Hamlet is a proto-Existential play. The play’s lengthy deliberation upon suicide and murder calls into question the nature of madness and disinters what death does to thought. Hamlet is confronted by the absurdity of the human condition which he capriciously avoids by taking solace in cynical philosophical pessimism. His confrontation with the Absurd leads to his numerous ruminations upon suicide and human agency. That Hamlet ultimately fails to adequately cope with the conditions of the human experience is tragic, but it is just that. Hamlet is a character who can be empathized with but not venerated. Hamlet is about the all too common human failure to cope with Absurd. The tragedy had implications that go far beyond the purview of Elizabethan Theatre.

The circumstances of Hamlet’s life are grave. His father has died and his kingdom has been stripped from him. Exigent situations often result in tragedy. The tragic takes on the character of The Absurd. That any form of human suffering exists feels absurd. Because there are no grand designs to find fault in, the revelation of the absurdity of the human condition results in angst. Hamlet stands upon the limit-edge of mortality. He is, for most of the play, incapable of coming to terms with death. That people die feels like an absurd ukase issued by an arcane tyrant who can not at all be benevolent. Yet, there is an odd kind of justice in death. The mind abates and the body decomposes. All people return to the same base materials after death. Death is The Great Equalizer. In spite of the Christian beliefs that he presents at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare substitutes Death for God in Hamlet. Such an intellectual machination contextualizes fatalism so that it can be rendered meaningful without invoking the mythic or the divine. Hamlet may not have been fated to kill Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, or Claudius, but he was fated to die. No person escapes death. That people die is the basic condition of the human experience. The “fell sergeant, Death” is “strict in his arrest.” No palaver can contend with mortality. There is no parley to be had with it. It is a fact that people die. There are no other terms or conditions to be offered. Coming to terms with death is a necessary existential endeavor. Hamlet’s cynical wit mocks every sincere attempt to do so. He can not cope with mortality, and, yet, believes that he wants to die.

Hamlet is exceptionally cruel. He attempts to cope with angst by obsessing over suicide and mercurially castigating others around him through the ample deployment of vicious repartee. Hamlet does not jest; he is hysterical. There are plenty of jokes within the play, but, almost none of them are funny. Hamlet utilizes his cruel wit in order to interrogate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His humor also takes on the form of a rebellion against what he has come to understand about the human condition. Hamlet is self-depreciating. I am incredibly skeptical of the cheap Psychoanalytic interpretations of the play that see Hamlet as either being a self-loathing narcissist or having an Oedipal complex. Such base reductions miss the point entirely. Hamlet lacks the resolve to break the upshot of his philosophical predilection to the world. He can not speak well enough to soften of the blow of what he has come to understand about the human experience in spite of that he is very well spoken. He copes with his alienated position by attempting to make light the very grave. His jests reveal to the audience the depths of his pathology and often take on the character of anti-jokes. I don’t, like T.S. Eliot, believe that this is indicative of that the play is just simply flawed (Eliot, para. 8). Shakespeare’s usage of wit in Hamlet is ingenious. The plights incurred during the human experience play as anti-jokes. Life is plagued by misfortune. One can only laugh to oneself. In so far that philosophical pessimism adequately assesses the human condition, what we come to understand about the world is often like a joke that nobody gets because it isn’t funny. Hamlet is a play that is about a failed attempt at overcoming philosophical pessimism. Hamlet believes too directly in the madcap charm that being suicidal allows for. There are but brief reprieves from his mania and melancholy. Shakespeare offers no relief in Hamlet. You are only given a suicidal lament to empathize with and the gravediggers to laugh at.

For nearly all of the first half of the play, Hamlet’s behavior is extraordinarily melancholic. The audience is led to believe that he is mourning the death of his father, but I would argue that Hamlet’s extolment of his father is self-deceiving. Hamlet is beset by the existential plight that the death of his father reveals to him. He is not mourning his father’s death; he is mourning the death of the symbolic itself. There is no divine order. A person’s will will not be commanded by cause or providence. We must cope with radical freedom. Hamlet is confronted by two choices in the play: whether or not he should kill Claudius and whether or not he should kill himself. The fixation upon his ruse is motivated by that he is avoiding thinking about suicide. He does not want to die, and, yet, can not choose to live. He refuses to abandon the postulation that the human experience is ultimately negative, and, is, therefore, incapable of coming to terms with mortality. Death produces desire. People want to live because they know that they will die. All of life is lived in spite of death. Hamlet’s whimsical derision delays death, but does not free him from it. His reliance upon his intellect offers him only a brief moment of clarity before his final hour. At the beginning of the play, he is crestfallen. By the middle of it, he has fallen in love with the idea of committing suicide. In the play’s famed soliloquy, Hamlet associates human action with suicide. He laments:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

