Why did Hamlet delay?

I finally accomplished my goal of reading Hamlet today. Special thanks to my lit ‘S’ course, my interest in the tragedy was aroused when I read more about the play in a commentary. Hamlet, according to one teacher of mine, is the only tragic hero in Shakespeare who is not stupid. Othello’s demise was due to his: (choose here) jealousy, inflexibility, dullness of mind etc., King Lear’s was due to his… well, to me, his dumbness and choleric haste in despatching Cordelia away, Macbeth’s, his ambition and his guilt (his dumbness lay in his execution of the murder, and his treacherous dealing of murdering all who ‘disturbed his sleep’), but Hamlet?

Reading A.C. Bradley on Hamlet, Coleridge and Schlegel labelled Hamlet as ‘The Tragedy of Reflection’. The central question about Hamlet, of course, is undoubtedly the question, ‘Why did Hamlet delay?” A deeply loyal and affectionate son to his murdered father, the Danish King, Hamlet was shown by the ghost of his father that his Uncle had murdered him, usurped the throne and married incestuously his wife the Queen. Hamlet is also instructed to avenge his father’s death. But he didn’t avenge him immediately, and the play goes on with Hamlet’s… indecision.

So why did he delay? Hamlet, as those who’ve read the book shall know, is no coward, nor a bookish scholar without guts. There was a view going about that he was the sort of person who, having spent 20 years at the University, was ‘thought-sick’ (Schlegel) , ‘loses himself in labyrinths of thought’ (Schlegel) , someone whom one would find ‘an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it’ (Coleridge). ‘The native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’.
Other quotes included the speculation that ‘During the reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood stil a haunter o the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a resolution or executed a deed’ (Shakespeare, his Mind and Art, 4th ed., pp 132, 133).

Or is it? Bradley raises a few doubts in response:
1. No one at court has classified him as a thinker in this manner.
2. Hamlet’s philosophy does not come across as the scholastic type, but more of the meditatively derived sort.
3. Famous philosophers and intellectuals have not been known to be extremely indecisive in this regard, thus the idea that the habit of a meditative and reflective life produces irresolution is but a myth.

Another typical view held was that ‘what Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge… it was public justice’, so he delayed in finding the right time to kill the usurper justifiably before the Danish public. But this is countered by the fact that Hamlet has never voiced out any external difficulties in his way, always assumes that he can obey the Ghost (’sith I have cause and will and strength and means / To do’t – Act IV, iv. 45), is so welcomed by the public that if Laertes can easily raise the people against the King, what more Hamlet? and the very fact that ‘Hamlet did not plan the play-scene in the hope that the King would betray his guilt to the court’, but rather because he wanted it as evidence for himself that the King was guilty, seems more than sufficient to rest this claim.

Another view was that Hamlet was restrained by ‘conscience or a moral scruple’, but Bradley argues that Hamlet at all times seems to believe that he must unquestioningly avenge his father. There is no trace of it being the other way. In his soliloquies where he blames himself bitterly for his neglect he does not cite moral scruples as a reason for delaying.
A subtler take on this same bend was that Hamlet felt consciously that he ought to avenge his father, but un-beknownst to his good self he felt ‘moral repulsion’ to the deed. But Bradley raises opposition:
1. If so, why did he not reveal this meaning until the last Act, in his speech to Horatio?
2. Looking to the part where Hamlet spares the King whilst he is praying: his reason being, he did not want to send the usurper to Heaven by killing him at this devout hour. If that was his unconscious thought, it certainly does not match up to a moral scruple by any standards.

Bradley’s answer to the question of All Time is: Hamlet’s indecision was caused by Melancholy. He was immediately spurred to this by the natural aversion a righteous soul like his was to the perversion of his mother’s incestuous re-marriage to his Uncle, his father’s brother, and the Court’s quiet acknowledgement of the matter. More so by the appearance of his Father’s Ghost with the ghastly revelation of his murder, and he slips into a melancholy that can be the only explanation for his tarrying. And why? It accounts for his varied temperaments in the play: his energy and his lassitude, how he can rejoice with exuberance at asking the players to stage a play mimicking the actual circumstances of the murder, yet bitterly scold himself for delaying in his actions, how he can greet his schoolmates with a ‘kind of joy’ at first, but later sink into ‘much forcing of his disposition’ to keep the joy afloat in the midst of his sadness.

My personal take on it? I can’t say I agree fully with Bradley on this matter. Hamlet strikes me as an artistic type, maybe not the sort who produces art, but who lives, immerses in and appreciates art. A spirit like that can be rather temperamental, as they live, love and hate passionately, but I would scarcely account all that for Melancholia.

