Was Shakespeare A Determinist?

"Although Naturalism is a product of the nineteenth century, its spiritual father, in modern history, was Shakespeare. The premise that man does not possess volition, that his destiny is determined by an innate 'tragic flaw,' is fundamental in Shakespeare's work."

- Ayn Rand, "What is Romanticism?" in The Romantic Manifesto, pp. 115-16

At an IOS Forum held at the Princeton Club in New York City on April 11, Susan McCloskey, a scholar of the literature of the English Renaissance and Restoration eras, offered a novel interpretation of Shakespeare's most enduringly celebrated play, Hamlet.

Susan McCloskey received her Ph.D. degree in literature from Princeton University. She taught at Vassar College for 14 years, specializing in dramatic literature. During a year's leave from the College in the early 1980s, she worked as a literary advisor to the Classical Stage Company in New York City on a production of King Lear. She has published articles on Shakespeare and other dramatists of his era. She is now a consultant working with legal and business groups to improve the quality of their writing.

David Kelley, executive director of IOS, introduced the Forum with these comments:

"Ayn Rand drew a basic distinction between Naturalism and Romanticism in literature. She held that Romanticism rests on and expresses the view that man has free will and is essentially a free agent pursuing his purposes. Naturalism, on the other hand, rests on and expresses the view that man is determined in all his actions, either by social environment, or by character and psychology, or by both. As a result of that difference, she argued, Romantics tended to project ideals-larger than life characters and arresting, unusual plots-whereas Naturalists tended to be more journalistic-creating the kind of people and events that we observe around us.

"In drawing this distinction, she generalized far beyond the usual understanding of the terms as describing certain nineteenth century schools of thought. Thus she referred to Shakespeare as a forerunner of Naturalism because of the common view that his tragic characters are doomed to defeat by tragic flaws....

"Our speaker today has a somewhat different interpretation-one that makes the play, I think, vastly more interesting to those of us who share the values of Objectivism."

Excerpts from her remarks, which included many responses to issues raised by the audience, are presented below.

A Demanding Ghost
This is a magnificent play, complicated and intricate. Ever since it first appeared in 1601, readers, critics, spectators, actors, directors and producers have been puzzling about the play, trying to solve its riddles, to figure out its problems, to understand its ambiguities, and to fathom its greatness.... All I can hope to do this afternoon is to trace a single thread through the play's intricate weave, a thread that will carry us from beginning to end without breaking....

I do not think that Hamlet's problem was indecisiveness or procrastination, that he was a delicate prince who could not stand the sight of blood, or that he is Shakespeare's illustration of the problem of thinking too much. The play is certainly more interesting, and the protagonist more heroic, than such traditional readings would lead us to suspect....

In Act I Scene V, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to him in the middle of the night, on a remote battlement at the castle of Elsinore, and charges Hamlet to revenge his "foul and most unnatural murder" by killing Claudius. But there is an important qualifier attached to this charge: "But howsomever thou pursues this act,/Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught." It's important to be clear about what this ghost is asking. He wants Hamlet to kill a man, who happens also to be a head of state and his uncle. Hamlet is to plan and carry out this execution without tainting his mind, without corrupting himself. And he is to do nothing-nor even think of doing anything-against his mother, whom he sees daily, who betrayed his beloved father, and who he now has reason to think may have been complicit in his father's death.

Truth in A World of Seeming
We cannot understand what prevents Hamlet from doing until the last act what he vowed to do in the first if we refer to his character alone. We need to take into account the world this play represents and the circumstances in which Hamlet is required to act. Through the characters' comments and especially through the play's action, we know a good deal about Denmark.

For instance, one of the favored pastimes in Elsinore appears to be spying. The very number of characters who engage in this activity, and the frequency with which they do so, tell us something important about Elsinore. Its inhabitants assume that others are always on guard, that their social demeanor masks rather than reveals their true selves. And they have warrant for thinking so. The distance between being and seeming, between what is and what appears to be, is wide indeed in Elsinore.

At the end of Act II, Shakespeare underscores this division between what is and what appears to be by announcing the arrival in Elsinore of a troupe of actors, people who put on shows, who make their livings by pretending to be what they are not. Like the professional actors, several characters in this play put on shows. Ambiguity of the kind that is part and parcel of the actor's trade is everywhere in Hamlet.... For instance, the player's speech about Pyrrhus and the play-within-the-play are at once a disguised reenactment of Claudius' murder of Old Hamlet, and the prediction of Hamlet's murder of Claudius.

