"Family Games and Imbroglio in *Hamlet*"

by John V. Knapp

c 2000

Need I repeat that the theatre critic's professional routine so

discourages any association between real life and the stage,

that he soon loses the natural habit of referring to the one to

explain the other? George Bernard Shaw, "Preface"

to Three Plays for Puritans (xxvii).

I

Possibly excepting either of Homer's epics, Hamlet may be the

single most discussed work in all of Western Literature (Jenkins 1982,

rpt. 1997, 81). The range of critical arguments about the play is

astonishing in its richness and variety, moving from explicitly

allegorical readings (Aguirre 1996) to more `realistic' analyzes (Heilbrun

1990), to mythical readings (Fergusson, 1972), with the most influential

psychologically-oriented reading of it remaining Ernest Jones's

Freudian-based Hamlet and Oedipus (1949, rpt. 1954):

[Hamlet's] long `repressed' desire to take his father's place in

his mother's affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the

sight of someone [Claudius] usurping this place exactly as he

himself had once longed to do. More, this someone was a member of

the same family, so that the actual usurpation further resembled

the imaginary one in being incestuous ... . Hamlet's second guilty

wish had thus been realized by his uncle, namely to procure the

fulfillment of the first -- the possession of the mother -- by a

personal deed, ... by murder of the father. (94)

It is interesting to note how this too-familiar explanation,

merely one psychological view of Hamlet and his family, has come to

dominate so many late 20th century readings and productions of the play.

The psychoanalytic perspective is so pervasive that even as fine a reader

of Shakespeare as Derek Jacobi is prompted to enact one of the more famous

scenes in this most famous work, Gertrude's closet scene, by having his

Hamlet actually get on top of the character of the mother in her bed and

"hump" her as he delivers his lines. And, as I have argued elsewhere,

actors and directors along with contemporary critics have drastically

limited their understandings of imaginative literature generally, and

Shakespeare's masterpiece in particular, by subscribing to a highly

suspect psychological clinical system, one now over 100 years old (Knapp

1996; 1997; cf. Schoenbaum 1991, 440-444; Vickers 1993, 281).

By offering an alternative reading to exisiting criticism, one can then

reexamine from the perspective of Family Systems Psychotherapy (fst),

questions of Gertrude's fidelity, the reader's understanding of sibling

rivalry between King Hamlet and Claudius, and the triangulated

interactions of the Hamlet family as each is better illuminated through

the lens of a family systems paradigm. Using family systems-oriented

criticism (fst), the critic now moves from focusing on a character's

intra-psychic conflicts to a systems approach where the observer, at least

temporarily, takes a "multi-positional" view of the family in question,

whether real or fictional.

Hence, adapting our "neutral" fst stance, we exam all of the major

characters as mimetic elements in a family system first, and then

reassessing the validity of what we think we know about them. Although

generations of critics may have been unwittingly "inducted" into the

Hamlet family system, we cannot understand Claudius, nor his family, nor

Shakespeare's genius without looking closely at one of the Bard's least

admired characters -- and looking in from outside the existing family

imbroglio.

In this essay, I intend to consider some issues hitherto little

discussed by critics of Hamlet -- not as a means of demonstrating the

`real truth' about the play -- but as a complement to the extensive,

elaborated, and at times excellent criticism already written about it.

In the full light of the fst explanation, I intend to argue for a somewhat

different view of Hamlet using a mixture of the recent insights afforded

by the tools of fst and neo-Darwinian family studies (Sulloway 1997;

Carroll 1995, 346-47; Storey 1996).