Hamlet is a fantastic text to teach because, like a faceted crystal, it shows me something new every time I approach it and I never end up teaching it the same way twice. On my most recent reading/teaching of the play, I found myself focusing on the way that Hamlet subverts the revenge narrative that it seems to purport. So perhaps it makes sense that the play would be forefront on my mind this morning after the assassination attempt on former President Trump and my subsequent scrolling through some of my social medias.
When I’ve taught British Literature, I’ve always spent the majority of the first semester focusing on two key texts in the British canon: Beowulf and Hamlet. Beowulf provides some very interesting context to Hamlet, especially in the arena of revenge. Revenge was a big deal to the ancient Anglo-Saxons, an honorable duty, and Beowulf is full of it: in revenge for the Danes murdered by Grendel, Beowulf murders Grendel, whose mother then seeks Beowulf out for revenge. The cycle of vengeance is clear.
Hamlet steps into this cycle in a fascinating way. For the first time, we have a protagonist questioning the morality of revenge. When he finally decides to go through with it, he accidentally kills the wrong person, Polonius, resulting not only in Polonius’s death but the later suicide of Polonius’s daughter. Which of course means that Polonius’ son has to exact revenge: an attempt that literally ends with the deaths of most of the major characters in the play. The tragic waste is clear.
One of the major messages of Hamlet is that the revenge cycle is futile and flawed. It only results in death, for the innocent and the guilty, alike.
As we take this message into the present, it becomes a warning. Look what can happen if we are too cavalier about our “honorable duty.” Look what can happen when we pursue violence as an answer to our problems. Look at the waste that ensues when we choose to support the revenge cycle instead of to stop it in its tracks the way that Jesus commands: the same Jesus that prayed on the cross for the forgiveness of those who put Him there.
I worry that, in general, we in the US are so sheltered as to the effects of violence and war that we are too happy to march right into it. Hamlet shows us the futility of revenge. Jesus commands us to avoid it. And yet, the inflammatory rhetoric that I’m hearing seems to be pointing us straight back to what we should be running from. Because when violence runs supreme, it is not just the guilty who pay, not just the innocents who suffer, but it is we, the enactors of violence, who pay the ultimate price. As Peeta Mellark in The Hunger Games reminds us, “It costs everything you are.”