renaissance. It is perfectly understandable that after these three operations any interpretation can succeed, but it is equally clear that these three operations turn the tragedy into something completely opposite to the way it is written. And the fact that such radical operations on the play were required to implement such an understanding is the best proof of the colossal discrepancy that exists between the true meaning of the story and between the meaning interpreted in this way. As an illustration of the colossal contradiction of the play into which the theater falls, it is enough to refer to the fact that the king, who actually plays a very modest role in the play, in such a situation turns into the heroic opposite of Hamlet himself (54). If Hamlet is the maximum of the heroic will, the light one is its one pole, then the king is the maximum of the anti-heroic will, the dark one is its other pole. To reduce the role of the king to the personification of the entire dark beginning of life - for this, it would be necessary, in essence, to write a new tragedy with completely opposite tasks than those that faced Shakespeare.

Much closer to the truth are those interpretations of Hamlet's slowness, which also proceed from formal considerations and really shed a lot of light on the solution of this riddle, but which were made without any operations on the text of the tragedy. Such attempts include, for example, an attempt to understand some of the features of the construction of Hamlet, based on the technique and construction of Shakespeare's scene (55), the dependence on which in no case can be denied and the study of which is deeply necessary for a correct understanding and analysis of the tragedy. Such a meaning, for example, is the law of temporal continuity established by Prels in Shakespeare's drama, which demanded from the viewer and the author a completely different stage convention than the technique of our modern stage. Our play is divided into acts: each act conventionally denotes only that short period of time, which is occupied by the events depicted in it. Long-term events and their changes occur between acts, the viewer learns about them later. An act can be separated from another act by an interval of several years. All this requires the same writing techniques. The situation was completely different in Shakespeare's time, when the action lasted continuously, when the play, apparently, did not disintegrate into acts and its performance was not interrupted by intermissions and everything was performed before the eyes of the viewer. It is quite clear that such an important aesthetic convention had a colossal compositional significance for any structure of the play, and we can understand a lot if we get acquainted with the technique and aesthetics of Shakespeare's contemporary stage. However, when we overstep the boundaries and begin to think that with the establishment of the technical necessity of some technique, we have thereby already solved the problem, we fall into a deep mistake. It is necessary to show to what extent each technique was conditioned by the technique of the stage at that time. Necessary - but far from enough. It is also necessary to show the psychological significance of this technique, why Shakespeare chose this one from a multitude of similar techniques, because it cannot be admitted that any techniques were explained entirely by their technical necessity, because this would mean admitting the power of bare technique in art. In fact, the technique, of course, unconditionally determines the construction of the play, but within the limits of technical possibilities, each technique and fact is, as it were, elevated to the dignity of an aesthetic fact. Here's a simple example. Silversvan says: “The poet was pressed by a certain stage arrangement. In addition to the category of examples emphasizing the inevitability of removing the characters from the stage, resp. the impossibility of ending a play or a scene with any troupe, there are cases when, in the course of the play, corpses appear on the stage: it was impossible to force them to get up and leave, and so, for example, in Hamlet there appears an unnecessary Fortinbras with various people, at the end ends only to proclaim:

Remove the corpses.
In the midst of the battlefield they are conceivable
And here out of place, like traces of a massacre,
And everyone leaves and takes the bodies with them.

The reader will be able to increase the number of such examples without any difficulty, having read carefully at least one Shakespeare ”(101, p. 30). Here is an example of a completely false interpretation of the final scene in Hamlet, using purely technical considerations. It is absolutely indisputable that, without a curtain and deploying the action on a stage open all the time in front of the listener, the playwright had to finish the play every time so that someone would carry away the corpses. In this sense, drama technique undoubtedly put pressure on Shakespeare. He certainly had to get the dead bodies to be carried away in the final scene of Hamlet, but he could have done it in different ways: they could have been carried away by the courtiers on the stage, or simply by the Danish guard. From this technical necessity, we can never conclude that Fortinbras appears only to carry off the corpses, and that this Fortinbras is not needed by anyone. One has only to turn to such, for example, the interpretation of the play, which is given by Kuno Fischer: he sees one theme of revenge embodied in three different images - Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are all avengers for their fathers - and we will now see a deep artistic meaning in that with the final appearance of Fortinbras, this theme receives its fullest completion and that the procession of the victorious Fortinbras is deeply meaningful where the corpses of two other avengers lie, whose image has always been opposed to this third image. This is how we easily find the aesthetic meaning of a technical law. We will have to turn to the help of such a study more than once, and, in particular, the law established by Prels helps us a lot in the matter of clarifying the slowness of Hamlet. However, this is always only the beginning of the study, and not the entire study as a whole. The task will always consist in establishing the technical necessity of some method, and at the same time understanding its aesthetic expediency. Otherwise, together with Brandes, we will have to conclude that technology is wholly owned by the poet, and not the poet's technique, and that Hamlet hesitates four acts because the plays were written in five, and not in one act, and we will never be able to understand why one and the same the same technique, which put exactly the same pressure on Shakespeare and on other writers, created one aesthetics in the tragedy of Shakespeare and another in the tragedies of his contemporaries; and even more so, why the same technique made Shakespeare compose Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet in completely different ways. Obviously, even within the limits assigned to the poet by his technique, he still retains the creative freedom of composition. We find the same lack of explanatory discoveries in those premises to explain Hamlet on the basis of the requirements of the artistic form, which also establish perfectly correct laws necessary for understanding tragedy, but completely insufficient for explaining it. Here is how Eichenbaum casually says about Hamlet: “In fact, the tragedy is delayed not because Schiller needs to develop a psychology of slowness, but quite the opposite — because Wallenstein is delaying, that the tragedy must be delayed, and the detention must be hidden. The same is in Hamlet. It is not for nothing that there are directly opposite interpretations of Hamlet as a person - and everyone is right in their own way, because everyone is equally wrong. Both Hamlet and Wallenstein are presented in two aspects necessary for the development of a tragic form - as a driving force and as a delaying force. Instead of simply moving forward along the plot, it is something like a dance with complex movements. From a psychological point of view, it is almost a contradiction ... Quite right - because psychology only serves as a motivation: the hero seems to be a person, but in fact he is a mask.

Shakespeare introduced the ghost of his father into the tragedy and made Hamlet a philosopher - the motivation for movement and detention. Schiller makes Wallenstein a traitor, almost against his will, in order to create a movement of tragedy, and introduces an astrological element that motivates the detention ”(138, p. 81). A whole series of perplexities arises here. We agree with Eichenbaum that in order to develop an art form, it is really necessary that the hero simultaneously develop and delay the action. What will explain this to us in Hamlet? No more than the need to remove the corpses at the end of the action will explain the appearance of Fortinbras; precisely not in the least, because the technique of the stage and the technique of form, of course, put pressure on the poet. But they put pressure on Shakespeare as well as on Schiller. The question is, why did one write Wallenstein, and the other Hamlet? Why did the same technique and the same requirements for the development of the artistic form once lead to the creation of Macbeth and another time of Hamlet, although these plays are directly opposite in their composition? Let us assume that the psychology of the hero is only an illusion of the viewer and is introduced by the author as a motivation. But the question arises, is the motivation chosen by the author completely indifferent to the tragedy? Is it accidental? Does it say something by itself, or is the operation of tragic laws exactly the same, in whatever motivation, in whatever concrete form they appear, just as the correctness of an algebraic formula remains completely constant, no matter what arithmetic meanings we substitute into it?

Thus, formalism, which began with extraordinary attention to a specific form, degenerates into the purest formalism, which reduces individual individual forms to well-known algebraic schemes. No one will argue with Schiller when he says that the tragic poet "must prolong the torture of the senses," but even knowing this law, we will never understand why this torture of the senses is dragged out in Macbeth at the frantic pace of development of the play, and in "Hamlet" with the exact opposite. Eichenbaum believes that with the help of this law we have completely clarified Hamlet. We know that Shakespeare introduced the ghost of his father into the tragedy - this is the motivation for the movement. He made Hamlet a philosopher - this is the reason for the detention. Schiller resorted to other motivations - instead of philosophy, he has an astrological element, and instead of a ghost, he has treason. The question is why, for the same reason, we have two completely different consequences. Or we must admit that the reason indicated here is not real, or, rather, insufficient, explaining not everything and not completely, more correctly, not even explaining the most important thing. Here is the simplest example: “We love very much,” says Eichenbaum, “for some reason 'psychology' and 'characteristics'. We naively think that an artist writes in order to “portray” psychology or character. We are racking our brains over the question of Hamlet - “did Shakespeare want to portray slowness in him or something else? In fact, the artist does not depict anything of the kind, because he is not at all occupied with questions of psychology, and we are not at all looking at Hamlet to study psychology ”(138, p. 78).

All this is absolutely true, but does it follow from this that the choice of character and psychology of the hero is completely indifferent to the author? It is true that we are not watching Hamlet in order to study the psychology of slowness, but it is also quite true that if Hamlet is given a different character, the play will lose all its effect. The artist, of course, did not want to give psychology or characterization in his tragedy. But the psychology and characterization of the hero is not an indifferent, random and arbitrary moment, but something aesthetically very significant, and to interpret Hamlet as Eichenbaum does in the same phrase means simply to interpret him very badly. To say that the action in Hamlet is delayed because Hamlet is a philosopher is simply to accept and repeat the opinion of those very boring books and articles that Eichenbaum refutes. It is the traditional view of psychology and characterization that claims that Hamlet does not kill the king because he is a philosopher. The same flat view suggests that in order to compel Hamlet to act, it is necessary to introduce a ghost. But Hamlet could learn the same thing in another way, and one has only to turn to the tragedy in order to see that the action in it is delayed not by the philosophy of Hamlet, but by something completely different.

Whoever wants to investigate Hamlet as a psychological problem must completely abandon criticism. We tried above to show in total how little it gives the researcher the right direction and how it often leads completely to the side. Therefore, the starting point for psychological research should be the desire to rid Hamlet of those N000 volumes of commentaries that crushed him with their weight and about which Tolstoy speaks with horror. We must take the tragedy as it is, look at what it says not to the philosophical interpreter, but to the ingenuous researcher, we must take it in an uninterpreted form (56) and look at it as it is. Otherwise, we would risk turning, instead of studying the dream itself, to its interpretation. We know of only one such attempt to look at Hamlet. It was made with ingenious courage by Tolstoy in his most beautiful article on Shakespeare, which for some reason still continues to be considered stupid and uninteresting. Here is what Tolstoy says: “But on none of Shakespeare's faces is he so strikingly noticeable, I will not say the inability, but complete indifference to imparting character to his faces, as in Hamlet, and in none of Shakespeare's plays is that blind worship Shakespeare, that non-judgmental hypnosis, as a result of which even the thought is not allowed that any work of Shakespeare might not be genius and that some main person in his drama might not be an image of a new and deeply understood character.

