Gorokhov P.A.

Orenburg State University

OUR CONTEMPORARY PRINCE DANISH (philosophical problems of the tragedy "Hamlet")

The article examines the main philosophical problems touched upon by the great playwright and thinker in the immortal tragedy "Hamlet". The author comes to the conclusion that Shakespeare in Hamlet acts as the greatest philosopher-anthropologist. He reflects on the essence of nature, space and time only in close connection with reflections on human life.

We Russians are celebrating the memory of Shakespeare, and we have the right to celebrate it. For us Shakespeare is not only one huge, bright name: he became our property, he entered our flesh and blood.

I.S. TURGENEV

Already four centuries have passed since Shakespeare (1564-1614) wrote the tragedy "Hamlet". Meticulous scholars seem to have explored everything in this play. The time of writing the tragedy has been determined with more or less precision. This is 1600-1601. - the very beginning of the 17th century, which will bring such profound shocks to England. It is estimated that the play has 4,042 lines, and its vocabulary is 29,551 words. Thus, "Gamlet" is the most voluminous play by the playwright, running on stage for more than four hours without abbreviations.

Shakespeare's work in general, and Hamlet in particular, is one of those topics that are sweet to address for any researcher. On the other hand, such an appeal is justified only in case of extreme necessity, because the chance to say something really new is unusually small. Everything in the play seems to be explored. Philologists and literary historians have done a great job. This tragedy has long been called philosophical, with the light hand of the great Goethe. But there are very few studies devoted specifically to the philosophical content of Shakespeare's masterpiece, not only in Russian, but also in world philosophical literature. Moreover, there are no articles in reputable encyclopedias and dictionaries on philosophy that highlight Shakespeare precisely as a thinker who created an original and enduring philosophical concept, the mysteries of which have not been solved to this day. Goethe said about this beautifully: "All his plays revolve around a hidden point (which no philosopher has seen or defined yet), where all the originality of our" I "and the bold freedom of our will collide with the inevitable course of the whole ...".

It is by finding this "hidden point" that one can try to solve the riddle of the genius. But our

the task is more modest: to solve some of the philosophical mysteries of the great tragedy, and most importantly, to understand how the main character of the play can be close and interesting to a person of the emerging 21st century.

For us, modern Russian people, Shakespeare's work is especially relevant. We can, like Hamlet, state with all justice: "Some kind of Danish rot in the state", for our country is rotting alive. In the epoch we are experiencing, for Russia "the connection of times has broken up again." Shakespeare lived and worked at a time that went down in Russian history under the epithet "vague." The turns of the historical spiral have their own mystical tendency to repeat itself, and the Time of Troubles has come again in Russia. New False Dmitry made their way into the Kremlin and opened the way into the very heart of Russia for new

Now for the American gentry. Shakespeare is close to us precisely because the time in which he lived is similar to our terrible time and in many ways resembles the horrors of the recent history of our country. Terror, civil strife, merciless struggle for power, self-destruction, "enclosure" of England in the 17th century are similar to the Russian "great turning point", "perestroika", the recent Gaidar-Chubais transition to the era of primitive accumulation. Shakespeare was a poet who wrote eternal human passions. Shakespeare is timelessness and ahistoricity: his past, present and future are one. For this reason, it is neither outdated nor outdated.

Shakespeare created Hamlet at a turning point in his work. Researchers have long noticed that after 1600, Shakespeare's previous optimism was replaced by harsh criticism, an in-depth analysis of the tragic contradictions in the soul and life of a person. During

for ten years, the playwright creates the greatest tragedies in which he solves the most burning questions of human existence and gives deep and formidable answers to them. The tragedy of the Danish prince is especially indicative in this regard.

For four centuries, Hamlet has attracted attention so much that one involuntarily forget that the Danish prince is a literary character, and not a once living person of flesh and blood. True, he had a prototype - Prince Amlet, who lived in the 9th century, avenged the murder of his father and eventually reigned on the throne. The Danish chronicler of the XII century Saxon Grammaticus, whose work "History of Denmark" was published in Paris in 1514, told about him. This story subsequently appeared several times in various adaptations, and the famous playwright Kid wrote a play about Hamlet 15 years before the appearance of Shakespeare's tragedy. It has long been noted that the name Hamlet is one of the spellings of the name Gam-no, and this is the name of Shakespeare's son, who died at the age of 11.

Shakespeare deliberately abandoned many persistent stereotypes in the presentation of the old story in his play. It was said about Amlet that he was "taller than Hercules" in his physical qualities and appearance. Shakespeare's Hamlet emphasizes precisely his dissimilarity with Hercules (Hercules) when he compares his father, the late king, and his brother Claudius (“My father, s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules”). Thus, he hints at the ordinariness of his appearance and the absence of originality in it. Since we are talking about this, let's say a few words about the appearance of the Danish prince.

Traditionally, on stage and in the cinema, Hamlet is portrayed as a handsome man, if not very young, then at least middle-aged. But making a forty-year-old man out of Hamlet is not always reasonable, because then the question arises: how old is his mother, Gertrude, and how could King Claudius flatter the old woman? Hamlet was played by great actors. Our Innokenty Smoktunovsky played him in a movie when he was already over forty. Vladimir Vysotsky played Hamlet from the age of thirty until his death. Sir Laurence Olivier played Hamlet for the first time in 1937 at the age of 3O, and at the age of forty he directed the film, where he played the main role. Sir John Gielgud, Possibly the Greatest Hamlet XX

century, first played this role in 1930 at the age of 26. Of the modern outstanding actors, it is worth noting Mel G Ibson, who played this role in the film of the great Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branu, who played Gamlet for the first time on stage at 32, and then staged the full film version of the play.

All the mentioned performers of this role represented Hamlet as a lean man in his prime. But he himself says about himself: "About that this too too sallied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!" (Literally: "Oh, if only this overly salted meat could melt and dissolve with dew!"). Yes, and Gertrude during the deadly duel gives his son a handkerchief and says about him: "He's fat, and scant of breath." Consequently, Hamlet is a man of rather solid build, if the mother herself says about her own son: "He is fat and suffocates."

Yes, most likely, Shakespeare did not imagine his character as beautiful in appearance. But Hamlet, not being a hero in the medieval sense, that is, beautiful on the outside, is beautiful on the inside. This is the great man of the New Age. His strength and weakness take their origin in the world of morality, his weapon is thought, but it is also the source of his misfortunes.

The tragedy "Gamlet" is an attempt by Shakespeare to capture with a single glance the whole picture of human life, to answer the sacramental question about its meaning, to approach man from the position of God. No wonder G.V.F. Hegel believed that Shakespeare by means of artistic creation gave unsurpassed examples of analysis of fundamental philosophical problems: a person's free choice of actions and goals in life, his independence in making decisions.

Shakespeare in his plays skillfully exposed human souls, forcing his heroes to confess to the audience. The genius reader of Shakespeare and one of the first researchers of the figure of Hamlet - Goethe - once said: “There is no pleasure more sublime and pure than, with closed eyes, listening to how a natural and faithful voice does not recite, but reads Shakespeare. So it is best to keep an eye on the harsh threads from which he weaves events. Everything that blows in the air when great world events take place, everything that fearfully closes in and hides in the soul, here comes into the light freely and naturally; we learn the truth of life without knowing how. "

Let's follow the example of the great German and read the text of the immortal tragedy, for the most correct judgment about the character of Hamlet and the other characters in the play can be deduced only from what they say and from what others say about them. Shakespeare sometimes remains silent about some circumstances, but in this case we will not allow ourselves to speculate, but will rely on the text. It seems that Shakespeare in one way or another said everything that was needed both for his contemporaries and future generations of researchers.

As soon as the researchers of the brilliant play did not interpret the image of the prince of Denmark! Mr. Bert Keith Chesterton, not without irony, noted the following about the efforts of various scholars: “Shakespeare, no doubt, believed in the struggle between duty and feeling. But if you have a scientist, then for some reason the situation here is different. The scientist does not want to admit that this struggle tormented Hamlet, and replaces it with a struggle between consciousness and subconsciousness. He endows Hamlet with complexes so as not to endow him with a conscience. And all because he, a scientist, refuses to take seriously the simple, if you will - primitive morality on which Shakespeare's tragedy stands. This morality includes three prerequisites from which the modern morbid subconscious runs away like a ghost. First, we must act justly, even if we hate to; secondly, justice may require that we punish a person, usually a strong person; thirdly, punishment itself can take the form of struggle and even murder. "

The tragedy begins with murder and ends with murders. Claudius kills his brother in his sleep by pouring a poisonous extract of henbane into his ear. Hamlet imagines the terrible picture of the death of his father:

Father died with a swollen belly

All swollen, like May, from sinful juices. God knows what other demand there is for this,

But in all, probably considerable.

(Translated by B. Pasternak) The ghost of Hamlet's father appeared Marcello and Bernardo, and they called Horatio precisely as an educated person, capable, if not explaining this phenomenon, then at least explaining himself with the ghost. Horatio is a friend and confidant of Prince Hamlet, which is why the heir to the Danish throne, and not King Claudius, learns from him about the ghost's visits.

The first monologue of Hamlet reveals his tendency to make the broadest generalizations on the basis of a single fact. The shameful behavior of the mother, who threw herself on the "bed of incest," leads Hamlet to an unfavorable assessment of the entire beautiful half of humanity. No wonder he says: "Filthiness, you are called: woman!" Original: frailty - frailty, weakness, instability. It is this quality for Hamlet that is now defining for the entire feminine gender. Mother was for Hamlet the ideal woman, and the more terrible it was for him to contemplate her fall. The death of his father and the betrayal of his mother in the memory of the late spouse and the monarch mean for Hamlet the complete collapse of the world in which he had happily existed until then. The fatherly house, which he longed to remember in Wittenberg, collapsed. This family drama makes his impressionable and sensitive soul come to such a pessimistic conclusion: How, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't, ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.

Boris Pasternak perfectly conveyed the meaning of these lines:

How insignificant, flat and dull the whole world seems to me in its aspirations!

O abomination! Like an unweathered garden

Unleash the grasses - it will overgrow with weeds.

With the same indivisibility, the whole world was filled with rough beginnings.

Hamlet is not a cold rationalist and analyst. He is a man with a big heart capable of strong feelings. His blood is hot, and his senses are heightened and unable to dull. From meditations on his own life collisions, he extracts truly philosophical generalizations concerning human nature as a whole. His painful reaction to his surroundings is not surprising. Put yourself in his place: your father is dead, your mother hastily rushed out to marry your uncle, and this uncle, whom he once loved and respected, turns out to be father's killer! Brother killed brother! Cain's sin is terrible and testifies to irreversible changes in human nature itself. The ghost is absolutely right:

Murder is vile in itself; but this is the most disgusting and inhuman of all.

(Translated by M. Lozinsky)

Fratricide testifies to the fact that the very foundations of humanity have rotted away. Everywhere - treason and enmity, lust and meanness. No one, even the closest person, can be trusted. This most of all torments Hamlet, who is forced to stop looking at the world around him through rose-colored glasses. The terrible crime of Claudius and the lascivious behavior of his mother (typical, however, for many aging women) look in his eyes only manifestations of universal damage, evidence of the existence and triumph of world evil.

Many researchers reproached Hamlet with indecision and even cowardice. In their opinion, he should have slaughtered him as soon as he learned about his uncle's crime. There was even the term "Hamletism", which began to denote the weak-willed, inclined to reflection. But Hamlet wants to make sure that the spirit that emerged from Hell told the truth, that the ghost of his father is indeed an "honest spirit." After all, if Claudius is innocent, then Hamlet himself will become a criminal and will be doomed to hellish torments. That is why the prince comes up with a "mousetrap" for Claudius. Only after the performance, seeing his uncle's reaction to the villainy committed on the stage, Hamlet receives real earthly proof of the revealing news from the other world. Hamlet almost kills Claudius, but he is saved only by the state of immersion in prayer. The prince does not want to send the uncle's soul cleansed of sins to heaven. That is why Claudius is spared until a more favorable moment.

Hamlet seeks not only to avenge his murdered father. The crimes of the uncle and mother only testify to the general corruption of morals, to the death of human nature. No wonder he utters the famous words:

The time is out of joint - o cursed spite.

That ever I was born to set it right!

Here is a fairly accurate translation by M. Lozinsky:

The century has fallen apart - and the worst of all,

That I was born to restore it!

Hamlet understands the depravity not of individual people, but of all mankind, of the entire era, of which he is a contemporary. Seeking revenge on his father's killer, Hamlet wants to restore the natural course of things, revives the destroyed order of the universe. Hamlet is offended by the crime of Claudius, not only as the son of his father, but also as a person. In Hamlet's eyes

the king and all the court fraternity are by no means isolated random grains of sand on the human shore. They are representatives of the human race. Despising them, the prince is inclined to think that the whole human race is worthy of contempt, absolutizing particular cases. Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, for all their love for the prince, are unable to understand him. Therefore, Hamlet sends curses of love itself. Horatio as a scientist cannot understand the mysteries of the other world, and Hamlet pronounces a verdict on scholarship in general. Probably, even in the stillness of his Wittenberg existence, Hamlet experienced the hopeless torment of doubt, the drama of abstract critical thought. After returning to Denmark, things escalated. He is bitter from the consciousness of his powerlessness, he realizes all the treacherous fragility of the idealization of the human mind and the unreliability of human attempts to think of the world according to abstract formulas.

Gamlet faced reality as it is. He experienced all the bitterness of disappointment in people, and this pushes his soul to a turning point. Not for every person the comprehension of reality is accompanied by such upheavals as Shakespeare's hero. But it is precisely when faced with the contradictions of reality that people get rid of illusions and begin to see true life. Shakespeare chose an atypical situation for his hero, an extreme case. The once harmonious inner world of the hero collapses, and then is recreated before our eyes again. It is precisely in the dynamism of the image of the protagonist, in the absence of static in his character, that the reason for the diversity of such contradictory assessments of the Danish prince lies.

The spiritual development of Hamlet can be reduced to three dialectical stages: harmony, its collapse and restoration in a new quality. V. Belinsky wrote about this when he argued that the so-called indecision of the prince is “disintegration, the transition from infantile, unconscious harmony and self-pleasure of the spirit into disharmony and struggle, which are a necessary condition for the transition to courageous and conscious harmony and self-pleasure of the spirit. "

The famous monologue "To be or not to be" is pronounced at the peak of Hamlet's doubts, at the turning point of his mental and spiritual development. There is no strict logic in the monologue, because it is pronounced at the moment of the highest discord in his

consciousness. But these 33 Shakespeare lines are one of the summits not only of world literature, but also of philosophy. Fight against the forces of evil or dodge this battle? - this is the main question of the monologue. It is he who entails all other thoughts of Hamlet, including about the eternal burdens of mankind:

Who would take down the whips and mockery of the century,

The oppression of the strong, the mockery of the proud,

The pain of despicable love, judges slowness, Arrogance of authorities and insults,

Credited to meritorious merit,

If only he could give himself a calculation with a Simple dagger ...

(Translated by M. Lozinsky) All these problems do not relate to Hamlet, but here he again speaks on behalf of humanity, for these problems will accompany the human race to the end of time, for the golden age will never come. All this is “human, too human,” as Friedrich Nietzsche would say later.

Hamlet reflects on the nature of the human tendency to think. The hero analyzes not only the present being and his position in it, but also the nature of his own thoughts. In the literature of the Late Renaissance, heroes often turned to the analysis of human thought. Gamlet also carries out his own criticism of human "judgment" and comes to the conclusion: excessive thinking paralyzes the will. So thinking makes us cowards,

And so determination, the natural color Withers under the bloom of pale thoughts,

And the beginnings that soared powerfully

Turning aside your move

Lose the name of the action.

(Translated by M. Lozinsky) The entire monologue "To be or not to be" is permeated with a grave awareness of the hardships of being. Arthur Schopenhauer, in his thoroughly pessimistic Aphorisms of Worldly Wisdom, often follows the milestones that Shakespeare left in this heartfelt monologue of the prince. I don't want to live in the world that appears in the hero's speech. But it is necessary to live, for it is not known what awaits a person after death - perhaps even worse horrors. "The fear of a country from which no one returned" makes a person drag out existence on this mortal earth - at times the most miserable. Note that Hamlet is convinced of the existence of the afterlife, for from hell came to him the ghost of his unfortunate father.

Death is one of the main characters not only in the monologue To Be or Not to Be, but in the entire play. She reaps a bountiful harvest in Hamlet: nine people die in the very mysterious country about which the Danish prince is thinking. Our great poet and translator B. Pasternak said about this famous monologue of Hamlet: “These are the most trembling and insane lines ever written about the anguish of uncertainty on the eve of death, rising by the power of feeling to the bitterness of the Gefsemane note”.

Shakespeare was one of the first in the world philosophy of modern times to begin to think about suicide. After him, this topic was developed by the greatest minds: I.V. Goethe, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.A. Berdyaev, E. Durkheim. Hamlet reflects on the problem of suicide at a turning point in his life, when the "link of times" fell apart for him. For him, struggle began to mean life, being, and leaving life becomes a symbol of defeat, physical and moral death.

Hamlet's instinct for life is stronger than the timid germs of thoughts about suicide, although his indignation against the injustices and hardships of life often turns on himself. Let's see what kind of curses he showered on himself! "Stupid and faint-hearted fool", "rotozei", "coward", "donkey", "woman", "dishwasher". The internal energy that overwhelms Hamlet, all his anger falls for the time being inside his own personality. Criticizing the human race, Hamlet does not forget about himself. But, reproaching himself for slowness, he does not for a moment forget about the suffering of his father, who accepted a terrible death at the hands of his brother.

Hamlet does not hesitate in revenge. He wants Claudius, dying, to find out why he died. In his mother's bedroom, he kills the lurking Polonius in full confidence that he has committed revenge and Claudius is already dead. The more terrible is his disappointment:

As for him,

(points to the corpse of Polonius)

Then I grieve; but heaven ordered

Having shown him to me and me,

That I should become their scourge and servant.

(Translated by M. Lozinsky) Hamlet sees in chance a manifestation of the highest will of heaven. It was heaven that entrusted him with the mission of being "scorge and minister"

goy and executor of their will. This is how Hamlet views the matter of revenge.

Claudius is enraged by the "bloody trick" of Hamlet, for he understands at whom the nephew's sword was really directed. Only by accident does the "fidgety, stupid troublemaker" Polonius die. It is difficult to say what were the plans of Claudius in relation to Hamlet. Whether he planned to destroy it from the very beginning, or was forced to commit new atrocities by the very behavior of Hamlet, who hinted to the king that he was aware of his secrets, Shakespeare does not answer these questions. It has long been noticed that the villains of Shakespeare, in contrast to the villains of ancient drama, are by no means just schemes, but namely living people, not devoid of the germs of good. But these sprouts wither with every new crime, and evil blooms in the soul of these people. Such is Claudius, who is losing the remnants of humanity before our eyes. In the scene of the duel, he actually does not prevent the death of the queen drinking poisoned wine, although he tells her: "Do not drink wine, Gertrude." But his own interests are above all, and he sacrifices his newly acquired spouse. But it was precisely the passion for Gertrude that became one of the reasons for Claudius's Cain sin!

It should be noted that in the tragedy, Shakespeare confronts two understandings of death: the religious and the realistic. The scenes in the cemetery are indicative in this respect. Preparing the grave for Ophelia, the gravediggers unfold a whole philosophy of life in front of the viewer.

The real, not poeticized, appearance of death is terrible and disgusting. No wonder Hamlet, holding in his hands the skull of his once beloved jester Yorick, reflects: “Where are your jokes? Your tomfoolery? Your singing? Nothing left to poke fun at your own antics? Jaw dropped completely? Go now to some lady's room and tell her that even if she has put on an inch of makeup, she will still end up with such a face ... ”(translation by M. Lozinsky). Before death, everyone is equal: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander turns to dust; dust is earth; they make clay from the earth; and why can't they plug a beer barrel with this clay, into which he turned? "

Yes, Hamlet is a tragedy about death. That is why it is extremely relevant for us, citizens of dying Russia, modern Russian

people whose brains are not yet completely dull from watching endless mind-numbing serials. The once great country perished, as did the once glorious state of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire. We, once its citizens, are left to drag out a miserable existence on the outskirts of world civilization and endure the bullying of all kinds of shailoks.

The historical triumph of Hamlet is natural - after all, it is the quintessence of Shakespeare's drama. Here, as in the gene, the bundle already contained "Troilus and Cressida", "King Lear", "Othello", "Timon of Athens". After all, all these things show the contrast between the world and man, the clash between human life and the principle of negation.

There are more and more stage and film versions of the great tragedy, sometimes extremely modernized. Probably, "Hamlet" is so easily modernized because it is all-human. And although the modernization of Hamlet is a violation of the historical perspective, there is nowhere to get away from this. In addition, the historical perspective, like the horizon, is unattainable and therefore fundamentally inviolable: how many eras

So many prospects.

Gamlet, for the most part, is Shakespeare himself, it reflects the soul of the poet himself. Through his lips, wrote Ivan Franko, the poet expressed a lot of things that burned his own soul. It has long been noted that Shakespeare's 66th sonnet strikingly coincides with the thoughts of the Danish prince. Probably, of all Shakespeare's characters, only Hamlet could write Shakespeare's works. It was not for nothing that Bernard Shaw's friend and biographer, Frank Garrick, considered Hamlet to be a spiritual portrait of Shakespeare. We find the same in Joyce: "And, perhaps, Hamlet is the spiritual son of Shakespeare, who lost his Hamnet." He says: "If you want to destroy my conviction that Shakespeare is Hamlet, you have a difficult task."

