Hamlet Hesse and Gidding

Shakespeare's Hamlet and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha meet the words Eliot's "Little Gidding" We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time," writes T.S. Eliot in his Fourth Quatrain entitled "Little Gidding." In the tragedy that bears his name Prince Hamlet begins and ends in the same place, namely the court of his late father and the living King Claudius.

He also begins and ends in the play in the hall of the court in a state of alienation from the rest of the court. However, while at the beginning of the play this alienation takes the form of a state of adolescent moodiness and mourning for his dead father at the end of the play Hamlet has a more reasoned and larger philosophical understanding of how his own family tragedy has a resonance with the larger state of human relations.

This adolescent anger at death is seen at the first act by his reaction to the words of his uncle Claudius who tells Hamlet to stop dwelling upon death because "your father lost a father, and your father lost his." But Hamlet refuses because Hamlet sees falseness wherever he goes in the court, a denial of the reality of death.

He sees his mother whom once followed like "Niobe, all tears" his father's funeral procession, now wed again, and to "mine uncle." ("Hamlet," Act I, Scene 2) This disbelief and the ignorance of death in most human minds parallels Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, the Buddha-to-be's, first realization about the permanent and ever-present nature of the demise of all forms of human existence, even of humanity's highest achievers and exemplars of philosophical understanding.

Attaining a way of making sense of death and the purposeless of existence that arouses his adolescent ire moves the Buddha to create his philosophy of non-attachment. Originally, Hamlet only perceives not personal animosity in the acts and attitudes of the Danish court. However, towards the end of the play he sees the evils of society as a reflection of larger human social evils, including but not limited to the fact that a good king's memory can be easily erased and forgotten.

When contemplating Yorick's skull in the graveyard before the suicide Ophelia's funeral, he realizes that even Caesar's existence, not only his father's ended in death and dust. It is this fact that spurs him to state, much like a proto-Buddhist, "let be," to his friend Horatio when facing the duel that takes place before the bloody last scene of the play, not caring whether he dies or lives, and accepting that vengeance will come, not when he wills it, but when the world's actions meet in the correct constellation.

Or, as Eliot says, "Quick now, here, now, always -- /A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)/And all shall be well and/All manner of things shall be well," echoing Hamlet's words of comfort to his mother after the infamous closet scene. Hamlet kills Claudius at the end, but there is no catharsis.