著者

成田 英明

出版者

東京芸術大学

雑誌

東京藝術大学音楽学部紀要 (ISSN:09148787)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.24, pp.47-67, 1998

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At the beginning of Hamlet, those who were looking into the darkness on the platform of the castle at Elsinore disclosed that the real darkness is in their own country. Their nominal watch against young Fortinbras revealed their country's inner rotten darkness through the revelation of the late King's ghost. Young Hamlet was also brooding darkness at the bottom of his bosom. Neither his mother's too quick remarriage nor his lack of advancement could have been the real cause of his melancholy. He tried to give shape to this darkness within himself that went beyond his own understanding. Though T. S. Eliot abandoned to find 'the objective correlative' to Hamlet's melancholy, he felt acutely that something lied undetected at the bottom of his heart. Eliot was right but unable to find it, concluding the play to be a failure. Other scholars and critics haven't even attempted to reach Hamlet's deepest bosom. In this thesis I have given an answer to Eliot's irritation, studying Hamlet's melancholy from a historical perspective. Hamlet was ordered to take revenge by his father's ghost in order to cleanse the rotten Denmark. He looked up to his father as Hyperion, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Hercules. When he was ordered to take revenge, however, Hamlet was forced to play the role of Hercules in place of his father to cleanse Denmark, which was the Augean stables, after a 30 years' absence, the years symbolically corresponding to his age. He realized himself to be the slave of passion, which suggested he had Herculean madness that would destroy everything including even those whom he loved most. The problem of delay can be solved from this point of view. There is no delay except in Hamlet's mind. Only he felt himself to be a coward. The reason why he felt so is obvious: he couldn't make up his mind to devote his life to revenge. The third soliloquy expresses his agony. 'To be, or not to be' can be read as 'to live as a coward without revenging, or to die honorably in revenge.' No other than Claudius realized the dangerous something which Hamlet's melancholy state of mind was generating. He felt that Herculean 'madness in great ones' would destroy everything. Now the deepest problem in Hamlet's melancholy has been solved here.