There can be no in creation that was not in the creator himself. Shakespeare may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the streets of London, but Hamlet was born from the depths of his soul, and Romeo grew out of his passion. A man is least of all himself when he speaks from himself. Give him a mask and he becomes truthful. Actor William Shakespeare knew this well.

The essence of Hamlet lies in the infinity of spiritual searches of Shakespeare himself, all of his "to be or not to be?"

di her impurities, awareness of the absurdity of being and the thirst for overcoming it by the greatness of the spirit. With Hamlet, Shakespeare expressed his own attitude towards the world, and, judging by Hamlet, this attitude was by no means rosy. In Hamlet, for the first time, a motive characteristic of Shakespeare “after 1601” will sound: “None of the people pleases me; no, not one either. "

The closeness of Hamlet to Shakespeare is confirmed by numerous variations on the theme of the Danish prince: Romeo, Macbeth, Vincent (Measure for Measure), Jacques (How Do You Like It?), Postumus (Cymbeline) - peculiar doubles of Hamlet.

The power of inspiration and the power of the brushstroke testify to the fact that "Hamlet" became an expression of some personal tragedy of Shakespeare, some of the poet's experiences at the time of writing the play. In addition, Hamlet expresses the tragedy of an actor who asks himself: which role is more important - the one that he plays on the stage, or the one that he plays in life. Apparently, under the influence of his own creation, the poet also thought about which part of his life is more real and fuller - a poet or a person.

Shakespeare in Hamlet acts as a major philosopher and anthropologist. At the center of his thoughts is always a person. He reflects on the essence of nature, space and time only in close connection with reflections on human life.

Very often pathetic and ignorant people tried to try on the tragedy of Hamlet. No civilized country has probably escaped this. In Russia, many loved and still love to pull on a Hamlet's cloak. This is especially the fault of various politicians and some representatives of the loud and stupid tribe, which in Soviet times was called “the creative intellect

liberty ". It was not for nothing that Ilf and Petrov created their own Vasisuali Lokhankin in The Golden Calf - a terrible and terrifying parody of the Russian intelligentsia, posing truly Hamlet questions, but forgetting to turn off the light in the communal closet, for which he receives a rod from the indignant masses. soft places. It is precisely these intellectuals A.I. Solzhenitsyn will call "education", and N.K. Mikhailovsky, at the end of the 19th century, aptly christened them “hamletized pigs”. The "Hamletized Piglet" is a pseudo-Gamlet, a proud nonentity, inclined to "poeticize and Hamletize himself." Mikhailovsky writes: "A gamletized pig needs ... to convince himself and others of the enormous merits that give him the right to a hat with a feather and black velvet clothes." But Mikhailovsky does not give him this right, as well as the right to tragedy: “The only tragic feature that can complicate their death, without changing the artistic truth, is degamletization, the consciousness at the solemn moment of death that Hamlet is by itself, but a pig also by itself. "

But the genuine Gamlet is a living embodiment of the eternal world drama of the Thinking Man. This drama is close to the hearts of all who have experienced the ascetic passion to think and strive for lofty goals. This passion is the true purpose of man, which contains both the highest power of human nature and the source of inescapable suffering. And as long as man lives as a thinking being, this passion will fill the human soul with energy for all new achievements of the spirit. This is the guarantee of immortality of the great tragedy of Shakespeare and its protagonist, in whose wreath the most luxurious flowers of thought and theatrical art will never fade.

List of used literature:

1. Goethe I. V. Collected works in 10 volumes. V. 10. M., 1980. S. 263.

3. Ibid. P. 1184.

4. Hegel G. V. F. Aesthetics: In 4 volumes. M., 1968 - 1973. T. 1. P. 239.

5. Goethe I. V. Collected works in 10 volumes. V. 10. M., 1980. S. 307 - 308.

6. Shakespeare V. Tragedies in the translation of B. Pasternak. M., 1993.S. 441.

8. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. V. 6. M., 1960. P. 34.

9. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. V. 6. P. 40.

10. Belinsky VG Complete Works. T. II. M., 1953.S. 285-286.

11. Shakespeare V. Complete Works in 8 volumes. V. 6. P. 71.

12. Pasternak B. L. Favorites. In 2 volumes.Vol. 11. M., 1985.S. 309.

13. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. P. 100.

14. Shakespeare V. Complete works in 8 volumes. T. 6. S. 135-136.

15.N.K. Mikhailovsky. Works, vol. 5.SPb., 1897. S. 688, 703-704.

Seminar lesson number 4.

Shakespeare's tragedy "Hamlet"

1. What was the basis of Shakespeare's Hamlet tragedy? Why is the plot about the Danish prince Amlet known only to specialists, while Shakespeare's Hamlet is known to the whole world?

It is no secret that Shakespeare often wrote his books inspired by old stories already told by someone. For example, the story of Romeo and Juliet was told before Shakespeare in a poem by Arthur Brooke. Someone unknown long before Shakespeare wrote the primitive dramatic novel King Lear and Three Daughters. The legend about Hamlet was also centuries old. Its history was set forth by Saxon Grammaticus in his History of the Danes (c. 1200). It described the life of the Jutland prince Amlet, who lived in pagan times, that is, until 827, when Christianity was introduced in Denmark.

Subsequently, this story was retold several times by different authors, and in 1589. the prince's story even took place on the London stage.

These legends and legends, with their inherent primordial simplicity and naivety, would continue to exist, as many legendary and fairy-tale plots still exist, retaining all the charm of their primitiveness. But it is to Shakespeare that they owe the acquisition of an extraordinary depth of comprehension of life, tremendous poetic power. Who would have known Romeo and Juliet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, if Shakespeare had not portrayed their fates? These and many other stories Shakespeare raised to the height of such an understanding of life, which was not in art before him.

2. Why in "Hamlet" every post-Shakespearean century saw a work consonant with his searches? What is the mystery of the Prince of Denmark?

Shakespeare's tragedy "Hamlet" is the most famous of the plays of the English playwright. According to many highly respected art connoisseurs, this is one of the most profound creations of human genius, a great philosophical tragedy. It concerns the most important issues of life and death, which cannot but concern every person, and have truly universal significance. In addition, the tragedy poses acute moral problems; this is why Hamlet has attracted many generations of people. Life changes, new interests and concepts arise, but each new generation finds something close to itself in tragedy.

However, everyone sees Prince Hamlet differently.

For example, Goethe considered him "a beautiful, pure, noble, highly moral being", although he notes his "weakness of will with a high consciousness of duty."

German researcher August Schlegel comes to the conclusion that an excessive tendency to reason, reflection kills determination, the will to act. Thus, the tragedy of Hamlet begins to be viewed as the eternal tragedy of the intelligentsia.

To Turgenev, he seemed egoistic: "He lives for himself ... He is a skeptic and always fiddles and rushes about with himself." He contrasts the indecisive, skeptical, incapable of captivating Hamlet Don Quixote, as a man of action.

asserts that Hamlet at different stages shows strength, weakness, indecision, and lightning-fast determination; and that only in this way, in evolution, in motion, should the multifaceted image of Hamlet be considered.

Hence the paradox of perceiving the great tragedy. Precisely because it hurts everyone very personally, it generates completely different, sometimes contradictory interpretations.

3. What is the tragedy of Hamlet?

"He was a man in everything" (The character of Hamlet, its content and the ways of its disclosure).

Prove, analyzing the texts, that Hamlet is a man of thought, a philosopher.

Hamlet is a bearer of the humanistic worldview of his era and at the same time a critic of the ideas of the Renaissance.

The problem of Hamlet's will.

Tragedy is a rare guest in world art. There are whole epochs of spiritual development devoid of developed tragic consciousness. The reason for this is in the nature of the dominant ideology. Tragedy can arise in a crisis of religious ideology, as was the case in ancient Greece and the Renaissance.

Shakespeare was a contemporary of the great era in the history of mankind, called the Renaissance, which was born at the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries. That was a long period of social and spiritual development in Europe, when the centuries-old feudal order was broken and the bourgeois system was born. It started in Italy. A new worldview was formed in connection with the growth of cities, the development of commodity production, the formation of a world market, geographical discoveries ... The spiritual domination of the church was put to an end, the beginnings of new sciences appeared.

Separately, it should be said about the birth and formation of a new humanistic culture. In sculpture and painting, the cult of antiquity arose, they saw in it the prototype of free humanity.

At first, humanism meant only the study of languages \u200b\u200band written monuments of the Greco-Roman world. This new science was contrasted with the dominant church doctrine of the feudal Middle Ages, the carrier of which was theology. Over time, humanism has acquired a broader meaning. It took shape in an extensive system of views, covering all branches of knowledge - philosophy, politics, morality, natural history.

Humanists by no means rejected Christianity as such. His moral teaching, the ethics of good was not alien to them. But humanists rejected the Christian idea of \u200b\u200brenouncing the blessings of life and, conversely, argued that earthly existence was given to man in order to fully use his powers.

For humanists, man is the center of the universe. The ideal of the humanists was a comprehensively developed person, equally manifesting himself in the field of thought and practical activity. Having broken the old morality of obedience to the existing order, the supporters of the new outlook on life rejected all kinds of restrictions on human activity.

Shakespeare reflected all aspects of this complex process. In his works, we see both people who are still inclined to live in the old-fashioned way, and those who have thrown off the shackles of obsolete morality, and those who understand that human freedom does not mean the right to build their well-being on the misfortunes of others.

The heroes of Shakespeare's plays are people of this kind. They are characterized by great passions, a powerful will, immense desires. All of them are outstanding personalities. The character of each is manifested with extraordinary clarity and completeness. Everyone determines his own destiny, choosing one way or another in life.

Hamlet is the foremost man of his time. He is a student at the University of Wittenberg, who was at the forefront of Shakespeare's era. Hamlet's progressive worldview is also manifested in his philosophical views. In his reasoning, glimpses of spontaneous materialism, overcoming religious illusions are felt. True, the misfortunes with which he faced, introduced discord in his worldview. On the one hand, Hamlet repeats the teaching of the humanists about the greatness and dignity of man, which he has well mastered: “What a masterful creation - man! How noble in reason! How unlimited in his abilities, guises and movements! How precise and wonderful in action! How he resembles an angel in deep comprehension! How he looks like a certain god! The beauty of the universe! The crown of all living! " (II, 2). This high assessment of a person is opposed by an unexpected conclusion, immediately pronounced by Hamlet: “And what is this quintessence of dust for me? Not one of the people pleases me ... ”(II 2). With these statements, he simultaneously confirms the ideas of the Renaissance and criticizes them.

Based on the text, we can safely assume that before the terrible incidents that disturbed his spiritual peace, Hamlet was a whole person, and this is especially manifested in the combination of thought, will and ability to act. The shaken consciousness led to the disintegration of the unity of these qualities.

The very first monologue of Hamlet reveals his tendency to make the broadest generalizations from a single fact. The mother's behavior leads Hamlet to a negative judgment about all women: "Dishonesty, you are called a woman!"

With the death of his father and the betrayal of his mother for Hamlet came the complete collapse of the world in which he had lived until then. He sees the whole world in black:

How boring and dull and unnecessary

It seems to me everything that is in the world!

O abomination! This lush garden that produces

Only one seed; wild and evil

It dominates.

Shakespeare portrays his hero with a nature endowed with great sensitivity, deeply perceiving the terrible phenomena that affect them. Hamlet is a man of hot blood, a big heart capable of strong feelings. He is by no means the cold rationalist and analyst that he is sometimes thought to be. His thought is excited not by abstract observation of facts, but by deep experience of them. If from the very beginning we feel that Hamlet rises above those around us, then this is not a person's elevation above the circumstances of life. On the contrary, one of the highest personal merits of Hamlet lies in the completeness of the sensations of life, his connection with it, in the consciousness that everything that happens around is significant and requires a person to determine his attitude to things, events, people. Hamlet is distinguished by a heightened, tense and even painful reaction to the environment.

In Hamlet, more than anywhere else, Shakespeare reveals a changeable personality. For example, at first Hamlet accepts the task of revenge for his father with somewhat unexpected fervor. After all, quite recently we heard from him complaints about the horrors of life and the admission that he would like to commit suicide, just not to see the surrounding abomination. Now he is imbued with indignation, gathering strength for the task ahead. A little time later, it is already painful for him that such a huge task fell on his shoulders, he does not look at her as a curse, she is a heavy burden for him:

The century has fallen apart - and the worst of all,

That I was born to restore it!

He curses the age in which he was born, curses that he is destined to live in a world where evil reigns and where he, instead of surrendering to truly human interests and aspirations, must devote all his strength, mind and soul to the struggle against the world of evil.

The problem of Hamlet's will is the problem of his choice. In his most famous monologue "To be or not to be?" Hamlet doubts as never before. This is the high point of his doubts:

What is nobler in spirit - to submit

To slings and arrows of fierce fate

Or, taking over the sea of \u200b\u200bturmoil, slay them

Confrontation?

In this monologue, Hamlet appears as a deep philosopher, a thinker appears in him, asking new questions: what is death:

Die, fall asleep -

And only: and say that you end with sleep

Longing and a thousand natural torments,

Legacy of the flesh - how such a denouement

Not thirsty?

Monologue "To be or not to be?" from beginning to end permeated with a heavy consciousness of the sorrows of being. This is the apogee of his thoughts. The bottom line is, will Hamlet stop at these reflections, or are they a transitional step to further?

But in Act III, Scene 5, Hamlet, after much thought, in yet another monologue, acquires final determination.

I don't know myself

Why do I live, repeating: "It must be done",

Since there is a reason, will, power and means,

To do it.

Before Shakespeare, no writer conveyed such deep moral torment, did not describe such deep meditation.

4. What is the heroism of Hamlet's deeds and the greatness of his feat (prove by analyzing the main monologues of Hamlet)? Assess your attitude towards Hamlet and the methods of fighting evil that he chooses.

Hamlet is irreconcilable to evil, but he does not know how to deal with it. His heroism is that, having gone through hellish circles of doubts, reflections, torments, he still brings his revenge to the end.

An interesting detail: when Laertes suspects that his father was killed by Claudius, he rouses the people to revolt against the king. Hamlet in exactly the same situation does not resort to the help of the people, although the people love him. Why doesn't Hamlet act like Laertes? Hamlet does not even think about such a way to settle scores with the king. His struggle with Claudius has an exclusively moral meaning for him. Hamlet is a lonely fighter for justice. But it is interesting that he fights against his enemies by their own methods - he pretends, cheats, seeks to find out the secret of his enemy, deceives and - paradoxically - for the sake of a noble goal, he turns out to be guilty of the death of several persons. Claudius is guilty of the death of only one former king. Hamlet kills (albeit not intentionally) Polonius, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain death, kills Laertes and, finally, the king; he is the direct cause of Ophelia's madness and indirectly responsible for her death. But in the eyes of everyone, he remains morally pure, for he pursued noble goals and the evil that he did was always a response to the intrigues of his opponents.

In our time one can only be horrified at the methods chosen by Hamlet. But you need to know the history of bloody revenge of the era, when a special sophistication arose to repay the enemy, and then Hamlet's tactics will become clear. He needs Claudius to become imbued with the consciousness of his criminality, he wants to punish the enemy first with internal torments, torments of conscience, if he has one, and only then inflict a fatal blow so that he knows that he is punished not only by Hamlet, but by the moral law, universal justice.

Monologues - question number 3.

5. The breadth and completeness of Shakespeare's characters (images of Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Ophelia, etc.) Episodic characters.

Claudiuspleasant, courteous, and perhaps even seductive in other eyes. (Hamlet: "Smiling scoundrel, accursed scoundrel.")

Claudius, unlike Richard III, for example, having committed one atrocity, was ready to stop at it. Having achieved the goal, he, as his speech from the throne shows, sought to strengthen his position by peaceful means: first, to protect the country from a possible raid by Fortinbrass, and secondly, to make peace with Hamlet. Realizing perfectly well that he took the throne from him, Claudius, compensating for this loss, declares him to be his heir, we ask you to see him as your father. The only thing he requires from Hamlet is not to leave the Danish court, so that it is more convenient to watch him (Hamlet: “Denmark is a prison for me”).

He realizes that he has committed a grave sin - fratricide. But he prays out of repentance, not because he deeply believes, he just wants to wash off the guilt from himself, in the hope of begging forgiveness. He himself admits that he is "unrepentant." His lowness is also manifested in the fact that he twice secretly plans to kill Hamlet, although he is married to his mother! As a result, he unwittingly poisons her. In addition, he killed the former king, turns out to be the culprit in the death of the crown prince - he exterminated the entire royal family and therefore, according to Shakespeare's plan, is worthy of death.

Gertrude.Hamlet is sure that Gertrude sincerely loved his father, and that she was prompted to marry Claudius by an extremely base sensuality that disgusts him. Hamlet reproaches and even with bitterness condemns Gertrude not only in this, but also in incest, which in those days was considered a grave sin. She so blindly gave herself up to her thirst for happiness, marrying a second time, that she did not recognize the true character of the one into whose hands she gave her fate. Nevertheless, Gertrude knows that Hamlet's madness is imaginary, but does not betray this to anyone.

During the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, she openly sided with her son. The king's treacherous conspiracy with Laertes is unknown to her. She calmly drinks a goblet of poison prepared for Hamlet. It is symbolic that she drinks the poison intended for her son. She, like Hamlet, falls victim to Claudius's treachery, and this at least partially expiates her moral guilt.

Polonium.He probably held a high position under the old king. The new king favors him with his favors and is ready to give them to him first. This suggests that after the death of the former monarch, Polonius played an important role in the election of Claudius as king. Worshiping the reigning persons, in his house he is an unlimited ruler, requiring unconditional obedience. He needs to know everything that is happening in the palace. He is always in a hurry to tell the king all the news and immediately runs to tell him, for example, that the reason for Hamlet's insanity is rejected love. The main means of obtaining information from him is surveillance. He dies while eavesdropping on Hamlet's conversation with his mother.

There is not a word in his speeches about sympathy or helping other people. Polonius knows by himself: "I know myself, when the blood burns, how generous the tongue is for oaths." He recommends caution in dealing with others and almost every of his prescriptions is imbued with distrust of people, even sends a person to spy on his own son to check whether Laertes fulfills his precepts in Paris.

The wisdom of Polonius is the wisdom of a courtier, sophisticated in intrigue, who goes to the goal in indirect ways, who knows how to act secretly, hiding his true intentions.

Laertes.If Hamlet admired his father, Laertes wanted to get rid of his guardianship as soon as possible. After the death of his father, his suspicion instantly falls on the king. From this we can conclude what his opinion of his sovereign is. Without hesitation, Laertes raises the people to a riot, bursts into the palace and is going to kill the king. Hence, he considers himself equal to the king. Revenge for his father is a matter of honor for him, but he has his own concept of it. For example, he is outraged that the ashes of his father and sister were not given due honors, but at the same time he is going to cut Hamlet's throat in church. For the sake of revenge, he is even ready for sacrilege

But in full measure his contempt for true honor is manifested in the fact that he agrees to Claudius's insidious plan to kill Hamlet by fraudulent means, fighting with him with a poisoned rapier against Hamlet's ordinary foil for fencing exercises. He does not behave like a knight, but like a cunning assassin. Before his death, Laertes, however, repents. Belatedly, the nobility of spirit returns to him, and he confesses his crime; he understands now: "I myself have been punished by treachery."

Hamlet forgives him: "Be pure before heaven!" Why? He is Ophelia's brother and Hamlet is convinced of Laertes' nobility, that he should have the same high notions of honor as he himself. If we recall everything that Hamlet was guilty of in relation to the Polonius family, then the relationship between them may well be characterized by Shakespeare's formula - “measure for measure”.

Ophelia.She speaks only 158 lines of text, but Shakespeare was able to put a whole life into these lines.

Ophelia's love is her misfortune. Although her father is close to the king, his minister, nevertheless she is not of royal blood and therefore is not equal to her lover. From the very first appearance of Ophelia, the main conflict of her fate is clearly indicated - her father and brother demand that she give up her love for Hamlet. Obeying them, we see her complete lack of voi and independence.

In the tragedy, there is not a single love scene between Hamlet and Ophelia. But there is a scene of their breakup. It is full of amazing drama.

The words that Hamlet utters over Ophelia's grave finally convince us that his feeling for her was genuine. That is why the scenes where Hamlet rejects Ophelia are imbued with a special drama - all the cruel words that he says to her are given to him with difficulty, he utters them with despair, for, loving her, he realizes that she has become a weapon of his enemy against him and for the implementation of revenge must give up love. Hamlet suffers from being forced to hurt Ophelia, and, suppressing pity, is merciless in his condemnation of women. It is noteworthy, however, that he personally does not blame her for anything and not jokingly advises her to leave this vicious world for a monastery.

Horatio.Hamlet's friend at the university. A completely inactive character, Horatio is assigned an important role in the ideological plan. He serves Shakespeare to bring out the ideal of man. He is the only one Hamlet fully entrusts his plan of revenge. He is not a slave to passions; Horatio is a calm, balanced person, rationalism is inherent in him. But the main thing that Hamlet emphasizes in him is his philosophical outlook on life. Horatio, for all his wise calm, loves Hamlet dearly. Seeing the one hundred prince dies, he wants to share his fate with him and is ready to drink poison from a poisoned goblet. Hamlet stops him.

Horatio is a man of humanistic culture, an ardent admirer of antiquity. Before trying to drink poison and commit suicide, he exclaims: "I am a Roman, not a Dane at heart."

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are quiet habits, obsequiousness and evasiveness, assenting, affectionateness and flattery, pretense, groveling, all-suitability and insignificance.

The peculiar drama of their fate is that they are pawns in someone else's game. Accustomed to pleasing and obeying, they do not know anything about the essence of what is happening, even about what they are directly involved in. Voluntary servants of evil, they perish, like Polonius, when hit by one of two powerful opponents.