Shakespeare takes a very pretty old story ... or a drama written on this topic 15 years before him, and writes his own drama on this plot, putting completely inappropriate (as he always does) into the mouth of the protagonist all of his seeming noteworthy thoughts. Putting these thoughts into the mouth of his hero ... he does not at all care about the conditions under which these speeches are spoken, and, naturally, it turns out that the person expressing all these thoughts becomes Shakespeare's phonograph, loses all characteristic, and actions and speeches its not consistent.

In the legend, Hamlet's personality is quite understandable: he is outraged by the deed of his uncle and mother, wants to take revenge on them, but is afraid that his uncle would not kill him the same way as his father, and for this he pretends to be crazy ...

All this is understandable and follows from the character and position of Hamlet. But Shakespeare, inserting into the mouth of Hamlet those speeches that he wants to express, and forcing him to perform the actions that the author needs to prepare spectacular scenes, destroys everything that makes up the character of Hamlet of the legend. Throughout the continuation of the drama, Hamlet does not what he might want, but what the author needs: he is horrified at the shadow of his father, then he begins to tease her, calling him a mole, then he loves Ophelia, then teases her, etc. No no possibility of finding any explanation for the actions and speeches of Hamlet, and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.

But since it is recognized that the brilliant Shakespeare cannot write anything bad, then learned people direct all the forces of their minds to find extraordinary beauty in what constitutes an obvious, cutting eyes, especially sharply expressed in Hamlet, a defect consisting in that the main person has no character. And so profound critics declare that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, an unusually strongly completely new and deep character is expressed, consisting precisely in the fact that this face has no character and that this lack of character is the genius of creating a profound character. And, having decided this, scholarly critics write volumes after volumes, so that praises and explanations of the greatness and importance of portraying the character of a person who does not have character make up huge libraries. True, some of the critics sometimes timidly express the idea that there is something strange in this face, that Hamlet is an inexplicable riddle, but no one dares to say that the tsar is naked, that it is clear as daylight that Shakespeare failed, yes and did not want to give any character to Hamlet and did not even understand that it was necessary. And scholarly critics continue to research and praise this mysterious work ... ”(107, pp. 247-249).

We rely on this opinion of Tolstoy not because his final conclusions seem correct and extremely reliable to us. It is clear to any reader that Tolstoy ultimately judges Shakespeare on the basis of non-artistic points, and the decisive judgment in his assessment is the moral judgment he pronounces over Shakespeare, whose morality he considers incompatible with his moral ideals. Let us not forget that this moral point of view led Tolstoy to reject not only Shakespeare, but almost all of fiction in general, and that at the end of his life Tolstoy considered his own works of art to be harmful and unworthy works, so this moral point of view lies generally outside the plane art, it is too broad and all-embracing in order to notice particulars, and there can be no talk of it in a psychological examination of art. But the whole point is that, in order to draw these moral conclusions, Tolstoy brings purely artistic arguments, and these arguments seem to us so convincing that they really destroy the non-judgmental hypnosis that was established in relation to Shakespeare. Tolstoy looked at Hamlet with the eye of an Andersen child and was the first to dare to say that the king was naked, that is, that all those virtues - thoughtfulness, accuracy of character, penetration into human psychology, and so on - exist only in the imagination of the reader. In this statement that the tsar is naked, lies the greatest merit of Tolstoy, who exposed not so much Shakespeare as a completely absurd and false idea about him, by opposing him with his own opinion, which he not without reason calls completely opposite to that which was established in everything European world. Thus, on the way to his moral goal, Tolstoy destroyed one of the most cruel prejudices in the history of literature and was the first to express with all boldness what has now been confirmed in a number of studies and works; precisely the fact that Shakespeare's not all the intrigue and not the whole course of action are sufficiently convincingly motivated from the psychological point of view, that his characters simply do not stand up to criticism and that there are often outrageous and for common sense absurd inconsistencies between the character of the hero and his actions. So, for example, So directly asserts that Shakespeare in Hamlet was more interested in the situation than in the character, in which Hamlet should be viewed as a tragedy of intrigue, in which the connection and cohesion of events plays a decisive role, rather than revealing the character of the hero. Rygg is of the same opinion. He believes that Shakespeare does not confuse the action in order to complicate the character of Hamlet, but complicates this character in order for it to better fit the dramatic concept of the plot he received by tradition (57). And these researchers are far from alone in their opinion. As for other plays, the researchers name an infinite number of such facts, which testify with irrefutability that Tolstoy's statement is fundamentally correct. We will still have a chance to show how fair Tolstoy's opinion is when applied to such tragedies as Othello, King Lear, and others, how convincingly he showed the absence and insignificance of character in Shakespeare, and how completely correct and accurate he understood the aesthetic meaning and the meaning of Shakespeare's language.

Now we take as a starting point for our further reasoning the opinion, completely consistent with the obviousness, that it is impossible to attribute any character to Hamlet, that this character is composed of the most opposite features and that it is impossible to come up with any plausible explanation for his speeches and actions. However, we will begin to argue with the conclusions of Tolstoy, who sees in this a continuous flaw and Shakespeare's pure inability to portray the artistic development of action. Tolstoy did not understand or, rather, did not accept Shakespeare's aesthetics and, having recounted his artistic techniques in a simple retelling, translated them from the language of poetry into the language of prose, took them outside the aesthetic functions that they perform in drama - and the result, of course, was , complete nonsense. But exactly the same nonsense would have turned out if we had performed such an operation with every decisive poet and would have made his text meaningless by a continuous retelling. Tolstoy retells King Lear scene after scene and shows how ridiculous their connection and mutual connection is. But if the same exact retelling were performed over Anna Karenina, it would be easy to bring Tolstoy's novel to the same absurdity, and if we recall what Tolstoy himself said about this novel, we will be able to apply the same words and to King Lear. It is absolutely impossible to express the thought of both the novel and the tragedy in the retelling, because the whole essence of the matter lies in the cohesion of thoughts, and this cohesion itself, as Tolstoy says, is composed not of thought, but something else, and this something else cannot be conveyed directly in words, and can be conveyed only by a direct description of images, scenes, positions. It is just as impossible to retell King Lear, just as it is impossible to retell the music in your own words, and therefore the retelling method is the least convincing method of artistic criticism. But we repeat once again: this fundamental mistake did not prevent Tolstoy from making a number of brilliant discoveries, which for many years will constitute the most fruitful problems of Shakespeare, but which, of course, will be illuminated in a completely different way than Tolstoy did. In particular, with regard to Hamlet, we must fully agree with Tolstoy when he asserts that Hamlet has no character, but we have the right to ask further: does this lack of character involve any artistic task, does it make any sense? and whether it is just a mistake. Tolstoy is right when he points out the absurdity of the argument of those who believe that the depth of character lies in the fact that a characterless person is depicted. But maybe the purpose of the tragedy is not at all to reveal the character of oneself but to itself, and perhaps she is generally indifferent to the portrayal of the character, and sometimes, perhaps, she even deliberately uses a character that is completely inappropriate to the events in order to extract from is there any special artistic effect?

In what follows, we will have to show how false it is, in essence, to think that Shakespeare's tragedy is a tragedy of character. Now we will accept as an assumption that the absence of character may not only stem from the explicit intention of the author, but that he may need it for some very specific artistic purposes, and we will try to reveal this with the example of Hamlet. For this, let us turn to the analysis of the structure of this tragedy.

We immediately notice three elements from which we can proceed in our analysis. Firstly, the sources used by Shakespeare, the initial design that was given to the same material, and secondly, we have before us the plot and plot of the tragedy itself and, finally, a new and more complex artistic education - the characters. Let us consider in what relation these elements stand to each other in our tragedy.

Tolstoy is right when he begins his consideration by comparing the saga of Hamlet with the tragedy of Shakespeare (58). Everything is clear and understandable in the saga. The prince's motives are revealed quite clearly. Everything is consistent with each other, and every step is justified both psychologically and logically. We will not dwell on this, since this has already been sufficiently revealed by a number of studies and the problem of the riddle of Hamlet could hardly arise if we were dealing only with these ancient sources or with the old drama about Hamlet that existed before Shakespeare. There is absolutely nothing mysterious about all these things. Already from this one fact, we have the right to draw a conclusion completely opposite to that which Tolstoy makes. Tolstoy argues as follows: in the legend everything is clear, in Hamlet everything is unreasonable - therefore, Shakespeare spoiled the legend. The reverse course of thought would be much more correct. Everything in the legend is logical and understandable, Shakespeare had, therefore, in his hands ready-made possibilities of logical and psychological motivation, and if he processed this material in his tragedy in such a way that he omitted all these obvious braces that support the legend, then, probably, he had a special intent in this. And we are much more willing to suppose that Shakespeare created the mystery of Hamlet, proceeding from some stylistic tasks, than that it was caused simply by his inability. This comparison alone forces us to pose the problem of Hamlet's riddle in a completely different way; for us it is no longer a riddle that needs to be solved, not a difficulty that needs to be circumvented, but a well-known artistic device that needs to be comprehended. It would be more correct to ask, not why Hamlet hesitates, but why Shakespeare makes Hamlet delay? Because any artistic device is learned much more from its teleological orientation, from the psychological function that it performs, than from causal motivation, which in itself can explain to the historian a literary, but not an aesthetic fact. In order to answer this question, why Shakespeare makes Hamlet hesitate, we must move on to the second comparison and compare the plot and plot of Hamlet. Here it must be said that the basis of the plot design is the already mentioned above obligatory law of the dramatic composition of that era, the so-called law of temporal continuity. It boils down to the fact that the action on the stage flowed continuously and that, therefore, the play proceeded from a completely different concept of time than our contemporary plays. The stage did not remain empty for a single minute, and while some conversation was taking place on the link, long events often took place behind the scenes, sometimes requiring several days to be performed, and we learned about them several scenes later. Thus, real time was not perceived by the viewer at all, and the playwright always used conditional stage time, in which all scales and proportions were completely different than in reality. Consequently, Shakespeare's tragedy is always a colossal deformation of all time scales; usually the duration of events, the necessary life time, the temporal dimensions of each deed and action - all this was completely distorted and brought to some common denominator of stage time. From this it is already quite clear how absurd it is to pose the question of Hamlet's slowness from the point of view of real time. How long is Hamlet slow, and in what units of real time will we measure his slowness? We can say that the real terms in the tragedy are in the greatest contradiction, that there is no way to establish the duration of all the events of the tragedy in real time units, and we absolutely cannot say how much time passes from the minute the shadow appears until the minute the king is killed - a day, a month , year. Hence it is clear that it is absolutely impossible to solve the psychological problem of Hamlet's slowness. If he kills in a few days, there is generally no question of any slowness from the point of view of everyday life. If time drags on much longer, we must look for completely different psychological explanations for different periods - one for a month and others for a year. Hamlet in tragedy is completely independent of these units of real time, and all the events of the tragedy are measured and correlated with each other in conventional (59), scenic time. Does this mean, however, that the question of Hamlet's slowness disappears altogether? Perhaps, in this conditional stage time, there is no slowness at all, as some critics think, and the author has given only as much time for the play as it needs, and everything is done on time? However, we can easily see that this is not so if we recall the famous monologues of Hamlet, in which he blames himself for the delay. The tragedy clearly emphasizes the slowness of the hero and, what is most remarkable, gives it completely different explanations. Let us follow this main line of the tragedy. Now, after the disclosure of the secret, when Hamlet learns that he is entrusted with the duty of revenge, he says that he will fly to revenge on wings as fast as thoughts of love, from the pages of his memories he erases all thoughts, feelings, all dreams, all his life and remains with only one secret covenant. Already at the end of the same action, he exclaims under the unbearable weight of the discovery that fell on him that time had gone out of the grooves and that he was born to a fatal feat. Now, after talking with the actors, Hamlet reproaches himself for the first time for inaction. He is surprised that the actor flared up in the shadow of passion, with empty fiction, and he is silent when he knows that the crime has ruined the life and kingdom of the great ruler - his father. What is remarkable in this famous monologue is that Hamlet himself cannot understand the reasons for his slowness, reproaches himself with shame and shame, but he alone knows that he is not a coward. Here is also the first motivation for delaying the murder. The motivation is that, perhaps, the words of the shadow are not credible, that perhaps it was a ghost and that the testimony of the ghost should be checked. Hamlet starts his famous "mousetrap", and he has no more doubts. The king betrayed himself, and Hamlet no longer doubts that the shadow told the truth. He is called to his mother, and he conjures himself that he must not raise his sword at her.

