Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet's Alienation

To be or not to be? Isolation and reaching for revenge

Ophelia, by John William Waterhouse. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

But orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

—Player King, Act 3, Scene 2.

Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most studied play, owing to its layered themes and rich rhetorical devices. It is a literary work drawn on by John Milton for Paradise Lost, it helped Sigmund Freud to develop his theory of Oedipus complex and inspired and two compositions from Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Karl Marx’s deep appreciation of Shakespeare is well known, and Hamlet is a work that he directly references in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.¹

The Play’s the Thing

Hamlet almost exclusively takes place at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, which is a real place and one of the Renaissance era’s most prominent. Shakespeare was a product of the Renaissance era, and this setting is crucial to contextualizing many of Shakespeare’s plays because it sits on the demarcation line between the Middle Ages and modernity, between superstition and reason, between feudalism and liberalism, between religion and science, between the aristocracy and commerce. The tensions of this era are very important to understanding Hamlet’s inner conflict, just as it is important to understanding the romance between Romeo and Juliet or the racial attitudes embedded in Othello.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. this connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would hold men together on its own.²

In most of Renaissance Europe, the aristocracy maintained a monopoly on political power, derived from ownership over lands worked by a large peasantry. The rise of an urban merchant class figures heavily in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but in Hamlet we are concerned only with the palace intrigue at the top of the Danish royal hierarchy. There is a multiplicity of love triangles, petty schemes from palace courtiers, eavesdroppers and personal grievances that must constitute a privileged drama in comparison to the hardship of life for many of the era. In the grand movement of history, palace intrigue is little more than the “political nonsense” that Marx identified.

The Apparition Comes

At the outset, the story establishes that Prince Hamlet’s father has died and his Queen mother had hastily remarried with his uncle Claudius who then consolidated the Danish nobility behind his rule. This turn of events has Hamlet already deeply unsettled and melancholy, exacerbated by a visit from his father’s ghost who wanders the Earth while in spiritual Purgatory. The ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was victim of a “murder most foul, strange and unnatural” by the poison of his brother Claudius.³

Apparitions, witches, potions and magic were accepted forces of nature in Shakespeare’s time and come regularly into his plays as plot devices guiding a character’s arc. Whereas today uncertainty over someone’s cause of death could be resolved by a medical autopsy or forensic crime scene investigation, Hamlet could only shelter under his suspicions until he was contacted from beyond the grave.

But the ghost’s revelation confronts Hamlet with demands on his position. In the aristocratic world of hereditary privilege—so far from modern law and commerce—kinship largely determined one’s station in life. Notions attached to honour and nobility depended heavily on defence of kin, and there was no legal authority that Hamlet could appeal to; indeed, his corrupted family was the legal authority.

Hamlet understands what is expected from the son of a slain father but revenge is complicated by the aristocratic hierarchy of which he is merely a component part. With a murdered father, a mother joined in marriage with the killer and childhood friends in the service of his usurping uncle, Hamlet finds himself completely alienated from the social relations that grant him his identity as a prince.

The ensuing conflict of the play is an internal struggle to overcome this experienced alienation, immortalized by Hamlet’s famous speech:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

This speech could be rephrased “to live or not to live?” If Hamlet chooses to live as his father’s son by seeking revenge against King Claudius he will certainly perish in the process. On the other hand, he cannot bear an existence as an obedient prince under these circumstances. To live his proper life is a death sentence but to avoid death he must surrender life.

The Readiness is All

There is a duality that opens up here between Hamlet’s blood instincts and his social status as a prince. Marx described alienation as characteristic to humanity’s estrangement from productive activity and the reduction of social relations to class standing, when “man feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than an animal.”⁴

As he is estranged from his family and friends by the revelation of his uncle’s homicide and arrogation of the throne, Hamlet ponders his alienated state: “What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”

It is Ophelia that bears the brunt of Hamlet’s dislocation, his rage against the animalistic propensity toward violence and sex. While they had been engaged in a genuine courtship prior to the events of the play, she becomes “the focus of his disgust with the whole sexual process.”⁵

Seeing the characteristics of his being stripped of all virtue, Hamlet dismisses any love he once had for Ophelia as brutish lust and he condemns her to a lifetime of abstinence: “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell.”

For Marx, alienation will ultimately be resolved when we take conscious control of our circumstances, when we reconcile our productive activity with both our individual selves and species-being. Hamlet’s internal conflict is resolved when he encounters the army of the crown prince of Norway, Fortinbras, on the march through Danish territory. Hamlet’s father had killed Fortinbras’ father in a duel decades earlier and the Norwegian prince had finally arrived to seek his just revenge.

Hamlet then grasps the unity of opposing forces; to be an obedient prince is the same as to be his father’s son; to be in love is to be lustful; to live is the same as to die; to be is not to be.⁶ Before throwing himself, his mother and his uncle to their doom, he says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Let be.”

1. For more on Marx’s personal interest in Shakespeare, see Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961).

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Martino Publishing, 2011): 18-19.

3. The “most foul” and “unnatural” aspects of the murder lie in it being committed by Claudius against his own flesh and blood.

4. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 91.

5. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare, 1982): 151.

6. This is an observation somewhat ahead of the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat.