Overview of Episode #243 — Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Stephen West (Philosophize This!) summarizes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, then reframes the play through a philosophical lens inspired by Nietzsche and by Simon Critchley & Jamieson Webster (authors of Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine). The episode mixes a concise plot summary with two competing interpretive frameworks: the traditional Renaissance/humanist moral-psychology reading, and a modern tragic/diagnostic reading that stresses knowledge, paralysis, surveillance, and Ophelia as the play’s true tragic figure.
Brief plot summary
- Setting: Elsinore (a Danish castle). Guards and Horatio see a ghost resembling the recently deceased king.
- The ghost tells Prince Hamlet he was murdered by Claudius (the new king and Hamlet’s uncle), and urges Hamlet to avenge him.
- Hamlet wrestles with belief, evidence, morality, and action; he decides to feign madness to gain time and test Claudius.
- Claudius uses Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and Ophelia to spy on Hamlet. Hamlet rejects and insults Ophelia.
- Hamlet kills Polonius (Ophelia’s father), mistaking him for Claudius; Ophelia descends into madness and drowns (ambiguous suicide/accident).
- Claudius plots Hamlet’s death abroad, but Hamlet returns, edits a death-warrant to kill Rosencrantz & Guildenstern instead, and is ultimately mortally wounded in a poisoned fencing match. Claudius is forced to drink poisoned wine. Most major characters die; Horatio survives to tell the story.
Traditional philosophical reading (Renaissance humanism)
- Hamlet as moral-psychological figure: emblematic of the intellectual, introspective Renaissance subject caught between medieval certainties (God, inherited moral authority) and emerging humanist autonomy.
- His indecision and ruminative paralysis illustrate the modern condition: we try to think our way to moral answers and are left perpetually uncertain.
- “To be or not to be” is read as the quintessential modern deliberative crisis: weighing suffering versus action, but unable to settle on a course.
The “Hamlet Doctrine” — Critchley & Webster (and Nietzsche)
- Core idea: excessive knowledge/insight kills action. Nietzsche: “Knowledge kills action. Action requires the veil of illusion.”
- Hamlet isn’t merely indecisive; he has seen through the moral narratives that normally justify violent or decisive acts, so he lacks the illusions that enable action.
- Critchley & Jamieson Webster label this the “Hamlet Doctrine”: insight becomes paralytic; Hamlet is an anti‑Oedipus (contrast to Oedipus, who acts in ignorance).
- Consequence: Hamlet’s internal crisis metastasizes into cruelty, self-loathing, and complicity in the tragedy that follows.
Surveillance as theme and structural condition
- Historical context: Elizabethan England saw the rise of state surveillance, spies, censorship — background that Shakespeare could be reflecting.
- Critchley & Webster push further: surveillance in Hamlet is both external (spies, eavesdropping) and internal (self-surveillance). The castle is a panoptic environment that cultivates neurotic self-monitoring.
- Claim: a society saturated by surveillance produces subjects who habitually monitor themselves, which can deepen paralysis, mistrust, and performative behavior.
- Contemporary resonance: likened to today’s “digital panopticon” and how constant tracking shapes consciousness and action.
Ophelia as the play’s tragic center
- Traditional view: Ophelia symbolizes lost innocence and the collateral damage of political/moral decay.
- Critchley & Webster’s argument:
- Ophelia is treated instrumentally by the men and institutions around her (father, brother, court).
- Unlike Hamlet, she actually acts from vulnerability and love; her madness and death become a final expressive language — akin to Antigone’s principled act.
- Ophelia’s death can be read as a love-act and a protest that reveals what the world has done to her: reduction to nothing.
- Contrast: Hamlet’s condition is “hell” as inability to love (quoting Dostoevsky); Ophelia embodies the tragic possibility and cost of loving in that world.
The play’s existential lesson about knowledge
- Recurrent motif in the Shakespeare episodes: different plays show different failures tied to knowledge.
- Julius Caesar: rhetoric and belief.
- Romeo & Juliet: imprisoned by inherited ideology/identity.
- Hamlet: the danger of over-analysis — when knowledge eliminates the moral illusions necessary for decisive action.
- Key provocative point: the knowledge you most need can also be the knowledge that ruins you. Revealing truth can destroy a person’s capacity to act or to sustain an identity.
Notable quotes cited in the episode
- Nietzsche (via Birth of Tragedy, quoted in the episode): “Knowledge kills action. Action requires the veil of illusion.”
- Dostoevsky (quoted by Critchley & Webster): “Hell is the inability to love.”
- Shakespeare (Hamlet): “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” — used as emblematic of modern overthinking.
Main takeaways
- Two complementary readings make Hamlet relevant today:
- As a study in modern moral psychology (the agonized chooser).
- As a diagnosis of how insight, surveillance, and the collapse of moral illusion can paralyze and destroy.
- Ophelia deserves central attention: her collapse and death expose the play’s social cruelty and may be the truest tragic voice.
- Hamlet warns about the costs of living in a world saturated by knowledge and surveillance: action, love, and agency can be undermined by the very clarity we prize.
Recommended next steps / questions to ponder
- Read or re-read Hamlet with both frameworks in mind: Which interpretation feels more convincing in different scenes?
- Consider modern parallels: how does digital surveillance or overexposure to information shape your ability to act or to love?
- If you want the contemporary philosophical take, read Simon Critchley & Jamieson Webster’s Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine.
If you’re using this summary for study or teaching, the episode’s strongest value is its comparative interpretive frame — it invites reading Hamlet as both a classic moral-psychological drama and a prophetic diagnosis of modern paralysis produced by knowledge and surveillance.