Hamlet: A Freudian Theoretical Analysis

After arguments like Goethe’s and Snider’s were published came a wave in the early 1900s where psychological theories began to take firm root and have scientific backing behind their former assumptions. After publications of psychoanalysis were released, literary critics began to apply psychoanalysis to almost everything they could find, and what better a muse than Hamlet, which, as shown above, had already been widely debated on Hamlet’s psyche alone? An earlier one of these authors, Samuel Tannenbaum, wrote a 1917 article in which he applies Freudian theory to Hamlet’s sense of consciousness. He states that Hamlet has made a conscious decision to not kill his uncle; his moral human state could not bring him to be so villainous (Tannenbaum

This is partially due to the fact that as time went on, psychological theory became more and more developed. Robert Palfrey Utter attempts to defend Hamlet by looking at how Shakespeare rebelled against Elizabethan ethical norms, 30 years after T.S. Eliot supported a historical approach in 1920. He takes a risk as a critic by calling Hamlet a “hero” despite the commonly agreed upon statement that he is not. Utter connects history and morality by saying that Hamlet did not kill Claudius in an attempt to bring into light a new sense of morality which did not exist in the 1600s (Utter 138). He claims that, although Shakespeare could not go very public with his opinion during the heat of Elizabethan change due to his will to keep his reputation as an esteemed playwright, Shakespeare detested the medieval concept of dueling being synonymous with revenge, and anger always having to end in action (Utter 139). Utter completely annihilates the arguments of some earlier critics by basically asking “Yes, Hamlet did not act, but so what?” He argues that there does not have to be an end-all be-all in order for vengeance to be satisfied, although Elizabethan times suggested otherwise. Like Feibleman, he studies the perplexity of Shakespeare’s unknown philosophy and how it intertwines with many of Shakespeare’s other works, but that Hamlet delves into revenge the most deeply because the character of Hamlet sees revenge as more than revenge, that the theory of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” is outdated, even for Elizabethan times, and that morality is slowly being destroyed with every extravagant and unnecessary duel (Utter