Hamlet's Duel

By Cesare Caneva

In the countries of the industrialized West is given an elevated value to the material results achieved by the individuals, but it is ignored, on the other hand, the meaning of those successes obtained by carrying out some inner transformations.
This study focuses on that particular “ethical” transformation which, once carried out, allows every character to perceive his own existence. The first nucleus of this inner transformation is recognizable in the adolescence.
The duel faced by Hamlet in the fifth act becomes the archetype of that negative asymmetrical duel that the young has to face when the "father" doesn't succeed in assuming his own role in the period of his child’s adolescence.
The unsuccessful carrying out of the ethical transformation under examination causes the development of more or less serious forms of pathological games, degenerate forms introduced in the sixth chapter and in appendix with some examples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326394974

Book preview

work.

Introduction

S. has been recently protagonist of an incident of bullying: he has beaten with wickedness the classmate G. while an accomplice shooted all that with a cellular phone. The video has been visible for some days on You Tube.

The counsellor who collaborates with our school reports me the result of an interview he had with S. and his version of the facts. It is true, him and others have done for long time to G. for game taunts and name-calling, but to the last provocation turned him G. reacted with unacceptable insults (… that blowjober of your mother). At this point S. had to do him to pay…

In the adolescence we learn, if everything is all right, to admit the existence of  other valid contexts of meaning which are different from that family context that has been, up to the puberty, a kind of Unique Context to assign sense and value to the reality. The awareness of the necessity of a validation of our point of view about the reality contemporarily occurs to the discovery and the validation of other equivalent points of view and it develops through the comparison with them.

We recognize to the adolescence the necessity of a particular dimension of experience that includes the possibility to make errors and to play a game, a game more complex and complete than the one played in the previous phases of growth and which is oriented to an extraordinary inner transformation. But the support the society provides to this phase of growth can be seriously lacking and inadequate. Besides the one who has the role of educator, particularly in this phase the father figure, can assume a hostile position facing the adolescent transformation with manners it is important to understand.

In the first act of his first tragedy Shakespeare shows the clash between Titus and his son Mutius by introducing a scheme that the playwright will use again in the following tragedies, a scheme that in the present work will be denoted as asymmetrical negative duel.

The Roman general Titus, who is a veteran from a victorious military campaign, for the acquired prestige is entrusted by the Roman people to appoint the future emperor by choosing between two noble pretenders: Saturninus and Bassianus. Titus confuses the value of the two candidates and wrongly chooses Saturninus who decides, as a compensation, to make of the general’s daughter Lavinia, his regal lady. At this point the excluded Bassianus, the natural pretender to Lavinia’s hand, kidnaps the woman while Titus’s sons, surprisingly with their friend Bassianus, decide to cover its escape (Titus Andronicus, I.1.283-296):

Titus      Traitors, avaunt! Where is the Emperor’s guard

Treason, my lord! Lavinia is surprised.

Saturninus      Surprised! By whom?

Bassianus       By him that justly may

Bear his betrothed from all the world away.

Exeunt Bassianus and Marcus with Lavinia

Mutius      Brothers, help to convey her hence away,

And with my sword I’ll keep this door safe.

Exeunt Lucius, Quintus and Martius

Titus            Follow, my lord, and I’ll soon bring her back.

Mutius      My lord, you pass not here.

Titus                  What, villain boy,

Barr’st me my way in Rome?

Mutius      Help, Lucius, help!

Titus kills him […] Enter Lucius

Lucius      My lord, you are unjust, and more than so,

In wrongful quarrel you have slain your son.

Titus            Nor thou, nor he, are any sons of mine;

My sons would never so dishonour me.

Traitor, restore Lavinia to the Emperor.