To act means to attempt to put an end to the suffering spawned by desire. All human action braves the unknown. Self-destructive suicidal impulses allow for an odd kind of freedom. A person seemingly becomes liberated from the fear of death. This liberation, however, is felt as a mere sensation. A person does not actually quell the anxiety caused by mortality. Liberating suicidal caprice is often expressed as jouissance. To act on a whim becomes an addictive compulsion. Hamlet is coping with the revelation that he is radically free. Human agency allows for the potentiality of suicide. That a person can take their own life should result in an appraisal of the concept of freedom. We are not just free to do good or to live well. We are also free to injure and inflict self-harm. The radical negation of another’s existential attestation, to kill, transgresses the inviolable. Because suicide only involves one person, no ethic ensues. The negation of the Self produces the semblance of ekstasis. That the Self can seemingly be negated allows for reflexive abstract thought. Hamlet learns about himself and the world through being suicidal. He mistakenly identifies the ecstasy of realization with psychological plight which engendered it. He experiences catharsis, but does not become more lucid after the fact. His behavior, following the soliloquy, is fiendish and rash. It is the last time, aside from a few ephemeral moments, that the audience can truly empathize with the character. His “antic disposition”, here, becomes true madness. What we are witnessing when we watch Hamlet deliver the “To be or not to be” soliloquy are the last moments of his lasting sanity.

Hamlet can be diagnosed with a litany of mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I would diagnose Hamlet as suffering from Major Depression and Psychosis. The DSM-5 treats Psychosis as a symptom of other disorders and not a disorder itself. As Hamlet is a character in a play, and not a person with whom I can communicate directly, I do not know whether or not I would diagnose Hamlet as suffering from Schizophrenia or other disorders that are claimed to have psychotic symptoms. We only know that he is “psychotic”. A clinical analysis of the character would be contingent upon the actor who plays him. The situation that Shakespeare casts Hamlet in calls into question the nature of madness itself. Every person who he encounters is to some degree lying to him. His father is dead and his mother has married a man who offers the pretense of being a drunkard. His sovereignty has been taken from him. Hamlet’s antics are an attempt to lay bare the falsehoods promulgated by his uncle. We know that there is an actual ghost by that Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo are also witnesses to it. We know that Claudius did kill King Hamlet by that he confesses to it in the third act. We discover, near the end of the play, that Claudius had attempted to have Hamlet executed upon landing in England. We also know that Claudius tempers the cup that Gertrude drinks from with poison and that he had brought Laertes under his wing so that he could devise a means to kill Hamlet. Hamlet is not just mad. His “antic disposition” is an extraordinarily clever means to cope with his extreme alienation at Elsinore. He exploits his madness in an attempt to dethrone his uncle. This works all too well. The play within the play forces Claudius to confront his guilt. Shakespeare uses the play within the play to demonstrate what madness is like. Because of the stigma associated with mental illness, a person who allegedly suffers from it will experience social encounters as a masquerade. Everyone pretends to offer the mentally ill the same cordiality that they extend to others. When the society that has designated a person as being “insane” is negative, the insane have no choice but to revolt. A mad revolt often takes on the character of a play within a play. We all attempt to act our way out of the roles that we are assigned in a world that classifies genuine free expression as madness. What is madness? Does madness describe a genuine psychological plight or is it merely determined by that a person is out keeping with whatever social order that they find themselves to be subject to? By that he is contemplating treason, Hamlet is certainly criminally insane. By that he gives way to his own mania, he could be considered to be mad. We know that he is mad by that Gertrude does not see the ghost who he speaks to in the fourth scene of the third act. What does Hamlet’s madness reveal about the human condition?

The human condition results in angst. There is no way to adequately cope with death. Parlous anxiety produces mania. A person can only develop the exalted resolve of those who are willing to stake their lives in conflict. Hamlet validly identifies a catholicon to angst, but fails not to succumb to the pitfalls of soldier mentality. That he is carried to the stage and given a military funeral at the end of the play is somewhat ironic. Such vainglorious fanfare was, in part, precisely what destroyed his mind. Hamlet is right to suggest that one should expose what is mortal and unsure to all that Fortune, Death, and Danger dare “even for an eggshell”, but falls prey to the call of the epochal when he suggests that to be great is to “find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake.” Hamlet can be interpreted as a subversive play in so far that it deconstructs a great man. Because he becomes consumed by vengeance, Hamlet becomes subject to history and loses his agency over it. His serene resolve in the second scene of the fifth act is as close to him developing a resolution with which to cope with the circumstances of his life as we come in the play. In regards to the wager that Hamlet has just agreed to, Horatio states, “If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.” Hamlet replies:

Not a whit, we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis
not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.