Prince Fortinbrass and his father.

The role of Fortinbrass is perhaps the smallest in the tragedy. Princes never meet in person, they judge each other by hearsay, but both think highly of each other.

Fortinbrass goes to fight, driven by ambition. Hamlet would not have raised his sword for this. Knightly militancy, the Norwegian prince goes to his father, who did not like to sit around. He languished in peace and without any reason challenged Hamlet's father to a duel, himself putting forward the condition that the defeated one would give his lands to the winner, and lost.

Hamlet gives Fortinbrass a vote for the possession of Denmark, because he, unlike Claudius, but despite some of his limitations, acts with an open visor, honestly, without malice and deceit. Not being a perfect knight, he is, one might say, the least evil.

Hamlet's father.There would be no tragedy without him. From beginning to end, his image hovers over her. Bequeathing to the prince to take revenge on Claudius, the Ghost warns Hamlet not to do any harm to his mother, whose punishment should be her own mental anguish and not tarnish her honor.

6. Are the ideas of "Hamlet" relevant today?

The problems of moral choice will always be relevant. The more deeply the reader ponders the great creation of Shakespeare, the more he will find in it. The meaning of the work is revealed not only in characters and situations. There is something not concretely expressed in tragedy. It is a very special feeling, as if reading or watching a play on stage, we are connecting to the very roots of life. It cannot be expressed in words. But after everything that we learned about the people who appeared in the tragedy, after the fate of each of them happened, there is a feeling that the poet has brought us to that central point where the greatness, beauty and tragedy of being are concentrated. It is in vain to look for clear and clear answers to the questions raised by it in Shakespeare's work. The more fully we can imagine the diversity of characters, the complexity of the dramatic action, the deeper we feel into the tragic fates of the heroes, the more we come closer to that huge world that Shakespeare's genius was able to embody in a relatively small volume of his great tragedy.

This is one of those pieces that is amazingly stimulating for thinking. For the majority, it becomes that personal property about which everyone feels entitled to judge. Having understood Hamlet, imbued with the spirit of the great tragedy, we not only comprehend the thoughts of one of the best minds; "Hamlet" is one of those works that expresses the self-consciousness of mankind, its consciousness of contradictions, the desire to overcome them, the desire for perfection, and irreconcilability towards everything that is hostile to humanity.

Helga dedicated to

A. Introduction

Shakespeare worked in that difficult era when, along with bloody civil strife and interstate wars, another world flourished in Europe, parallel to this bloody one. It turns out that everything was different in that inner world of consciousness than in the outer one. However, both of these worlds coexisted in some strange way and even influenced each other. Could the great playwright ignore this circumstance, could he just look at what excites the minds of his contemporary philosophers, with whose works he, as you know, was well acquainted? Of course, this could not be, and therefore it is quite natural to expect in his works his own reasoning on the topic of the inner life of man. The tragedy of "Hamlet" is perhaps the most striking confirmation of this. Below we will try to reveal this thesis. Moreover, we will try to show that the theme related to the subjective essence of a human being was not only important for the playwright, but thinking it over as the work was created created a framework for the entire narrative, so that Shakespeare's deep resulting thought turned out to be a kind of matrix for the plot.

I must say that Shakespeare did not really try to encrypt the main idea of \u200b\u200bthe work. So, its main character Hamlet is constantly thinking, and already the mention of this has become a commonplace. It would seem that there is nothing to go further, that here it is - the general idea of \u200b\u200bthe play. But no, the entire critical guard is trying with all its might to do everything not to accept this. An infinite variety of schemes is created for constructing your understanding of what exactly the master was trying to say. Here is the induction of numerous historical analogies, and the construction of a value scale in the form of a too general and therefore unproductive statement of the power of good over evil, etc. To prove their vision, researchers use a variety of methods, while omitting the main one, the use of which for any work of art can only give an extremely clear answer to the question of its meaning. I mean the method of disclosing the artistic structure, the use of which Y. Lotman called for in his works. Surprisingly, no one has resorted to this unmistakable resource in the four hundred years of the existence of the tragedy, and all critical activity blurred into secondary, albeit interesting, details. Well, there is nothing to do but try to fill the existing gap and show, finally, that Shakespeare laid down his basic idea of \u200b\u200bthe subjectivity of the human being in his creation not so much in the form of Hamlet’s “random” statements to a certain extent, but mainly in the form of a clear a well-thought-out structure of the work (we insist on this approach, despite the widespread opinion that in the era of Shakespeare there were no plot-structured works).

B. Research

Let's start. In view of the complexity of our task, we have only one way to get the correct result - to begin with, go through the work, peering into each of its atomic components. Further, on the basis of the material received (in chapter C of our research), it will be possible to make the final constructions.

Act one of Hamlet's exploration

Scene one (the division into acts and scenes is conditional, since, as you know, the author did not have them).

The guards and Horatio (friend of Prince Hamlet) discover the ghost of the deceased King Hamlet. After he hides, it is reported about the impending war between Denmark and the young Norwegian prince Fortinbras, whose father once died in a duel at the hands of the very King Hamlet, whose spirit had just passed by. As a result of that duel, the possessions of Fortinbras's father - the lands of Denmark - passed to Hamlet, and now, after the death of the latter, young Fortinbras wanted to return them back. After this information, the spirit appears again, they seem to want to grab it, but in vain - it leaves freely and unharmed.

Obviously, the first scene provides an understanding of the connection between the appearance among people of the ghost of the deceased King Hamlet and a possible war.

Scene two. In it, we distinguish two parts (of the plot).

In the first part, we are presented with the current king Claudius - the brother of the deceased king Hamlet. Claudius received the crown because he married the widow-queen Gertrude, and now revels in his royal position: he is thinking of establishing peace with Fortinbras through a letter to the king of Norway (Fortinbras's uncle), and Laertes, the son of the nobleman Polonius, graciously lets go to France (obviously , have fun), and Prince Hamlet (the son of the deceased king and his nephew) tries to oil with his benevolent disposition towards him. In general - here we have a king who is "knee-deep", who does not see problems in their volumetric complexity, but considers them to be something like a joke that should be quickly solved so that they do not interfere with the queen's fun. Everything he has is fast and light, everything seems to him airy and fleeting. So the queen sings along to him: "This is how the world was created: the living will die / And after life will go away into eternity."

In the second part of the scene, the protagonist is Jr. Hamlet. He, unlike the king and his mother, looks at the world differently: "It seems to me that they are unknown." It is focused not on appearance and fleetingness, but on the stability of existence. But, as A. Anikst quite rightly believes, his tragedy lies in the fact that he, aiming at stability, sees the collapse of all grounds: his father died, and his mother betrayed the ideals of fidelity (read - stability) and a little over a month after the funeral came out for the husband's brother. In this he, a student at the progressive university in Wittenberg, sees not only the collapse of moral foundations in his personal life, but also in the entire Danish kingdom. And now he, who has lost his grounds (external and internal), Horatio (his student friend) and two officers invite at night to see the ghost of Hamlet-st. It turns out that even though initially Hamlet Jr. and appears before us as deprived of the foundations of life (the foundation of his being), but he is dissatisfied with this, reflects on this ("Father ... in the eyes of my soul") and therefore immediately at his own will plunges into the abyss of the obscure, into the realm of the ghost kingdom, into the ghostly realm. It is clear that one can wish to go into the unclear only being aimed at getting out of his life impasse: in the current situation (as if the second person in the state) he does not see himself. Therefore, perhaps, in a ghostly fog, he will be able to find for himself the purpose of life and the meaning of existence? This is the life position of a dynamic character, so when they talk about the immutability of Hamlet throughout the entire play, it becomes somehow embarrassing for such, if I may say so, “analysts”.

In general, in the second scene we see that Prince Hamlet found himself in a situation of lack of solidity both in his environment (i.e. in the world) and in himself, and, taking advantage of the opportunity (the expected meeting with the ghost of his father), decided to leave of this position without foundation, at least having entered the position of pseudo-foundation, which is the situation of finding the previous foundation with the ghost (mirage).

Scene three.

Laertes tells his sister Ophelia not to have anything to do with Hamlet: he does not belong to himself (read - does not own his foundation) and therefore love affairs with him are dangerous. In addition, the prince must confirm his love with deeds: “Let him now repeat to you that he loves / Your duty is not to trust the words anymore, / What is he able to do in this situation / They are justified, and he will confirm them, / How the common voice of Denmark wants ". Further, their common father Polonius instructs Laertes on how to behave in France (common worldly wisdom), and after - Ophelia, like Laertes, advises not to believe Hamlet (see Note 1). She accepts the advice of her brother and father: "I obey."

Here Laertes and Polonius betray their disbelief in the decency of Hamlet, and for that they have reasons - he has no basis. However, it is important that Ophelia easily accepts their arguments (especially her brother), thereby demonstrating that she lives with someone else's mind. Hamlet's love is less valuable to her than the opinion of her brother and father. Although, if you think about it, then she might not agree with them. Indeed, Laertes and Polonius are men who carry a rational attitude to life, and in their eyes Hamlet has no reason (the basis of his strength as a statesman), since he is clearly dependent on the king. Hamlet is politically suspended, something can only be changed here by the people, about which Laertes reports with the words: "... he will confirm them, / As the common voice of Denmark wants." Ophelia, as a woman, evaluates (should evaluate) Hamlet not from a political (rational) point of view, but from a spiritual (irrational) point of view. Of course, the prince lost the foundations of both external and internal existence, and this may give Ophelia the formal right to distrust him. But this approach, again, is absolutely rational and should not be characteristic of a woman who carries an irrational principle. Hamlet loves her, and she could see it through the eyes of her soul. However, she easily abandoned her (female, internal) point of view and adopted someone else's (male, external).

Scene four.

Hamlet with his friends (Horatio and officer Marcellus) prepared to meet the ghost of Hamlet-st. Time - "Nearly twelve". Hamlet Jr. denounces the bad manners prevailing in the kingdom, and immediately after that, a ghost appears.

Here, the prince traces the connection between the spirit of denial of the existing state of affairs and the spirit of his father that has arisen: the denial that sits in Hamlet Jr. pushes him from his dwelling in the existing to the unknown. In addition, in this scene, time is given not just as a chronological factor, a factor of a certain interval between events, but is designated as the entity that, through events, begins to shift itself. In this context, time ceases to be the number of seconds, minutes, days, etc., but becomes the density of the event stream. The latter will become clearer after our analysis of subsequent events.

Scene five. In it, we distinguish two parts.

In the first part of the scene, Prince Hamlet's conversation with the ghost of his father is given. He begins with a message: "The hour has come, / When I have to flame hell / give myself up for torment." There is obvious sin on it. Further, he reports that he was killed (poisoned) by the current king, and once again regrets that he died with sins, not having time to repent ("Oh horror, horror, horror!"). Finally, he calls on the prince to take revenge ("do not condone"). Hamlet Jr. swears revenge.

In this plot, a connection is made between the sin of King Hamlet and everything connected with his murder. There is a feeling that it was his death that put the blame on him. Paradox? Hardly. Everything will be clear soon.

Further, it should be noted that time, having manifested its existence in the previous scene, here confirms its special, extra-everyday, essence. Namely, from the fourth scene we know that the conversation of Hamlet Jr. with the ghost started at midnight or a little later. The conversation itself, as it is presented by Shakespeare, could take no more than 10-15 minutes (and even then with a stretch), but at the end the ghost leaves, because dawn has begun: “It's time. Look, firefly. " It usually dawns at 4-5 o'clock in the morning, well, maybe at 3-4 o'clock, taking into account the Danish white nights - if it was in the summer. If, as is often believed in Shakespearean studies, the event took place in the month of March, then dawn should come at all at 6-7. In any case, several astronomical hours have passed since the beginning of the conversation, but they were able to squeeze in a few minutes of stage action. By the way, a similar situation took place in the first act, when the time interval between twelve o'clock in the morning and the crowing of a rooster absorbed no more than ten minutes of the characters' conversations among themselves. This suggests that in the play, time in the flow of heroes' actions has its own structure and density. It is their own time, time of their activity.

In the second part of the scene, the prince tells his friends that after talking with the ghost, he will behave strangely so that they are not surprised at anything and remain silent. Takes an oath from them about it. The ghost several times with his call "Swear!" reminds of his presence. He follows what is happening, wherever the heroes move. All this means that the location of the characters does not matter, and that everything that happens is related to them, and even more, everything happens in them, i.e. in a person, in every person.

Analysis of the first act.Based on the results of the first act, the following can be said. The young prince Hamlet has lost his foundation, there is no sense of the value of his being in him: "I do not value my life as a pin." He does not accept this position of his, denies it and is thrown into the search for some new stability. For this, Shakespeare ensures his meeting with a ghost who is afraid to burn in fiery hell for the sins he has committed and asks the prince not to leave everything as it is. In fact, he asks not only to take revenge, but to make the situation such that there are no more life mistakes behind him, behind the ghost. And here we come to an important question: what exactly is the sin of King Hamlet?

Since, on closer examination, this sin is seen in the suddenness of his death through murder - on the one hand, and on the other - after this murder, a confusion of morals went all over Denmark, the fall of all solidity of existence, and even, as an extreme manifestation of this, the threat of war, it seems that the sin of King Hamlet is that he failed to provide the Danish people with a sustainable future. Having received the kingdom through an accidental duel, he introduced the kinship of chance into the life of the state, deprived it of stability. He should have thought about creating a mechanism for the succession of power, but did nothing for this. And now a new king sits on the throne, the legitimacy of which is controversial, the consequence of which are the claims of the young Fortinbras. The sin of Hamlet-st. is growing chaos, and Hamlet Jr., in order to remove this sin, must stabilize the situation, obviously, through the seizure of power: in this case, the power will have the property of family continuity, which in the eyes of the public in Europe at that time meant its legitimacy, stability, reliability ... Power was to be passed from father to son - this was the ideal order of its inheritance that was adopted at that time. The sudden assassination of Hamlet-st. and the interception of the crown by his brother made the situation pseudo-legitimate: it is as if a member of Hamlet's family (clan) rules, but not that one. Hamlet Jr. it is necessary to reveal this deception, and to reveal it openly, so that it becomes clear to everyone, and so that in the end everyone will accept his coming to the throne as legitimate, and therefore just. Legitimacy, justice of power - such is the task of Prince Hamlet, which looms at the end of the first act. If it is fulfilled, everything around will stabilize and receive its foundation. As V. Kantor rightly thinks, "Hamlet sets himself the task of not revenge, but of correcting the world ...". A. Anikst is expressed in the same spirit: “Hamlet ... raises the particular task of personal revenge to the stage when it outgrows the narrow framework, becoming a noble deed of affirming the highest morality” (p. 85).

But this is only the first part of the case. The second part is related to the fact that the movement of Hamlet Jr. to power is closely related to his need to obtain the inner foundation of his existence. Actually, he initially denied the groundlessness of all parts of the world - both the one inside him and the one outside. Therefore, the foundations must also receive both the inner world and the outer. It can even be said that both of these worlds are not separated for him by an impassable abyss, but are different sides of one whole, and differ relatively, like right and left. Consequently, the basis for them will be the same, but only, perhaps, in different ways.

But where does this idea of \u200b\u200ba single world of inner and outer, more precisely, where and how is it shown in the play come from? This is shown through the phenomena of time and space - in scenes 4 and 5. Indeed, after Hamlet Jr. decided to get out of the deplorable state of total lack of solidity, i.e. after he decided to act, the time of the course of external events (a conversation with a ghost) quite clearly became what it is for internal reflection in a situation of extremely heightened perception of the world, i.e. external time, like internal time (internally perceived), began to flow equally quickly, since it was required by the strongest tension of the prince's spirit. And since exactly the same situation was at the beginning of the play, where the theme of growing chaos was clearly connected with the murder of Hamlet-st., And where we see the experience of the characters about a possibly impending war, it turns out that in the play the internal tension of the heroes does not only their internally perceived time, but also their external time, which in ordinary life, outside the play, does not depend on subjective moments. Thus, the fact that external time became a function of the circumstances of the internal life of the heroes, and in particular of Hamlet, is proof of the unity of the world - internal and external - within the vision of the poetics of tragedy.

A similar proof is the situation with space. Well, in fact, the activities of Hamlet Jr. in the fifth scene, it turns out to be soldered into a location next to a ghost, and if you get rid of unnecessary mysticism, then next to and even together with the memory of a ghost. When he reminds of himself with the exclamation “Swear!”, He thereby asserts that the inner space of his stay in the memory of the prince does not differ from the outer space in which the prince himself is.

However, our statement that the ghost reminds of itself precisely in the mind of Hamlet Jr., and not elsewhere, requires clarification. The fact is that all the invocations of the spirit "Swear!", Apparently, only the prince hears, and the other heroes who are present here nearby do not hear this, since they keep deathly silence on this matter. After all, we know from previous scenes that when they actually saw a ghost, they did not hide their feelings, and spoke quite frankly. But that was earlier. Here they are silent. This clearly indicates that they do not hear the voice of the ghost, but hears and therefore only Hamlet Jr. reacts to it.

However, if the ghost refers only to the consciousness (in memory, in the consciousness) of Hamlet, then why does he use the plural “Swear” in addressing, and not the singular “Swear”, meaning his friends? Moreover, by the very meaning of the requirement for an oath, it does not apply to the prince, who does not need to swear to himself in silence, but to his friends. Everything is correct! The ghost speaks through the consciousness of Hamlet to his companions, since Shakespeare thereby wants to say about a single space that permeates the soul of the protagonist and the entire external world, so that the voice in Hamlet's consciousness must in fact be accepted in the outside world, while the oath must be voiced. She was voiced and taken for granted. Hamlet's friends did not hear the otherworldly voice, but fulfilled his command (of course, directly responding not to the request of the ghost, but to the request of the prince).

However, Horatio nevertheless exclaimed: “O day and night! These are miracles! " At first glance, this refers to the voice of a ghost. But why then did he remain silent before, when before that the voice made itself felt three times, and spoke only after Hamlet's remark “You, old mole! How fast you are underground! Have you dug in? Let's change the place ”? To understand this, it is enough to present the events from the point of view of Horatio: Hamlet asks him and Marcellus not to talk about meeting the ghost, they willingly promise, but then Hamlet begins to behave strangely, rushing from place to place and repeating the request for an oath. Of course, if Hamlet's comrades heard a voice from under the ground, then the prince's throwings would be understandable to them. But we found out that the adoption of such a point of view (generally accepted) leads to the inexplicable silence of Horatio and Marcellus when the voice itself sounded. If we accept our version that they did not hear the voice, and that only Hamlet heard it in his mind, then his throwing from side to side and numerous repetitions of the request for an oath for them look more than strange, so it would be quite natural to consider an exclamation Horatio "That's so miraculous!" related to exactly this, all of a sudden strange for an outside observer the prince's behavior.

In addition, Horatio's words may have another connotation. It is possible that Shakespeare is here addressing the audience in this way, meaning that everything that happened in scenes 4 and 5, i.e. at night and at dawn, very wonderful. What is this miracle? On behalf of Hamlet, there is an explanation: "Horace, there are many things in the world, / That your philosophy has never dreamed of." It turns out that the miracle of what happened lies in the birth of a new philosophy, different from the one that was previously adopted, and which was taught to students by Hamlet and Horatio. Hamlet decided to break out of the shackles of previous ideas, since they did not allow him to live (have a foundation) in this world, and form a system of new ones, in which the foundation of the consciousness of man and the whole world is one. After all, before Hamlet, in the era of the worldview of Christian theologians, consciousness (inner world) was not considered in the system of philosophical reflections as something independent. Undoubtedly, even then the world and man possessed a single foundation - God. However, a person was taken either as an object - and then he viewed himself as if from the outside, not peering into his own soul and not allowing himself to consider it on a par with the whole world, or as a subject - and then the subjective mind, although it was extremely important (so important that it often interrupted even the authority of the church), was separated from the world, standing apart from it as something separate, accidentally incorporated into him, unequal to him. Hamlet dared to equate in importance the soul (mind) and the world, as a result of which he began to draw out the contours of a new philosophy, which the former sages “never dreamed of”. The influence of new ideas on Shakespeare (in the form protest in relation to Catholic Christianity, by the end of the 16th century. decomposed and largely lost the moral spirit of Holy Scripture), which were saturated with the philosophical treatises of many of his contemporaries, and which were used by many rulers, including the rulers of the then England, to ensure their political independence. At the same time, against the background of such representations, the theme of the correlation in the importance of reason and authority is imperceptibly introduced into the play. This topic, which is old in scholastic literature (see the work of V. Soloviev on this subject), by the time of Shakespeare's life had already been represented by the works of many philosophers-theologians who asserted the primacy of reason over church authority (starting with John Erigena and so on). In the play we will see that Shakespeare clearly picks up this line, transforming it into a dispute between the human mind and the authority of the state (or monarch), at the end of the work - with a clear preference for reason: the monarch can act in his own, selfish interests, and the task of the mind is to reveal it.

Thus, in the first act, Hamlet asserts the basis of his new philosophy, which consists in the fact that he puts his consciousness on a par with the world (in political terms - on a par with the opinion of the authorities), and so that space turns out to be the same for both consciousness and the external world, and the time of the active consciousness determines the flow of time in the environment of a person. And this he does against the background of the absolute rejection of Laertes, Polonius and Ophelia of his spiritual moments, when they see in him only one politician. In fact, this means their adherence to the old philosophical attitudes. In the future, this will turn into a disaster for them.

Act of the second exploration of Hamlet

Scene one.

Polonius instructs his servant Reynaldo to hand over a letter to Laertes who has left for France, and at the same time to find out ("Sniff") about his life. At the same time, during the instructions, he gets lost, and switches from a poetic syllable to a prosaic one. After that, Ophelia appears and informs her father about the strange behavior of Hamlet against the background of his love for her.

