Hamlet is widely circulated as one of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, and we often say that there are a thousand Hamlets for a thousand readers, so what is this story about?
The protagonist of the tragedy, Hamlet, is a Danish prince who was originally studying at the University of Wittenburg in Germany, but when he returned to China, his father had died violently, and his mother Gotlud had remarried to his uncle, the new king Kródis. Rumors abounded in the country, and Hamlet was also very sad about the violent death of his father and the hasty remarriage of his mother, and he saw that there were evil things everywhere and that he had been depressed.
At this moment, the ghost of his father appeared before him, telling him in detail about his uncle Crodice's murder of himself and ordering Hamlet to avenge himself. Hamlet is distraught and hesitant about this quest for revenge. He intends to pretend to be crazy, but his pretense of madness arouses the suspicion of his uncle, and Crodice sends many people to test whether Hamlet is really crazy. Under the constant temptation of the enemy, Hamlet took advantage of the opportunity of a drama team to enter the palace to test his uncle. Before the show was final, his uncle Crodice left in a hurry, further confirming his uncle's crime of murdering his father.
At the behest of her uncle Claudius, Hamlet's mother summons her son to her room to talk, but Hamlet mistakenly kills Ophelia's father, the Palace Minister, Bolenius. Ophelia went mad because of this and finally died a tragic death. Knowing that his sins had been discovered by Hamlet, Crodis managed to send the prince on an envoy to England and wrote a secret letter to the king asking him to put Hamlet to death. Fortunately, Hamlet escaped and escaped back halfway through.
So Crodice set up a poison plan, so that Hamlet and Pollenius's son, Leotis, prepared a real sword, a poisonous sword, and a poisonous wine, which must result in Hamlet's life. In the process of sword matching, Hamlet's mother, Gotlud, accidentally drank poisoned wine and died of poison. Leotis stabbed Hamlet with a poisonous sword, but Hamlet later stabbed Leotis with the poisoned sword he had taken. Before his death, Leotis exposes Claudius's criminal plot, and Hamlet kills his uncle Crodice with a poisoned sword and poisoned wine.
This tragedy is probably best known for the domestic translation of the phrase "To be or not to be": to survive or to perish. In fact, Hamlet here is not to express deep thinking about life and death and survival, but more accurately, it should be a question of whether he wants to take revenge.
Hamlet was faced with three ethical knots at that time: the taboo of killing the father, the taboo of killing the mother, and the taboo of killing the king. For his uncle's killing of his brother and sister-in-law, Hamlet is essentially saddled with a social and ethical responsibility to avenge his father. But his uncle's act of marrying his sister-in-law led to a shift in his ethical relationship with Hamlet, who became Hamlet's titular father, the stepfather. This makes Hamlet hesitate again and again to take revenge on himself, facing a father killer who has achieved the suppression of his Oedipus complex (i.e., the Oedipus complex), killing his uncle is also equivalent to killing the subconscious childhood self.
In the face of her husband's murder but her mother, who quickly remarried, Hamlet was also full of resentment. Although his father's soul told him not to hurt his mother, all the phenomena of his mother showed that he was not loyal to her husband. But from the perspective of the mother at that time, the son traveled far away, the husband was killed, and the mother had to or the best choice at this time was to choose to commit herself to the little uncle who usurped the throne. Although the mother has no powerful forces to avenge, she can do her best to protect her son. In the end, the mother also chose to atone for her son's drinking of poisoned wine in order to untie this messy ethical knot.
(Of course, we don't rule out the possibility that the mother and uncle colluded to kill Hamlet's father.) ）
Our delayed prince, Hamlet, asks "To be or not to be" when he struggles with whether to kill his uncle to avenge his husband. For Hamlet, survival represents the silent enduring of the poisonous arrows of fate' tyranny, while destruction is taking action to stand up against the endless suffering of this world. Revenge or no revenge, this is undoubtedly the ultimate life proposition for Hamlet, who was a prince but had no real power at the time. From Hamlet's inner struggle, we can also see this tragedy happening. This is, as Engels put it, "a tragic conflict between the inevitable demand of history and the practical impossibility of this demand."
The tragedy is also about the conflict between ideals and reality, with Goethe mentioning that "Shakespeare meant to show the result of a great cause being committed to an incompetent person." It was a tree planted in a precious pot, and this pot could only grow lovely flowers; the roots of the tree stretched out and the pot shattered. "A man of beauty, purity, nobility, and high morals, who has no strong energy to make him a hero, but who is destroyed under a heavy burden which he cannot lift or let go of; which is sacred to him, is too heavy."
From the religious point of view of the Renaissance at that time, the "Hamlet Mystery" stemmed from the confusion and anxiety of human beings about fate, value and future. Early humanism's confidence in human dignity and creativity was a satire on its actual condition. If you still insist on faith in this disillusionment, you have to settle for tragedy, which is the reason behind Shakespeare's tragedy. Shakespeare no longer believed that courage and virtue could control fate, and all man could do was to face his failure with perseverance.
All worldly revenge, the struggle for the throne, is not important, they are only meaningful if they are used as means of expressing themselves as ideal humanity. Even when they deny themselves, i.e., in destruction and defeat, that they express ideal humanity and personality strength more purely, and acquire a more real meaning of life.
Hugo said: "Hamlet is as real as each of us, but greater than us. He was a giant, but he was a real man. Because Hamlet is not you, it's not me, it's all of us. Hamlet is not a person, but a person. ”
Hamlet depicts the process of the kingdom of God from destruction to reconstruction, embodying the contractual nature of human existence: no matter how human beings destroy their home country, they cannot rely on God in the end, but should rely on themselves, and use practical actions to relentlessly rebuild the ideal kingdom.
There is also a serious religious theological thought in Hamlet's inner world, which is characterized by the fact that during the Renaissance, the "man" who had just stood up from the pressure of religion was still spiritually inextricably linked to God. But its loosening of consciousness in this shackle and its affirmation of "people" all show that under the shackles of religion at that time, there were "people" who paid attention to themselves under the shackles of religion who were trying to open the shackles to achieve the transcendence of their own spiritual values...
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