Now is the time for night witchcraft.
Coffins creak, and hell breathes with infection.
Now I could drink living blood
And he is capable of deeds, from which
I staggered back in the afternoon. Mother called us.
No brutality, heart! Whatever happens,
Do not put the soul of Nero in my chest.
I will tell her the whole truth without pity
And, perhaps, in words I will kill.
But this is a dear mother - and hands
I will not give will even in rage ... (III, 2)

Murder is ripe, and Hamlet is afraid that he might raise his sword to his mother, and, what is most remarkable, this is followed by another scene now - the prayer of the king. Hamlet enters, takes out his sword, stands behind - he can kill him now; do you remember what you just left Hamlet with, how he implored himself to spare his mother, you are ready for the fact that he will now kill the king, but instead you hear:

He prays. What a lucky moment!

A blow with a sword - and he will rise to the sky ... (III, 3)

But Hamlet, after a few verses, sheathes the sword and gives a completely new motivation for his slowness. He does not want to destroy the king when he prays, in a moment of repentance.

Back, my sword, until the most terrible meeting!
When he is angry or drunk
In the arms of sleep or unclean bliss,
In the heat of excitement, with abuse on the lips
Or in thoughts of new evil, on a grand scale
Chop him up to go to hell
Upside down, all black with vices.
... Reign more.
Delay is only, not a cure.

In the next scene, Hamlet kills Polonius, eavesdropping behind the carpet, quite unexpectedly striking the carpet with his sword, exclaiming: "Mouse!" And from this exclamation and from his words to the corpse of Polonius further it is absolutely clear that he meant to kill the king, because it is the king who is the mouse that has just fallen into the mousetrap, and it is the king who is that other, "more important" whom Hamlet received Polonius. Already there is no question of the motive that removed the hand of Hamlet with the sword, which had just been raised above the king. The previous scene seems logically completely unrelated to this one, and one of them must contain some visible contradiction, if only the other is true. This scene of the murder of Polonius, as Kuno Fischer explains, is very much agreed by almost all critics as evidence of Hamlet's aimless, thoughtless, unplanned way of acting, and it is not for nothing that almost all theaters and very many critics completely pass over the scene with the king's prayer in silence, skip it altogether, because they refuse to understand how it is possible for such a clearly unprepared person to introduce a motive for detention. Nowhere in the tragedy, neither before nor after, there is more that new condition for murder that Hamlet sets for himself: to kill without fail in sin, so as to destroy the king beyond the grave. In the scene with his mother, a shadow appears again to Hamlet, but he thinks that the shadow has come to reproach his son for his slowness in revenge; and yet he does not offer any resistance when he is sent to England, and in the monologue after the scene with Fortinbras he compares himself to this brave leader and again reproaches himself for lack of will. He again considers his slowness a shame and ends the monologue decisively:

O my thought, henceforth be in blood.
Live by a thunderstorm or don't live at all! (IV, 4)

We find Hamlet further in the cemetery, then during a conversation with Horatio, finally, during a duel, and until the very end of the play there is not a single mention of the place, and the promise just given by Hamlet that his only thought will be blood is not is justified in no verse of the following text. Before the fight, he is full of sad forebodings:

“You have to be above superstition. All the will of the Lord. Even in the life and death of a sparrow. If something is destined to happen now, then it will not have to wait ... The most important thing is to be always ready ”(V, 2).

He anticipates his death, and the viewer with him. And until the very end of the fight he has no thought of revenge, and, what is most remarkable, the catastrophe itself happens in such a way that it seems to us spurred on for a completely different line of intrigue; Hamlet does not kill the king in fulfillment of the basic covenant of the shadow, the viewer learns earlier that Hamlet is dead, that the poison is in his blood, that there is no life in him for half an hour; and only after that, already standing in the grave, already lifeless, already in the grip of death, does he kill the king.

The scene itself is constructed in such a way that it leaves not the slightest doubt that Hamlet is killing the king for his latest atrocities, because he poisoned the queen, because he killed Laertes and him - Hamlet. There is not a word about the father, the viewer seems to have forgotten about him altogether. Everyone considers this denouement of Hamlet to be completely surprising and incomprehensible, and almost all critics agree that even this murder still leaves the impression of an unfulfilled duty or a duty performed completely by accident. It would seem that the play was mysterious all the time, because Hamlet did not kill the king; at last the murder was committed, and it would seem that the mystery should end, but no, it has just begun. Mézières says quite precisely: "Indeed, in the last scene everything excites our surprise, everything is unexpected from beginning to end." It would seem that we were only waiting for the whole play for Hamlet to kill the king, and finally he kills him, where does our surprise and misunderstanding come from again? “The last scene of the drama,” says Sokolovsky, “is based on a collision of accidents that merged so suddenly and unexpectedly that commentators with the same views even seriously accused Shakespeare of unsuccessfully ending the drama ... It was necessary to come up with the intervention of some outside force ... accidental and reminded, in the hands of Hamlet, a sharp weapon, which is sometimes given into the hands of children, at the same time controlling the handle ... ”(127, p. 42-43).

Berne correctly says that Hamlet kills the king not only in revenge for his father, but also for his mother and for himself. Johnson rebukes Shakespeare for the fact that the murder of the king does not take place according to a deliberate plan, but as an unexpected accident. Alfonso says: "The king was killed not as a result of a well-considered intention of Hamlet (thanks to him, perhaps he would never have been killed), but because of events independent of Hamlet's will." What does a consideration of this main line of intrigue in Hamlet establish? We see that in his conventional stage time, Shakespeare emphasizes the slowness of Hamlet, then obscures it, leaving entire scenes without mentioning the task before him, then suddenly reveals and reveals it in Hamlet's monologues in such a way that it can be said with perfect accuracy that the viewer perceives Hamlet's slowness not constantly, evenly, but in explosions. This slowness is obscured - and suddenly there is an explosion of monologue; the viewer, when looking back, especially sharply notes this slowness, and then the action again drags on, obscured until a new explosion. Thus, in the consciousness of the viewer, two incompatible ideas are always connected: on the one hand, he sees that Hamlet must take revenge, he sees that no internal or external reasons prevent Hamlet from doing this; moreover, the author plays with his impatience, he makes him see with his own eyes when Hamlet's sword is raised over the king and then suddenly, completely unexpectedly, lowered; on the other hand, he sees that Hamlet hesitates, but he does not understand the reasons for this slowness and he constantly sees that the drama develops in some kind of internal contradiction, when a goal is clearly outlined in front of it, and the viewer is clearly aware of those deviations from the path that tragedy commits in its development.

In such a plot structure, we have the right to immediately see our plot form curve. Our plot unfolds in a straight line, and if Hamlet had killed the king immediately after the shadow was revealed, he would have traveled these two points along the shortest distance. But the author acts differently: he constantly forces us with perfect clarity to be aware of the straight line along which the action should have proceeded, so that we could more sharply feel the inclinations and loops that it actually describes.

Thus, here, too, we see that the task of the plot is, as it were, to deviate the plot from the straight path, to force it to take crooked paths, and, perhaps, here, in this very curvature of the development of the action, we will find those necessary for the tragedy. the concatenation of facts for which the play describes its crooked orbit.

In order to understand this, one must again turn to synthesis, to the physiology of tragedy; from the meaning of the whole, one must try to figure out what function this curved line has and why the author, with such exceptional and unique courage, makes tragedy deviate from the straight path.

Let's start at the end, with disaster. Two things here easily catch the eye of a researcher: first, that the main line of the tragedy, as noted above, is here obscured and obscured. The murder of the king takes place in the midst of a general dump, this is only one of four deaths, they all break out suddenly like a tornado a minute before that, the viewer does not expect these events, and the immediate motives that determined the murder of the king are so clearly embedded in the last scene that the viewer forgets that he has finally reached the tone of the point to which his tragedy has been leading all the time and could not bring. As soon as Hamlet learns of the Queen's death, he now cries out:

Betrayal among us! - Who is the culprit?
Find him!
Laertes reveals to Hamlet that these are all tricks of the king. Hamlet exclaims:
How, and a rapier with poison? So go
Poisoned Steel, on purpose!
And, finally, further, serving the king a goblet of poison:
So on, the impostor-murderer!
Swallow your pearl in solution!
Follow your mother!