The meaning of all these events may be as follows. The main point in Polonius's teachings to Reinaldo appears to be that he goes astray. This happens when he is about to draw the conclusion of his speech: "And then, then, then, then, then ..." and then comes his surprised muttering (in prose): "What did I want to say? ... Where did I stop? ? ". This achieves the effect of nullifying all that profundity that Polonius was winding up, obviously admiring himself and his cleverness. "Cleverness" after a hesitation burst, and only the hero's former self-admiration remained the bottom line. In fact, the stupidity of this nobleman appears here, which he tries to cover up with standard speculation, very characteristic of people of his warehouse - representatives of behind-the-scenes intrigues, accustomed to doing everything secretly. All Polonius' instructions to his servant (however, like Laertes in scene 3 of the first act) are pure rules of the gray cardinal, confident in himself, but not showing himself off; acting in secret rather than openly. From here the meaning of the figure of Polonius in the play immediately follows - it is a symbol of behind the scenes, undercover intrigues, implicit actions.

And Hamlet enters into this sphere of intrigue. He must act in it, and therefore, in order to hide his aspirations from prying eyes, wears appropriate clothes - clothes of play and pretense - so as not to differ from the surrounding background. Moreover, neither Ophelia nor Polonius know that he is pretending (we remember that he decided to play his oddities after meeting with the ghost of his father, i.e. after he decided to move towards legitimateauthorities), and tend to blame everything on his mental disorder, which happened to him after Ophelia rejected his love at the instigation of her brother and father. It turns out that Hamlet's mimicry succeeded, he clearly outplayed the hardened intriguer Polonius, and his newly created philosophy, which accepts the human soul, immediately surpassed the old philosophy, which does not take it seriously. By the way, Polonius immediately noticed this: he realized that he was “too smart” with a disregard for the prince's emotional experiences, but he himself could not do anything here, and for advice he went to the king.

In addition, in Ophelia's story about Hamlet's arrival to her, it is clear that our hero began to observe the world in a completely different way than before: "He studied me for a long time point-blank." On the one hand, this is due to his play, and on the other, it is an indication that he began to become different in essence, as a result of which he began to look at those around him with new eyes, i.e. as something new, with interest and focus.

Scene two. In it we distinguish six parts.

In the first part, the king instructs Hamlet's school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what happened to the prince, what caused his "transformations": "To say otherwise, so unrecognizable / He is internally and externally ...".

Here the king cocks the spring of undercover merrymaking and secret inquiries under the plausible pretext of a desire to cure Hamlet: "And do we have a cure for her (the prince's secret - ST)." However, the fact that the king initially calls a certain “secret” the cause of the illness, and that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are charged with “force” to draw the prince into their society, speaks of the king's disbelief of Hamlet's accidental illness. Apparently, the king suspects him of something dangerous to himself, but since he has no direct evidence to think so, he speaks more in hints than directly. Nevertheless, everything is clear: this murderer and throne invader is not sure of the stability of his position, is afraid of being exposed, and therefore gives the task to two of his subordinates to "find out" what is on the prince's mind. In addition, it is clear from this that the king has no reason for existence, just like the main character. However, unlike the latter, our autocrat does not want to change anything, he is an adherent of existence without a foundation, existence as a case, outside the context of the global laws of this world.

In the second part, Polonius appears and says, first, that "The ambassadors are safe, sir, / Have returned from Norway", i.e. that the king's peace initiative was a success, and there would be no war with the young Fortinbras, and secondly, that he "attacked the root of Hamlet's ravings."

After the message of peace, the king's opinion was strengthened that just like that, playfully, through a simple letter, peace and order can be ensured, and that his mood for fun and an easy attitude to life is fully justified. He easily, through insidious murder, gained power, and now with the same ease he thinks to rule the country. So he invites the ambassador who has returned with good news to the fun: "And in the evening, come to the feast." Our king does not have a life full of difficult tasks, but a continuous celebration. The same applies to life and Polonius: "This business (with the war - TS) in the hat." Typically, this kind of phrases are thrown by businessmen, after they concoct their small affairs. The attitude towards such an important event as the war should be different, and words for a satisfactory attitude towards the achieved peace should also be chosen worthy. The lack of seriousness in the words of the king and Polonius speaks, firstly, of their ideological similarity (however, this is so clear), and secondly, of their unwillingness to meet a new Hamlet, whose attitude to the stability of existence is not simply formed in the form casual opinion, but in the form of a deeply thought-out position.

And now, being in such a complacent, relaxed state, Polonius, the king and, while the queen who shares their worldview, proceed to the question of Hamlet's oddities (third part of the scene). Polonius starts, and under the guise of scholastic-figurative cleverness, in which logic exists not to describe life, but for itself, he carries a uniform boring nonsense, for example: “... Your son has gone mad. / Crazy, I said, because he is crazy / And there is a person who has gone crazy, ”or:“ Let's say he is crazy. It is necessary / To find the cause of this effect, / Or a defect, for the effect itself / Due to the reason is defective. / And what is needed is what is needed. / What follows? / I have a daughter, for a daughter is mine. / This is what my daughter gave me, out of obedience. / Judge and listen, I will read. " He could simply say: I have a daughter, she and Hamlet had an amorous relationship, and so on. But he is not interested in saying simply and clearly. By all his behavior, he demonstrates his adherence to the old, scholastic philosophy. However, unlike the geniuses of Duns Scotus, Anselm of Canterbury or Thomas Aquinas, Polonius' verbiage only in form resembles the scholastic grace of the mind, but in fact it is empty, pseudo-clever, so that even the queen - so far his ally - does not stand, and in the middle of it he inserts chatter: "More efficient, but more artful." Thus, the author of the tragedy not only mocks scholasticism, as it is rightly accepted to think in Shakespeare's studies, but also equates reasoning for the sake of philosophizing and outright stupidity, and through this brings the scholastic theme in the play to a systemic level, without paying attention to which it is impossible to completely understand the general concept of the work.

Finally, Polonius reads Hamlet's letter to Ophelia, and he reads, in contrast to the previous text of the play, not in poetry, but in prose, and immediately, having just begun, he gets lost - exactly as it happened in the previous scene, when he instructed his servant Reinaldo to spy on Laertes in France. And as then this confusion blew away all his feigned, artificial and lifeless "cleverness", so the same thing happens here: well, he is not a philosopher, you know, not a philosopher. His thinking is completely non-vital, and therefore he rejects everything normal, human in confusion. Here is the word from Hamlet's letter to the “beloved” addressed to Ophelia, he does not accept: beaten, you see. Well, of course, he has a high mind, and a simple human word is not for him. Give him on a silver platter a semblance of that pseudoscience, which he himself has just given out. A little further, he reads a very remarkable quatrain, on which we will stop. Recall that this is Hamlet addressing Ophelia:

“Don't trust the daylight,
Don't trust the star of the nights
Don't believe the truth is somewhere
But trust my love. "

What does it say here? The first line calls not to believe the obvious things (we associate daylight with the complete clarity of all things), i.e. not believe what Ophelia's eyes see. In fact, here Hamlet tells her that his illness, so conspicuous to everyone, is not real. The next line urges you not to trust weak pointers (stars) in the darkness of the night, i.e. - not to believe hints about the unclear essence of the matter. What kind of business can young people have? It is clear that this is either love or Hamlet's illness. Love will be directly discussed in the fourth line, so here again we are talking about the prince's madness, but in a different key - in the key of some courtly opinions about its cause. Hamlet seems to say: all possible guesses about my strange behavior are deliberately wrong. This means that the prince is very confident in the secrecy of his move. Further: “Do not believe that the truth is somewhere”, ie somewhere, not here. In other words, the whole real reason for his changes is here in the kingdom. Finally, "But believe my love." Everything is clear here: the prince opens his heart and confesses his love. "What's more?" Pushkin would say. In general, it turns out that Hamlet told Ophelia quite fully (albeit in the form of encryption) about his position, striving, especially through a direct declaration of love, to bring his beloved into spiritual conjunction with himself, therefore - to get an ally in her face and in terms of that so that she began to share common worldview values \u200b\u200bwith him (acceptance of the soul as an equal part with this, the outside world), and in terms of political struggle to assert the stability of the state's existence (see Note 2).

Ofelia did not understand the meaning of the letter (she is generally stupid at first), moreover, she betrayed the very spirit of cordiality that dominates in him, since she gave it to her puppeteer father (does a decent girl give amorous letters to someone like that, easily? ).

After the poetic form, Hamlet's letter turns into prose. The main thing here is that, in general, writing is built on the principle of prose-poetry-prose. The middle proclamation is framed by ordinary human feelings. Our hero is not only smart and creates a new philosophy, but he is also human. Actually, this is his philosophy - in the acceptance of the human soul as equivalent to the world.

Neither Polonius nor the royal couple understood any such nuances in the letter, and given the subsequent explanation of Polonius that he forbade his daughter to communicate with the prince because of his high nobility, they accepted Hamlet's strange behavior as a result of his undivided love for Ophelia.

The fourth part of the scene consists of a conversation between Polonius and Hamlet, which is conveyed in prose. The prose in the play always (with the exception of the letter from the prince to Ophelia that we have just analyzed) indicates the presence of some kind of tension in comparison with the main, poetic, text. The tension in this case stems from the fact that two pretenders came together. Odin, Polonius, is an old courtier, a “gray cardinal,” constantly playing games to promote small, momentary affairs, outside the context of a global and long-term strategy. The other, Hamlet, is a young, I'm not afraid of this word, a patriot of his country, who for its good has stepped onto the dangerous path of the political struggle for power and therefore is forced to pretend to be abnormal.

Polonius was the first to ask the hidden question. We can say that he attacked: "Do you know me, my lord?" If we take this literally, then one might get the impression that the old courtier has lost all memory, and hence his reason, because Hamlet grew up in the royal family and who else does not like him to know everyone who is somehow close to the court, especially since he loves his daughter Ophelia. But the implication here can be twofold. First, Polonius deliberately belittles his importance so that Hamlet, having lost his vigilance, would reveal himself to him. And secondly, the question can be understood at the same time in the opposite way, like "Do you know my real strength, what ideology is behind me, and do you overestimate your strength, trying to create an alternative to the existing state of affairs?" He replies: "Excellent", and immediately attacks himself: "You are a fishmonger." Conversation, seemingly harmless, in fact turns out to be a serious fight. Indeed, a "fish merchant" is the most insult to a noble nobleman. Those. to the question of Polonius "Do you know my strength" Hamlet actually answers "You have no power, you are nobody, a petty fussing businessman."

Note that A. Barkov interprets the phrase “fish merchant” as “pimp”, finding for this certain lexical and historical grounds. Perhaps this is so, but this still suggests that Hamlet puts Polonius very low, does not see real power in him, although he is the father of his beloved. However, "pimp", if you take this word literally, is hardly suitable for Polonius simply because this low business does not correspond to his status as secret chancellor. And even from a young age, at the start of his career, he, in principle, could not engage in brothels, since this business would have imposed on him such a stigma that would forever block his entry into high spheres of influence. And it's not that there was no prostitution in Shakespeare's time, or that the rulers of that time had strict moral principles. Of course, debauchery was always and everywhere, but power in those days rested not only on the force of arms, but also on the myth of its special honor. The noble's word of honor was stronger than a contract certified by a lawyer. And now, if frankness, permissible for sailors and fishermen, creeps into the system of this myth, then the myth itself, and therefore the power, is instantly destroyed. Kings and princes (as well as Polonius, who "oh, how much has suffered from love") could easily afford to use the services of pimps, but they were never approached, as it was catastrophically dangerous for their position. Therefore, the translation of "fishmonger" as "pimp", if it can be accepted, is not literally, but in the sense of a trader in human souls. This approach much better reflects the very essence of the whole play, where it is, by and large, about the human soul. Polonius does not put it in anything and is quite ready, for the sake of selfish interests, to sell anyone who stands in his way. Hamlet throws this accusation in his eyes, and he can only, as weakly deny: "No, what are you, my lord."

After a few interesting phrases, which we will omit due to their external attitude to the general line of our reasoning, Hamlet advises Polonius not to let his daughter (ie Ophelia) in the sun: “Conception is good, but not for your daughter. Don't yawn, buddy. " It is clear that the sun is understood as a king, a royal court, etc. Hamlet simply fights for his beloved, does not want her to receive ideological influence from a frivolous king. He continues what he started in his letter to Ophelia. It is like an empty vessel, it will possess what is placed in it. Hamlet sees this, and is struggling to prevent it from being filled with non-life morality (see Note 3).

Hamlet's efforts are transparent, but not for Polonius. For him, the words of the prince are closed, as the new philosophy is closed to those who are used to the old (or to whom it is more beneficial). Nevertheless, he does not calm down, does not lose the desire to understand what lies in the prince's madness, and again carries out a thrust in a verbal duel: “What are you reading, my lord?”, Or, simply put, “What thoughts do you cling to, what is your philosophy?". He calmly replies: "Words, words, words." Here you can recall his vow to avenge the death of his father in the fifth scene of the first act: "I will erase all signs / Sensitivity from the plaque, all words from books ... I will write the whole book of the brain / Without a low mixture." Obviously, here and there we are talking about the same thing - he must erase from his "brain" everything that interferes with life, and, on the contrary, fill his "brain" with that purity ("without a low mixture"), which fully corresponds to high ideals with which he was fully saturated at Wittenberg.

Further, after explaining his attitude to the book with which Polonius met him, he says to him: "for you yourself, my dear sir, will someday grow old, as I, if, like a crab, will move back." Here, apparently, Hamlet does not mean physical old age, to which his interlocutor has about greater closeness than himself, and old age in the sense of a certain numbness of consciousness from piled up problems. Hamlet, having recently received a huge stream of experiences, makes incredible intellectual efforts to overcome the piled up difficulties, and therefore is in a certain constraint in his behavior: he is limited to the game into which he was forced to unexpectedly plunge into. This jumped him away from the blissful stay in the university paradise with his humanitarian delights and the feeling of endless youth, and, as it were, made him old. However, it didn’t even “somehow”, but naturally aged, because, as it follows from the first act, the inner work of his soul directly accelerates the flow of physical time in which the flesh lives. Therefore, in a jump, the mature Hamlet calls on Polonius: so that an incredible mass of problems does not attack him at once, and does not age him at once - not to back away, like cancer, from problems, not to avoid them, not to look for pseudo-solutions, as happened with the military problem, but realistically solve them with a long-term perspective.

In addition, it is necessary to highlight another, parallel, subtext of Hamlet's words. Namely, one can recall how in the previous act Ophelia told Polonius that the prince visited her in a very strange way, examined her, and then left, "backing away." Perhaps Hamlet here recalls that incident, or rather, his state at that moment - the state of observing the world with new eyes. Going backwards is a criticism of the position of simple, passive observation, which is important at first, but only as a momentary moment. Simple observation (in relation to Polonius - peeping) is not enough. All this now cannot satisfy the prince, who, in order to solve all problems, needs the position of an active leader.

In general, we can say that the prince preaches his ideological position and seeks to win Polonius to his side. Moreover, with this gentleman behind the scenes, he speaks in his own language - the language of hints and semitones. And Polonius, it seems, begins to understand what the matter is, he begins to see in Hamlet not a boy, but a husband: "If this is insanity, then in its own way it is consistent." However, he clearly does not intend to go over to the side of the prince and quickly retreats. As a result, Hamlet was left with a low opinion of his interlocutor: “Oh, these obnoxious old fools!”, Who not only wasted his time on questioning, but in the end he was frightened of the conversation and ran away, tail between his legs.

In the fifth part of the second scene, Hamlet's conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is given. These inseparable two act and think in exactly the same way. In general, the sameness, repetition in a play often means the absence of living thought. For example, Hamlet in the previous act, answering another question of Polonius about the book he was reading (obviously taken from his university era), says: "Words, words, words", meaning the purely theoretical nature of what was written, without going into reality hence the absence of vital thought. Similarly, the identical, repeating each other Ronenkranz and Guildenstern are by definition adherents of stupidity, the old, obsolete, ideological paradigm, and, therefore, they are supporters of its political protection - the king.

And in fact, Hamlet, having not received Polonius as a political allies, at first rejoiced at his old school friends in the hope that, perhaps, they could help him in something. He welcomes them cordially, and opens up a little to them, expressing his dissatisfaction with the order in the country: "Denmark is a prison." But they do not take this turn of affairs: "We do not agree so, prince." Everything, the dividing line has been drawn, the positions have been clarified, and you only need to prove your case. Twins: "Well, it's your ambition that makes it a prison: it's too small for your spirit." They remember the order of the king to find out from the prince secret, dangerous thoughts for him (the king), i.e. thoughts about seizing power, and act head-on, trying to push the interlocutor to frankness. Like, you, Hamlet, the great, you have great ambitions, well, tell us about them. But he does not fall into such primitive traps, and answers: "Oh my God, I could have closed myself in a nutshell and consider myself the king of infinite space, if I had not had bad dreams" (translated by M. Lozinsky), i.e. he says that he personally does not need anything, no power, that he could be happy being in his inner world, if not for the chaos and lack of foundation in the world ("if I had not had bad dreams"). The twins insist: "And these dreams are the essence of ambition," and further, attention, they shift to the language a la scholastic philosophy, ideologically to which they belong: "For the very essence of an ambitious person is just a shadow of a dream." They hope that the way of chatting up the problem, clouding their minds by means of excessively abstract images will give them the opportunity to win the argument and convince Hamlet of their rightness, i.e. that the existing worldview system fully allows you to live in this world, react to it and think with dignity. But this is a cheap move: Hamlet denies the existing system of thought because he sees in himself the strength to overcome it, since he fully studied it and masters it better than any of its adherents. Therefore, he easily picks up the proposed level of discussion, and this is what comes out of it:

Hamlet: And the dream itself is just a shadow.
Rosencrantz: True, and I consider ambition in its own way so airy and light that it is nothing more than a shadow of a shadow.
Hamlet: Then our beggars are bodies, and our monarchs and pompous heroes are the shadows of beggars. (translated by M. Lozinsky)

Twins are knocked over on their shoulder blades! Hamlet defeated them with their own weapons, which speaks doubly against their position, and therefore against the position of all supporters of the old system of thought, in which there are no grounds for man; politically against the king.

After this verbal skirmish, it is quite clear to Hamlet what these two dummies are. A few more words, and he will directly declare this ("They sent for you") - he realized that the king had sent them to sniff out his plans. Should he be afraid of this? Does he need, who defeated both Polonius and these two, who already knows the power of the influence of his word, i.e. to hide the basis of changes in yourself? No, he does not intend to hide it anymore - as he did before - especially since he had the imprudence to open a little bit (“Denmark is a prison”). He walks with his visor slightly open and says that he sees no reason for this world. And since in any state the basis for life is power, in fact he thereby declares his dissatisfaction with the existing power situation, in which the king does not cope with the duty to ensure the stability and reliability of the foundations of society. Moreover, after all, everyone knows that he, the king, by a hasty marriage to his brother's wife, himself was the first to violate the previously unshakable moral norms of behavior. Therefore, Hamlet, speaking about his lack of enthusiasm for the current state of affairs, speaks of the need to change the government to one that could give people ideals. Of course, he does not speak about it directly (his visor is not completely open), but he makes it known, so that “those who have ears, let them hear”. He no longer disguises himself as before, and is quite confident in his abilities - that's what is important here.

The sixth part of the second scene is a practical preparation for unfolding the force of Hamlet's compressed spring. Here he meets wandering artists who have come to the castle to show performances and asks them to read a monologue from an ancient Roman tragedy. Hamlet, after talking with them, returns to poetic speech. Before that, starting with the conversation with Polonius, everything was conveyed in prose, since that was required by the backstage mood. At the end of the scene, the tension began to subside, and the prince, when finally left alone with himself, was able to relax. It was impossible to completely relax in public: Polonius and the twins who came up spoiled everything. The atmosphere was tense, although outwardly it was not noticeable, for example:

Polonius: Come on, gentlemen.

Hamlet: Follow him, friends. We have a show tomorrow.

Such a seemingly wonderful idyll. But behind her is a mass of emotions from the recent confrontation.

However, the main thing in this part of the scene is, first, the unity of Hamlet with the actors, i.e. with a cultural stratum of the people that forms public opinion ("It is better for you to have a bad inscription on the tomb than their bad opinion during your lifetime"), and secondly, Hamlet's mood for this part of the people to remove from their memory such scenes in which horrors are described rulers (Pyrrhus), seizing power by force and falsehood. As a result, although Hamlet did not find support in power circles, he managed to find it among the people: the first actor, reading a monologue, got into such an experience that even Polonius noticed it. In addition, the actors agreed to play the play based on the Prince's script.

Finally, the following should be noted. Left alone, Hamlet says that "the actor is a newcomer" "So he subdued his consciousness to a dream, / That the blood comes off his cheeks, his eyes / Tears fog up, his voice fades, / And his appearance says with every fold / How he lives ..." e. he says that the dream changes the whole of human nature. In the following lines, he immediately refers to himself. In other words, he means the following: I am quite ripe for the fight, my dream has changed me, so I have nothing to fear and I have to go into battle, i.e. be active. Denial should be changed to affirmation. But for this change to take place correctly, the grounds are necessary, which he will receive through his active action-attack: “I will instruct the actors / To play a thing in front of my uncle according to the model / of the Father's death. I'll follow my uncle, - / Will take it for a living. If so, / I know how to be. " Hamlet prepared to jump.

