Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Tragedy of Knowing Thyself

Poet T. S. Eliot (1920) maintained that "Hamlet is the Mona Lisa of literature" (1). Eliot makes such a comparison because Shakespeare's Hamlet is as immune to absolute analysis as is DaVinci's immortal portrait of Mona Lisa. Such a dilemma might also apply to knowing one's self, as brilliantly expressed in the play by Shakespeare. In his review of John Lee's Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Controversies of the Self, Arthur F. Kinney (2002) argues that "his study confronts the problem of defining the self, of establishing a sense of interiority in the protagonist that is in keeping with the thought of late Elizabethan and early Stuart times" (88). It is exactly the difficulty in establishing such an interiority that is Hamlet's tragedy. Human beings are thought capable, by their cognitive abilities and ration, to add meaning to the unpredictability and indifference that are often the stuff of life. However, Hamlet is preoccupied throughout the play with trying to determine if such meaning is possible in the face of his or anyone else's circumstances. The difficulty in making such a determination immobilizes Hamlet for a majority of the play, unable to take action until he has fully deliberated upon the events within the play. This analysis will demonstrate Hamlet's awareness that to know thyself is often a futile preoccupation, one that is fraught with errors and hampered by the limitations of human understanding.