Thesis: Eliot's famous opinion that Hamlet "is most certainly an artistic failure" (98) is based on the assertion that the "the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother" (99). Eliot believes that Hamlet makes so much fuss about his mother that he's not believable. This is the way Eliot puts it: 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. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. (100-101)Evaluation: Because Eliot takes such a high-and-mighty tone it's hard to disagree with him and even harder to take him seriously. He disdains to quote or comment on even one of Hamlet's speechs which is "in excess of the facts as they appear"; nor does he mention what degree of emotion would be appropriate as a reaction to the spectacle of one's beloved mother committing adultery and incest. And it doesn't seem to occur to him that he has poisoned the well by reducing all of Hamlet to "the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother." Bottom Line: Most certainly a critical failure. |