Nowhere is there a single mention of the father, everywhere all the reasons rest on the incident of the last scene. So the tragedy comes to its end point, but it is hidden from the viewer that this is the point to which we have been striving all the time. However, next to this direct obscuration, it is very easy to reveal another, directly opposite, and we can easily show that the scene of the murder of the king is interpreted precisely in two opposite psychological planes: on the one hand, this death is obscured by a number of immediate causes and other concomitant deaths, with on the other hand, it is singled out from this series of general killings in a way that it seems to have never been done in any other tragedy. It is very easy to show that all other deaths occur as if imperceptibly; the queen dies, and now no one mentions it more, Hamlet only says goodbye to her: "Farewell, unfortunate queen." In the same way, Hamlet's death is somehow obscured, extinguished. Again now, after the mention of Hamlet's death, nothing else is directly said about it. Laertes also dies imperceptibly, and, most importantly, before his death, he exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet. He forgives Hamlet and his father's death, and he himself asks forgiveness for the murder. This sudden, completely unnatural change in the character of Laertes, who was always burning with revenge, is completely unmotivated in the tragedy and most clearly shows us that it is needed only in order to extinguish the impression of these deaths and against this background again highlight the death of the king. This death is highlighted, as I have already said, with the help of a completely exceptional technique, which is difficult to indicate an equal in any tragedy. What is extraordinary about this scene (see Appendix II) is that Hamlet, for no reason at all, kills the king twice - first with a poisoned sword point, then makes him drink poison. What is it for? Of course, in the course of the action, this is not caused by anything, because here before our very eyes both Laertes and Hamlet die only from the action of one poison - the sword. Here a single act - the murder of the king - is, as it were, split in two, as if doubled, emphasized and highlighted in order to make the viewer especially vividly and acutely feel that the tragedy has come to its last point. But maybe this double murder of the king, so methodically incongruous and psychologically unnecessary, has some other plot meaning?

And it is very easy to find it. Let us recall the significance of the whole catastrophe: we come to the end point of the tragedy - to the assassination of the king, whom we have been expecting all the time, starting from the first act, but we come to this point in a completely different way: it arises as a consequence of a completely new plot series, and when we get to this point, we do not immediately realize that this is exactly the point to which the tragedy has been rushing all the time.

Thus, it becomes quite clear to us that at this point two rows, which were constantly diverging before our eyes, converge, two lines of action, and, of course, these two different lines also correspond to a split murder, which, as it were, ends one and the other line. And now the poet again begins to mask this short circuit of two currents in the catastrophe, and in a short afterword of the tragedy, when Horatio, according to the custom of Shakespeare's heroes, briefly retells the entire content of the play, he again conceals this murder of the king and says:

I will publicly tell about everything
What happened. I'll tell you about the scary
Bloody and ruthless deeds
Vicissitudes, murders by mistake
Punished duplicity and by the end -
About the intrigues before the denouement that ruined
The culprits.

And in this common heap of deaths and bloody deeds, the catastrophic point of the tragedy is again blurred and drowned. In the same scene of the catastrophe, we clearly see what tremendous power the artistic shaping of the plot achieves and what effects Shakespeare draws from it. If we look closely at the order of these deaths, we can see how Shakespeare alters their natural order solely in order to turn them into an artistic series. Deaths form a melody, like sounds, in fact, the king dies before Hamlet, and in the plot we have not heard anything about the death of the king, but we already know that Hamlet died and that there is no life in him for half an hour, Hamlet survives everyone, although we know that he died, and although he had been wounded before. All these rearrangements of the main events are caused by only one requirement - the requirement of the desired psychological effect. When we learn about the death of Hamlet, we finally lose all hope that the tragedy will ever reach the point where it wants to. It seems to us that the end of the tragedy has taken exactly the opposite direction, and precisely at the moment when we least expect it, when it seems impossible to us, then this is exactly what happens. And Hamlet, in his last words, directly points to some secret meaning in all these events, when he ends up asking Horatio to retell how it all happened, what caused it all, asks him to convey an external outline of events, which the viewer also retains. and ends: "Further - silence." And for the viewer, the rest really happens in silence, in that remainder unsaid in the tragedy that arises from this amazingly constructed play. New researchers willingly emphasize the purely external complexity of this play, which eluded the previous authors. “Here we see several parallel plot chains: the story of the assassination of Hamlet's father and the vengeance of Hamlet, the story of the death of Polonius and the revenge of Laertes, the story of Ophelia, the story of Fortinbras, the development of episodes with actors, with Hamlet’s trip to England. During the tragedy, the scene changes twenty times. Within each scene, we see rapid changes in themes, characters. The game element abounds ... We have a lot of conversations not on the topic of intrigue ... in general the development of episodes interrupting the action ... "(110, p. 182).

However, it is easy to see that the point here is not at all in thematic diversity, as the author believes, that the interrupting episodes are very closely connected with the main intrigue - both the episode with the actors, and the conversations of the gravediggers, who, in a comic way, again tell about the death of Ophelia, and the murder of Polonius. And all the rest. The plot of the tragedy is revealed before us in its final form as follows: from the very beginning, the entire plot underlying the legend is preserved, and the viewer always has before him a clear skeleton of the action, those norms and paths along which the action developed. But all the time the action deviates from these paths outlined by the plot, strays into other paths, draws a complex curve, and at some high points, in Hamlet's monologues, the reader, as if by explosions, suddenly learns that the tragedy has deviated from the path. And these monologues with self-reproaches in sluggishness have the main purpose that they should make us clearly feel how not what should have been done is being done, and should once again clearly present before our consciousness the final point where the action should still be directed. Each time after such a monologue, we again begin to think that the action will straighten, and so on until a new monologue, which again reveals to us that the action has again been twisted. In fact, the structure of this tragedy can be expressed using one extremely simple formula. Plot formula: Hamlet kills the king to avenge his father's death. Plot formula - Hamlet does not kill the king. If the content of the tragedy, its material tells how Hamlet kills the king in order to avenge his father's death, then the plot of the tragedy shows us how he does not kill the king, and when he does, it does not come out of revenge at all. Thus, the duality of the plot-plot - a clear course of action in two planes, all the time a firm consciousness of the path and deviations from it - an internal contradiction - are laid in the very foundations of this play. It seems that Shakespeare chooses the most suitable events in order to express what he needs, he chooses material that finally rushes to the denouement and makes him painfully avoid it. Here he uses that psychological method, which Petrazhitsky beautifully called the method of teasing the senses and which he wanted to introduce as an experimental method of research. Indeed, tragedy all the time teases our feelings, it promises us the fulfillment of a goal that stands before our eyes from the very beginning, and all the time rejects and diverts us from this goal, straining our striving for this goal and making us painfully feel every step in side. When, finally, the goal is achieved, it turns out that we are led to it in a completely different way, and two different paths, which seemed to us to go in opposite directions and were at odds during the entire development of the tragedy, suddenly converge at one common point, in a split scene killing the king. In the end, what led to murder is that which has always diverted from murder, and the catastrophe thus reaches again the highest point of contradiction, a short circuit of the opposite direction of the two currents. If we add to this that during the entire development of the action it is interrupted by completely irrational material, it becomes clear to us how much the effect of incomprehensibility lay in the very tasks of the author. Let's recall the madness of Ophelia, recall the repeated madness of Hamlet, recall how he fools Polonius and the courtiers, recall the pompously meaningless recitation of the actor, recall the cynicism of Hamlet's conversation with Ophelia, which has not been translated into Russian until now, recall the clownery of the gravediggers - and we will see everywhere and everywhere, that all this material, as in a dream, processes the same events that were just given in the drama, but thickens, intensifies and emphasizes their nonsense, and then we will understand the true purpose and meaning of all these things. These are, as it were, lightning rods of nonsense, which, with ingenious prudence, are placed by the author in the most dangerous places of his tragedy in order to bring the matter somehow to the end and make the improbable possible, because the tragedy of Hamlet itself is incredible as it was constructed by Shakespeare; but the whole task of tragedy, like art, is to make the las experience the incredible, in order to perform some extraordinary operation on our feelings. And for this poets use two interesting methods: firstly, they are lightning rods of nonsense, as we call all these irrational parts of Hamlet. The action develops with ultimate improbability, it threatens to seem ridiculous to us, internal contradictions thicken to the extreme, the divergence of the two lines reaches its climax, it seems that they are about to burst, leave one another, and the action of the tragedy will crack and it will all split - and into these the most dangerous moments suddenly the action thickens and quite openly turns into insane delirium, into repeated madness, into pompous declamation, into cynicism, into open buffoonery. Along with this sheer madness, the play's improbability, as opposed to it, begins to seem plausible and real. Madness is introduced so abundantly into this play in order to save its meaning. Nonsense is rejected, as if by a lightning rod (60), whenever it threatens to break the action, and resolves a catastrophe that must arise every minute. Another technique that Shakespeare uses to force us to put our feelings into an incredible tragedy comes down to the following: Shakespeare allows, as it were, conventionality in a square, introduces a scene on a stage, forces his characters to oppose themselves to actors, the same event gives twice , first as real, then as played out by the actors, doubles its action and its fictitious, fictional part, the second convention, obscures and hides the improbability of the first plan.

Let's take the simplest example. The actor recites his pathetic monologue about Pyrrhus, the actor cries, but Hamlet now in the monologue emphasizes that these are only the actor's tears, that he is crying because of Hecuba, to whom he has nothing to do, that these tears and passions are only fictitious. And when he opposes his passion to this fictitious passion of the actor, it seems to us not fictitious, but real, and we are transferred into it with extraordinary force. Or the same method of dividing the action and introducing a fictitious action into it in the famous scene with the "mousetrap" is just as precisely applied. The king and queen on the stage depict a fictitious picture of the murder of their husband, and the king and queen - the audience is horrified by this fictitious image. And this bifurcation of the two plans, the opposition of actors and spectators, makes us, with extraordinary seriousness and strength, feel the king's embarrassment as real. The improbability underlying the tragedy has been saved because it is surrounded on two sides by reliable guards: on the one hand, a lightning rod of outright delirium, next to which the tragedy acquires a visible meaning; on the other hand, a lightning rod of outright fictitiousness, acting, a second convention, next to which the foreground seems real. It resembles as if the picture was an image of another picture. But not only this contradiction lies at the heart of our tragedy, it also contains something else that is no less important for its artistic effect. This second contradiction lies in the fact that the characters chosen by Shakespeare somehow do not correspond to the course of actions that he outlined, and Shakespeare, with his play, gives a clear refutation of the general prejudice that the characters of the characters should determine the actions and actions of the heroes. But it would seem that if Shakespeare wants to portray a murder that cannot take place in any way, he must act either according to Werder's recipe, that is, to surround the execution of the task with the most complex external obstacles in order to block the path of his hero, or he must would follow Goethe's recipe and show that the task entrusted to the hero exceeds his strength, that the impossible, incompatible with his nature, titanic is demanded of him. Finally, the author had a third way out - he could follow Berne's prescription and portray Hamlet himself as a powerless, cowardly and tearful person. But the author not only did neither one, nor the other, nor the third, but in all three respects went in the opposite direction: he removed all objective obstacles from the path of his hero; in the tragedy it is absolutely not shown what prevents Hamlet from killing the king immediately after the words of the shadow, further, he demanded from Hamlet the most feasible task of murder for him, because during the play Hamlet becomes a murderer three times in completely episodic and random scenes. Finally, he portrayed Hamlet as a man of exceptional energy and tremendous strength and chose a hero for himself, the exact opposite of the one who would answer his storyline.