If ever there were a play's world that made it difficult for its inhabitants to separate truth from falsehood, appearance from reality, fact from fantasy, it's this one, and Shakespeare constructs it with consummate care. Its inhabitants bristle with questions that resist unequivocal answers....Unable to determine what is true by questioning, they resort to spying and playacting and putting on shows in the hope of discovering what's really the case. "Something is rotten in the State of Denmark." And this is the context in which Hamlet is asked to carry out his extremely difficult task....

"Taint Not Thy Mind"
At the center of this world, Shakespeare places a particular young man. In all Shakespeare's tragedies, the nature of the protagonist's chosen roles bears directly on the tragic action. It matters that Hamlet is a student, an intellectual by training and temperament, the kind of young man who jots down his thoughts in a notebook, who is often seen with book in hand....

Why place an intellectual in the world we've just described? What difference does it make that Hamlet is a student in this particular place...?

Hamlet's status as an intellectual transforms what might have been a typical Elizabethan revenge play into something richer. Revenge plays were wildly popular on the Renaissance stage-as popular in the 1600's as the films of Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood are today. Revenge tragedies usually featured a heinous crime, perpetrated by a villain beyond the law's knowledge or reach, and a hero determined to let justice do what the law could not. The hero's efforts to exact his revenge usually succeed, but at a high price: the revenger usually becomes morally indistinguishable from his prey, and always loses his life. Hamlet certainly participates in this genre, but with a difference....

An Epistemological Thriller
Hamlet's intelligence and self-awareness transform what might have been a typical revenge play into an epistemological thriller.

Dedicated as a scholar to the pursuit of the truth, Hamlet finds himself in a world where everyone seems bent on making lies the common currency. Against these odds, he has to figure out what he knows, and how he knows it. Is a ghost's word alone sufficient warrant to take a man's life? If not, can its claims about Claudius be corroborated? What can count as proof of an unwitnessed crime? Can such proof be obtained?

Hamlet has more than a casual interest in the truth. He wants to be absolutely sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Claudius is guilty of killing Old Hamlet. That moral questions deeply engage Hamlet is apparent to us every time he is on stage alone speaking in soliloquy. He soliloquizes more than any other character in Shakespeare's entire body of work, and about all kinds of moral questions: his mother's remarriage, the appeal and terror of suicide, the bearing of passion on action. Shakespeare is at pains to make Hamlet's moral preoccupation clear to us from the outset. Hamlet cares about the integrity and righteousness of his action - a care the ghost recollects when he says to Hamlet, "Taint not thy mind."

Few taints are more permanent than the murder of an innocent man....If Claudius is guilty, Hamlet wants to carry out his revenge properly. He has no wish to turn himself into Claudius' replica: the cold-blooded slaughterer of a blood relation, the sort of man who sneaks up on a sleeping man in a garden and pours poison in his ear.

Hamlet wants Claudius' murder to be an execution-the warranted dispatching of a proven felon....He cannot achieve this goal without proof, he needs sturdier proof than a ghost on the battlements can provide and proof in Elsinore is hard to come by.

A Renaissance Prince
Hamlet thinks, after the play-within-the-play, that he has corroborating evidence of Claudius' guilt, but he has purchased this evidence at an extravagant price. He knows that Claudius killed his father, but now Claudius knows that Hamlet knows, and knows as well that Hamlet plans to kill him. At precisely this point of hard-won clarity for protagonist and antagonist alike, the confused, baffling, difficult circumstances in Elsinore take a dramatic turn for the worse....

In Act V, Shakespeare reintroduces Hamlet to an Elsinore worse than the one he left. Laertes, relying exclusively on Claudius' testimony, has become Hamlet's sworn enemy, and is determined to take his life. In these highly charged circumstances, we witness Hamlet's attempt to make sense of his experience. The drama in the early part of Act V lies not in action, but in Hamlet's mind.

In the course of the final act, Hamlet tries on various philosophical positions, which are immediately weighed by experience and found wanting...

Throughout, however, whether he is toying with nihilism or fatalism-he continues to speak of himself as a free agent, able to plan and carry out his intentions even as the net of circumstances tightens around him....

