Few critics have even acknowledged that Hamlet the play is the main issue and Hamlet the character is only secondary in T. S. Eliot’s critical essay, Hamlet and His Problems. And Hamlet the character has a unique weakness for that most hazardous kind of critic: the critic whose intellect is naturally of the creative order but who exercises itself in criticism instead due to some deficit in creative strength. According to Eliot, critics like Coleridge and Goethe frequently use Hamlet as a metaphor for their own artistic fulfilment. They appear to have lost their primary responsibility as critics, which is to analyze the play, he continues. As a result, their strategy seems deceptive. Actually, they have made their own version of Hamlet.
Eliot is also very appreciative of Robertson and Prof. Stoll for making a good faith effort to turn their critical observation in the right direction, which compelled him to say, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.” At this point, it is obvious that Eliot is criticizing Shakespeare and defending the critics like Robertson.
According to Eliot, the renowned critics paid considerably more attention to the character of Hamlet than to the play Hamlet. This is what he refers to as the root of the issue. The fundamental reason why Hamlet is regarded as the Mona Lisa of Literature is that it is fascinating. The play is a masterpiece, yet it is unquestionably a failure on the level of art. According to Eliot, “The play is perplexing and unsettling in a number of ways that none of the others are. Shakespeare may have worked the hardest on this play out of all of them, but despite its length, it has a number of unnecessary and illogical passages.
Shakespeare’s attempt to create the impression of a mother’s guild did not, in Eliot’s judgment, succeed as well as he could have with Othello’s jealousy. Shakespeare, who is well-known for working on Thomas Kyd’s vengeance play The Spanish Tragedy, took inspiration for Hamlet’s psychosis from that work. The remark “Hamlet’s madness is less than madness and more than feigned” could be made.
Eliot also claims that Shakespeare searched for an appropriate “Objective Correlative” for Hamlet’s feelings. Objective Correlative is described by Eliot himself as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” The Prince of Denmark’s inner suffering cannot be effectively expressed by any thing, person, circumstance, or occasion. Although his anguish is awful, neither a character nor an action in the play captures the whole severity of his shock at his mother’s culpability.
Shakespeare’s other tragedy, Macbeth, according to Eliot, is also successful in generating the same emotional quotient, or the “Objective Correlative.” The author explains to the readers that “a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions has been used to communicate to you the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep; the words of Macbeth upon learning of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. In Hamlet, this total suitability of the external to the emotion is lacking, which is precisely where the artistic “inevitability” rests.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an aesthetic failure, but this failure is solely attributable to the fact that he attempted to solve an issue that was too difficult for him. His inability to do so is an indication of his artistic excellence because he was attempting to convey an indescribable horror. Similar to how a great artist would fail to create a stunning painting in the lack of suitable colors and canvas, he failed because the plot he picked and the characters he used were insufficient for the task. Shakespeare actually wanted to portray a truly amazing event, but his ability failed him even before he tried.
The best example of “destructive criticism” is the essay Hamlet and His Problems. It demonstrates Eliot’s creativity and audacity as a critic. At a time when everyone had praised the play Hamlet, only Eliot had the audacity to call it a “artistic failure.” Recall that Eliot’s essay is more of a praise than a critique of the play.
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