That is why the critics had to, in order to save the situation, make the indicated adjustments and either adapt the plot to the hero, or adapt the hero to the plot, because they always proceeded from the false belief that there should be a direct relationship between the hero and the plot, that the plot is derived from the character of the heroes, as the characters of the heroes are understood from the plot.

But all this is graphically refuted by Shakespeare. He proceeds precisely from the opposite, namely from the complete discrepancy between the heroes and the plot, from the fundamental contradiction of character and events. And for us, already familiar with the fact that the plot design also proceeds from a contradiction with the plot, it is not difficult to find and understand the meaning of this contradiction arising in the tragedy. The fact is that according to the very structure of the drama, in addition to the natural sequence of events, another unity arises in it, this is the unity of the character or hero. Below we will have the opportunity to show how the concept of the character of the hero develops, but even now we can assume that a poet who plays all the time on the internal contradiction between the plot and the plot can very easily use this second contradiction - between the character of his hero and between development of action. Psychoanalysts are quite right when they argue that the essence of the psychological impact of tragedy lies in the fact that we identify with the hero. It is quite true that the hero is the point in the tragedy, from which the author forces us to consider all the other characters and all the events that take place. It is this point that brings together our attention, it serves as a fulcrum for our feelings, which would otherwise be lost, infinitely deviating in their assessments, In their worries for each character. If we had the same assessment of the king's excitement, and Hamlet's excitement, and the hopes of Polonius, and the hopes of Hamlet, our feeling would get lost in these constant fluctuations, and the same event would appear to us in completely opposite senses. But tragedy acts differently: it gives our feeling unity, makes it accompany the hero all the time and through the hero to perceive everything else. It is enough to look only at any tragedy, in particular at Hamlet, in order to see that all the faces in this tragedy are depicted as Hamlet sees them. All events are refracted through the prism of his soul, and thus the author contemplates the tragedy in two ways: on the one hand, he sees everything through the eyes of Hamlet, and on the other hand, he sees Hamlet himself with his own eyes, so that every spectator of the tragedy immediately Hamlet and his beholder. From this it becomes completely clear that huge role that falls on the character in general and on the hero in particular in the tragedy. We have here a completely new psychological plan, and if in a fable we open two directions within the same action, in a short story - one plot plan and another plot plane, then in tragedy we notice another new plan: we perceive the events of the tragedy, its material, then we perceive the plot design of this material and, finally, third, we perceive another plane - the psyche and experiences of the hero. And since all these three plans ultimately refer to the same facts, but only taken in three different respects, it is natural that there must be an internal contradiction between these plans, if only in order to outline the divergence of these plans. To understand how a tragic character is built, one can use an analogy, and we see this analogy in the psychological theory of the portrait that Christiansen put forward: for him, the problem of the portrait lies first of all in the question of how the portraitist conveys life in the picture, how he makes the face live in a portrait and how he achieves the effect that is inherent only in a portrait, namely that he depicts a living person. Indeed, if we begin to look for the difference between a portrait and a painting, we will never find it in any external formal and material features. We know that a painting can depict one person and several faces can be depicted in a portrait, a portrait can include both landscapes and still life, and we will never find the difference between a painting and a portrait, if we do not take that life as a basis that distinguishes every portrait. Christiansen takes as the starting point of his research the fact that “inanimateness is interconnected with spatial dimensions. The size of the portrait increases not only the fullness of his life, but also the decisiveness of its manifestations, above all the calmness of her gait. Portrait painters know from experience that a larger head speaks easier ”(124, p. 283).

This leads to the fact that our eye is detached from one specific point from which it examines the portrait, that the portrait loses its compositional fixed center, that the eye wanders back and forth in the portrait, “from eye to mouth, from one eye to another and to all the moments that include the facial expression ”(124, p. 284).

From various points of the picture, at which the eye stops, it absorbs a different facial expression, a different mood, and from here arises that life, that movement, that successive change of unequal states, which, in contrast to the numbness of immobility, constitutes the distinguishing feature of the portrait. The picture is always in the form in which it was created, the portrait is constantly changing, and hence his life. Christiansen formulated the psychological life of a portrait in the following formula: “This is a physiognomic discrepancy between different factors of facial expression.

It is possible, of course, and, it seems, arguing abstractly, it is even much more natural to make the same emotional mood reflected in the corners of the mouth, in the eyes and in the rest of the face ... Then the portrait would sound in one single tone ... But it would be like a thing sounding, devoid of life. That is why the artist differentiates the emotional expression and gives one eye a slightly different expression than the other, and in turn another to the folds of the mouth and so on everywhere. But simple differences are not enough, they must relate harmoniously to each other ... The main melodic motive of the face is given by the relationship of the mouth and the eye to each other: the mouth speaks, the eye responds, excitement and willpower are concentrated in the folds of the mouth, the resolving calmness of the intellect dominates in the eyes ... The mouth gives out instincts and everything that a person wants to achieve; the eye opens what it has become in a real victory or in a tired resignation ... ”(124, pp. 284-285).

In this theory, Christiansen interprets the portrait as a drama. The portrait conveys to us not just a face and the mental expression frozen in it, but something much more: it conveys to us a change of emotional moods, the whole story of the soul, its life. We think that the viewer approaches the problem of the nature of the tragedy in a completely analogous way. Character in the exact sense of the word can only be sustained in an epic, like spiritual life in a portrait. As for the nature of the tragedy, in order for it to live, it must be composed of contradictory features, it must transfer us from one spiritual movement to another. Just as in a portrait the physiognomic discrepancy between different factors of facial expression is the basis of our experience, in tragedy the psychological discrepancy between different factors of character expression is the basis of a tragic feeling. Tragedy can have incredible effects on our feelings precisely because it makes them constantly turn into opposites, deceive in their expectations, run into contradictions, split in two; and when we experience "Hamlet", it seems to us that we have experienced thousands of human lives in one evening, and, for sure, we managed to experience more than in whole years of our ordinary life. And when we, together with the hero, begin to feel that he no longer belongs to himself, that he is not doing what he should have done, then it is precisely the tragedy that takes effect. Hamlet expresses this wonderfully when, in a letter to Ophelia, he swears eternal love to her as long as "this machine" belongs to him. Russian translators usually convey the word "machine" with the word "body", not realizing that this word is the very essence of the tragedy. Goncharov was deeply right when he said that Hamlet's tragedy is that he is not a machine, but a man.

In fact, together with the tragic hero, we begin to feel ourselves in tragedy as a machine of feelings, which is directed by the tragedy itself, which therefore acquires a very special and exclusive power over us.

We come to some conclusions. We can now formulate what we have found as a threefold contradiction underlying the tragedy: contradictory plot and plot and characters. Each of these elements is directed, as it were, in completely different directions, and for us it is completely clear that the new moment introduced by tragedy is the following: already in the novel we dealt with a split in plans, we simultaneously experienced events in two opposite directions: one, which gave him the plot, and the other, which they acquired in the plot. These two opposite planes are preserved in the tragedy, and we pointed out all the time that, reading Hamlet, we move our feelings in two planes: on the one hand, we are more and more clearly aware of the goal towards which the tragedy is heading, on the other hand, we can see just as clearly how far it deviates from this goal. What does the tragic hero bring new? It is quite obvious that he unites both of these planes at any given moment and that he is the highest and constantly given unity of the contradiction that lies in the tragedy. We have already pointed out that the whole tragedy is being built all the time from the point of view of the hero, and this means that he is that force that unites two opposite currents, which all the time collects into one experience, attributing both opposite feelings to the hero. Thus, the two opposite planes of tragedy are always felt by us as a unity, since they are united in the tragic hero with whom we identify ourselves. And that simple duality, which we found already in the story, is replaced in the tragedy by an immeasurably sharper and higher order of duality, which arises from the fact that, on the one hand, we see the whole tragedy through the eyes of the hero, and on the other, we see the hero with our own eyes. ... That this is really so and that, in particular, this is how Hamlet should be understood, we are convinced by the synthesis of the scene of the catastrophe, the analysis of which we presented earlier. We showed that at this point two plans of tragedy converge, two lines of its development, which, as it seemed to us, were taken in completely opposite directions, and this unexpected coincidence of them suddenly refracts the whole tragedy in a very special way and presents all the events that have taken place in a completely different form. ... The viewer is deceived. All that he considered deviating from the path led him exactly where he was striving all the time, and when he got to the final point, he is not aware of it as the goal of his journey. The contradictions not only converged, but also changed their roles - and this catastrophic exposure of contradictions unites for the viewer in the experience of the hero, because in the end only these experiences he accepts as his own. And the viewer does not feel satisfaction and relief from the murder of the king, his feelings strained in the tragedy do not suddenly receive a simple and flat resolution. The king is killed, and now the viewer's attention, like lightning, is transferred to the future, to the death of the hero himself, and in this new death the viewer feels and experiences all those difficult contradictions that tore apart his consciousness and unconsciousness during all the time he was contemplating the tragedy.

And when the tragedy - both in the last words of Hamlet and in the speech of Horatio - as if again describes its circle, the viewer quite clearly feels the split on which it is built. Horatio's story brings his thought back to the external plane of the tragedy, to her "words, words, words." The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence.

Why is the image of Hamlet an eternal image? There are many reasons, and at the same time, each separately or all together, in a harmonious and harmonious unity, they cannot give an exhaustive answer. Why? Because no matter how hard we try, no matter what research we do, we are not subject to "this great secret" - the secret of Shakespeare's genius, the secret of the creative act, when one work, one image becomes eternal, and the other disappears, dissolves into nothingness, so and without touching our soul. And yet, the image of Hamlet beckons, haunts ...

W. Shakespeare, "Hamlet": the history of creation

Before embarking on a fascinating journey deep into the soul of Hamlet, let us recall the summary and history of the writing of the great tragedy. The plot of the work is based on real events described by Saxon Grammaticus in the book "History of the Danes". A certain Horvendil, a wealthy ruler of Jutland, was married to Geruta, had a son, Amlet, and a brother, Fengo. The latter was jealous of his wealth, courage and fame, and once, in front of all the courtiers, he cruelly dealt with his brother, and subsequently married his widow. Amlet did not submit to the new ruler and, in spite of everything, decided to take revenge on him. He pretended to be crazy and killed him. After a while Amlet himself was killed by his other uncle ... Look - the similarity is obvious!