Which attempt of transformation is it implied here for the young Mutius? It acts as a piece of information to understand it, as a metacommunicative message, the previous phase in which Titus, who is at the top of his social prestige after his war triumph, shows he hasn’t carried out the personal maturation which would have allowed him to recognize in autonomy what it is correct and orderly (Bassianus’s election to emperor). On protecting his friends’ escape Mutius appears on the scene of the life as a subject that starts choosing meanings and values autonomously. Mutius’s choice is specular to the one with which his father has just decided the empire destiny. For the young Mutius barring the way to his father with the sword is an important action including both an objective level (the ethical choice of field), both a symbolic level (the threat to his father), therefore a new form of game. In fact the sword has a symbolic value and by grasping it can become a provisional form provided his father admits the existence of a context of symbolic, not yet definitive, conflict. Therefore the task to give a meaning to this moment of conflict would be up to Titus: an educator accepts the duel but he uses his position of strength to lead the game. In this sense the duel is asymmetrical and so it is in a positive sense if the educator succeeds in leading this game towards a useful direction for the challenger’s transformation.

Titus’s pedagogic immaturity, in line with his confusion in the previous phase, is clear due to the choice of a negative option for this kind of asymmetrical duel. For Titus, Mutius doesn't have the right to oppose himself («What, villain boy, barr’st me my way in Rome?»), and to his son’s symbolic threat the father answers with a real homicidal intent, spending in this choice the advantage of his position of strength. Subsequently Titus will try with contempt to put a gravestone on this war of meanings, and will oppose a refusal to a dignified burial of his son since he was «basely slain in brawls» (I.1.353).

The tragic cue: «Help, Lucius, help!» is revealing in a psychological sense. Suddenly Mutius realizes that his father doesn't have any intention to play with him and that, on the contrary, he wants to kill him and not only in a symbolical way.

But let’s go back to the point in which Mutius draws his sword guarding the exit to protect his friends’ escape. This moment is important; Mutius, as son of the eminent Titus, certainly has had access to many chances of growth that we can easily imagine: martial jousts, transgressions with his friends… But that sword drawn, in that time, is the suitable form of game to carry out an autonomy in fixing meanings and values.

Actually, this point of view is lived in a hostile way by that father who hasn’t been able to carry out, successfully, a similar personal transformation. Entirely worried about his honour Titus refuses to his son the availability to that form of experience which is complete for Mutius but that it’s lived by his father as not admissible.

Different forms of game, as a drawn sword or some kind of provocation, always need a relational context in which the actors recognize each other, by living again a recognition previously had from their parents. Moreover, they need a certain degree of awareness around the temporariness of the meanings and also the sharing of a suitable context to which these last could be related.

In which way the educators and the society are responsible of the absence of suitable forms of game and of the existence of degenerate forms of game that cause suffering? 

Trying to enter with Shakespeare that complicated hell of assigning meanings which is the tragedy of Hamlet is a useful exercise to face the complex universe of the inner transformations in the adolescent age.

The structure of the essay

The first two chapters have an introductory feature and they are essentially an invitation to consider some useful elements of a perspective approach to the tragedy of Hamlet. Particularly in the second one some characters’ stories of the tragedy are introduced pointing out the concept of inner transformation.

The third chapter links the complexity of Hamlet’s task, paradigm of the complexity of the adolescent transformation, with the suffered condition of non-game: a last chance to get round the lack of suitable transitional forms.

In the fourth chapter the description of Gertrude’s inner transformation has the aim to clarify the dynamics of the tragedy, on pointing out some evolving passages that happen away from the reflectors.

The fifth and the sixth chapter introduce the scheme of the asymmetrical duel, a key passage for the constitution of a nucleus of autonomy in the teen-ager, and some cases in which the adolescent transformation, having a negative result, degenerates into the adult’s pathological games.

Finally the seventh chapter is an appendix which collects some observations on the adolescent transformation, some examples of a negative asymmetrical duel in the arts and the final considerations.

Chapter 1  The approach to the tragedy

1.1) Elsinore

The reality of Elsinore is shown, in the first act, on two parallel levels in antithesis between them. In daytime set the court is subject to the formal authority of the King; the conventional order is accepted by everybody, Hamlet included, and this notwithstanding the hasty marriage of Claudius and Gertrude, soon after the funeral of the King Hamlet, let’s understand immediately that the appearances hide something wrong.