Analysis of the second act. Thus, according to the second act, we can say that in it Hamlet is busy looking for allies. In circles close to power, he does not find understanding, because he is not able to understand anything there due to his adherence to the old worldview system, which does not really accept the inner world of a person, and therefore does not see real power in consciousness. As a result, consciousness takes revenge on them and does not unfold in them to its full power, making them elementarily stupid, constantly losing in intellectual disputes with Hamlet. The only hope among the wealth and nobility of our prince is still Ophelia. He fights for her both in a letter to her and in a conversation with her father Polonius.

The real acquisition of Hamlet in this act was his alliance with the people in the person of wandering actors. Having received support from them, he decided to take his first step not just to find out who is who in his environment, but to remove all barriers to generating his activity, i.e. to obtain proof of the king's guilt in the death of his father, and as a consequence - his complete guilt in the existing chaos and lack of foundation in the world.

Obviously, the appearance of the actors and their subsequent presentation was not an accident associated with the tradition of Shakespeare's time to insert performances within the performance. That is, of course, Shakespeare followed such a tradition, but this move does not arise from scratch, but as a consequence of the fact that Hamlet won the verbal duel between Polonius and the twins, using in their own language - the language of scholastic studies. Therefore, it is perfectly natural for him to use a similar technique in relation to the king, and offer him as bait what he shows weakness for - an entertainment action, a performance. The fact that this performance will not turn into a fun show at all will become clear in due time, but Hamlet set up such networks for the king, which he simply could not help but please because of his character, or rather, because of his corresponding ideological mood.

Finally, in the second act, the essence of Hamlet is clearly manifested: he is active. This should not be confused with the haste that many critics of the play expect from him. Not finding her (haste), they themselves rush to declare the main character either a coward or someone else, not understanding what kind of figure is in front of them. Hamlet is activity itself in its purest form. Activity, in contrast to simple spontaneity, ponders all its acts. Hamlet is moving towards the fulfillment of his task of creating the foundation of the world. Vengeance is far from the most important line in his list of tasks. Moreover, as it will become clear from our further analysis, all its movement is similar both in form and in content to the construction of a philosophical system, which is not only conclusions (results), but also the very process of achieving them. It would be extremely strange to expect from a philosopher only final maxims. Similarly, it is strange to expect instant action from Hamlet to carry out his mission.

Act three of Hamlet's exploration

First scene. We distinguish two parts in it.

In the first part, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report to the king that they could not find out from Hamlet the reason for his altered state, although they noticed something was wrong: "He escapes with the cunning of a madman." According to them, Hamlet is a sly one. However, they reassured the king, saying that he loves entertainment, ordered the visiting actors to play the play and invites the "august couple" to it. For the king, Hamlet's love for performances is a sign of his belonging to the worldview, code-named "having fun." And if so, then he has nothing to fear a coup and it is quite possible to respond to the invitation. This means that he pecked at the bait. A little more, and the hook of exposure will sink into him with the irreversibility of death.

In the second part of the scene, the authorities (the king, queen, Polonius and Ophelia) themselves tried, once again, to catch Hamlet in their snares. She does not know that she is practically doomed and initiates her imaginary activity. Ophelia turned out to be the decoy duck here - to her shame and to her death, she agrees to this treacherous role in relation to the one who recently opened his heart to her. She had to do what Polonius and Rosencrantz failed with Guildenstern - to find out the cause of the prince's illness. This whole camarilla cannot accept the transcendence of such an understanding for them: after all, the strangeness of Hamlet can be presented in such a way that he left their system of views, but he has not yet finally worked out the new system. As a result, during almost the entire tragedy, he is "suspended" between the old and the new, having no reliable home - neither here nor there. To understand such a state, they themselves need to break free from the shackles of the past, and find themselves in an airless, supportless position. But they do not want this (after the second act it is clear), but try to break through the wall of misunderstanding with their foreheads. This again speaks against their mental faculties, i.e. - against their worldview and philosophical position, which serves them as a useless tool in analyzing the entire situation.

But before they use the bait - Ophelia, we will hear Hamlet's central monologue in the whole play, his famous "To be or not to be ...". In it, he says that people live and are forced to fight, because they do not know what is on the other side of life, moreover, they are afraid of this unknown. The very thought of the possibility of getting there, in an unknown country, makes you “groaning, under the burden of life,” so it turns out that “It’s better to put up with a familiar evil, / Than to strive for an unfamiliar flight. / So thought turns all of us into cowards. " Hamlet, analyzing his failure to recruit Polonius and the twins, considers the reason for everything to be their fear of the unknown: the thought of the future, falling into a hole of nothing, makes the weak-willed numb and turns them into cowards, unable to move forward. But, on the other hand, after all, thought as such is always a kind of anticipation, a kind of peering over the edge, an attempt to see the invisible. Therefore, the one who has refused to move forward is, in principle, unable to think. Regarding Polonius, Hamlet has already spoken in this spirit ("Oh, those unbearable old fools"), but here he sums up the situation, concludes that he is on his way only with smart people capable of independent, forward-looking thinking. Hamlet himself is not afraid of novelty, just as he is not afraid of death, and he treats with sarcasm those whom “thought turns into cowards”. He dotted all the i's, he just had to go forward. As A. Anikst correctly notes, to his question "To be or not to be" he himself answers: one should be, that is. to be in it, in being, to be, since to be is to live, to constantly strive for the future. But the latter means not to be afraid to think about this very future. It turns out that in this monologue there is a statement of the connection: to be means to think about the future, about life in it, i.e. think about this being. This is the formula of the subject. Hamlet formulated his idea, with which he intended to move towards achieving his goal. Again, this idea is this: be a subject and don't be afraid of it! If in the first act he equalized the importance of reason and power, now reason outweighed power. This does not at all speak of his claim to some kind of genius. “Be a subject” is a philosophical formula, not a primitive everyday one, and means the ability and need to think in principle, which in the play turned out to be possible only with a respectful attitude towards the soul, ie. to the inner qualities of a person.

Hamlet made his discovery, and at this vulnerable moment they let in the bait - Ophelia. She is greeted with joy: “Ophelia! Oh joy! Remember / My sins in your prayers, nymph. " And what is she? Does she respond in kind? Not at all. She gives (and what she gives, in fact - throws) his gifts. He is shocked, but she insists, justifying this by the fact that "their smell has fizzled out", i.e. the fact that Hamlet seemed to stop loving her. Is this not insidiousness: we know that it was Ophelia, at the instigation of her father and brother, who refused to love Hamlet, and here she accuses him of cooling off to her, i.e. dumps everything from a sore head to a healthy one. And she does this with someone who is considered mentally unhealthy. Instead of pitying him, she seeks to finish him off. It’s how low you have to fall to go for this! After such statements, Hamlet immediately realizes what kind of fruit is in front of him - the traitor of their joint harmony, who exchanged his love for a quiet life at court. He realized that her previous signals in his direction were explained by the fact that she went over to the side of the king, and her essence, so empty, was filled with the poisonous content of an empty life without foundation. This does not mean at all that Hamlet saw a prostitute in Ophelia, as Barkov is trying to prove. Indeed, one can quote the words of Laertes in the third scene of the first act, when he urged her to keep away from Hamlet: “... understand how honor will suffer, / When ... you open the treasure / Innocence (emphasis mine - ST) hot insistence. " Rather, Hamlet's harsh behavior means that he saw Ophelia's spiritual corruption. And the root of this depravity lies in its focus not on the stability of existence, but on the momentary pleasantness of being in a state of rest, when the closest (relatives) control her, and she agrees to this and completely surrendered herself to their hands. She is not that thinking subject who freely chooses her own path of life, but an inanimate object-plasticine, from which the puppeteers sculpt what they want.

Therefore, from now on, Hamlet refers to Ophelia not as a beloved girl, but as a representative of the hostile side, so that the whole atmosphere of the subsequent conversation heats up, turns into the plane of behind-the-scenes intrigue, and is transmitted through the prose typical of this situation. At the same time, he repeats five times to her to go to the monastery: he is clearly disappointed with her and calls on her to save her soul.

At the same time, the king overhearing all this did not see the manifestation of Hamlet's love for Ophelia. And in fact, what kind of "manifestations" there are to the one who betrayed you. But, please tell me, what else could be expected from the situation that the king and Polonius modeled? Any normal person will flare up and make a scandal when he is first rejected, and then he is declared rejecting. This means that everything was arranged in advance, and the king simply needed an excuse to shape his fear of Hamlet (the spark of which was already visible at the beginning of the scene during the king's conversation with the twins) into a plausible motive for sending him to hell. And now, the pretext was received, and the decision to send the prince into exile for an obviously impossible job (collecting an underpaid tribute from a distant land without serious troops is a hopeless business) was not long in coming: "He will immediately sail to England."

It turns out that the king nevertheless saw his rival in Hamlet, but not because he blurted out (this did not happen), but because the spirit of a serious attitude to business, to the soul of a person, which was revealed with all obviousness in just happened conversation between young people. Hamlet carries a new ideologeme, which means that the issue of his power claims is a matter of time. Of course, he invited him to the performance, and this tuned our autocrat to a wave of blissful relaxation to his nephew. But then it became clear that "in his words ... there is no madness." One way or another, the cards are gradually revealed.

Scene two. In it, we distinguish two parts.

The first movement is a piece within a piece, i.e. everything related to the presentation of itinerant actors. In the second part, we have the primary reaction of different characters to this performance. In the play itself ("The Mousetrap", or the murder of Gonzago), the poisoning of Hamlet by Claudius is modeled in general terms. Before and during the action, a conversation with Hamlet Jr. is given. and Ophelia, where he treats her as a fallen woman. Again, Barkov here speculates about Ophelia's sexual promiscuity, but after our explanations to the previous scene, everything seems to be clear: the prince considers her spiritually fallen, and all his dirty attacks are just a way to highlight the problem. The show itself is an open challenge from Hamlet to the king, his claim that he knows the true cause of his father's death. The king, interrupting the action and running away from the performance, thereby confirms: yes, indeed, this is how it was. Here, with the reaction of the king, everything is extremely clear, and it is safe to say that the words of the spirit of Father Hamlet have been verified, the prince was convinced of their truth, so that the task of the "Mousetrap" was completely fulfilled.

It is important that the philosophical alignment of the play dictates its own rules. In this case, the play in the play was needed as the next step of Hamlet in his movement towards building his philosophically significant position. After he had established himself “be a subject!”, He should have been active, so that if not to fulfill, but to begin to fulfill this set of his. The performance organized by him is his act of activity, the beginning of the assertion of his own value (real value) in the eyes of the actors and spectators, i.e. in the eyes of society. After all, the subject not only passively observes, but he himself actively creates new events and is already looking for the truth in them. And the truth was that the king was the murderer of his father. Hence, he has every right to revenge. But does Hamlet need it? No, he needs to take power in a legitimate way. If he goes to a simple murder, then the situation in the kingdom will not calm down, and the world will not receive the desired basis for its reliable existence. In the end, repeating his uncle's actions will give the same result - chaos, instability. In this case, the father's covenant will not be fulfilled, and he (the father) will be left to burn in hell with an eternal flame. Is this what Hamlet wants? Of course not. He needs to save his father from hellish torments, therefore, to ensure the stability of the state. Therefore, there can be no question of spontaneous, due to revenge, the murder of the king. There must be other actions.

Nevertheless, it is important that Hamlet fully revealed himself in the political struggle, and already openly gives out: "I need a promotion", quite clearly asserting his imperious ambitions (however, no, it is not true - not ambitions to seize power for her own sake, but for the benefit of all people). This openness is a consequence of his ideological self-confidence.

Scene three.

In it, the king instructs the twins to escort Hamlet to England, in fact, to the place of exile: "It's time to put this horror that walks free into the stocks." The king understood the ideological superiority of Hamlet, and this is the whole "horror". Further, we see him repenting: he realized the "stench of villainy" of his, but is unable to do anything to correct the situation. That is, he seems to say "Everything is fixable", but he does not see the mechanism for this. After all, true repentance and in essence, and as Claudius correctly understands, is at least to give back what was taken dishonestly. But “What are the words / Pray here? "Forgive the killing me"? / No, you can't. I have not returned the loot. / I have everything that I killed for: / My crown, region and queen. " In short, the king here acts in his role: let everything be as before, and then it may be done by itself. All his stability is a hope at random, in contrast to Hamlet, who seeks the foundation in a stable adjustment of existence. Claudius needs immutability as such, in fact - nothingness in which he wants to stay (later Hamlet will say about him: "the king ... no more than zero"). This situation is absurd, since it is impossible to remain, and even more so to remain stable, in nonexistence. Therefore, he loses to Hamlet, who as a basis chose the sphere of meanings, the existential sphere in which to be natural and stable. In addition, it is important that if Claudius knew exactly about the hellish torments of sinners, i.e., in fact, if he truly believed in God not as a kind of abstractness, but as a formidable real force, then he would not have hoped , and took real steps to atone for his sin. But he doesn't really believe in God, and his whole life is just a fuss about entertainment and momentary benefits. All this again makes him the direct opposite of Hamlet, who does not perceive the existence of hell as a joke, and builds his attitude to life on the basis of the desire for good both to his dead father (so that he does not burn in fiery hell), and to his people (the desire for real reliability and stability in society). Therefore, Hamlet refuses (on the way to his mother, after the performance) to kill the king when he prays that he does not need murder as such, but the implementation of his global task. Of course, this will automatically decide the fate of Claudius, since he does not fit into the world order created by Hamlet. But that will come later, not now, so he leaves his sword in its sheath: "Reign." Finally, there is another reason for Hamlet's "good nature", which he himself voiced: killing the king during his prayer will guarantee that he will go to heaven. This seems unfair to such a villain: "Is this revenge if the villain / gives up his ghost when he is clean of filth / And all ready for a long journey?"

Fourth scene.

Hamlet talks to the mother queen, and at the beginning of the conversation kills the hiding Polonius. The whole scene is conveyed in verse: Hamlet stopped acting, he fully revealed himself to his mother. Moreover, he kills Mr. Polonius, hiding behind the carpet (behind the scenes), so that he no longer needs to hide his aspirations. The veils were asleep, the positions of different sides were completely exposed, and Hamlet, unashamedly, brought charges of debauchery and so on to his mother. In fact, he tells her that she was complicit in the destruction of all foundations of this world. In addition, he calls the king the center of all troubles, and regrets that it was not he who was killed, but Polonius: "I confused you with the higher."

It must be said that there is doubt whether the prince really hoped that he was killing the king behind the curtain. I. Frolov here gives the following considerations: on the way to his mother, just a few minutes ago, Hamlet saw the king, and had the opportunity to take revenge, but did not carry it out. The question is, why then would he kill the one he just left alive? In addition, it seems incredible that the king was able to somehow break away from the prayers, get ahead of the prince and hide in the queen's chambers. In other words, if we present the situation in a worldly context, then it really seems that Hamlet, killing the man behind the curtains, could not even suspect the presence of the king there.

However, after all, we have before us not an everyday story, but a play in which space and time live not according to the usual laws, but according to completely special ones, when both temporal duration and spatial location-stay depend on the activity of Hamlet's consciousness. We are reminded of this by the emerging ghost, which at a critical moment cooled the prince's ardor towards his mother. The voice of the ghost is heard in the play in reality, but only Hamlet hears it: the queen does not perceive him in any way. It turns out that this is the phenomenon of Hamlet's consciousness (as in the fifth scene of the first act), and such that by its essence it affirms the peculiarity of space and time. Consequently, all other space-time transformations are natural for Hamlet, and the expectation that the king will be behind the carpet is quite acceptable. Let us repeat, permissible - within the framework of the poetics of the work so approved by Shakespeare. In addition, having received his mother as a witness, Hamlet was no longer afraid that the murder would turn out to be a secret, behind-the-scenes act. No, he acts openly, knowing that the mother will confirm the situation that has arisen, so that the murder in the eyes of the public will not look like an unauthorized seizure of power, but, to a certain extent, an accidental coincidence, in which the king is entirely to blame: after all, the eavesdropper encroaches on honor Queen and Hamlet, and according to the laws of that time, this was quite enough to carry out tough actions on him. Hamlet defended his honor and his mother, and if the king was indeed killed, then the doors to power would open before our hero on a completely legal basis (in the eyes of the public).

Analysis of the third act.

In general, the following can be said about the third act. Hamlet formulates the basis of his ideologeme: be a subject, and takes the first step to implement this setting - he organizes a play where he almost openly accuses the king of killing the former ruler (Hamlet-Sr.) and usurping power. Moreover, the second step of his activation as a subject is his killing Polonius, and by committing this act, the prince hopes to end the king. Hamlet is active! He became active when he realized the rationale behind this activity ("Be the subject"). But the situation is not yet completely ready: the subject does not act on its own, but surrounded by circumstances, and the result of his actions depends on them too. In our case, the fruit has not ripened, and Hamlet's attempt to solve all the problems at once is still naive, and therefore failed.

Act four of Hamlet's exploration

Scene one.

The king learns that Hamlet killed Polonius. He is clearly frightened, because he understands: "It would be so with us, if we were there." Therefore, the decision taken even earlier to send Hamlet to England is accelerated as much as possible. The king feels that it is not he who determines the situation, but the prince. If earlier the king was the thesis, and Hamlet the antithesis, now everything has changed. The prince's activity asserts the thesis, and the king only reacts to what happened a second time, he is an antithesis. His "soul is in alarm and frightened", because the people (obviously, through wandering actors), having taken the side of Hamlet, is a real force that cannot be dismissed as an annoying fly. Changes are brewing in society in relation to the king, to his legitimacy, and this is a real threat to him. It is her that he fears, calling her "The hiss of poisonous slander." Although, what kind of slander is this? After all, he himself recently, during prayers (act 3, scene 3), confessed to himself the crimes he had committed. Calling the truth a slander, the king is not simply trying to hide his guilt before the queen, who, apparently, did not participate in the murder of Hamlet-Sr. In addition, here he, firstly, clearly demonstrates that he has lost control of the situation (hoping at random: "The hiss of poisonous slander ... perhaps we will pass by"), and secondly, and this is the most important thing, enters the state full of lies. After all, calling the truth a lie, the king puts an end to the correctness of his position. Strictly speaking, if Hamlet moves in the direction of his subjectivity, and as this movement intensifies (primarily ideologically, that is, in the influence on the people), then the king, on the contrary, sinks more and more into lies, that is, moves away from his subjectivity, and in the ideological plan inevitably loses. Note that the king's ideological defeat became obvious even to himself after Polonius - this symbol of the backstage - died, exposing the situation, and everyone (the people) gradually began to understand what was what.

Scene two.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern elicit from Hamlet where he hid the body of Polonius. He openly denotes his opposition to them, calling them a sponge, i.e. instrument in the hands of the king, which is "no more than zero." Hamlet shifted public opinion to his side; the king, without such support, turned into an empty space, to zero. Even before he was almost zero passivity, only imitating activity (the murder of Hamlet Sr. and the seizure of the throne), now everything was bare and his passivity became obvious.

Scene three.

Hamlet tells the king that Polonius 'body is "at supper" - at the worms' supper.

In general, the question is, why should the king fuss so much about the corpse of Polonius? Isn't there a lot of honor? That is, of course, Polonius was his friend and right hand in the production of all his abominations. It is not for nothing that even in the second scene of the first act, Claudius, addressing Laertes, says: "The head does not get along with the heart any more ... Than the Danish throne for your father." Okay, but why should Shakespeare pay so much attention to the search for an inanimate body? The answer lies on the surface: the king entered a false situation (in the previous scene he called the truth a lie), moved away from his active subjectivity and moved towards its opposite - non-vital passivity. He has not yet fully moved to this destination, but he is making steps in this direction: he is looking for a dead man. In addition, the king's strength lay in behind-the-scenes intrigues, in secret machinations, when the truth was closed from the human eye. The death of Polonius personifies the removal of all veils from the real state of affairs. The king is naked, and without the usual embellishment, he is not a king, he is an empty place. Therefore, he frantically tries to restore his world behind the scenes, even if only through a simple search for the corpse of Polonius. The king did not yet understand that Hamlet, with his active position (the arrangement of the performance), shifted the whole situation, and it began to develop irreversibly against him, against his ideological attitude towards fun: Hamlet’s performance was by no means cheerful, and this non-cheerfulness helped to expose the situation. (Incidentally, by this very same Shakespeare argues that tragedy as a genre has a higher artistic status in comparison with comedies, which he himself was engaged in in his youth).

And so, Hamlet gives the king: the corpse - "at supper." The once actively fussing Polonius with some signs of a subject (but only somesigns: in addition to activity, a mind is needed here, which the deceased, by and large, did not possess, but possessed only a pseudo-mind - cunning and a standard set of rules of the gray cardinal) became an object for worms. But the king is a strong analogy for Polonius, so here Hamlet simply informs him of his similar fate: a pseudo-subject only in the absence of a real subject can pretend to be real, but when the original appears, the masks fly off, and the pseudo-subject becomes what he is in fact - an object, in a plot implementation - a dead man.

In addition, the whole theme with worms (“We feed all animals to feed ourselves, and we ourselves feed on worms to feed ourselves,” etc.) shows the cycle of activity and passivity: activity will sooner or later calm down, and passivity will be excited. And this is all the more so if the activity was with the prefix "pseudo", and passivity for the time being was in the dark about its real essence. But as soon as within the passivity there was an awareness of the activity of oneself (the call "Be the subject!" pseudo-activity, transferring it to the status of passivity.

In general, Hamlet behaves very frankly, and the king, defending himself, no longer just sends him to England, but gives the twins a letter with an order to the English authorities (who obeyed the Danish king and paid him tribute) to kill the prince. Obviously, he would have killed him himself, but the people are scary.

Scene four.