Besides, Bradley did admit that ‘this pathological condition (Melancholia) would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge type of theory lays stress’. I guess at the end of the day Bradley still wants to make his a valid point by citing Hamlet’s Melancholia as a by-product of his philosophical, reflective nature, but his argument that the tragedy would never be truly tragic if not for this attractive quality in Hamlet’s character is a point I want to make: I simply find it hard to agree with Bradley that Hamlet’s delay, a key component in the tragic spiral, should simply be cause by something as Melancholy, which would hardly effect any form of pity, sorrow or fear.

So why did Hamlet delay?

Another initial step to Modern Art

That’s lifting from one of the subheadings of the book.
There was a reaction the the facts-only portrayal in Art. William Blake (who was also a Romantic poet ;) ) reacted against the Machine Age. Reminding me a bit of myself in years past, he invailed against technology, and his works were full of lyrical natural depictions. He designed his own covers for his manuscripts, and the one on his Songs of Innocence and Experience was typical: the words swirled into long, leafy beanstalk like structures that told of the irrationality of his Art (and his message of free love).
There was also another stream called Romantic, and this seemed to deal with landscape paintings that depicted an idyllic pastoral theme.
Now we come to a theme I found rather interesting. Rookmaaker devotes this section to discussing ‘Christian’ paintings, and I believe by this term that he meant ‘Christian’ rather loosely, to refer to art that was not iconically religious but which was done by people who were themselves adherents of the faith, whether or not they were weak, or strong in it.
The art of the period (Enlightenment) showed that Christ was, ‘to borrow a term from mathematics… extrapolated’ from the canvas. Rookmaaker cites three cases: Leys’ Women praying at a Crucifix near St. James in Antwerp, where we see a group of women fervently praying, but the object of their prayers is nowhere to be found. The message: physical reality, painting what the eye saw. God could not be seen, therefore was not in the world, and so he was ‘extrapolated’.
In the second example, Ciseri’s Ecce Homo, we see Pilate and wife, but where is Christ? The scene is factually real, it is the scene a detached onlooker would probably have found if he was at Pilate’s place at the time: Pilate’s back is facing the onlooker, he is looking out of a Roman balcony, important Roman officials are poised naturally around, his wife is walking dejectly somewhere from the right… But that is about it. There is no other message to this piece of art save its factuality. And that was the message, the worldview, that the painter was trying to put across: paint things as they are, because all that is, is.
The third example was, aside from being slightly blasphemous to me personally, rather hilarious if we took it light-heartedly and detachedly. Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death shows Christ in a carpentry setting stretching, and his shadow in the shape of a Cross imprinted on the wall behind him. Rookmaaker felt that ‘the painter shows us nothing of any depth or importance at all… Here is a fact, of no importance … and we are invited to give it meaning, within us, in our feelings (certainly not with our intelligence)’.

The Steps to Modern Art

Here I aim to summarise the book by Rookmaaker, ‘Modern Art and the Death of a Culture’. I believe the blurb. It is ‘illuminating’. I swear I won’t be able to look at an art piece the same way again.
Book starts with Byzantine art, trying to cover the periods before modern art so as to show the causes that set the foundations for modern art. Byzantine art is iconic. Rookmaaker says of a typical Byzantine painting of the Madonna that it is a sermon on Mary, if you like. It tells people that you can come to Mary with your troubles and she will help you. In other words it is not a realistic portrayal of Mary, or a sensational (what one senses) portrayal of Mary. It has a central message that it is trying to get through with its portrayal of Mary.
The quote to remember for this period of Art: The Message is in the Medium.

Then came Medieval times, which scholastic theology had great influence upon. It drew a dualism between the realm of Grace and Nature. The Heavens were where Grace, the ideal, was found, and that is what mortals should aim for, but here on earth, Nature is all there is, and Reason reigns, by virtue of it being the only way we can perceive Nature. Reality is only understood by sensory perceptions.
In the Renaissance this was played out when people decided that since earth was where Nature is all that there is, God was out of the equation (relegated to the Heavens) and so Humanism was born. Everything became an attempt by Man to understand the world and achieve perfection in his Natural sphere…
This gave way to Enlightenment tendencies. This is the point where God becomes totally isolated from the picture. If reality is only understood by sensory perceptions, Man’s reason is the only tool to understanding the world. Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) was the central principle of the day.

This deviates a bit from the Art trend, but what happened after God was taken out of the equation and Reason was heightened was that the iconic style of painting disappeared. Rookmaaker did take pains to emphasise that Art was not about just the Aesthetic: Art has a central message that is depicted in the Medium.