The time of the action, the place, the action itself and all the participants in the unfolding events - there are many parallels, however, the problematics of Shakespeare's tragedy does not fit into the concept of "the tragedy of revenge" and goes far beyond its limits. Why? The thing is that the main characters of the Shakespearean drama, led by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, are ambiguous in nature, and differ significantly from the solid heroes of the Middle Ages. In those days, it was not customary to think a lot, reason, and even more so, to doubt the accepted laws and ancient traditions. For example, it was considered not evil, but a form of restoring justice. But in the image of Hamlet we see a different interpretation of the motive of revenge. This is the main distinguishing feature of the play, the starting point of all that unique and amazing that is in the tragedy, and that has been haunted for several centuries.

Elsinore is the majestic kings. Every night the night watch watches the appearance of the Ghost, and informs Horatio - Hamlet's friend. This is the ghost of the late father of a Danish prince. In the "dead hour of the night" he confides to Hamlet his main secret - he did not die a natural death, but was treacherously killed by his brother Claudius, who took his place - the throne and married the widow - Queen Gertrude.

The inconsolable soul of the murdered man demands revenge from his son, but Hamlet, perplexed and stunned by everything he heard, is in no hurry to act: what if the ghost is not a father at all, but a messenger of hell? He needs time to be convinced of the truth of the secret told to him, and he pretends to be crazy. The death of the king, who in the eyes of Hamlet was not only a father, but also an ideal of man, then the hasty, despite the mourning, wedding of the mother and uncle, the story of the Phantom - these are the first lightning flashes of the imperfection of the world coming to light, this is the beginning of the tragedy. After her, the plot develops rapidly, and with it the main character himself changes dramatically. In two months he turns from an enthusiastic youth into an indifferent, melancholic "old man." This is where the topic “V. Shakespeare, "Hamlet", the image of Hamlet "does not end.

Treachery and betrayal

Claudius is suspicious of Hamlet's illness. To check whether the nephew is in fact suddenly lost his mind, he conspires with Polonius, the loyal courtier of the newly made king. They decide to use the unsuspecting Ophelia, Hamlet's beloved. For the same purpose, the old loyal friends of the prince, Rosencrantz and Guildensten, are summoned to the castle, who turn out to be not so loyal, and readily agree to help Claudius.

Mousetrap

A theater troupe arrives in Elsinore. Hamlet persuades them to put on a play in front of the king and queen, the plot of which exactly conveys the story of the Ghost. During the performance, he sees fear and confusion on Claudius's face, and is convinced of his guilt. Well, the crime has been solved - it's time to act. But Hamlet is in no hurry again. “Denmark is a prison”, “time is dislocated”, evil and betrayal reveal themselves not only in the murder of the king by their own brother, they are everywhere, from now on this is a normal state of the world. The era of ideal people is long gone. Against this background, blood feud loses its original meaning, ceases to be a form of "rehabilitation" of justice, because, in essence, it does not change anything.

Path of evil

Hamlet finds himself at a crossroads: “To be or not to be? - that's the question". What's the use of revenge, it is empty and meaningless. But even without a quick reckoning for the evil done, it is impossible to live on. It is a debt of honor. Hamlet's internal conflict leads not only to his own suffering, to his endless arguments about the futility of life, to thoughts of suicide, but, like boiling water in a sealed vessel, seethes and pours out into a whole series of deaths. The prince is directly or indirectly guilty of these murders. He kills Polonius, who overhears his conversation with his mother, mistaking him for Claudius. On the way to England, where Hamlet was to be executed, he replaces a letter defaming him on board the ship, and his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenster, were put to death instead. In Elsinore, Ophelia, mad with grief, dies. Laertes, Ophelia's brother, decides to avenge his father and sister, and challenges Hamlet to a court duel. The tip of his sword is poisoned by Claudius. During the duel, Gertrude dies, having tasted the poisoned wine from a cup actually intended for Hamlet. As a result, Laertes, Claudius is killed, and Hamlet himself perishes ... From now on, the Danish kingdom is under the rule of the Norwegian king Fortinbras.

The image of Hamlet in tragedy

The image of Hamlet appears just when the Renaissance is approaching its decline. At the same time, other, no less vivid, “eternal images” appeared - Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan. So what's the secret to their durability? First of all, they are ambiguous and multifaceted. Each of them contains great passions, which, under the influence of certain events, sharpen to an extreme degree this and that character trait. For example, Don Quixote's extreme lies in his idealism. The image of Hamlet, one might say, brought to life, one might say, the last, extreme degree of introspection, self-examination, which does not push him to a quick decision, to decisive action, does not force him to change his life, but on the contrary - paralyzes. On the one hand, events are dizzily replacing each other, and Hamlet is a direct participant in them, the main character. But on the one hand, this is what lies on the surface. And on the other? - He is not the "director", he is not the main manager of the whole action, he is just a "puppet". He kills Polonius, Laertes, Claudius, becomes the culprit for the death of Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildensten, but all this happens by the will of fate, by tragic accident, by mistake.

Exodus of the Renaissance

However, again not everything is so simple and unambiguous. Yes, the reader gets the impression that the image of Hamlet in Shakespeare's tragedy is full of indecision, inactivity and weakness. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Under the impenetrable thickness of the water lies something else - a sharp mind, an amazing ability to look at the world and oneself from the outside, the desire to get to the very essence, and, in the end, to see the truth, no matter what. Hamlet is a real hero of the Renaissance, great and strong, who puts spiritual and moral self-improvement in the first place, glorifying beauty and boundless freedom. However, it is not his fault that the ideology of the Renaissance at its later stage is experiencing a crisis, against the background of which he is forced to live and act. He comes to the conclusion that everything he believed in and what he lived is just an illusion. The labor of revising and reassessing humanistic values \u200b\u200bturns into disappointment, and as a result ends in tragedy.

Different approaches

We continue the topic of what is the characteristic of Hamlet. So what is the root of the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? At different times, the image of Hamlet was perceived and interpreted in different ways. For example, Johann Wilhelm Goethe, a passionate admirer of Shakespeare's talent, considered Hamlet a beautiful, noble and highly moral being, and his death comes from the burden imposed on him by fate, which he could neither bear nor throw off.

The famous S. T. Coldridge draws our attention to the complete lack of will of the prince. All the events taking place in the tragedy, no doubt, should have caused an unprecedented surge of emotions, and subsequently an increase in activity and decisiveness of actions. It could not be otherwise. But what do we see? Thirsty for revenge? Instant execution of the plan? Nothing of the kind, on the contrary - endless doubts and senseless and unjustified philosophical reflections. And here it is not a lack of courage. It's just the only thing he can do.

He attributed the weakness of will to Hamlet and But, in the opinion of the outstanding literary critic, it is not his natural quality, but rather a conditional one, conditioned by the situation. It comes from a spiritual split, when life, circumstances dictate one thing, and inner convictions, values \u200b\u200band spiritual abilities and capabilities - another, absolutely opposite.

W. Shakespeare, "Hamlet", the image of Hamlet: conclusion

As you can see, how many people - so many opinions. The eternal image of Hamlet is surprisingly multifaceted. We can say, a whole picture gallery of mutually exclusive portraits of Hamlet: a mystic, an egoist, a victim of the Oedipus complex, a brave hero, an outstanding philosopher, a misogynist, the highest embodiment of the ideals of humanism, a melancholic, not adapted to anything ... Is there an end to this? More likely no than yes. As the expansion of the Universe will continue indefinitely, so the image of Hamlet in Shakespeare's tragedy will excite people forever. He long ago broke away from the text itself, left the narrow framework of the play, and became that “absolute”, “supertype” that has the right to exist outside of time.

In the twentieth century, V. Vysotsky, E. Mironov played on the Russian stage of Hamlet, he was filmed, G. Kozintsev, this role was played in cinema, I. Smoktunovsky. The tragedy was staged either in costumes from the Victorian era, or wearing miniskirts and bell-bottoms, or completely undressing; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern took the form of rock and roll stars, Hamlet portrayed a pathological idiot, and Ophelia turned from a nymph into a nymphomaniac. They made Shakespeare now a Freudian, now an existentialist, now a homosexual, but all these "formalistic" tricks, fortunately, have not led to anything particularly outstanding so far.

A notable page in the "Russian Hamletian" was the performance of the Moscow Art Theater (1911), staged by E.G. Craig, is the first experience of joint work of Russian actors and an English director, while actors and a director of diametrically opposed theatrical preferences and directions. The role of Hamlet was played by V. I. Kachalov. Elegichesky V.I. Katchalov, it seems, did not in any way resemble his boiling forerunner, and nevertheless, in principle, he also experienced the same dissolution in Hamlet. And not just Kachalov, but the entire play, Shakespeare and the audience: the world through the eyes of not Shakespeare, but Hamlet.

E.G. Craig was the forerunner of symbolism in the performing arts. He replaces the vital concreteness of Shakespeare's conflicts and images with abstractions of a mystical nature. So, in "Hamlet" he sees the idea of \u200b\u200bthe struggle between spirit and matter. The psychology of heroes does not interest him. The living environment also does not matter in his eyes. Being a gifted artist, he creates conditional decorations and frees the characters from everything that could make them people of a certain era. True, the practical implementation of his concepts E.G. Craig achieved only a minimal degree, but the ideas put forward by him had a significant impact on the development of decadent trends in the theater. The production of "Hamlet" at the Moscow Art Theater in 1911 only partially expressed his intention, which consisted in affirming the idea of \u200b\u200bhuman weakness. The views of E.G. Craig came into conflict with the ideological and artistic positions of K.S. Stanislavsky and the theater directed by him.

The history of relations between K.K. Stanislavsky with Shakespeare was extremely difficult. The progressive experiments of the Moscow Art Theater were based on the then fashionable realistic drama and the "romantic tragedy" did not correspond to the image of the theater. But, in the end, Hamlet performed by Katchalov demonstrated to the public the helplessness of the individual in an atmosphere of triumph for the forces of reaction.

V.E. Meyerhold, plotting the production of Hamlet, thought to return to the forms of areal performance, although it was in Hamlet that Shakespeare outlined his disagreements with the public theater and expressed confidence in the court of a connoisseur, a loner?

