Comparative analysis of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear

Hamlet, Othello, Lear

In his book Radical Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore claims that part of the function of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy was to present and digest potentially frightening political scenarios -- to "rehearse threats in order to contain them" (6). Shakespeare's play Hamlet is full of such unsettling political figures and implications, most notably in the character of Hamlet himself. Hamlet embodies a threat not only in a political sense but in as philosophical sense as well, challenging in his complexity the Providentialism that governed political and social philosophy in Elizabethan England.

Hamlet threatens Providentialism on three levels. First he represents a troublesome impotence of the divine order in his failure as a natural heir to assume the crown. Conversely, he represents a threat to the sense of Providentialism as expressed by Pope later -- "Whatever is, is right." His persistent and persistently ineffective struggle against the unnatural but legally legitimate ascension of his uncle represents a subversive and radical current against the ordained order of things. Francis Barker notes the strong association between the corporal body of the king and the body politic during the Renaissance: "[M]embership of this anatomy [was] the deep structural form of all being in the secular realm" (2). The incestuous relationship between Hamlet and his uncle/stepfather means that Hamlet constitutes a crisis, even a corrosion, of this corporal signification.

Most profoundly, however, Hamlet muddies the semiotic structure of Renaissance knowledge by refusing to allow his outward form to mirror his inner reality: "I have that within which passeth show" (I.ii.76). His assumption of madness rebukes any attempt to reconcile his appearance with his reality, as so tragically witnessed by Ophelia.

For the most part, Hamlet's death resolves these issues. He no longer represents the thwarted natural progression of the crown, or an incestuous canker in the body politic. And perhaps for the first time since the death of his father, his internal reality is at one with his external being.

2.

In his essay, Sinfield claims that "all stories comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to exclude" (12). This assertion lies at the heart of his ideas of dissidence and subversiveness.

Dissidence for Sinfield is the element in a text that seeks to contradict the dominant ideology of the text, or of the culture in which the text was produced (Sinfield agrees with Marx that these are the same thing). Subversiveness is similar, perhaps even identical in objective; the difference is that to be subversive, a text must be successful in its dissidence. For that reason, one must consult the historical impact of a text to determine whether it was subversive or merely dissident. In Othello, one could say that Othello was dissident in his challenge of racial assumptions, where Iago was subversive in overthrowing the hierarchy that supports Othello.

3.

In his article "The Breakdown of Medieval Hierarchy in King Lear," Alessandro Serpieri locates in the tension between the hierarchical system and those who are exiled or exile themselves from that system a mirror for the falling away of the traditional medieval worldview rooted in signs and symbols. In his interpretation of Lear, he finds this dissolution embodied in the characters of Kent, Cordelia, and most poignantly Lear himself.