Thesis: Rabkin's general thesis is that Shakespeare (and every other great writer) "changes our way of seeing by doing through art what can really be done no other way: fusing as complementary to one another and simultaneously valid total responses to life that would seem to be contradictory" (16). Regarding Hamlet, Rabkin focuses on the Ghost and the ideal of reasonableness. About the Ghost, Rabkin comments, "Though we learn quickly that it is justice he demands, we never fully shake the very different sense of him we acquire in the first scene: a harbinger of evil to come . . ." (3). Concerning the ideal of reason, Rabkin says that while Hamlet rightly admires Horatio's reasonableness, Hamlet can fulfill his destiny only by "the surrender to impluse": This is to say that the play presents an ideal, that of reason, in such a way that we must recognize its absolute claim on our moral allegiance, and then entirely subverts that ideal by demonstrating that its polar opposite is the only possible basis for the action its protagonist is morally committed to perform. From the point of view of reason seen in ideal terms, the passion to which Hamlet succumbs is only another variety of the bestial willfulness, the mindless impulsiveness, which we have loathed in Claudius and regretted in Gertrude and Laertes. From the point of view of passion as the plot forces us, with Hamlet, to see it, reason leads either to hypocrisy or to a futile kind of civilized virtue out of touch with existential reality and with the depths of feeling which -- as much as his intellectuality -- make Hamlet so much more engaging than anyone else in the play. (6)Evaluation: Rabkin writes so well that it's easy to forget that you just have to take his word for a lot of what he says. For instance, Rabkin never specifies just what it is that Claudius does out of "mindless impulsiveness," or in what way Hamlet's killing of Claudius is an example of "mindless impulsiveness." Bottom Line: Cloudy. |