Evolving Hamlet :

Abstract

When Harold Bloom produced his hyperbolic tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he did the bard a great disservice. Dramatization would have been a more accurate word choice than Invention and would have offered less of a distraction from Shakespeare's actual achievements. Hamlet remains Exhibit A in making the case that Shakespeare attempted to put more humanity on stage than those who had come before him. The title character is hardly a fully realized human, which may be a dramatic impossibility, but he does, at least, represent an element of humanity and, as such, can be examined in terms of forces that act on humans. One of these predominant forces is evolution. Matt Ridley argues in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, “A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff's bombast, Iago's cunning, Leontes's jealousy, Rosalind's strength, and Malvolio's embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature we know today” (11). If audiences could not see elements of humanity in plays like Hamlet, they would be less likely to derive as much emotional, intellectual, and perhaps even aesthetic pleasure as they have for so long—this work and these characters cannot be reduced to merely cultural signifiers. The humanity expressed in Hamlet displays varied characteristics of the human and, therefore, human evolution. But first, to set the stage.Since the one-two punch of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1983) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1989), New Historicism and cultural materialism have dominated Shakespeare studies and interpretations. This dominance entails the study of culture; the employment of identity politics; and the historical contextualizing of texts, authors, and audiences. Indeed, even a cursory glance at quite recent editions of Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Studies offers current articles: “Questions of Identity in Renaissance Drama” and “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital,” respectively. Johnathan Bate's Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (2009), one of a handful of current biographies, places Shakespeare in his cultural context in hopes of gaining insight into his life. On the other hand, Shakespeareans enthralled with French theory propose the most frequently used critical alternatives, Sausserian and deconstructive explications. Volumes such as Lacanian Interpretations of Shakespeare (Brooks and Sharon-Zisser, 2010) abound and articles using these theoretical stances are published regularly.Hamlet itself has been read and explicated through these critical lenses. David Bevington's most recent book, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011), advertises its argument that the play can be seen as “a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.” Margreta De Grazia's seminal “Hamlet” Without Hamlet (2007) decenters “Hamlet” the character and focuses on historicism. Danish politics, possession of land, and a sense of historical epoch and empire inform De Grazia's book. While books about Shakespeare's play proliferate, the slate of recent journal criticism specifically about Hamlet seems scant in comparison. Articles concentrate on what seems like Hamlet esoterica, such as “The History of Air: Hamlet and the Trouble with Instruments.”Regardless, historical and cultural critiques have afforded scholarship great insights into Shakespeare and Hamlet. Yet the focus on cultural meanings has been to the detriment of the human, the biological, in the text. Small wonder evolution would not be considered, as without the biological it is a moot point. Multitudinous reasons exist for this neglect, from the old phantoms of “essentialism” and “reductionism” to the irrational fear that literature will become the handmaiden of science. Cultural critics worry they will be supplanted by what they often consider the antithesis of their work.To address the last first, reading Hamlet with an eye toward evolutionary forces is not a competing or alternative methodology. This theoretical approach, like the cultural critiques that came before it, just reveals another layer of meaning in the play. The slow breaking down of the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture into the biocultural causes “essentialism” to look a bit weathered, and, as Joseph Carroll has pointed out, all acts of criticism are reductive (Reading Human Nature 29). In his work Consilience, E. O. Wilson allays the fear of discipline subjugation by arguing that science explains feeling but art transmits it, each having a vital and different role in sharing culture.Literary Darwinism is different from current theoretical approaches in that it is more inclusive. Instead of dividing us by our respective cultures, it brings us together under the aegis of our humanity. Biocultural readings of literature allow critics to experience Shakespeare's texts in a different light, looking for the human and the evolutionary forces that act upon it, and literary critics are beginning to take notice and think about their work in these terms. Perhaps no one has led this charge harder than its founder, Joseph Carroll. His essential Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004) and his more recent Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (2011) have done much to propagate this school of thought. The important The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Sloan Wilson and Gottschall, 2005) was followed by Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall, 2010). The latter volume demonstrates just what literary Darwinism can reveal about varied works of arts. Brian Boyd's insightful On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009) has paved the way for further inquiry.Shakespeare studies have just begun to explore the implications of this theoretical perspective, from Marcus Nordlund's tour de force Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution (2007) to Philip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking (2009). Joseph Carroll's recent article “Intentional Meaning in Hamlet: An Evolutionary Perspective” (2011) uses said perspective to discuss Hamlet's personality, depression, and the psychosymbolic significance of mothers. Thinking of the biological in relation to Shakespeare has also led to other considerations, such as cognition, Arthur