So in the Renaissance period artists realized they couldn’t just paint an icon. Sensual reality became important as well. Rookmaaker uses Rembrandt’s Christ on the Road to Emmaus to illustrate: Rembrandt wants to show that Christ is the central figure in the story of his journeying with two believers after his resurrection to their place for supper, yet he doesn’t want to abandon reality by depicting Christ was a yellow halo around his head. Rembrandt wanted to paint a picture that would look real, befitting the actual scenario. So Rembrandt solves the problem pretty neatly by structural composition that makes it apparent to the onlooker which of the three figures is Christ.

In the Enlightenment sensual reality took an even more important row. Ideals as the Message disappeared. For instance, in the Renaissance, it was common for art to be done about Venus, the Roman goddess of Love and Beauty. Nobody believed she actually existed or worshipped her, but she stood for an Ideal: Love and Beauty. But in the Enlightenment there was to be no more of that. Everything had to be known through the senses. Why paint a picture of something that you did not believe in.

So gradually people painted what they saw. Be it landscape or portraits. A landscape by Turner entitled Rain, Steam and Speed painted, not pictorial reality, but what one would expect to see on a rainy day: an obscured, hazed, blurred vision of a train speeding along. The portrait example that I found most ridiculous (but also most powerful) was that of the evolved Venus: Venus paintings of Old were nude portraits of idealized women signifying Beauty and Love, but Ingres painted what a nude would probably be in reality: a very unabashed prostitute staring out of the canvas. She happened to be a figure of some notoriety, which, Rookmaaker surmised, must have shocked many contemporaries. But it made a point: Venus, the Ideals, were really and truly dead.

Recommendation: Tony Buzan

I never finished one of this guy’s books. But you bet I always hit myself when I think of the fact that I didn’t. Because if I did, I’d probably have been 10 times more effective at time management, would not waste unnecessary time studying in 5 hours what I could in 1, and so on.
I read half of two of his books more thoroughly: Use Your Head, and The Speed Reading Book. I skimmed Use Your Memory.
Tony Buzan is the inventor of the Mind Maps technique (or at least, he systematized it and patented it) and the author of a whole series of related books on how to make use of your amazing brain. It tries to spread the word that everyone can be a genius if they want to.
I actually do believe him.
Tony Buzan usually walks the reader through the amazing potential of the human brain in any introductory chapter of his books. A pretty astonishing fact he put forth concerned the human brain and the computer: I can’t remember exact figures but your brain and mine are both capable of processing information that would take the computer a hundred plus (?) years to do, and has I don’t know how many trillion cells I should think, all capable of storing information. The gist of it all is, your brain is powerful, and you’re under-utilising it, and guess what? Buzan will show you how to use it effectively.
Use Your Head talks about how to remember things by showing you that the brain remembers things if they are connected and vivid. If you had a list of 10 disorganised items to remember in order, a good way to remember them is to link them in a comic sequence of events. Say you had ’soap – elephant – fly’ you could imagine a gigantic bar of soap very full of suds – see the soap water oozing out at the sides? Then think of a huge gigantic elephant appearing out of nowhere, perhaps starting as no more than a dot, but in the twinkle of an eye, growing LARGE… the elephant slips on the bar of soap… think of the astonished look on its comic face and how fast it slides on the soap (like on a skateboard), then think that just as it leaves the corner of the imaginary world you created for both it and the soap, the elephant suddenly grew wings and flew… and its face turned to one of indescribable joy… things like that. The unrelated events are now both interconnected and vividly imprinted in your mind.
He goes through other more advanced memorizing techniques as well, like the Roman room system, which consists of thinking of your dream house with all sorts of things that you have to remember inside it – perfect for that shopping list you need in your head when you visit the supermarket. There’s also a number-word system that will be used as an advanced memory technique.
The Speed reading book guarantees that whilst the average person tends to read 200 to 400 words per minute, usually at the lower end, speeds of 1000 words per minute and over are possible. The secret? Your eyes – can take in more than one word at a time. If you don’t believe this, think about how your eyes can take in the view at a blind spot mirror in a split second. Then flip a book open and stare at it for one second: you will realise that you can remember the structure (the paragraphing) of the pages, and, especially, any illustration they have on the page. The second secret is that your brain should be the one doing the reading, not your eyes. After elevating my reading speed to about 800 words per minute, I figure speed readers probably skip words and grasp the general meaning of those words that they glance only momently and

Review: What colour is your Parachute?