A comedy from the tragedy "Hamlet" in the 30s. made by N.P. Akimov, who, while working on Hamlet, returned with justified decisiveness in his time to a whole series of questions, the answers to which required updating. What does “humanism” mean when applied to Hamlet and the Shakespearean era (“does not at all coincide with the trivial humanity of liberals”)? He was also right when, looking at the history of the productions of Hamlet in the last century, he concluded that the 19th century, in many ways, however invariably, repeated the same romantic alignment of forces in the interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy: “the king is evil; the spirit of Hamlet's father is the eternal beginning of good ”, especially since“ Hamlet himself personified the nocturnal idea of \u200b\u200bgood ”. In short, the essence of the romantic understanding of Hamlet is contained in the words - "the best of people" It is significant that these words, which, like grace, become an integral characteristic of Hamlet, are attributed by Shakespeare to a completely different character. It is possible that Hamlet is very good, that he is an exceptional and outstanding personality, but the type is not at all the same as the definition of "the best of people" suggests. As “graceful and gentle” in Shakespeare is not Hamlet, but Fortinbras, so “the best of people” is not Hamlet, but Horatio. Vakhtangov, inspired by N.P. Akimov, confined himself, however, to the fact that the high definition that was affirmed for Hamlet was turned inside out, and Hamlet became no better, no worse than others, he became the same as everyone around him. But to alter, to turn it upside down is not a revision in essence.

N.P. Akimov emphasizes that the works of E. Rotterdam were reference books for all educated people of Shakespeare's time, and this is another point, especially important for the director: the time and place of his performance is extremely concretized - England of the Elizabethan era. So, if we level out the philosophical layer of the tragedy, then the only line remains - the struggle for the throne. The usurper is on the throne. Therefore, the main goal of the heir is to take back what belongs to him by right. This is how Akimov formulated the theme of his production. He conceived "Hamlet" as a vivid show with tense, never stopping action, instant changes of scenery, with tricks and buffoonery. “Nothing can be done - it turns out to be a comedy!”, - N.P. Akimov at the presentation of the exposition of the future performance to the actors.

Later N.P. Akimov admits: “At that time, until the Resolution of April 23, 1932, which coincided with the dress rehearsals of my production of Hamlet, when I could no longer revise and change the foundations of my staging plan, we still did not have our present reverence for the classics ".

"He is obese, and suffers from shortness of breath ..." According to N.P. Akimov, this remark of Queen Gertrude prompted the director to think of assigning A.I. Goryunov, a great comedian, an improviser, a fat joker. The Akimov sketch of a Hamlet costume depicts A.I. Goryunov. Similar and not alike. Even strange: N.P. Akimov, a wonderful portrait painter, who always knew how to grasp the main character trait of a person, to embody it in a drawing, and with A.I. Goryunov did not work. Everything is spoiled by a heavy strong-willed chin.

A number of facts indicate that the execution of A.I. Goryunov, his role was markedly different from what the director originally intended. Akimov wanted to see Hamlet assertive, even a little boorish, cynical, impudent, angry. Goryunov's charming infantilism confused all the cards. He couldn't be really angry. Funny - yes, defenseless - yes. The only moment when A.I. Goryunov managed to create a feeling of something ominous in the viewer, was at the very beginning of the performance.

But most of all, Akimov got from the critics for the "blasphemous" interpretation of this very image. "The function of this girl in the play is that she is the third spy assigned to Hamlet: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern - and Ophelia." The director's position is formulated very clearly and clearly. Actress V. Vagrina was perhaps the most "scandalous" Ophelia in the history of theater. There was no talk of any love between Hamlet and Polonius' daughter in the Vakhtangov performance. The marriage with the prince was of interest to Ophelia only as an opportunity to become a member of the royal family - she strove for this ambitious goal, regardless of anything: she spied, eavesdropped, spied on, reported. And she was extremely offended and upset when she realized that her dream could not come true. She was so upset that at the royal ball she got drunk and bawled obscene songs - this is how Akimov solved the scene of Ophelia's madness. “I was somewhat irritated by this unconvincing insanity, which fits entirely into the old stage tradition, but falls out of our stage tradition.<…> I changed the ending of Ophelia's role: she leads a frivolous life, as a result of which she drowns in a drunken state. This affects our attention much less than if we think that she has gone mad, and even drowned. "

The famous interpretation by Akimov of the scene "The Mousetrap", where the comic is brought to such a grotesque level that King Claudius becomes the central character, has been described many times. At the performance of the wandering actors, he came in another new outfit, the main detail of which was the longest red train. Claudius gravely took his place, but as soon as the actor portraying the king injected poison into the ear of the sleeping Gonzago, Hamlet's uncle would quickly jump out of his chair and run away, one might say, fleeing behind the scenes. And behind him, fluttering, stretched an infinitely long red - bloody - train.

Another resonant scene from Akimov's performance is Hamlet's famous monologue "To be or not to be?" In a tavern, lined with wine barrels, barely moving his tongue, the prince pondered whether or not he should be a king, putting on or taking off the fake cardboard crown left by the actors after the rehearsal, and the drunken Horatio enthusiastically assented to his friend.

According to N.P. Akimova Hamlet is a humanist, which means that he should have an office for academic studies. In Hamlet's library, in addition to books, maps, a globe, there was a human skeleton with a playfully raised bony hand. (Akimov planned to put another horse skeleton, but as in the case of the piglet, this intention was not realized).

As we can see, there was quite a lot of "black humor" in the performance. The murder of Polonius was followed by an episode in the spirit of a stunt western with comic pursuits. Taking up the corpse of Polonius, Hamlet walked him along the numerous staircases of the castle, escaping from the palace guards. And even the fight was a half-clowning, half-guignol. The place of the duel, made like a ring, was surrounded by a crowd of spectators: live actors interspersed with dolls: this was found out when the guards began to disperse the crowd at the signal of Claudius (after Gertrude was poisoned). Hamlet and Laertes fought in fencing masks, and Laertes's mask resembled a jackal. Goryunov was an unimportant swordsman, but one can guess with what infectious ardor he brandished his sword.

The last scene of the play by N.P. Akimov worked out especially carefully. Fortinbras rode on horseback directly to the platform on which the duel took place. He spoke his monologue without leaving the saddle. In the finale of this cheerful performance, tragic notes suddenly sounded. While Fortinbras watched the removal of the corpses, a grief-stricken Horatio, bending over the body of Hamlet, read the poems of Erasmus of Rotterdam:

“He talked about clouds, about ideas,

He measured the joints of a flea,

He admired the mosquito singing ...

But I didn't know what was important for ordinary life ... "

The last remark in the play was a quote from Ulrich Von Gutten: "What a joy to live ...". Horatio pronounced this phrase in a grave-mournful voice, emphasizing with bitter sarcasm the difference between meaning and intonation.

Thus, if in the 1930s and 1940s there was a tendency to reinterpret Shakespeare by showing Hamlet a strong man who knew almost no doubts (V. Dudnikov, Leningrad, 1936; A. Polyakov, Voronezh, 1941), then the performances of the 1950s mark the revival of the complexity and duality of the character of the hero, his hesitations and doubts, and Hamlet, without losing the features of a fighter for justice, is increasingly revealed as a person who faced the tragedy of life, which was a characteristic feature of the productions of G. Kozintsev and N. Okhlopkov. In contrast, the performance of Hamlet by M. Astangov (theater named after Yev. Vakhtangov, director B. Zakhava, 1958) was marked by somewhat cold didacticism, because in his interpretation Hamlet appeared as a person who knew the answers to all the "damned questions" in advance.

G. Kozintsev in "Hamlet" follows a fundamentally different path: he preserves all the plot lines, all the main characters, but boldly (although not at all mercilessly) truncates even monologues and remarks that are very important for the meaning of the tragedy, removes from them everything descriptive, everything that can be visualized on the screen.

This approach was already outlined during the period of work on the theatrical production of Hamlet. B. Pasternak, the author of the translation used by the director, gave the most radical recommendations in this regard: “Cut, cut and reshape as much as you like. The more you throw out of the text, the better. Half of the dramatic text of any play, the most immortal, classical and brilliant, I always look at as a common remark written by the author in order to introduce the performers as deeply as possible into the essence of the action being played out. As soon as the theater has penetrated into the idea and mastered it, it is possible and necessary to sacrifice the brightest and most profound remarks (not to mention the indifferent and pale), if the actor has achieved a playful, mimic, silent or laconic correspondence with them in this place of the drama, equivalent in talent. this link in its development. In general, dispose of the text with complete freedom, this is your right ... ".

G. Kozintsev accepted these advice, but, so to speak, for the future - for the screen: “In cinema, with its power of visual images, one could risk reaching an" equivalent ". The word dominates on the stage ... ”.

Continuing the same train of thought, the image dominates the screen. This means that in order for Shakespeare to be perceived cinematically, his poetry must be translated into the visual range. That is why, filming Hamlet, G. Kozintsev deliberately proses the language of the tragedy - in this, Pasternak is his ally, whose translation, as close as possible to modern colloquial speech, he uses. The same is achieved by reducing the pieces of poetically beautiful, metaphorically figurative. But poetry does not disappear, it does not depreciate. It is preserved, but not in the word, but in the plastic - both the actor's and the one that is created by the visible images of the screen.

Known problems of staging "Hamlet" G. Kozintsev, where a conflict situation was created with the leading actor I. Smoktunovsky, who presented his hero as completely different (in other words, within the framework of a different thesaurus). Kozintsev, according to Smoktunovsky, literally forced him to adhere to the director's intention.

Thoughts about man and humanity, about the uprising against the despotism of the century, which worried the director, were not just uttered from the screen by actors speaking Shakespeare's texts, they permeate every cell of the film. It has been written more than once about the meaningful fullness of Kozintsev's stone and iron, fire and air. The fact that Denmark is a prison will be revealed to us not only by the words of Hamlet, but also by the very image of Elsinore, the lifeless stone of the walls, the creaky sharp-toothed grilles descending on the gates, the cold steel of helmets hiding the faces of the soldiers guarding the castle. And the Danish prince who rebelled against this world will be accompanied by fire throughout the film - rebellious, rebellious, flashing like truth in the darkness of lies.

"Hamlet" by Yu.P. Lyubimov at the famous Taganka, where V.S. Vysotsky. As the director Yu.P. In general, Lyubimov has a sharp plastic solution to the image of the performance as a whole, therefore, this time, in collaboration with the artist D. Borovsky, he determined, first of all, the visual dominant of the performance. But today it is not a pendulum from Rush Hour, not an amphitheater of a university auditorium from What Is to Be Done ?, or cubes from Listen! But a wall separating everyone and everything in the Danish kingdom.

In this performance, the director and the actors were not tempted by the lightweight external modernization and rightly passed both Hamlets in tailcoats and bearded men in faded jeans - and yet such princes were tried to show us in a foreign theater, claiming to bring Shakespeare's tragedy closer to our days. Hamlet Vysotsky is not a weak-willed dreamer, split between the dictates of conscience and duty, and not an adventurer striving for mastering the crown, not an exalted mystic and not an intellectual, lost in the labyrinths of Freudian "complexes", but a man of our era, a young man who is aware of his historical duty to fight for the basic values \u200b\u200bof human existence and therefore openly entering the battle for humanistic ideals.