Having spent much of the play in an increasingly feverish search for certain knowledge-of the ghost's veracity, Claudius' guilt, Gertrude's complicity in her husband's death, Ophelia's feelings, his own self-he is now willing to accept uncertainty as part of what it means to live in this world.

Life holds few certainties beyond the fact that it will end, that death will claim us, one and all. Death is no longer for Hamlet an occasion for cynicism, as it was in the graveyard. Instead, he recognizes that one of our human tasks is to choose how to live a life that is inescapably finite and, in the larger scheme of things, brief. As Hamlet says, "a man's life's no more than to say 'one.'''

We understand Hamlet's choice about his life as we watch him living it out in Act V Scene II. Even as Claudius and Laertes set in motion their plot to end his life, Hamlet spends his time munificently: conversing expansively with Horatio, having some fun at Osric's expense, agreeing to join Laertes in what he thinks is a mere pastime, a sporting contest. Shakespeare lets us glimpse Hamlet at the end of the play as Ophelia tells us he was before the play began: "The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,/ The expectancy and rose of the fair state,/The glass of fashion and the mould of form,/The observed of all observers...." Moments before Claudius and Laertes spring their trap, Hamlet seems, for the first time in the play, to be relishing his life, to be holding it as precious.

The Time To Act
Hamlet's acceptance of life's uncertainty and unpredictability comes not a moment too soon. In the final moments of the play, several unpredictable things happen in rapid-fire sequence.... Hamlet becomes, in the last 50 lines of his part, a juggernaut of action. He assumes the authority of the crown and executes Claudius. He forgives Laertes [for dealing him a fatal blow in the duel]. With his last bit of strength, as the poison [from the sword tip] is coursing through his system, he prevents Horatio's suicide. And he secures the Danish throne for young Fortinbras's succession. He acts without hesitation as soon as he has what he's been looking for since Act I Scene V-incontestable evidence of Claudius' villainy, in the form of Gertrude's corpse and Laertes's dying testimony; and public justification of his own retributive action.

Had he acted earlier, without that clarity, without public evidence of Claudius's crimes, he would have become another Claudius. No one would wish "flights of angels" to sing him to his rest, no successor to his throne would judge him "most royal," and Horatio would not agree to live and report Hamlet's cause aright. And we would greet his death without a trace of sorrow or the sense that his death diminishes not only his world, but our own....

Character and Volition
Over the roughly two decades of Shakespeare's career, he wrote at least 37 plays. The evidence of these, all of them taken together, indicates a strong temperamental preference for the sunny side of the street. His comedies feature young men and women overcoming obstacles to their union. His histories, while showing the huge price of civil war and usurpation, offer a pageant of heroes, the most splendid of whom is Henry the Fifth. And the late romances all enact a pattern in which the potential for tragedy is averted through the human capacity to endure, to love, and to forgive....

The notion of a "tragic flaw" is simply irrelevant to Shakespearean drama, including his great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Lear and Macbeth. The tragic action arises not simply because a character has a frailty, but because a character finds himself in precisely the set of circumstances for which his qualities-including his virtues-are ill suited. Test this hypothesis by moving protagonists from one play to another. For instance, had the ghost in Act I of Hamlet appeared to Macbeth instead of to Hamlet, Claudius would have been dead before morning.

As I hope my remarks on Hamlet make clear, I see no evidence there of determinism. Nor is there such evidence in the other plays, with the notable and revealing exception of Romeo and Juliet-an early, successful, but never-repeated experiment. That play's determinism has everything to do with the youthfulness of its protagonists. Because Romeo and Juliet are children, they do not control their own destinies and their efforts to seize that control ultimately doom them. The same cannot be said of Shakespeare's mature protagonists.

Evidence of determinism is hard to come by in Shakespeare's plays because Shakespeare the dramatist believed in free will.... His plays represent human characters in the essentially dramatic act of making significant choices. This is what is revolutionary about the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. They rejected the medieval tragic tradition, for which Fortune's Wheel is an appropriate emblem, and offered in its place a drama of men and women defining their own purposes, and pursuing them with varying degrees of intelligence, vigor, ruthlessness, nobility, success, and failure. The choices they make, just like the choices you and I make, shape their lives, opening up some possibilities and foreclosing others....Even after Hamlet commits himself to carry out the ghost's bidding, he chooses the terms under which he is willing to act.

A complete version of this talk is available as a The Objectivism Store Audio Tape