It describes how a young Fortinbras with his army goes to war against Poland. Moreover, the war is supposed to be over a miserable piece of land that is worthless. The path of the army passes through Denmark, and before sailing to England, Hamlet talks with the captain, from whom he learns all the important moments for him. What is important to him? Before being exiled to England, it is important for him not to lose heart, and he receives such moral support. The situation is as follows. Gathering an army for the war with Denmark, Fortinbras Jr. received a ban from his uncle - the ruler of Norway - on this campaign. But he and all his guards went into a state of expectation of war, became more active, and it is no longer possible for them to stop. As a result, they realize their activity even on a useless campaign, but in it they express themselves. This is an example for Hamlet: activity, being cocked, cannot easily stop moving towards its goal. If obstacles occur on her life path, then she does not abandon herself, but manifests herself, although, perhaps, a little differently than it was planned in advance. Hamlet fully accepts this attitude: “O my thought, henceforth be in blood. / Live by a thunderstorm or do not live at all. In other words: “O my subjectivity, from now on be active, whatever the cost to you. You are activity only insofar as you attack and do not stop at any obstacles. "

In addition, the appearance of a young Fortinbras immediately after the statements in the previous scene about the cycle of passivity and activity (the theme with worms, etc.) makes one think that if everything moves in a circle, then Fortinbras should have a chance of success in the struggle for power in Denmark: once his father owned it (was active), then lost (passed into the category of passivity - died), and now, if the law of circulation is correct, then Fortinbras Jr. has every chance of getting the throne. So far, this is only a guess, but since we know that in the end it will all happen this way, this our guess turns out to be justified in hindsight, and the very appearance of a Norwegian in the current scene, when the outline of the end of the whole play is already somewhat visible, seems to be a skillful Shakespeare's move : it reminds us of where the roots of all history grow from, and hints at the upcoming denouement of events.

Scene five. We highlight three parts here.

In the first part, Ophelia, damaged by her mind, sings and says mysterious things to the queen, and then to the king. In the second part, Laertes, who has returned from France, rushes in to the king with a crowd of rioters and demands an explanation about the death of his father (Polonius). He calms Laertes and transfers him to his allies. In the third part, Ophelia returns and makes some strange instructions to her brother. He is shocked.

Now in more detail and in order. Ophelia has lost her mind. This was expected: she lived with the mind of her father, and after his death she lost this foundation of her - the intelligent (rational) foundation of her life. But, unlike Hamlet, who only played madness and strictly controlled the degree of his "madness", Ophelia went crazy because, we repeat, having lost her father's mind, she did not have her own. She demonstrated the latter throughout the play, refusing to resist her father's instigations against Hamlet. The lack of a spirit of resistance (a spirit of denial) for a long time alienated her from Hamlet, who, at one time, having lost his foundations, found the strength to move, because he knew how to deny. Denial is the capsule that undermines the charge of the cartridge (cocks the will), after which the hero's movement becomes irreversible. Ophelia had none of this - no denial, no will. Actually, that's why they didn't have a full-fledged relationship with the prince, because they were too different.

At the same time, Ophelia's madness, among other things, means her departure from the previous position of indulging the views of her father, and therefore the king. Here, we repeat, we have an analogy with the madness of Hamlet. And although the physiology and metaphysics of their insanity are different, the very fact of a change in consciousness in both cases allows us to say that Ophelia in this scene appeared before us completely different than before. That is, of course, she lost her mind and already in this she is different. But the main thing is not this, but her new outlook on life, freed from the previous royal attitudes. Now she “accuses the whole world of lying ... and there are traces of some terrible secret” (or, in Lozinsky’s translation, “In this is hidden even a vague, but sinister mind”). Ophelia acquired denial, and this is the mystery ("obscure, but ominous mind"), the mystery of how denial appears in an empty vessel that has lost its foundation; something that (knowing by the example of Hamlet) is the basis for all new movements, for all true thinking making its way into the future. In other words, the question arises: how does the basis for thinking arise in that which is non-thinking? Or else, how does activity arise in passivity? This is clearly a continuation of the conversation about the circular movement of the world that took place in the previous scenes. Indeed, it is still possible to somehow understand the tranquility of activity, but how to understand the activation of passivity when something arises from nothing? The scholastics had a formula: nothing arises out of nothing. Here we see the opposite of this statement. This means that the new philosophy of Hamlet has latently penetrated into many strata of society, that the ideology of the exiled prince lives on and acts on the example of Ophelia. In principle, one can even say that Hamlet's efforts to tune Ophelia in his own way, in the end, were crowned with success, albeit too late: she can no longer be saved. The reason for this state of affairs will be discussed a little later.

In any case, in the altered consciousness, Ophelia, like Hamlet, began to give out such pearls that make the most inquisitive minds of Shakespearean study numb from misunderstanding. By the way, while Gertrude did not hear them (pearl), she, emotionally, and therefore ideologically, taking the side of her son, did not want to accept Ophelia: “I will not accept her,” because she considered her to be in the opposite, royal, camp. Until a certain moment, this was true. She herself stayed there until Hamlet opened her eyes to the essence of things in the kingdom. But already at the beginning of communication between two women, the situation changes radically and the queen's attitude towards the girl becomes different. So, if her opening words were very strict: "What do you want, Ophelia?", Then after the first quatrain of the song that she began to hum, the words were completely different, much warmer: "Dear, what does this song mean?" Ophelia's altered consciousness in some way made her related to Hamlet, brought them closer, and this could not go unnoticed by the queen.

Actually, here is the first song of Ophelia, with which she addresses Gertrude:

How do you know who your sweetheart is?
He walks with a rod.
Pearl barley on the crown,
Pistons with strap.
Ah, he died, lady,
He is cold dust;
Green turf in their heads
A pebble at the feet.
Shroud is white as mountain snow
Flower over the grave;
He descended into it forever,
Not mourned by the sweetheart.
(Translated by M. Lozinsky)

It is clearly talking about the king ("He walks with a staff," plus the dear Queen Gertrude is King Claudius). Ophelia means that the situation in the state began to develop irreversibly not in favor of the existing government, and that the king is close to death, like that traveler walking to God: we all will someday appear before Him. Moreover, in the second quatrain, she even says: ah, he's already dead. In the third quatrain it is announced that "he ... was not mourned by the dear", that is, that the queen, apparently, will face the same sad fate, and she will not be able to mourn her husband. We know that this is how it will all happen, and that Ophelia, based on her vision of the political situation, was able to correctly predict the fate of the monarch couple. We can say that in her, through illness, the ability to think began to mature. (see Note 4).

Further, she gives the king who approached (by the way - in prose, like Hamlet, from a certain moment communicating with the king and his accomplices in the language of tension and behind the scenes - namely prose): “They say the owl had a father baker. Lord, we know who we are, but we don't know what we can become. God bless your meal! " (translated by M. Lozinsky). This is an explicit reference to Hamlet's idea of \u200b\u200bthe circuit. Indeed, the phrase "the owl had a baker's father" can and can be somehow remotely connected with some historical allusions in the life of Shakespearean England, as some researchers are trying to do, but much closer and more understandable here is the understanding that of one essence (the owl) the beginning had another essence (bread-maker), therefore “we know who we are, but we do not know who we can become”. Ophelia says: everything is changeable, and the directions of change are closed for understanding. This is the same, but served with a different sauce, as Hamlet's talk about worms and the king's journey through the intestines of a beggar. That is why she ends her sentence with the sentence: "God bless your meal," which clearly indicates that conversation between the prince and the king. In the end, this is again a statement about the imminent death of the monarch, who is about to become an object for someone's mass. But he does not hear all this due to his ideological disposition against the soul of man, as a result - disposition to stupidity, and believes that these conversations are her "thought about the father." Ofelia, trying to clarify her riddles, sings a new song, which tells that the girl came to the guy, he slept with her, and then refused to marry due to the fact that she too easily, before marriage, gave himself up to him. Everything is clear here: it follows from the song that the cause of all troubles (including that of Ophelia herself) is the fall in morals. In fact, she again echoes Hamlet, who accused the king (even when he did not yet know about the murder of his father) of immorality. It turns out that in the scene under consideration, Ophelia reminds Hamlet of the beginning of the play.

In the second part of the scene, a raging Laertes appears. He is outraged by the incomprehensible murder of his father and his equally incomprehensible, secret and quick burial (however, all this very much corresponds to his status as a gray cardinal who did everything in secret: he lived and was buried). He is full of a desire for revenge, which repeats the situation with Hamlet: he, too, is moving towards revenge. But, if Laertes, not knowing the reasons for the death of Polonius or the murderer, shows violent activity, then Hamlet, on the contrary, at first only seethed inwardly, did not throw his potential out in vain, but only clearly realizing the whole situation, began to act, confidently moving towards the goal. Moreover, his goal was connected not only and not so much with revenge as with the salvation of the father's soul and the calming (stabilization) of the situation in the state. Laertes does not even think about the welfare of the people, he is fixated exclusively on the idea of \u200b\u200brevenge and he does not need anything else: “What is it that this light, I do not care. / But, come what may, for my own father / I will avenge! ". He does not care about the philosophically verified position, he does not care about the foundation of the world (“What is it, that this light, I don’t care”), he is pure spontaneity, activity, but without meaning. If at the beginning of the play he read the moral teachings of Ophelia and thus claimed some kind of cleverness, now he completely abandoned this, turning into an active lack of subjectivity. And it is not surprising, therefore, that he comes under the influence of the king (although a few minutes ago he could have had power over him), which means that he signs a sentence for himself, like Polonius. In the third part of the scene, Ophelia returned to him about this: “No, he died / And he was buried. / And it's your turn. " Everything is very well thought out on the stage here. At first, before her brother's appearance, Ophelia left, because she had hope for his independence, which he began to show when he burst into the king with a crowd. When he surrendered to the monarch's power, and it became clear that he had turned into an instrument of someone else's game, then his fate became obvious, which she told about upon her return.

Scene six.

Horace receives a letter from Hamlet, in which he informs about his flight to the pirates, asks to deliver the attached letters to the king and urgently hurry to him. At the same time it is signed: "Yours, in which you do not doubt, Hamlet", or in the lane. M. Lozinsky: "The one about whom you know that he is yours, Hamlet."

The entire letter is in prose. This means that the prince is extremely excited, cocked to seize power (we remember how in the fourth scene he promises himself “live by a thunderstorm, or do not live at all”) and therefore is extremely careful in his expressions. Actually, the text of the message does not allow doubting this: everything is said in it only in general, neutral features - in that extreme case, if it suddenly falls into the hands of the king. The specific information Hamlet is going to tell a friend only at a face-to-face meeting, since he trusts only him, and trusts - because he “knows” (or “does not doubt”) about it. Knowledge for him is the power that opens each other to people. Indeed, he is a subject!

Scene 7.

She narrates that Laertes has finally turned from a subject of activity into a kind of inanimate instrument, completely dependent on the king: "Sovereign ... rule me, / I will be your instrument." At the same time, Laertes already knows from the lips of Claudius that the goal of his revenge - Hamlet - is supported by the people, so that, in fact, he is rebelling against the entire public. This is clearly a contradictory, erroneous position, since to oppose the people means to have a claim to leadership, with the hope that the people will eventually accept the point of view they advocate. Laertes missed his chance to be a leader. Moreover, he clearly put himself in the role of a tool in the wrong hands. It turns out that, on the one hand, he claims to be active (opposes the people), and on the other hand, he becomes passive (turns into an instrument). This contradiction must inevitably blow up his existence, lead him to a deep crisis. About this, back in the fifth scene, his sister warned him. Now we see that the situation is developing in this direction. Moreover, his logically contradictory position breaks out and becomes obvious after the king received a message from Hamlet about his stay in Denmark and about an imminent visit to him. The king decided to act: to kill the prince at any cost, but fraudulently (through a cleverly arranged pseudo-honest duel), connecting Laertes here (in vain, perhaps, did he pacify him?). Laertes, having agreed to this, lost all moral grounds for his existence, designated his total fallacy.

It must be said that the action of the king can be understood as his activation and in this sense can be considered as worthy against the background of an active subject-Hamlet. But is it? I think not. The fact is that Hamlet acts openly: his letter is very clear about his arrival with a desire to explain the reasons for his quick return. Of course, he does not report important details regarding his struggle for truth in this life. However, he is "naked", i.e. naked, open and unadorned - as it is. What is he like? He is a subject, in proof of which he ascribes “one” to his signature. "One" is what in the subsequent development of European philosophy will result in Fichte's "pure I". “One” is an affirmation of one's own strength and significance, whose strength and significance lies in relying on one's own activity ... This is a mutual guarantee of force before activity and activity before force ... This is what is in the subject, his almost absolute, emanating from himself (with the permission of God), self-activation.

The king acts differently. He is secretive. His world is behind the scenes. After the death of Polonius, he did not understand anything, remained the same, passing black as white, and white as black. The King is the most static character in the play. How can he have true activity? No, he can not. His activity - with the prefix "pseudo", his activity remains empty. And even more so then Laertes's mistake intensifies, since he not only becomes a derivative of some force, but it becomes a derivative of pseudo-activity, which does not lead anywhere, or, more precisely, leads nowhere, into emptiness, into nothingness of death.

Laertes himself brought himself into a virtually doomed state, which agreed to kill Hamlet in an unfair way, at the instigation of Claudius. At the same time, it is important that the entire flow of events in the play entered into an irreversible fall into the horror of darkness. It is already becoming clear that Hamlet is not a tenant, as well as the fact that Laertes is also not a tenant. The first must perish, because the application of the action of pseudo-activity (in fact, anti-activity) to him cannot end with anything other than the nullification of his own activity: the "minus" of evil, superimposed on the "plus" of good, gives zero. The second (Laertes) must perish, because he had lost all the foundations of his existence, and he did not have the spirit of denial that would give him the strength to get out of the emerging existential vacuum (as was the case with Hamlet in his time).

In the end, the drama focused on its denouement. It will finally take place in the fifth, final act, but already in the seventh scene of the fourth act, we learn the dark news: Ophelia has drowned. She drowned as something ephemeral, non-earthly. There is nothing terrible in the description of her death, on the contrary - everything was very beautiful, in some ways even romantic: she almost did not drown, but seemed to dissolve in the river atmosphere ...

What should have happened has happened. Having lost one foundation of consciousness in the form of her father, Ophelia took the path of Hamlet. It would seem that the flag is in her hands. But now she is deprived of another basis of consciousness - Laertes, and even her beloved (yes, yes, exactly like that) Hamlet. What is her life for? A woman lives in order to love, and if there is no one to love, then why should she all these flowers?

However, here's the question: we learn the description of Ophelia's death from the queen, as if she herself watched what happened. Maybe it was she who was involved in this tragedy? If this is allowed, then, the question is, why did she need it? Her beloved son, after all, loves Ophelia, and this is important. In addition, after clarifying the relationship with Hamlet, when he killed Polonius, the queen obviously emotionally went over to his side, just as Ophelia went over to his side when she began, albeit figuratively, to call things by their proper names. By and large, these two women became allies, which Gertrude will later inform us about in the first scene of the fifth act: "I dreamed of you / Introduce Hamlet's wife." Therefore, the queen was not at all interested in Ophelia's death. There is no reason to suspect the king of murder, despite his wary attitude towards her after she went mad (after Hamlet, he has any madness, that is, dissent seems dangerous). Of course, we remember how, in the fifth scene, he ordered Horatio to “Look after her at both ends,” but we don’t remember that he ordered or at least somehow hinted to kill her, especially since after the order to “watch” we saw Ophelia and Horatio are separate from each other, so that there was no surveillance or supervision from Horatio, and it could not be, since he was on the side of Hamlet, who loves Ophelia, and not on the side of the king. Finally, after the last appearance of Ophelia (in the fifth scene) and the news of her death (in the seventh scene), very little time has passed - as long as is necessary for the conversation between the king and Laertes, who had been together all this time, so that the king could not organize her murder: firstly, under Laertes it was impossible to do this, and secondly, he was busy organizing the assassination of Hamlet, and her figure for him was relegated to the background or even more distant plan for this time.

No, Ophelia's death has not a political cause, but a metaphysical one, more precisely, this reason lies in the alignment of the artistic structure of the work, in which each move of the heroes is determined by the internal logic of the development of events. There is no such thing in life, but that is what distinguishes an artistic creation from ordinary everyday life, that there is a certain creative plan that serves as a boundary for possible and impossible action (as well as for any necessity). Ophelia died because this is how the circumstances of her life, her being, developed. If the foundations (including the meaning of existence) have collapsed, then nothing remains in the place of being.

Analysis of the fourth act of Hamlet's research

Thus, on the fourth act, the following must be said. Hamlet became more active, and as a result of the unity of the inner and outer worlds, this subjective activation of him spread to the entire universe, moved everything off the ground, and laid bare the essential basis of the play's heroes to the limit. Hamlet is a subject from himself ("one"). The king is a cowardly assassin who does evil with someone else's hands in undercover intrigues. Ophelia - a heroine who does not know herself, does not see her goal - naturally dies. Laertes abandons himself and becomes an instrument in the hands of the king: the subject has become an object. Everything is clearing up. After the murder of Polonius, every "pseudo" is separated from its carrier: now it is precisely clear that pseudo-activity is in fact non-activity, i.e. passivity. Here we have a chain of the following transformations:

activity (the initial activity of the king to seize power) turns into pseudo-activity (the actions of the king become secondary to those of Hamlet), which turns into passivity (the predicted future of the king).

This chain was formed under the influence of the Hamlet movement:

the sum of passivity and denial passes into one that knows itself, and in this it manifests its activity, subjectivity, which becomes almost absolute, i.e. going beyond its borders. The latter is a subject who cognizes the world, and through cognition transforms it.

The true activity of Hamlet, which develops for the good, drinks vitality from the false activity of the king (who lives by the camouflage of his essence), providing that cycle of activity and passivity, which Shakespeare constantly hints at throughout the fourth act (see Note 5).

Act Five of Hamlet's Research

Scene one. It can be divided into three parts.

In the first part, two gravediggers are digging a grave and talking about the fact that it is intended for a drowned woman. In the second part, Hamlet and Horatio join them. In the third part, it is revealed that the drowned woman is Ophelia, and between Hamlet and Laertes, who came up with the funeral procession, a struggle takes place in the grave.

The first part is probably the most mysterious of the whole scene. In general, the fact that this is happening in a cemetery evokes sad forebodings: the tragedy is approaching its climax. There is nothing cheerful or light in the words of the gravediggers. In addition, the first gravedigger who sets the tone for the whole conversation clearly gravitates towards "philosophical" vocabulary. Everything must be said to him with excessive intricacy - in the same spirit in which Polonius and the twins once tried to express themselves, imitating the scholastics. For example, here's their conversation about the drowned woman:

First gravedigger: ... I wish she drowned herself in a state of self-defense.

Second gravedigger: Condition and decided.

First gravedigger: The condition must be proven. It's not a law without it. Let's say I now drown myself with intent. Then this is a threefold matter. One - I did it, the other - I executed it, the third - I did it. It was with intent that she drowned herself.

Where is the logical connection in the words of the first gravedigger here, please tell me? Rather, it resembles the delirium of a madman who suddenly decided to be smart in front of his partner. But the whole point is that it was in this spirit that scholastic lawyers who delved into verbal nuances, but did not see real life, were scolded in the courts. So it is here. An example is given: "Let's say I ... drown myself ...". When applied to oneself, it is exactly the same to say "carried out", "did" or "did". But the gravedigger claims some differences. They, of course, are - lexical. And this is quite enough for our verbiage to assert about some threefoldness of the case. At the same time, all this "threefoldness" in an incomprehensible, fantastic way allows him to conclude: "With intention, it means that she drowned."

Elsewhere, the delirium of the first gravedigger is no less refined. All this suggests that all that philosophical pseudo-intelligence, which the loyal servants of the king tried to flaunt before, now, after Hamlet activated the whole Ecumene and, consequently, introduced his philosophy into it (which can now be called the philosophy of real life), sank to the very bottom of human society, to its very backyards, to the gravediggers, practically to the grave. At the same time, her apologists began to resemble crazy people much more clearly than the playing (pretending) Hamlet.

After the first gravedigger gave out his pro-holastic foams, he finished them with a song about the transience of life, that everything dies. This is nothing more than a continuation of the thought of the king and queen, which they expressed at the beginning of the play (act 1, scene 2): “This is how the world was created: the living will die / And after life it will go away”. All this, again, turns into dust the royal ideologeme, the essence of which is - have fun while you live, and when you die, everything will end for you forever. This is the most perfect anti-Christian position of the burners with disbelief in God and the life of the soul after the death of the flesh.

It turns out that Hamlet's position is much closer to God than the position of the king. There are two moments here. The first is that the prince takes seriously the torment of the soul of a sinner (father) in hell, and the king treats this as a fiction. The second moment, which became convex after the conversation of the gravediggers and has a direct connection with the first, is this: according to the king and his ideology, all movements in life are similar to a line with a beginning and an end, according to Hamlet, all true movements are circular when the beginning ever becomes its opposite , and she, in due time, will abandon herself, equal to the starting point from which the report went. And since a person was created by God in his own image and likeness, and He himself contains both the beginning and the end like any point of the circle, being an Absolute activity, then a person should also be an activity with a circular nature of his essence, ultimately, he should see his life after death is the life of your soul in God and with God. Subjective circularity turns out to be immanent to the divine plan, while the linear-monotonous movement of the type of birth-life-death reveals in itself anti-divine, decadent features. The burning of life turns out to be objectionable to the Highest, and that is why all representatives of this ideology are distant from Him, punished with mental retardation in the form of inability to really think, i.e. adequately connect their mental struggles with life as it is. The focus on high ideas, on the contrary, is pleasing to God, as a result of which Hamlet - the main representative in the play of such a position - was rewarded by Him with the presence of a mind capable of cognition and thinking. We repeat that we are not talking about some special genius of the protagonist, which, in general, is not visible, but we are talking about the elementary ability to use your mind for its intended purpose.