F. Kinney's Shakespeare and Cognition (2006) being a prime example of this kind of scholarship. There is still much work to be done in this fertile field, and no play lends itself more readily to literary Darwinism than Shakespeare's Hamlet.Natural selection's most profound impact on human evolution is large, costly brains that can be both adaptive and maladaptive, depending on environmental circumstances. Clearly the former outweighs the latter or natural selection would have not acted on these organs in the manner it has, but there are both costs and benefits, and Shakespeare dramatizes these all-too-human attributes. One important benefit is the human mind. Steven Pinker differentiates between “brain” and “mind” in How the Mind Works when he asserts, “The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people” (21). How fascinating that this “foraging” mind is on display in Hamlet. After all, what is the play but constant repetitions of characters computing means of outmaneuvering each other? Hamlet's brain is the evolved, computational machine that allows him to “put an antic disposition on” to deal with his newfound foe Claudius and his father's revenge (1.5.189),1 or when he outmaneuvers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempt to carry out Claudius's plan by telling Gertrude, “But I will delve one yard below their mines / and blow them at the moon. O, 'tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet” (3.4.209–11). Claudius, Polonius, and Laertes all endeavor to outmaneuver Hamlet, and the prince tries to do the opposite, while Gertrude, Horatio, and Ophelia offer varied attempts to compute their most successful positions between these two poles. An adapted mind enables these characters to make these moves and function within their environments—some more successfully than others.There is, however, a cost, a maladaptive component. Joseph Carroll notes in Literary Darwinism, “The brain produces a new adaptive problem—it causes confusion and uncertainty. The human brain allows for unparalleled flexibility of response to environmental conditions, but to achieve this flexibility it must cut human cognition loose from any rigidly programmed set of instinctual behaviors. In a dangerous and challenging world that demands decisive action oriented to adaptively functional goals, confusion and uncertainty are potentially fatal disabilities” (XXI). Hamlet's inability to act on his revenge has been much written about in scholarship concerning the play, but the fact that we may be seeing the adaptive problem of a human brain dramatized for the stage has not been considered. When Hamlet first learns of Claudius's treachery from the ghost of his father, his immediate response is “O, my prophetic soul! Mine Uncle!” (1.5.46). Hamlet knew the truth from the opening, but his big brain enabled him to disregard his instinct to preserve himself by ignoring his guilty uncle. Hamlet's reticence helps define him as a character, and he will continue to overlook his instincts throughout the play by overthinking, such as when he catches a guilty Claudius praying, postevidence of his crimes, but stays his hand with “That would be scanned” (3.4.78). Instead, he chooses to make his entire life a drama, feigning madness while offering long, philosophical speeches to an audience of one, himself.This tendency for the dramatic points to the adaptive side of these large human brains. They have enabled humans to produce art, a cross-cultural phenomenon that must serve some evolutionary function to be such a consistently selected behavior. Ellen Dissanayake considers the ramifications of this ability in Homo Aestheticus when she points out, “We have evolved in a world and are designed to live in that world, although our also evolved but overdeveloped ability to ‘leave’ that world and construct whole realms of abstract thought or fanciful imaginative alternatives permits us to disguise or forget our ultimate dependence on that inescapable base reality” (149). Shakespeare and we, his audience, use the fictive world of drama to escape the base reality of our own lives. Hamlet himself illustrates this propensity when he moves quickly from his interrogation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to exhorting the players, “We'll have a speech straight: come, give us a taste of your quality: come, a passionate speech” (2.2.379–80). At the same time art generally, and drama more specifically, can serve an even more practical purpose. As David Sloan Wilson asserts in The Literary Animal, “Stories serve the function of transmitting and coordinating local appropriate behavioral norms and thus, are directly beneficial to the individuals (and groups) that participate in them” (qtd. in Nettle 62).This paradox of absence and presence permeates Hamlet and aids audiences in understanding its relationship with drama. The title character uses this art form to escape his world; at the same time he employs drama to understand how to live in his world—how to are the nature of both and The paradox in our world and with it both through drama. Hamlet this when he has the the The Murder of as this art form enables him to know how to act in this The relationship between art, the and the human in Hamlet is even more perhaps even must be and Shakespeare's has a from to the Danish a of at the of the play. 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of norms through the is not just the out of but also the of through the display of its While the is to Claudius's the is to such as the relationship between father, and to set a for in the of this was not to be in the dangerous world of offers an evolutionary not to Hamlet and his explains the impact of this when he in The of two of in the same came into the one being a of and who to the other of to and each this would without a and the While and are not of successful still of for Claudius could be read as much as a for a of his and by it as being the as it can be read as actual toward a act as a to Hamlet, but his so to that of the as and Shakespeare reveals with the which one will their The Evolutionary and the of and the alternative to one from our evolutionary history and from our the of and through and force would as of and would be to and and are at in Claudius's Perhaps both Hamlet and Claudius do not this as Hamlet for his father's and Claudius with and are with a of and just 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