WAS THERE ADEQUATE MOTIVATION FOR HAMLET?

WAS THERE ADEQUATE MOTIVATION FOR HAMLET? Hamlet’s father is murdered by his own brother, his mother hastily marries the murderer, and the murderer rather than Hamlet seizes the throne. Tom Stoppard has a lot of fun in ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD with the notion that anybody is puzzled by Hamlet’s behaving strangely under the circumstances. Yet, kids, one of the most influential critics of the last century claimed that Hamlet’s emotions were excessive. In this famous essay, T.S. Eliot said that: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” Eliot used the essay as a vehicle for explaining his concept of the “objective correlative”, which was used as a tool of literary analysis for at least the next fifty years. His famous definition was: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, 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.” For Eliot, HAMLET was a flawed play, and the lack of an “objective correlative” was the flaw that explained HAMLET’s failure: “The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.”