Hamlet is a subject because he feels (knows) God in himself (see Notes 6, 7). At the same time, it is obvious that the king and the company are anti-subjects, because there is no God in them.

But then, the question arises, what is the connection between all the prince's ridicule over scholasticism - on the one hand, and our affirmation of his vital and true Christian worldview - on the other? After all, the best scholastics were great theologians, and they tried to bring a person closer to God. It seems that in fact Shakespeare was ironic not at scholasticism itself, but at the useless practice of imitating it, when, hiding behind the great minds of mankind, they tried to push through their low deeds. Using that form of deep abstraction, without which there is no possibility to clearly say anything about God, and which was used by true scholastic philosophers, many speculative figures of that time hid the real content of their intentions - the intentions of anti-divine, selfish ones. Under the guise of belonging to the highest values, many lived in revelry and oblivion about the salvation of their souls, enjoying only today. As a result, the very idea of \u200b\u200bGod was denigrated. And it was against this anti-divine attitude that Hamlet (Shakespeare) fought. His entire project is the reanimation of the divine commandments in their ultimate form, i.e. in the form of the fact that any act should be correlated with whether it is a good (divine good) or not. In this regard, his idea of \u200b\u200bthe circulation of all movements can be understood as a return to Christian values \u200b\u200b(Protestantism). He needs subjectivity not by itself, but as a mechanism by which he will abandon (knowingly) the unacceptable anti-divine bacchanalia, and return (also knowingly) to the bosom of His truth, when the world is given naturally as it is when any moments are explained proceeding not from themselves, but proceeding from their connection with His world.

All this is shown in the second part of the scene, where Hamlet is talking with the first gravedigger. To begin with, they are measured by intellectual power in a topic that discusses who is intended for the prepared grave. The gravedigger is engaged in speculation for the sake of speculation, and Hamlet brings him out into the open:

Hamlet: ... Whose grave is this ...?

First Gravedigger: Mine, sir.

Hamlet: It is true that yours, because you lie from the grave.

First gravedigger: And you are not from the grave. So she's not yours. And I am in it and, therefore, I am not lying.

Hamlet: How are you not lying? You stick in the grave and say that it is yours. And it is for the dead, not for the living. So you are lying in the grave.

Hamlet sees everything in connection with the essential state of affairs, his reasoning is understandable, they are adequate to the true state of affairs, and are taken for granted. That's what he takes.

Then, finally, it turns out (also after breaking through the pseudo-scholastic thinking of the gravedigger) that the grave is intended for a woman. The scholastic gravedigger does not want to talk about her, since she (i.e. Ophelia) was not from his system of thought. Indeed, we remember that before her death, Ophelia embarked on the path of Hamlet, although she went on her own - having neither purpose nor strength. Therefore, its movement was indicated only by the initial stroke of intentions, and then it breaks off in this terrible earthen hole. Nevertheless, she died under the flag of subjectivity, i.e. under the flag of a new philosophy. And this is clearly not to the first gravedigger.

After that, Hamlet "communicates" with the skull of some Yorick. The main moment of this action seems to be that the living hero is holding the skull of the decayed hero in his hands. Here life was combined with death, so that these two opposites (both physically and in the memory of the prince, when in the dead he sees the echoes of the one who once lived) came together. The next moment has the same meaning when Hamlet tells Horatio that the great Alexander the Great, through a series of transformations of his body after death, may not become a great plug to the barrel at all. And there and there opposites converge. This is still the same theme about the circuit of movement, which Hamlet began to explore in the fourth act. It is already absolutely obvious to him that such dialectical constructions are necessary for an adequate description of the world; at the same time, he clearly follows in the footsteps of the then famous scholastic philosopher Nicholas of Kuzansky, whose idea of \u200b\u200bGod presupposes His closeness to Himself when His beginning coincides with His end. This again confirms our idea that Hamlet, philosophically, sees his task in restoring scholasticism, but not in the form of form, but in the form of content - that is, an honest attitude towards God, and a vision of the human soul, which allows us to link everything into a single whole, with a single foundation - God.

It is important that the information that the grave is for a woman (Ophelia) is adjacent to the theme that opposites converge. This suggests that Ophelia's death is somehow connected to her life. It seems that this connection lies in the assertion that along with the death of Ophelia's body, the opposite of this body - her soul - is alive. The heroine's dead body is adjacent to her living soul - this is the main meaning of the second part of the first scene. But what does a living soul mean? Can we say that the soul is alive when it burns in fiery hell? Hardly. But when she is in paradise, then - it is possible, and even necessary. It turns out that Ophelia is in paradise, despite her (only in a certain sense) sinful death, since she repented of her previous sins (she atoned for Hamlet's betrayal by joining his camp), and died not because she threw herself into the river, but because the ontological foundations of her life have dried up. She - as told by the queen - did not commit a volitional act of taking her own life, but accepted it as a natural dissolution of the river atmosphere in nature. She didn't drown herself on purpose, she just didn't resist being immersed in the water.

Finally, it is interesting that during a conversation with the gravediggers, Hamlet turns thirty (or even a little more) years old. At the same time, the whole play began when he was about twenty. The entire timing of the tragedy fits into several weeks, well, maybe months. A. Anikst asks: how to explain all this?

Within the framework of the vision of the work developed in this study, this fact has already been practically explained by us. We affirm that the passage of time for Hamlet is determined by the inner workings of his spirit. And since after the exile very intense events took place with him, and all this time he was in a strong tension of consciousness, then his strangely rapid aging is quite understandable. We have met similar things before: when he spoke with a ghost in the first act, when he spoke with Polonius in the third act (when he advised him not to back away, like a cancer, from problems), when the time for his flesh thickened in accordance with his inner work on himself ... The same is true in this case: Hamlet grew old (more precisely, matured), because he had a serious inner work. By astronomical standards, this is impossible, but poetically it is possible and even necessary. It is necessary - from the point of view of the idea of \u200b\u200bisolation and therefore completeness (and therefore - and perfection) of the entire play. But more on that later.

In the third part of the scene, we see Ophelia's funeral. At first, Hamlet observes everything from the side, but when Laertes jumps into the grave to the body immersed in there and begins to lament: "Fill the dead with the living", he leaves the hiding place, jumps into the grave himself and fights with Laertes, shouting: "Learn to pray ... You, really, you'll regret it. " What is he talking about?

We remember that just before the funeral, Hamlet again turns to the idea of \u200b\u200bthe unity of opposites. And then he sees that Laertes rushes to the dead sister with the words "Fill the dead with the living", demonstrating the desire to identify the living and the dead in a single burial mass. It would seem that this is quite consistent with the mood of the prince, but only at first glance. After all, what was Laertes aiming for? He rushed to the direct equating of opposites. Indeed, we know (or can guess) that the philosophy of Hamlet, through his allies, actors, is already hovering in the public minds of the kingdom, that information about it penetrates all the pores of public life, apparently reaching the king and his retinue. They would have to absorb its life-giving juices, but no matter how they act, they act in their own role, within the framework of their old paradigm, according to which the real, life philosophy should be replaced by pseudo-scholarship, and under this (pseudo-scholastic) sauce, justify the deception of everything and all, receiving the basis of the possibility of your endless fun. They do it as follows. They take the main provisions of real philosophy, tear them away from life, thereby deadening them, and in such a non-life form they use them for their intended purpose. For example: the thesis "opposites converge" they take in statics, and they understand it not as the fact that one will become different as a result of a complex dynamic transformation process (this is exactly how Hamlet has it both in his views and in the very fact of his changes in within the play), but as a direct given. As a result, their left becomes equal to the right, black - white, and evil - good. The same thing happens with Laertes: having wished to identify life and death through their primitive alignment, he, thereby, wished to transfer Ophelia to the opposite state in relation to the one in which she began to be with an altered consciousness, directly to death. And since she was already then, in fact, an ally of Hamlet, Laertes, at least at the last moment, wants to designate her in his, i.e. pro-royal camp. This is what makes Hamlet indignant, makes him struggle with him. Hamlet fights here for the bright memory of his beloved, for not being considered either his traitor or an accomplice to royal machinations.

Here you can ask: how did Hamlet and Laertes know (or understand) that Ophelia changed their worldview? The point is that philosophy has a substantial status in the play. It is a kind of ether, material insofar as it allows one or another activity to be carried out. Philosophy turns out to be the medium of action, and, at the same time, the toolkit that is used to obtain the desired result. All our analysis leaves no doubt about it. Therefore, in a poetic context, knowledge of the position of one or another hero, who has become involved in the flow of events, is not a miracle for all other heroes, but the norm. All the optics of the world are distorted around them in accordance with their way of thinking, but the whole world begins to distort the perception of such heroes. There is a mutual change in the opinion of the characters about each other, as soon as they move a little in their thoughts relative to the previous situation. And the closer the hero is drawn into the stream of events, the more this applies to him. We can say that through participation in events, he contributes his bit to the distortion of the poetic space-time continuum. But, in doing so, he opens his inner world to the outside world, and as a result - becomes visible to other players who are involved in the vortex of changes. Therefore, Laertes sees the true situation with Ophelia and wants to deceive it. Hamlet, in turn, sees this too, and prevents such deception, which in Laertes' lamentations somewhat resembles a prayer. But there is no truth in this prayer, hence Hamlet's appeal, reinforced by the threat: "Learn to pray ... You really will regret it." Laertes will still regret that on the day of mourning he decided to act as a joke. Laertes is a primitive liar, and Hamlet throws it in his face: “You lied (emphasis mine - ST) about the mountains? "

The situation is stretched to the limit, like the bowstring of a bow from which an arrow is about to fly out.

The second scene, the final one, in which we distinguish four parts.

In the first, Hamlet tells Horatio about how he replaced the letter from the king, which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were taking to England, and according to which Hamlet were to be executed, with his own letter, according to which the twins themselves are sentenced to death. In the second part, Hamlet receives an invitation from the king to participate in a duel with Laertes. In the third part we see the duel itself, in which and around which the king, queen, Laertes and Hamlet perish. The latter, before his death, bequeathed power in the state to Fortinbras. He appears in the fourth part of the scene and orders Hamlet to be buried with honors.

In more detail, the situation is as follows. After Ophelia's funeral, Hamlet says: “As if everything. Two words about something else. " It seems that he has done some important thing, and now he wants to start another. Since his business, by and large, is one thing - the assertion of the reliability, therefore, the God-like existence of the world, then this is his "as if everything", of course, should concern just this. In this context, the whole situation with the funeral, and first of all with his struggle with Laertes, seems to be part of his assertion of the divine, i.e. closed (circular) structure of human relations. Specifically: Hamlet in that action returned good to good (returned the good name of Ophelia, who, before her death, took the path of truth). Now he says “Two words about something else,” that is, about another action, which, however, cannot be completely different, divorced from his main business, since he simply has no others. The “other” action is the opposite of what happened at the funeral, but within the framework of the previous intentions. And if then there was a return of good to good, now is the time to talk about the return of evil to evil. In this case, everything will close: abstract thought-forms about the unity of opposites in life are realized at the level of interaction between good and evil, and it is in this simple and clear form, when good responds with good, and evil turns into evil for the one who committed it (see . Note 8). And to prove this, he tells Horatio how he replaced the letter that Guildenstern and Rosencrantz were taking to England for his execution with a letter with the opposite content, according to which these two should be executed. The twins brought evil to England, which turned against them: "They tried to do it themselves."

Thus, through the story of the return of evil to evil, Hamlet finally sharpens the topic with vengeance. Previously, she was in the background, it was more important for him to build the entire system of relations based on the worldview of sustainability, and therefore on the philosophy of the divine circle. Now that all this has been done, it is time for the next steps, when abstract propositions are translated into concrete. And if the situation with the king, who is guilty of the death of the prince's father, and in the attempt to kill him, requires revenge, then so be it. And so, when the king, through the substitute for Polonius - the wobbly and florid Osric - in the same spirit, in the spirit of the backstage, challenges Hamlet to a duel with Laertes, he agrees, since the situation becomes extremely clear. Indeed, he is confident in his abilities, because he "constantly exercised." We saw that throughout the play Hamlet "practiced" in verbal duels with his rivals, building his new (however, well forgotten old) ideologeme, so that the upcoming battle, having the form of rapier fencing, is in fact the last, already final statement their innocence. The elasticity of his thought, as a result of the world he built (this became possible after he proclaimed “be the subject” and put reason above power, and put the world in dependence on reason) with a single space-time continuum, turned into the elasticity of steel of that weapon, to whom he intends to present his arguments. Moreover, during Ophelia's funeral, he put some of them on display, and they were not parried. In that rehearsal of the upcoming battle, Hamlet won, and after that he had nothing to fear. On the other hand, he understood that all the serpentine ornateness of Osric did not promise anything good, that the king had invented something in his spirit of secret games and dishonest moves. But since the duel should take place in public, then any royal trick will become visible, and this will be the basis for killing the king. Hamlet knew that there would be a trick, and he also knew that this trick would give him legal grounds to return evil to the original source. Thus, he agreed to this strange duel because it gave him the chance to legally kill Claudius. Hamlet went to fencing with Laertes not for fencing, but for fulfilling his father's promise! And this is natural: after all, if you look at it, it was not Laertes who challenged him to battle, but the king. Well, so the king was destined for his true attack with a rapier. Evil to evil and will return.

This is exactly what will happen. Of course, Hamlet's heart was not deceived when he felt (anticipated) danger. Laertes's weapon was poisoned, and Hamlet could not escape death. But the main thing is that evil, nevertheless, received a portion of its own essence, and Laertes, as well as the king, were killed after their dishonest actions were discovered. Hamlet killed the king, restoring justice not only for himself, but for everyone, since those who watched the duel saw everything with their own eyes: Gertrude drank the wine intended for Hamlet, poisoned herself and announced to everyone that it was the king's tricks. Likewise, Laertes, stabbed by his own poisoned sword, pointed to the king as the mastermind of all the dishonor that had happened. The king was doomed even before Hamlet thrust a poisoned blade into him. He, as the center of all secret machinations, was exposed. Evil is strong as long as it skillfully camouflages itself as good. When its interior becomes exposed, it loses its existential power and naturally dies. So, when the prince returns to the poisonous snake in royal guise its own poisonous bite with a rapier, he simply puts an end to the history of its existence. At the same time, he negates the very idea of \u200b\u200ba linear course of time and finally confirms its circular nature: “What was, will be; and what has been done will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun ”(Eccl. 1: 9). Moreover, he asserts this not only to the external situation in relation to himself, but also to himself: suspecting something bad, he nevertheless goes to a duel, trusting God, trusting that his possible death is a good that closes some a more global wave of changes than the one in which his life participated. At the end of the first act, our hero sets the vector of his moods: “The connecting thread has broken. / How can I put them together! " (early translation by B. Pasternak). At the end of the play, he fulfilled his task, connected the broken thread of times - at the cost of his life - for the sake of the future.

The life of Hamlet, like the king or other heroes of the tragedy, is a plot, ultimately, local in comparison with the entire history of the Danish state, in metaphysical terms - in comparison with history as such. And when Hamlet dies, he closes this story on himself, bequeathing power to the young Fortinbras (see Note 9), who by that time is returning from Poland. Once his father lost the kingdom through Hamlet's father. Now, through Hamlet himself, he gets it back. The history of centuries has become isolated on itself. At the same time, the memory of the hero Hamlet did not dissolve into nothing. He ensured the continuity of power, stability of existence and a God-like worldview, in which evil is punished by evil, and good breeds good through itself. He established moral morality. "If he were alive, he would become a king ...". However, he became more than a deservedly ruling monarch. He became a symbol of good, consciously affirming the limitation of man, but limitation not by himself in the name of his own selfish and momentary goals, but by God, and therefore having endless opportunities to overcome himself through the whirlwind of movements. In Shakespeare, he died not to die, but to move into the category of great values \u200b\u200bthat humanity lives by.

Analysis of the fifth act.

In the fifth act, in general, we can say that it is about the fact that the good has a circular structure, and evil - the structure of linear movement. Indeed, the very aspiration of Hamlet for the blissful stability of the kingdom, which is ensured by the introduction of a god-shaped, circular (self-closed) philosophy, speaks for itself. In addition, after all, the good that symbolizes life, in order to be yourself, must always repeat itself, just as life from generation to generation multiplies itself just as it was and was. On the contrary, evil has a needle-shaped character, like a stinging arrow, since it carries with it a denial of life. Evil has a certain beginning - a beginning when deception occurs, and life from a circle unfolds into an arrow. However, in the end it kills itself by itself, because it has no continuation, it breaks off. Salvation is seen in this cliff: someday evil will end, it is finite in itself. Evil is defined as finite, and good is infinite, generating itself countless times, as many times as God wants. And when the deception is revealed, the evil goes away, and the story again turns into a circle - natural, logical, absolutely verified and correct. This circle is provided with subjective activity, so that through its activity, the inner essence of a person passes into the god-like harmony of the world. Man turns out to be a participant in creation, His helper.

C. Conclusions

Now the time has come to think about that dry philosophically verified remnant that constitutes a kind of skeleton of the whole drama. To get it, you need from everything said in part IN of our research to remove the emotions that helped us to set the correct reference points when wading through the forest of mysteries nurtured by Shakespeare, but which are now becoming redundant. When the forest is passed, our own thoughts should serve as landmarks, and on their basis we should move on.

In short, we get the following. At the beginning of the play, Prince Hamlet finds himself in a situation without a foundation, not seeing the meaning of his existence. He represents that something in which there is nothing, but which denies this state of affairs. In an extremely schematic form, he is negation as such, or nothing. After all, nothing contains being, does not contain any existence (as the scholastics would say, there is neither essential nor existential being in it), and at the same time, the fact of the impossibility of its being (the fact is that there is what no) pushes itself out of itself, from standing-in-itself, and makes it move to the opposite area.

Which area is opposite to nothing? It is opposed to something that exists, and it exists explicitly, as a kind of stability. This is what it is quite appropriate to designate as existential being, or, taking into account Heidegger's research, being. Thus, Hamlet from non-being rushed to the existing. He does not regard this position as his final destination; this point is intermediate, and consists in the fact that it asserts itself as a subject. The reliability and solidity of subjectivity is due to the fact that this state depends only on the person himself, even more precisely - it is based on the knowledge of his subjectivity, on the acceptance of his inner world as a certain significance. Further, starting from this position of standing-in-oneself, he extracts from himself such a worldview that takes into account the spirituality of the human being and, thus, brings into the world the same foundation on which his own self-confidence is based - the foundation of stability, eternity existence. Thus, Hamlet not only affirms the unity of the inner and outer worlds, which now have a common foundation, but he closes the foundation to itself and makes it a semblance of the Divine Absolute, in which any activity is generated by itself from itself in order to come to itself. Indeed, in the play, all of Hamlet's actions proceed from him as a subject, generate a corresponding worldview, and close on the need for him to gain power, but not for himself personally, but so that the ideologeme embedded in the world (which is such that is good for everyone) long, sustainable. Here the soul of the prince, tuned in for the good, spreads throughout the Ecumene, becomes everything, just as everything is focused in it. A closed structure arises, reflecting the true primary source of everything, about which Hamlet constantly reminds himself and us, the spectators of the performance (the readers of the play). This primary source is God. It was He who launched all the movements, and therefore they are naturally such that they repeat in their arrangement His self-contained essence.

Hamlet secured the security of existence through involvement in a self-repeating historical process, and secured this by his death with the will of the throne of Fortinbras Jr. Moreover, our hero not only died, but became a symbol of the value of human life. He received the status of a high, maximally generalized value, and this value is found in a meaningfully lived life. Thus, his death allows us to treat him as some kind of meaningfulness, essential being, or that noematic sphere, which today can be called the being of being (being).

As a result, all of Hamlet's movements fit into the following scheme: nothing - being - being. But since the being of a being is not a being in the form of an immediate given (after all, it is expressed through the death of the protagonist), then in a certain sense - in the sense of the current life process - it repeats a state in non-being, so that this scheme turns out to be closed, God-like, and the whole project of Hamlet - expressing the truth in its divine embodiment. (Note that the idea of \u200b\u200bequality of being and non-being was subsequently used by Hegel in his Science of Logic). In addition, it is important to emphasize that the being of beings is a certain ultimate meaningfulness, in a sense, an all-collecting idea (Platonic Logos), so that it (being) exists outside of time, at all times, and is the foundation to which Hamlet aspired. And he got it. He received the foundation of himself, and, at the same time, the foundation of the world: the world evaluates him, and thereby gives him an existential foundation, but he also gives the world a valuable environment for existence, i.e. gives it a reason. Both of these foundations have the same root, since they stem from the same godlike movement of Hamlet. In the end, these subjective movements turn out to be the formula of being in His truth.

And to emphasize the strength of this conclusion, Shakespeare, against the background of Hamlet, shows Ophelia and Laertes with completely different movements.

For Ophelia, we have a scheme:

Being (an empty vessel for placing someone's ideas in it) - non-being (a state of deep error) - being (Hamlet's assessment of her repentance).

For Laertes we have:

Being (he is a certain significance that teaches Ophelia to doubt the love of Hamlet) - being (that which cannot think; a simple instrument in the hands of the king) - non-being (death and obvious oblivion).

Both of these movements are wrong because they do not contribute to history, and therefore are not involved in its course. They did nothing for life, unlike Hamlet, and therefore their life should be considered a failure. It was especially unsuccessful for Laertes, and to prove this, his movement turns out to be not only different from Hamlet's, but it turns out to be exactly the opposite. In any case, the movements of the brother and sister are not closed and therefore are not God-like. For Ophelia, this is obvious, but for Laertes, let us explain: if Hamlet compares initial non-being with final being on the basis of Hamlet's essential understanding of their dynamic unity, when one becomes to others as a result of the consistent conversion of consciousness to one and the other form, then in Laertes, due to his static relationship to opposites, these very opposites are not aligned, i.e. actions to align them turn out to be false.