What colour is your Parachute? is a best-selling job seeker’s manual, or so the book’s blurb touts itself to be.
If you ask my opinion, it’s even better than that. It’s one of those books that, if one really follows it wholeheartedly, will help one loads in getting THE job. Not just a job, THE job. The job that one is supposed to be in.
After so many entries on book reviews I’ve given up trying to summarise every aspect. It’s impossible. So I’ll just substitute what I cannot remember exactly for a general opinion on how the book was like on the whole, and insert bits that impressed me so much I remembered.
I must confess here: I didn’t finish reading it. But it’s so good I want to go back to it someday.
The basic philosophy of Richard Nelson Bolles (the author) is that the job-seeker should find a job that suits him, not market himself to suit the jobs that are currently in the market.
Good reasons for doing so: you will obviously love your job, if you’ve got interest, you’ve got drive, when you’ve got both, you’re likely to have material, and that makes you cut out for the job.
And when you have all three, the chances are, you’re a very unique individual with that special blend of skills and talents necessary, and it will be hard to replace you, and you will be in that special position doing the thing that, besides you, very few others are capable of doing.
Well, I wonder how that’ll work if you want to be something general, like an Engineer, or a truck driver, or a sales assistant or typist, but I guess nothing beats Drive and Passion.
Bolles starts off trying to get you to know thyself. Know, not just what you like to do, but what skills you have. Which is something that I think is simply great in this book. How many times have you heard people saying, ‘just follow your heart, pal’? Well, some things just need specialised skills that you don’t have. So, skills are an important consideration into getting a job that fits you too.
And: do you like to work with people, data, or things? Imagine that at the end of your life a group of people gathered from all around the world had a dinner held in your honour and everyone said something about you that was praiseworthy. What would you hope to hear mentioned? Role play is big in this book and it does help to make one figure what’s really important to one in life. And in case you worry you’ll be struck dumb and at a loss of what really is important to you, Bolles gives a dozen over suggestions for you to deliberate over. For example, that dinner role play situation: examples included: made a lot of money and had a great life (for the business-minded), was keen to help people and always charitable (for the kind-hearted), someone whose desire was to be a true servant of God (for the religious), someone who stood up for his/her own ideals (for those with firm convictions) etc etc. Take your pick.
Even if you didn’t end up finding out what you really want to do after reading the book (or chances are, reading the book halfway through), you’d at least end up with a better understanding of yourself. I ended up knowing that my top 3 favourite skills (amongst 20 over that his helping words helped me pick out) was: researching, analysing and performing.
Bolles also tries to drum in his readers the fact that a career = job + field. How so? You can’t just find what it is that you want to do, you must also be certain where you want to do it. Say you want to be a teacher. Good! Now where? So many places! His list had at least 12 institutions I think. Which really shocked me. Well, do you want to teach at: kindergartens? primary? secondary? tertiary? university? private institutions? as a classroom teacher? as a professional? doing something like Mr Bolles, teaching as a niche activity? Teaching people how to find jobs? Teaching people effective public speaking? Teaching people at local education instituions how to teach? The list goes on.
Another thing I took home was the fact that he tries to make us combine our top 3 interests to constitute a field. So after ranking all my interests I found out that my top three interests were (I hope they’re accurate, it was actually hard to choose between so many interests!) literature, culture (where by this definition I mean a very broadened and watered down understanding of a people’s history, tradition, way of living, art, society etc) and law. His challenge is to find, in the venn diagram where the three fields meet, that one job where all three interests will be put to good use. I told you, it’s very specialised.
If you ever think it’s impossible… he quoted a rather ‘impossible’ person’s venn diagram whose interests were: psychology, gardening and carpentry. Help me here! Well Bolles said the person followed his advice, which was to start ‘interviewing’ people in each field and asking them, is there a way to combine these three interests? What would I need to get me there? starting with the field that took the most effort to get qualified (in this case, the psychologist). And guess what? The guy eventually found a psychologist who told him there was a field of psychology that used plants to heal people. And as for carpentry, the guy could use his carpentry skills to make the planters that he would employ in gardening.
So… if you ever ended up in a place where you didn’t have the right qualifications for the dream job you’ve identified? Bolles admits that most of the time people will demand a degree in something something and minimum 5 – 10 years experience. But he also showed how people can market themselves even if they don’t have that kind of experience – by marketing their skills. Bolles insists that it is skills that one employs in a job, and having the right skills for the job might actually stand one in better stead. Say you want a job as a journalist. Skills to market: great writing and communication skills, attentiveness to details happening around one.
And for the job-changer, What colour is your Parachute? was equally written for these guys. Bolles was in fact in church ministry when he lost his job and had to change to a different track. He decided to help job-seekers find jobs. Talk about life-changing experiences.
Anyway, if, say, you want to switch to something drastically different – switching both job and field, as in the case of an accountant in a law firm who wants to switch to a medical journalist, say… take the 2-step approach! First, change either career or field. So, either: continue to be an accountant, but this time in a medical institution, or, switch to be a journalist, but continue in a legal institution. Stay in this position for a transition period of 2 to 5 years gaining experience about the other career that one is going to leap into. Then make the transition. This lessens the shock effect on future employers who might be wary of one’s capabilities when one makes too sudden a leap from something completely unrelated to what one is applying for.