Romantic Love in Hamlet

Hamlet out of Love When Hamlet arrives home from school, he finds his father dead and his mother remarried to his uncle. Hamlet caustically remarks that “the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.87-88) to express his displeasure with his mother’s hasty re-marriage: Hamlet loved his father and believed his mother had as well. He expected there to be a longer period of grieving and was disappointed not to find one.

A sense of his mother’s own fickleness and infidelity leads Hamlet to reject romantic love in general and to spurn his betrothed Ophelia specifically. “Get thee to a nunnery!” (3.1.131) he commands Ophelia before ranting about the knavishness of man (and woman). In many ways, his rejection of romantic love is the real tragedy of the play. It leads to Ophelia’s death and to the stack of corpses that litter the stage at the end.

Had Hamlet simply found a better way to cope with his mother’s quick re-marriage, the events of the drama might have unfolded differently. For even in the midst of avenging his father’s death, Hamlet berates and lectures his mother on her infidelity towards his father’s memory before slaying the spy Polonius and entering into his downward spiral. This paper will explore Hamlet’s trauma with regard to eros and show how this trauma is the source of his main troubles.

Because Hamlet has been disappointed with love by his mother's actions, he does not believe that romantic love is important for human relationships. As Tenney Davis points out, it is Hamlet’s mother’s re-marriage so soon after the funeral of his father, that derails Hamlet from the beginning: “the young intellectual, sorrowing for the death of his father, very naturally developed a psychosis under the influence of his mother’s unseemly second marriage” (629).

This psychosis is of course exacerbated by the appearance of the ghost of his dead father, which urges the young man to take action against his murderer—his mother’s new husband. So what was already a knife in his heart is now urged to become a knife in his hand, which is a sure burden to his already grief-stricken mind: as a Christian, Hamlet would upon principle be opposed to revenge—yet in justice he would be opposed to doing nothing.

Thus, Hamlet is doubly anguished: longing to love (which is why he turns briefly to Ophelia) yet finding romantic love to be sorely limited by his own inability to rise out of the depths, where his father’s ghost waits for him, pushing him to blood. The fact that Blackmore emphasizes the revengeful entreaty of the ghost shows that appearance of the specter is a catalyst in Hamlet’s downward trajectory, which is set in motion by the mother’s faithlessness.

Blackmore suggests, however, that “Hamlet as a Christian knew that evil spirits may at times assume various forms, the better to beguile to evil, and, therefore, he doubted [rightly] whether this spectre-like form of his father were really his ghost or a demon” (130).

This doubt aggravates his sensibilities—and so seeking stability he turns to Ophelia for support, only to find that she has been enlisted by her father Polonius (the spy for his uncle) and that her allegiance is divided: one the one hand, she loves Hamlet—but on the other she feels she must obey her father and spurn Hamlet, which she does (and which adds to his cynical conviction that romantic love is unimportant in the world and has no place whatsoever in it).

Hamlet goes to Ophelia, and when she offers his “remembrances” back to him, he is infuriated and transforms: he refuses to acknowledge that he ever gave her anything, her refusal hurts him so—he denies it to deny the hurt. When she pushes them on him, he turns on her and snaps: “Ha, ha, are you honest?” (3.1.113).

He then rants that “the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness” (3.1.121-124). This expression of disdain for beauty, which he sees as a corrupter and seducer of truth, hints at what Vyvyan describes as Hamlet’s own undoing: “Ophelia symbolizes the love-star in Hamlet’s soul—inspiring him, when he is moving upward; but an irksome reproach now that he has sworn to sink.

And his rejection of her is the rejection of his guiding self” (28). From the moment the play begins, things are already unraveling for Hamlet—and the source of the unraveling is his mother’s quick re-marriage. Hamlet broods about the castle and laments, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” (1.2.150) as he considers what his mother has done to the memory of his father.

He views his mother’s remarriage as a weakness and when he finds this same fickleness in Ophelia, in whom he has hoped to find something that his mother has not possessed—i.e., fidelity—he is hurt all the more and refuses to admit that he ever loved her at all.

His refusal frustrates Ophelia, for she has only returned his love letters to him to please her father: the truth is she has loved Hamlet and still loves him, which is shown when she openly weeps for him following his epic rant against love, marriage and romance.

She cries, “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, / Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mold of form, / Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!” (3.1.163-168). Her grief exposes her love, which, of course, she has just denied to Hamlet’s face—which further erodes his confidence in romantic love.

In fact, her obedience to her father at a time when Hamlet has needed her most has essentially driven Hamlet right off the deep end. What might have served as a life line bringing Hamlet back from the edge now acts as a false bottom through which Hamlet crashes. First, his mother’s infidelity, and now Ophelia’s seeming infidelity—and Hamlet is out of sorts.

The initial disappointment in his mother’s love for his father has been compounded by the second disappointment in his own love life. It is this sequence that completely destroys his faith in romantic love. Up to that point, Hamlet has already questioned the point of existence in his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy—and after that point he sinks further into himself.

At his second meeting with Ophelia before the play begins, she remarks on the opening of the play: “’Tis brief, my lord,” and he replies, “As a woman’s love” (3.2.174-175). Thus, he shows he is still hurting over his lost sense of romantic love having any meaning in life. It is as though he still wants it to have meaning, but he cannot believe it does.

And later, when he berates his mother for having forgotten his father so quickly and for marrying someone he considers to be so much lesser of a man than his father was, Hamlet shows that real source of his pain is not Ophelia—but his own mother. She is the one who sets the example; she is the one who should be grieving for an appropriate period of time, yet does not. She is the one who sets his despondency all in motion.

One may forget the ghost because it is but a secondary plot device. His mother’s infidelity to the memory of his father is the primary plot device: it is what causes the ground underneath the feet of Hamlet to begin to shift and crumble. Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia is thus a response to his mother’s rejection of his father’s memory and to Ophelia’s rejection of Hamlet’s remembrances.

It is a case of two separate women seeming to reject memory itself, which Hamlet feels is important if romantic love is going to have any validity. Romantic love must hinge upon the lovers’ ability to remember their vows, their promises, their duty—and yet, first, he sees his mother forgetting his father so soon after he dies; and, second, he finds Ophelia forgetting his love for her.

In Act V, he professes his love—though it is too late, for she is dead: “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum” (5.1.285-287). His brag to Laertes is a kind of macho saber-rattling, but it is also the truth: he did love and his love was greater than brother-sister love. It was romantic love—love between a man and a woman that could potentially lead to the begetting of children.

In his line, Hamlet acknowledges at last the veracity and validity of romantic love—that which he has denied for virtually the whole play. But now having returned from his brief expulsion from the state and finding that Ophelia is dead, the fog in his mind clears away in an instant and the light of the sun shines through: he admits the truth and stands up for the truth though all now think he is mad, since he.