On a certain level, Hamlet deals with Hamlet’s unearthing of

Claudius’ crime against the former King, committed before the curtain opens
but not fully revealed until the final scene. Yet it is just as much about
Shakespeare illustrating Hamlet’s own problems, his, as it were, crime
against himself, which mirrored a problem that permeated the Renaissance.
That problem is the

And in his seventh and final soliloquy,

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event— (4.4.36)

He’s so alienated from his body that he cannot kill the King

The turning point, fittingly, is “To be, or not to be.”

This paper deals with Hamlet’s two transformations

as it is about Shakespeare illustrating Hamlet’s crime against himself.

Here and there, in Hamlet’s musings, the reader catches a glimpse of

some philosopher or another’s ideas. For instance: first soliloquy, line one,
“Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt” (1.2.129), rings of this
agonized aversion to the physical, and a cold, impossible hope to melt,
leaving behind only the soul and the mind. And oh! there’s Descartes, “a
substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and
which... has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing.” Or
take Hamlet, in the moment when Horatio is begging him not to follow the
Ghost, scoffing, “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee,/And as for my soul, what
can it do to that,/Being a thing immortal as itself?” (1.4.65–67). The mortal,
gravitational life at odds with (and crucially, disparaged in favor of) the
eternal, heavenly soul—it recalls, specifically, St. Paul (was he a
philosopher?), “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life
everlasting” (Galatians 6:8), and perhaps more generally the New Testament
emphasis on the individual seeking salvation. Hamlet, in these moments,
serves as a sort of proxy character for Descartes and St. Paul, in order to give
other characters (themselves serving, as it were, as proxy for Shakespeare)
the capability to criticize the presented philosophies.

And what is their—and Shakespeare’s—verdict?

Plato’s Phaedo — the soul “both preexists and survives the body”
Descartes’s Discourse on the Method — “I think, therefore I am”
Act I, sc. 4, 65–67 — “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee,/And as for my soul, what
can it do to that,/Being a thing immortal as itself?”

Descartes’s Discourse on the Method — “a substance whose whole essence or

nature consists only in thinking, and which... has need of no place, nor is
dependent on any material thing”

KJV, Galatians 5:16–26 — “the Spirit… love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control… the flesh… sexual
immorality, impurity and debauchery... selfish ambition... drunkenness, orgies, and
the like”
KJV, Galatians 6:8 — “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting”

Coleridge — “It is the nature of thought to be indefinite… the sense of sublimity

arises…” “His soliloquy—O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, &c.—springs
from that craving after the indefinite—for that which is not—which most easily
besets men of genius…”

D.H. Lawrence, “The Theater” — “There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or
self-dislike, through much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later
Shakespeare. In Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flash and a consfious
revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet frenzied, for he
will never admit that it is his own flesh… Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the
uncleanest. But he accused only the others… The whole drama is the tragedy of the
convulsed reaction of the min dfrom the flesh, of the spirit from the self, the
reaction from the great aristocratic to the great democratic principle.”

Act 4, sc. 2

Rosencrantz - “What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?”
Hamlet - “Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin.”

Hamlet - “My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one
flesh, and so, my mother.—Come, for England!” (still not accepted own flesh?)

Act 4, sc. 4

Hamlet - “What is a man

If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.”

Hamlet - “Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake.” (the stupid prince blindly leading the army to death
brings Hamlet back to earth)

Act 4, sc. 5

Claudius - “Divided from herself and her fair judgment,

Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts.” (same theme as Hamlet
soliloquy in Act 4, sc. 4 - importance of thought - Shakespeare’s view?)

Laertes - “This nothing’s more than matter.” (see Polonius a fishmonger, earlier
on, same idea)