This is about as much there is to draw from for inspiration in all of Western civilization. The “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” unceasingly levy their assault, and all that we have are the brief moments of serenity in men who can be considered to be nothing but mad. That Hamlet is suicidal is a natural response to the circumstances of his life. It is incredibly tragic that the world should ruled by suicidal men. What is all the more tragic is that the only reprieve from the disintegrative order established by such an aporia comes from those who are willing to stake their lives in an attempt to reintegrate a life-affirming philosophy that would undo the psychological plights incurred through the diffusion of the thanatopolitical. The answer is “to be”. To state such an answer still means to risk death. The very crux of sanity can be considered as a form of self-sacrificing suicide in what has been wrought by Western civilization. There are no sane men. There is only that there is a means to cope with the Absurd. Hamlet attempts to do so and tragically fails. He is human. What his tragic failure reveals is the very human failure to adequately cope with the human condition. It takes courage to attempt to come to terms with existence. The questions that Existentialism poses are not for the feint of heart. Hamlet may not have died as a hero, but he did die with valor. Such men need not be venerated, but their stories have enough within them to be offered the condescension of empathy. Hamlet may not be understood well by all, but can be. We are all, to some degree, suicidal. By acting, we negate some facet of the Self which had potentiality. There is knowledge to be gained from the ekstasis that is produced while contemplating suicide. Overcoming suicide is a necessary existential endeavor. We can glean certain means to cope with the Absurd from Hamlet. Black humor has its place in spiting the very bleak human condition with laughter. That there is no inherent meaning in the world can be somewhat liberating. We can, like Hamlet, whimsically denounce the inveterate establishment of the symbolic by utilizing the affected mien we have developed in response to the conditions of the Absurd. It is also quite brave to confront suicide and mortality. One should attempt to develop a resolve with which to live in spite of the tragic human experience. That Hamlet had made such an attempt is what makes the character tragic.

Hamlet is, of course, no role model. Unlike Camus’ Sisyphus who heroically chooses to live in spite of the Absurd, Hamlet lets his despairing outlook become a reality. The assumption that the human experience is ultimately negative is pathological. It becomes true in so far that it is believed to be so. A person who believes that existence primarily entails suffering will suffer. Shakespeare chooses not to create a heroic myth about confronting the Absurd. He, rather, tells a tragic tale about a man who becomes incapable of escaping his own self-fulfilling prophecy. The play is about a man who breaks down completely. Hamlet is tragic, but he is not a tragic hero. He offers only a brief respite before death. That Hamlet ultimately fails to come to terms with the Absurd, calls his very character into question. Should his cruelty be excused by his charm? Is Hamlet at all someone who an audience member can empathize with? His cruel disregard for Ophelia drives her to commit suicide. The experience of watching Hamlet can be likened to Ophelia’s relationship to the character. She represents the relationship that people have to men who can not cope with the gravitas of power. We are left hysterically beset by the uninvited cruelty of the play. One can only lament, “Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!” Hamlet can be interpreted as much as a mediation upon revolutionary suicide as it can an investigation into the suicidal pathology of Fascism. Should an audience member even attempt to identify with the character in so far that he is a Fascist? The proper response would seem to be the cold logic of clinical analysis. In so far that Hamlet’s cruelty is unwarranted, the character can only be analyzed. In that sense, Hamlet is a character study in Psychosis. The play, however, is far more subversive. Hamlet transgresses what Christianity falsely identifies as inviolable knowledge. He braves the unknown in attempting to actually cope with mortality and is, therefore, thrust into the actual conditions of the human experience which are beset by the perils of human agency. Hamlet’s cruelty is an acceptable revolt against the Absurd. He simply misplaces his fury by taking his distress out on Ophelia. His anger is righteous, but he falls prey to mania. What the audience is left with after Hamlet delivers his exalted soliloquy is a character who no longer has any control over his own mind. The human encounter with the Absurd does not usually end in sublime victory. It, more often than not, results in catastrophic tragedy. Hamlet’s defeat brings ruin to his entire kingdom. We are left only with Horatio to deliver his epitaph. The play is about the all too human encounter with the Absurd. One should, like Hamlet, have the courage to attempt to cope with the actual conditions of the human experience. One should not, however, repeat his mistakes. Hamlet is a character who is deserving of empathy but not veneration. The death of the symbolic is completed by Hamlet’s death at the end of the play. He, at the very least, leaves us with one last lament: “The rest is silence.”

Hamlet can be seen the beginning of the abandonment of the belief in the aristocracy. Their beautiful world could never be looked at the same way again. The play marks the outset of Modernity. It can be seen as the rudimentary Existential text which called every Renaissance assumption about the world and humanity into question. Shakespeare leaves us with a “world that has grown honest.” It is up to us to learn to cope with the tragic modality of the Absurd. He offers the brief respite of resolution as a means to cope with the human condition. I would argue that this does not go far enough. We should take a leaf from Camus and revolt against our state of affairs. In doing so we will discover how to do so joyously. One must choose “to be”. That one does is the most difficult task of all.