Thus, a comparison of the movements of the three heroes makes it possible to show more vividly the only correct course of life - the one that was realized by Hamlet.

The truth of subjectivity went down in history, and Shakespeare's tragedy proclaimed it loudly.

2009 - 2010

Notes

1) An interesting fact seems to be that Polonius urges his son to leave for France: "On the way, on the way ... / The wind has arched the shoulders of the sails, / And where are you?", Although recently, in the second scene, at a reception with the king, wanted to let him go: "He wore out my soul, sir, / And, surrendering after long persuasion, / I reluctantly blessed him." What is the reason for the different position of Polonius at the reception with the king, and when seeing off his son? Natalya Vorontsova-Yurieva asks this fair question, but answers it completely incorrectly. She believes that the intriguer Polonius in a troubled time conceived of becoming king, and Laertes supposedly could be a rival in this matter. However, firstly, Laertes is completely devoid of power aspirations, and at the end of the play, when he surrendered completely to the power of the king (although he could seize the throne himself), this becomes completely clear. Secondly, becoming a king is not an easy task. Here help is extremely useful, if not absolutely necessary, help, moreover, power. In that case, who can Polonia rely on if not her son? With this approach, he needs Laertes here, and not in distant France. However, we see how he escorts him, apparently caring not at all about his imperious ambitions. It seems that the explanation for the contradictory behavior of Polonius lies in the text itself. So, at the end of his instructions to his son, before sending him, he says: "Above all: be faithful to yourself." Polonius here urges Laertes not to change. It is very important! Against the background of the fact that Fortinbras Jr. declared his claims for the lands of Denmark, not recognizing the legitimacy of the current king Claudius, a situation of instability of power arises in general. At the same time, Hamlet is dissatisfied, and there is a possibility that he will win over Laertes to his side. Polonius needs a resource in the form of a force that would be on the side of the king, and which, if necessary, would help stabilize the situation. Laertes is a knight, a warrior, and his military abilities are just needed in case of danger to the royal power. And Polonius, as the right hand of Claudius, very interested in maintaining his high position at court, has a son in mind. Thus, he hastily sends him to France in order to protect him from new trends and keep him there as a help, just in case such a need arises. We know that at the end of the play, Laertes will indeed appear to serve as an "instrument" for the king to kill Hamlet. At the same time, Polonius does not want to speak about his fears about the stability of the existing state of affairs - so as not to stir up panic. Therefore, in front of the king, he pretends that he is not worried about anything, and that it is difficult to let his son go.

2) Note that this quatrain is apparently better translated by M. Lozinsky as follows:

Don't believe that the sun is clear
That the stars are a swarm of lights
That the truth has no power to lie
But trust my love.

Its difference from Pasternak's version is reduced to a strong difference in the third line (otherwise everything is similar or even strictly the same). If we accept such a translation, then the meaning of Hamlet's message does not fundamentally change, with only one exception: in the third line he does not say that the reasons for his changes are "here", but about his correctness, obviously - for the sake of good intentions, to be a lie ... Indeed, camouflage, even if through madness, is fully justified and natural when the struggle for the common good begins.

3) It is about morality that we need to talk here, and not about direct sexual games with the king, as various researchers often like to do lately. Anyway, would Gertrude want to marry Claudius, if he were a drunken and outright traitor? She must have been aware of his moods.

4) In general, the play strikes the kinship of madness, even if simulated, like in Hamlet's, with the ability to reason reasonably. This move, which has a deep metaphysical background, would later be taken up by Dostoevsky and also by Chekhov. On the stage, madness means the otherness of thinking in relation to the official system of thought. From an ontological point of view, this suggests that the hero is in search, he reflects on his life, about his being in it, i.e. this speaks of his being full.

5) Studying the work of Shakespeare, we can confidently say that the idea of \u200b\u200bthe isolation of life on itself, i.e. the idea of \u200b\u200bthe cycle of everything worried him for a long time, and in Hamlet it did not appear at all by accident. So, similar motives appear in some early sonnets. Here are just a few (translations by S. Marshak):

You ... combine stinginess with waste (sonnet 1)
Look at my children.
My former freshness is alive in them.
They are the justification for my old age. (sonnet 2)
You will live in the world ten times
Repeated ten times in children,
And you will have the right in your last hour
To triumph over conquered death. (sonnet 6)

Therefore, it can even be assumed that many ideas of the play were hatched by the playwright long before its actual appearance.

6) By the way, this could have been guessed at the beginning of the play, when in the third scene of the first act in Laertes's speech to Ophelia we hear: "As the body grows, in it, like in a temple, / The ministry of spirit and mind grows." Of course, in this phrase there is no direct reference to Hamlet himself, but since we are in principle talking about him, there is a clear association of the connection of the quoted words with the main character of the tragedy.

7) The Christian character of Hamlet was noticed long ago on the basis of only some of his statements, and without an obvious connection with the structure of the play. I would like to think that this study has overcome this flaw of the previous criticism.

8) Of course, such statements run counter to the well-known position from the Gospel of Matthew, when it is called to turn the cheek under a blow. But, firstly, this is the only case of such invocations of the Savior. Secondly, He himself behaved in a completely different way, and when it was necessary, he either escaped the dangers, or took a whip and whipped the sinners with it. And thirdly, it is impossible to exclude the inserted nature of this appeal, inspired by the clergy-traitors to Christianity, who always knew how to forge documents of the highest value for the sake of their own self-interest - the self-interest of managing people. In any case, the idea of \u200b\u200breturning evil to evil is fair and in the highest degree corresponds to Christian morality, to the approval of which Hamlet aspires.

9) I must say that Hamlet, apparently, knew in advance that the power would belong to Fortinbras. Indeed, if he is seriously talking about stability and the fact that everything should revolve in a circle, then he should have come to this very conclusion.

What allows us to make such a statement? The sixth scene of the fourth act allows us to do this. Recall that there Horatio receives and reads a letter from the prince, which, among other things, says: “They (the pirates who attacked the ship on which Hamlet with twins sailed to England - ST) treated me like merciful robbers ... However, they knew what they were doing. For this I will have to do them a favor. " The question is, what kind of service should Hamlet serve the bandits, defending the purity of human relations, honesty, decency, etc.? In the play, nothing is said directly about this. This is rather strange, since Shakespeare might not have inserted this phrase, but he did. This means that the service did exist, and it is spelled out in the text, but only one should guess about it.

The suggested version is as follows. These robbers are not. They are the people of Fortinbras Jr. Indeed, before sailing to England, Hamlet talked with a certain captain from the army of a young Norwegian. This conversation has been transferred to us and there is nothing special in it. However, since the entire narration comes on behalf of Horatio (his words at the end of the play: "I will publicly tell about everything / What happened ..."), who might not know all the ins and outs of that conversation, it can be assumed that in it Hamlet agreed with that captain and the attack, and the transfer of power to Fortinbras Jr. Moreover, a "heavily armed corsair" could well have been led by the same captain. Indeed, under the heading "characters", the clearly land-based Bernardo and Marcellus are presented as officers, without specifying their rank (rank). The captain is presented precisely as the captain. Of course, we meet him on the shore and we get the impression that the captain is an officer's rank. But what if this is not a rank, but the position of the ship's commander? Then everything falls into place: Hamlet, just before his exile, meets the commander of the Norwegian ship, negotiates with him about salvation, and in return promises Denmark, meaning, first of all, obviously, not so much saving himself as returning the entire historical situation to square one. It is clear that this information quickly reaches Fortinbras Jr., is approved by him, and then everything happens as we know from the play itself.

Literature

1. The structure of the literary text // Lotman Yu.M. About art. SPb., 1998.S. 14 - 288.
2. Anikst A.A. Shakespeare's tragedy "Hamlet": Lit. comment. - M .: Education, 1986, 223.
3. V.K. Kantor Hamlet as a Christian Warrior // Problems of Philosophy, 2008, no. 5, p. 32 - 46.
4. The crisis of Western philosophy // V.S. Soloviev. Works in 2 volumes, 2nd ed. T. 2 / General. Ed. and comp. A.V. Gulygi, A.F. Losev; Note. S.A. Kravets and others - M .: Mysl, 1990 .-- 822 p.
5. Barkov A.N. "Hamlet": the tragedy of mistakes or the tragic fate of the author? // In the book. Barkov A.N., Maslak P.B. W. Shakespeare and M.A. Bulgakov: an unclaimed genius. - Kiev: Rainbow, 2000
6. Frolov I.A. Shakespeare's Equation, or Hamlet, which we haven't read. Internet address: http://artofwar.ru/f/frolow_i_a/text_0100.shtml
7. M. Heidegger. The main problems of phenomenology. Per. with him. A.G. Chernyakov. SPb .: ed. Higher religious and philosophical school, 2001, 445 p.
8. Vorontsova-Yurieva Natalia. Hamlet. Shakespeare's joke. Love story. Internet address:
9. http://zhurnal.lib.ru/w/woroncowajurxewa_n/gamlet.shtml

II semester

THE RISE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT IN THE LITERATURE OF THE RENAISSANCE

LESSON No. 65

Subject. Philosophical Problems of Shakespeare's Tragedy"Hamlet"

Purpose: to identify the philosophical issues raised in the tragedy "Hamlet"; analyze staged passages; establish interdisciplinary connections; develop creativity; to bring up high moral qualities.

Equipment: props for staging; texts of the tragedy "Hamlet"; reproduction paintings by E. Delacroix "Hamletand Horatio in the cemetery. "

Alas, poor Yorick!

W. Shakespeare

DURING THE CLASSES

I. Franco wrote about Shakespeare's tragedy: “Hamlet is not only the most personal, but also the most philosophical of Shakespeare's dramas. The hero of the tragedy is a thinker, and the events of the tragedy are prompting his opinion by sorting out the most important, the most difficult questions about the purpose of existence, the value of life, the nature of moral concepts and social order.

Therefore, today, following Hamlet, we will try to clarify the question posed by Shakespeare, and, perhaps, we will find answers to them.

II. Generalization and systematization of the studied

Excerpt one

The hand is not strained, always more sensitive ... "

Second gravedigger (digs and poet)

In the days of young love, love,

I thought - the nicest of all

To while away the hours - oh! - with fire - wow! - in blood,

I thought there was nothing.

Hamlet

Or this fellow does not feel what he is doing,

what is he singing while digging a grave?

Horatio

Habit turned it for him

into the simplest thing.

Hamlet

It's always like this, a hand that works little

most sensitive.

First gravedigger(sings)

But old age, sneak like a thief,

I took it with my hand

And took me to the country

As if I wasn't like that.

(Throws out the skull.)

Hamlet

This skull there was a language, and he could sing at one time; and this man throws him to the ground, as if it were Cain's jaw of the one who committed the first murder!

Maybe it's some politician's head that this donkey has now outwitted; a man who was ready to deceive the Lord God himself - isn't he?

Horatio

Perhaps a prince.

Hamlet

Or a courtier who said: “Good morning, my dear sir! How do you feel, my most merciful sir? " Perhaps my sovereign So-and-so, who praised the horse of my sovereign So-and-so, hoping to beg for it, isn't it?

Horatio

Yes, my prince.

Hamlet

That's it; and now this is my sovereign Rot, without a jaw, and the gravedigger's spade knocks her on the lid; here is a wonderful transformation, if only we had the ability to see it. Is it so cheap to feed these bones that all that remains is to play ruyuhi? The thought hurts my bones.

First gravedigger (singing)

Shovel and pickaxe, pickaxe,

And the shroud is white as snow;

Ah, the pit is pretty deep,

So that the guest was overnight.

(Throws another skull.)

Hamlet

Here's another one. Why shouldn't it be the skull of some lawyer? Where are his hooks and tricks, ego incidents, ego slander and subtleties now? Whynow he allows this rude man to slap his ego on the back of the head with a raggy shovel and does not threaten to attract him for insulting him? Hmm! Perhaps in in his time this fellow was a large buyer of land, with all sorts of mortgages, obligations, bills of sale, double guarantees and penalties; Is it really all the ego of the deeds of sale and the penalties only led to the fact that his landowner's head is stuffed with dirt? Could it be that all his guarantees, even double ones, only ensured him of all his acquisitions that the length and width of two manuscript fortresses? Even the ego's land acts would hardly fit in this box; And the owner himself only received this?

Horatio

That's exactly the same, my prince.

Excerpt two

"Oh, poor Yorick!"

Hamlet

How long will a person lie in the ground,

until it decays?

First gravedigger

But what if he did not rot before his death - after all, nowadays there are many such rotten dead that even a funeral can hardly stand - so he will last you eight, or even nine years; tanner, he'll last nine years.

Hamlet

Why is it longer than the rest?

First gravedigger

Yes, sir, his skin is so tanned that it does not let water through for a long time; and water, sir, is a great destroyer for such a dead dog. Here's another skull; this skull lay in the ground for twenty years and three years.

Hamlet

Whose is this?

First gravedigger

One canine's madcap; in your opinion, whose is it?

Hamlet

I really don't know.

First gravedigger

Spread him a plague, you foolish madcap! Once he poured a bottle of Renskoye on my head. This very skull, sir, is the skull of Yorick, the king's jester.

Hamlet

This?

First gravedigger

This one.

Hamlet

Show me. (Takes up the skull.) Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; the man is infinitely witty, the most wonderful inventor; he carried me a thousand on my back; and now - how disgusting I will imagine it! The thought rises to my throat. Here were those lips that I kissed myself, I don't know how many times. Where are your jokes now? Your tomfoolery? Your songs? Your outbursts of fun, from which every time the whole table laughed? Nothing left to poke fun at your own antics? Jaw dropped completely? Go now to some lady's room and tell her that even if she puts on her makeup an inch, she will end up with that face anyway; make her laugh with that. '' `` Please, Horatio, tell me one thing.

Horatio

Which one, my prince?

Hamlet

Do you think Alexander had the same

kind in the ground?

Horatio

Exactly like that.

Hamlet

And he smelled the same? Fu! (Places the skull on the ground.)

Horatio

Quite the same, my prince.

Hamlet

What a base need we can escape, Horatio! Why shouldn't the imagination trace the noble ashes of Alexander until it finds him plugging the barrel hole?

Horatio

To look like that would be to look too closely.

Hamlet

No, really, not at all; this would mean following him with due modesty and, moreover, guided by probability; for example, like this: Alexander died,Alexander is buried, Alexander turns to dust; dust is earth; they make clay from the earth, and why can't they stuff a beer barrel with this clay, into which he turned?

StateCaesar turned to decay

Went maybefor coating the walls.

Dust, which scared the whole world around,

Patching cracks against winter blizzards!

But quieter! Let's get away! The king is coming.

2. Conversation on the content of the staged passages

Excerpt one

Striking Hamlet in the cemetery? (That the grave digger sings during his work.)

How did the prince think he should behave? (Respect for the dead, with restraint, without songs.)

Why is the grave digger justified by Hamlet? (He explains this behavior to himself by the fact that the digger is used to the peculiarities of his work.)

What is Hamlet thinking when he sees a skull dug out of the ground? (About who this person could have been in life; expresses regret that after death a person loses everything.)

Explain the title of the staged passage. (Hamlet justifies the digger with the words: "The hand that is not bruised is always more sensitive", explaining that the cynicism of the gravedigger is associated with many years of work in such conditions. And calluses can appear not only on the hands, but also on the soul, if a person lives among evil or grief Hamlet is sensitive to human grief and amazed at what a person turns into after death.)

Excerpt two

Explain the words of the grave diggers about those deceased who rotted before death. " (This is not the first time that the tragedy contains words for rot - this is a manifestation of the highest degree of corruption, inability to live a field and joyful life.)

How does Hamlet characterize York, the royal jester? (The prince recalls the time he spent with Yorke with sadness, recalls him as a cheerful, witty, creative person. Hamlet is amazed that he is holding his skull in his hands - all that remains of York.)

Yorick is only a royal jester. Hamlet reflects on the fate of "the mighty of this world." What conclusions does he come to? (Hamlet comes to the conclusion that both big and ordinary people have one end: after death they turn into dust, earth. And even Alexander the Great is no exception, and now part of him can be in a wine barrel.)

3. Philosophical problems in Shakespeare's tragedy

The tragedy "Hamlet" is called philosophical, because it touches upon the problems associated with the foundations of human existence.

The totality of problems in a work is called problematics.

Let us determine what issues (problems) are violated by the author of the tragedy.

The problem of life and death is the leitmotif of the entire play. Most of the heroes of the work die, almost all of them talk about death and life. An important moment for realizing the transience of human life is the scenes in the cemetery.

The problem of struggle and inaction

Which is better: to accept or fight evil? Is it good with fists? Doesn't it turn into evil at this time? More questions than answers.

The problem of love and betrayal

Treason is a concept that is almost constantly present in the play. Even people close to Hamlet turn into traitors and spies. Why does the queen betray the memory of Hamlet's father, Ophelia - Hamlet, Claudius - her brother, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - a friend?

One thing is clear: true love and betrayal are incompatible.

Hood. Eugene Delacroix. Hamletand Horatio in the cemetery

III. Lesson summary

To compose a sencan on the theme “The Tragedy of“ Hamlet ”” (I version) or “Hamlet” (II version).

smart, noble,

thinks, fights, dies,

a lonely fighter against evil,

the thinker-hero.

IV. Homework

Write an essay on the topic "What is the tragedy of Hamlet?"

Material for writing an essay

Writing-reflection differs from other works in its structure and content.

In the introduction, you need to express the point of view on the question (topic) - generally accepted or the one that belongs to a famous person.

In the main part it is necessary to express your opinion on this issue (agree or disagree) and provide evidence, arguments confirming the validity of your position. In conclusion, summarize the defense of your opinion regarding the disclosure of the question "What is the tragedy of Hamlet?"

Quotes for use in the work (optional for students)

“Hamlet is a work of fiction, not a treatise; not an instructive story, but a drama about how life is revealed to a person in its most important manifestations. " (A. Anikst)

"The tragedy of Hamlet is the tragedy of man's knowledge of evil." (A. Anikst) “Hamlet could not solve the problem. His greatness lies in the fact that this question was raised by him. " (M. Morozov)

"The greatness and tragedy of Hamlet generated by the gap between the duty of a thinker and a fighter." (S. Nels)

“Hamlet is sure that the sad story about his life is needed by people - as a lesson, warning and appeal ... With his fate he testifies to the tragic contradictions of history, the hard but more and more persistent work to humanize man. And it proves the special importance of a courageous individual victim of tragic circumstances. " (M. Urnov)

"By nature, Hamlet is a strong man: his bilious irony, his instant outbursts, his passionate antics in conversation with his mother, proud contempt and open hatred for his uncle - all this testifies to the energy and greatness of the soul." (V.G.Belinsky)

"Hamlet is a synthetic portrait of the humanists of the Shakespearean era." (M. Morozov)

In the history of art and literature, there is no more popularity of the play than the popularity of "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare. For more than 300 years this tragedy has been played on the stages of theaters around the world. People of different cultures are looking for answers to questions that worry them. The secret of this tragedy lies in the philosophical depth and humanistic inspiration of this work, in the skill of Shakespeare the playwright, who embodied universal human problems into artistic grievances.

The image of Hamlet is central to Shakespeare's tragedy. Already at the beginning of the play, it is determined

The main goal of this hero is revenge for the murder of his father. According to medieval ideas, this is his duty, but Hamlet is a man of modern times, he is a humanist, and cruel revenge is contrary to his nature. To make a decision, he needs to weigh well whether the death of Claudius will change anything in the world. Around himself, he sees only treason and deceit. He is disappointed even in his love and remains alone.

His reflections on the purpose of man acquire a tragic color (scene in the cemetery). Man is a very weak creature to resist evil, Hamlet believes. The events of the tragedy seem to confirm these arguments of the hero: Ophelia dies innocently, and evil remains unpunished. Hamlet cannot come to terms with this, but he also does not find the strength to resist. If he becomes a murderer, he will go over to the side of evil and thereby strengthen him.

Shakespeare gives Hamlet several opportunities to kill Claudius: Hamlet sees the king praying alone, and he gets an opportunity. But the hero doesn't take the plunge. In prayer, Claudius expiates his sins, death at such a moment was perceived by Shakespeare's contemporaries as forgiveness of sins, and the human soul, it was believed, flew to heaven. To kill Claudius at such a moment meant to forgive him for the harm done. This is precisely what Hamlet cannot do. Before our eyes, the hero is going through a difficult struggle between a sense of duty and his own convictions, this struggle leads to a sad conclusion: the whole world is a prison where there is no place for human virtues, where each person is doomed to loneliness.

Hamlet's monologues reveal the inner struggle that the hero is waging with himself. He constantly reproaches himself for inaction, tries to understand whether he is capable of any action at all. He even thinks about suicide, but here, too, reflections on whether the same problems await him in the other world stop him ("To be or not to be?"). Duty commands him to "be" and to act. Shakespeare shows a consistent development to the character of Hamlet. In the finale of the tragedy, the king's killer is punished, but it happened as a result of a coincidence, and not from the will of the hero.

It is not by chance that Hamlet pretends to be mad: only a very strong person can understand what Hamlet understood and not go mad.

The strength of this image is not in what actions it takes, but in how it feels and forces readers to experience. Why a person cannot achieve happiness and harmony, what is the meaning of human life, is it possible to overcome evil - these are just the main philosophical problems that Shakespeare raises in his tragedy. He does not give a definitive answer to them, perhaps this is impossible. But his faith in a person, in her ability to do good, to resist evil is the way to answer them.