Vysotsky's Hamlet is the most democratic of all that were played in the twentieth century, and this is also a sign of the century, because blue blood no longer serves as a guarantee of grace and nobility and a hero today can easily be imagined not only with a sword, but also with a hockey stick or crowbar rock climber.

The last production of "Hamlet" on the national stage was the work of the German director P. Stein. P. Stein simply tells the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Tells for those who first encounter Shakespeare's play in its full version. He tells how the Ghost of his murdered father appears, how he pushes his son to revenge, how Hamlet the Younger prepares to carry out his plan, how Claudius resists and tries to get rid of his persistent stepson, how at the end almost all the heroes die, and a close-minded man arrives in Denmark in a tank, but a strong soldier Fortinbras.

One gets the impression that P. Stein reads Shakespeare's play as a "well-told story", the performance does not at all aim to find something new in Hamlet. In general, both new "Hamlets" are interesting because, it seems, all these moves have already been somewhere somewhere. Hamlet performed by E. Mironov is an ordinary young man who really does not feel well: after all, his father died recently, his mother immediately married an unloved uncle, then the Ghost of his murdered father would appear, offering revenge. There is little joyful, but Hamlet Mironova is not at all moping, he reflects, but these are not some lofty philosophical problems, this is an ordinary course of thought of a young man who learns such news, sometimes even tries on suicide, often peering carefully at the veins on his arm.

Hamlet Sr. (M. Kozakov) is an ethereal shadow. A white figure walks along Elsinore, the face is not visible, the steps are not heard, the voice echoes, Marcellus and Bernardo jump through him, Gertrude is really unable to see the ghost.

P. Stein's characters are prosperous people, dressed by Tom Climb, watching The Mousetrap in elegant glasses, quietly knocking a silver spoon on a porcelain cup, silently unrolling candy wrappers and handing them out to the servants-bodyguards, and young people are not far behind them. Only Hamlet and Horatio are busy with the idea of \u200b\u200bexposing the king, Ophelia and Laertes prefer such a life.

Thus, the twentieth century brought new incarnations of the image of Hamlet not only in the theater, but also in the cinema. The images of the Prince of Denmark, created by P. Kachalov, I. Smoktunovsky, V. Vysotsky and other actors, showed how different Hamlet can be in different interpretations at different stages of the twentieth century.

So, even though more than four hundred years have passed since the first staging of Hamlet, this tragedy does not leave the minds of directors and actors all over the world. The image of Hamlet changed not only from the historical era, but also from the country in which the production of “Hamlet” takes place, who plays the role. A huge role in the embodiment of the image of Hamlet was played by the translations, on the basis of which the play was staged. If in England the image was created as a tragic one, then in Germany Hamlet is a lazy and boring hero who is incapable of action. In Russia, Hamlet was so different depending on the era and translation that each production of the play is a new hero and a new drama.

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1. New!

   The whole life of Hamlet passed before us. Although the tragedy spans several months, it was a period of the real transformation of the hero from a boy who never faced the everyday blackness of life, into a thinker, a philosopher, ready for the actions of a young man. Several...

At the very beginning of the new century, Shakespeare began work on a new play - the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. An old legend about a prince who pretends to be insane in order to hide his plan of revenge for the murder of his father was quoted in the historical chronicle ...

2. New!

   Each generation for four centuries has experienced differently the tragedy of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", written in 1601. Each one reveals the secret hidden in the tragedy in his own way. Hamlet? .. Do we understand the meaning of this name? - it is great and deep: ...

3. New!

   The legend of Hamlet was first recorded at the end of the 11th century by the Danish historian Samson Grammatik in his collection of legends and chronicles called The History of Denmark. This legend says that during the times of paganism, one of the rulers of Jutland was killed at a feast by his brother ...

The most famous play "Hamlet. Prince of Denmark" is a great philosophical tragedy.

The most attractive thing about her is the image of the main character.

Shakespeare is the son of a small merchant from the town of Strathord. From the age of 14 he began to help his father in his affairs, at the age of 18 he got married. Then he went to London and became an actor. He played on stage until he was 40, then returned to his hometown and was buried there at 52. In the eyes of a contemporary, he was nobody, because the acting profession was not held in high esteem at that time.

Brilliant self-taught.

Shakespeare's time is humanism, where the person stands in the center.

100 years after his death, he was recognized as a classic.

The tragedy "Hamlet" was created in 1600.

Shakespeare was especially sad to see how his main ideal was crumbling (a person is beautiful and capable of constant self-improvement)

Shakespeare foresaw a deep spiritual crisis associated with the bourgeois revolution.

Shakespeare creates a new type of tragedy - the tragedy of time. This time is the opposite of all its tragic heroes.

His era was filled with belief in human dignity and ends in disappointment.

In Hamlet, evil is the dominant force of life.

"To be honest in this world means he was the only one out of ten thousand."

"Disgrace has swept the whole world"

The pathos of tragedy is indignation against the omnipotence of evil.

Hamlet's image:

Hamlet rises above all characters.

The first blow is the death of the father, the second is the wedding of the mother, the third is the uncle's betrayal.

"No man can be trusted" - this is the conclusion made by Hamlet.

This is how he treats everyone except his friend Horatio. He curses the age in which he was born. He is full of innate spiritual nobility. Entering adulthood was a shock for him.

His madness is not real. It is needed to tell people the truth.

Hamlet's view of the world is world sorrow (then it was called melancholy) For Shakespeare, this is a complete disappointment in all life values.

The monologue "to be or not to be" is the highest point of Hamlet's doubts. Meaning: to fight against evil or to evade the fight? He chooses the first.

Hamlet thinks a lot about death. This problem is related to another: "how to live?"

Except for Hamlet and Horatio, no one thinks about death. Hamlet is a man because he is a philosopher.

He calls Denmark a prison.

At first, the mother for Hamlet was the ideal of a woman. At that time, marriage with the brother of the deceased was considered a sin of incest. And Hamlet blames his mother. It is not the son who speaks to Gertrude, but the judge.

Reason for Hamlet is the highest human ability. Education and intelligence are among the strongest traits of Hamlet's character. He is also interested in art.

The type of "universal man" of the Renaissance.

His monologues contain many thoughts and quotations from ancient authors. This makes his speech meaningful.

Hamlet is even outwardly noble.

Father for Hamlet was the ideal of man, he was godlike for his son.

For Shakespeare, the juxtaposition of two kings is important. It has a deep philosophical meaning.

Hamlet is the first reflective (more inward than outward) hero of world literature. The first alienated and alienated grows in the course of the tragedy.

A high concept of a person is the main thing in Hamlet, as well as a tendency to reflect. There was no such hero in world literature.

The image of Hamlet evokes respect and interest, not pity. His image also makes it possible to make sure that even in the most difficult conditions a person can remain tall and noble.

Hamlet is a philosophical tragedy. Not in the sense that the play contains a system of world views expressed in a dramatic form.

The goal of art is not to teach, but, as Hamlet says, "to keep, as it were, a mirror in front of nature: to show the virtues of its own features, arrogance — its appearance, and to every age and class — its likeness and imprint." To portray people as they are - this is how Shakespeare understood the task of art.

That no direct teaching can be drawn from tragedy is best evidenced by the difference of opinion about its meaning. The picture of life created by Shakespeare, being perceived as a "likeness and imprint" of reality, encourages everyone who thinks about tragedy to evaluate people and events in the same way as they are evaluated in life.

Shakespeare's understanding of the world is dissolved in the images and situations of his plays. With his tragedies, he strove to arouse the attention of the audience, to put them face to face with the most terrible phenomena of life, to disturb the complacent, to respond to the moods of those who, like him, experienced anxiety and pain because of the imperfection of life.

The purpose of tragedy is not to scare, but to cause the activity of thought, to make one think about the contradictions and troubles of life, and Shakespeare achieves this goal. Achieves primarily through the image of the hero. By posing questions to himself, he encourages us to reflect on them, to seek answers. But Hamlet not only asks life, he expresses many thoughts about it. His speeches are full of sayings, and, what is remarkable, the thoughts of many generations are concentrated in them.

The premiere of "Hamlet" at the Globe Theater took place in 1601, a year of well-known upheavals in the history of England, which directly affected both the Globe troupe and Shakespeare personally. The fact is that 1601 is the year of the "Essex conspiracy", when the young favorite of the aging Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex, took his people to the streets of London in an attempt to raise a rebellion against the Queen, was captured and beheaded. Historians regard his speech as the last manifestation of the medieval feudal freemen, as a revolt of the nobility against the absolutism that limited their rights, not supported by the people. Together with Essex, young nobles who followed him were thrown into the Tower, in particular, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron. Southampton was later forgiven, but as Essex was being tried, Shakespeare must have been particularly dark in his soul.

Hamlet is the same as Don Quixote, an "eternal image" that arose at the end of the Renaissance almost simultaneously with other images of great individualists (Don Quixote, Don Juan, Faust). All of them embody the Renaissance idea of \u200b\u200bunlimited personal development, and at the same time great passions are embodied in these artistic images, as is characteristic of the literature of the Renaissance.

The indecently fast wedding of the mother, the loss of Hamlet the elder, in which the prince saw not just a father, but an ideal of a man, explain his gloomy mood at the beginning of the play. And when Hamlet is faced with the task of revenge, he begins to understand that the death of Claudius will not correct the general state of affairs, because everyone in Denmark quickly consigned Hamlet the elder to oblivion and quickly got used to slavery. The era of ideal people is in the past, and the motive of Prison Denmark runs through the whole tragedy.

Hamlet knows that his duty is to punish evil, but his idea of \u200b\u200bevil no longer corresponds to the straightforward laws of ancestral revenge. Evil for him is not limited to the crime of Claudius, whom he ultimately punishes; evil is poured into the world around him, and Hamlet realizes that one person cannot afford to confront the whole world. This inner conflict leads him to the idea of \u200b\u200bthe futility of life, of suicide.

The fundamental difference between Hamlet and the heroes of the previous tragedy of revenge is that he is able to look at himself from the outside, to think about the consequences of his actions. The main sphere of Hamlet's activity is thought, and the acuteness of his introspection. Hamlet is a hero born in the spirit of the Renaissance, but his tragedy testifies to the fact that at its later stage the ideology of the Renaissance is in crisis. Hamlet undertakes the labor of revising and re-evaluating not only medieval values, but also the values \u200b\u200bof humanism, and the illusory nature of humanistic ideas about the world as a kingdom of unlimited freedom and direct action is revealed.

the main tragic conflict is the loneliness of a humanistic personality in the middle of the desert of a society in which there is no place for justice, reason, and dignity. Hamlet is the first reflective hero in world literature, the first hero to experience a state of alienation.