Outside, on the walls of the castle, it is instead represented the other face of Elsinore: the hidden at night, on the hem of the abyss, dominated from the figure of dead King’s ghost. Thanks to this contrast the characters are introduced, as well as the topics of the tragedy and the characteristics of the whole court.

Both moments have, as a centre, a dramatic talk of Hamlet with the two paternal figures: the phantom of his father on the walls, the uncle-King at court.

Shakespeare seeks the symmetry with insistence. The scene at court begins with a long speech of Claudius during which the King stresses in many ways his own power, before facing his real thorn in the flank, Hamlet¹. Moreover Claudius doesn’t meet with Hamlet’s wish to continue his studies and ends his speech with an explicit request for submission from his nephew.

On the walls, on the contrary, the final talk of Hamlet with his father’s ghost follows a hierarchical order linked to another type of authority, associable instead to King Hamlet. 

The guards call Horatio, because, with his culture, he can address to the ghost. Horatio, temporary acting with authority, asks the others on the opportunity of applying to Hamlet². The Prince must win, with determination, the resistances of the subjects-friends who oppose themselves to his following the ghost. Finally the father speaks to Hamlet: he asks, in imperative way, to revenge him but, at the end of the scene, he agrees on the strategy of his son, giving him up the guide of the enterprise, and imposing to all to swear complicity.

Therefore, while the attention of everybody is for the exceptionality of the event and for the content of the revelations of the phantom, Shakespeare is worried to fix also two antithetic ways to consider the hierarchical order and the exercise of the authority. The cold and the martial harshness evoked by the scenes on the walls make the root of fidelity of the relationships among Hamlet’s friends stand out³. The formal exchanges of courtesies inside the court suggest the existence of connections based on the mutual self-interest and on the complicity in the lie. To the bad faith of Claudius, that acquits himself with refined rhetoric, the author counters the trouble of soul of Hamlet father who couldn’t ask forgiveness for his own sins.

The formal speech of Claudius at court is, since the first words, a subtle composition of falsehood, an imposition of meanings⁴ to establish an order to which all must conform. In the cold night of Elsinore, on the contrary, on the edge of a dark precipice, in a moment of chaos⁵ in which King Hamlet, returning from the world of the dead, meets his son on the walls of the castle – outside walls that can protect from external enemies but not from the truth – the Prince knows, before the sun rises, on the murder of the King.

We can think about the first act like a presentation of two types of order, of two fatherly figures, antithetical between them, anticipating so the dramatic moment in which Hamlet will show the two medallions to his mother: «… This was your husband. Looks you now what follows./ Here is your husband… Have you eyes? … What devil was’t/ that thus hath cozened you at hood-man blind?»  (III.4.65…).

Nevertheless the life of court at Elsinore can be seen as normal, founded on ordinary relationships. It is opportune to give our attention to an aspect relative to the works of the literary critics on Hamlet. 

In the evaluations that are given on the court of Elsinore two opposite positions can be distinguished: from one side we find the extremely negative judgments on the dynamics of the reality distortion that characterizes Elsinore, judgments that don't hide the gravity of the famous exclamation: «something is rotten in the state of Denmark» (I.4.90). André Green, stresses for instance the: «false language of the Court… the chaos of the people of Elsinore that compete to be the better lier»⁶. Instead others critics or don't treat the issue of the court falseness, or they marginally speak about. Besides, they find the opposition of Hamlet towards the components of the court excessive, a sign of scarce self-control. This way Harold Bloom mentions the «miasma of Elsinore’s corruption»⁷, closing however his analysis with a generalization:

«Elsinore’s disease is anywhere’s, anytime’s. Something is rotten in every state, and if your sensibility is like Hamlet’s, then finally you will not tolerate it. Hamlet’s tragedy is at last the tragedy of personality.  The charismatic is compelled to a physician’s authority despite himself; Claudius is merely an accident; Hamlet’s only persuasive enemy