This paper examines Patricia Parker's 2003 journal article "Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor," published in Shakespeare Studies, which uses blackness as a central symbol to interpret Shakespeare's Hamlet. The analysis traces how Parker associates blackness with impurity, malice, deviltry, melancholy, and vengeance to explain the tragic dimensions of the play. Focusing on the major characters — Claudius, Old Hamlet, Gertrude, Ophelia, and Hamlet — the paper argues that blackness functions differently for each character: as Moorish evil in Claudius, sexual impurity in Gertrude and Ophelia, and a combination of grief, melancholy, and revenge in Hamlet himself.
In the journal article Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor (2003), published in Shakespeare Studies, Patricia Parker centers on blackness as one of the emergent symbols in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Parker uses blackness as a symbolic representation of important themes underscored throughout the play. By synonymously associating blackness with impurity, malice, death, deviltry, vengeance, and melancholy, her analysis shows how blackness — as both a symbol and a concept — generates conflict among the play's characters, specifically Hamlet, Old Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia. Parker also illustrates how the persistence of blackness and its associated themes allows Hamlet to be understood as a genuine tragedy.
This paper examines the use of blackness and its associated themes as the catalysts that lead to the tragic ends of the characters in Hamlet. Centering on the play's main characters, Parker demonstrates how blackness creates a distinction between goodness and evil — between Old Hamlet and Claudius, and within Gertrude, Hamlet, and Ophelia. More specifically, this paper argues that blackness is used in several distinct ways: (1) to illustrate the "Moor-ness" of Claudius against Old Hamlet's "angel-like" character; (2) to mark the "stained" or impure characters of Gertrude and Ophelia; and (3) to capture the vengeful, grieving, and melancholic nature of Hamlet. The paper also analyzes how, through these illustrations, blackness brings together the characteristics that make the play a literary tragedy — death, vengeance, malice, and impurity.
One of the dominant themes in Parker's article is the conflict between, and the contrasting natures of, Old Hamlet and King Claudius — Hamlet's father and uncle, respectively. Blackness surrounds the Old Hamlet–Claudius relationship because it is saturated with malice: the malice of Claudius's murder of Old Hamlet, and the malice further compounded when Queen Gertrude, Old Hamlet's wife, married Claudius immediately after her husband's death. Parker symbolically frames this conflict as one between the "angel-like" character of Old Hamlet and the "Moor-ness" of Claudius's nature (128). Associating Old Hamlet with being an "angel" and Claudius with being a "Moor" designates the two kings as individuals with "white" (good) and "black" (bad) personalities, respectively.
Focusing primarily on Claudius's black, Moorish character, Parker associates him with one who leads a "carnival misrule" — an "adulterate Beast" who won the "will" of his most virtuous-seeming queen as a "contrasting devil" (129, 149). The angel-versus-Moor characterizations assigned to Old Hamlet and Claudius, respectively, are evidently more than mere depictions of a good-versus-evil theme. Parker's association of blackness with Claudius's Moorish character — equated in her analysis with deviltry — highlights how blackness surrounds not only Claudius but all those associated with him. His "blackness," according to Parker, "besmeared" the purity of Queen Gertrude as his wife and of the kingdom he eventually ruled. Association with Claudius's blackness therefore meant the pervasiveness not only of impurity and malice but, most particularly, of treachery, which dominates the lives of Hamlet and Claudius throughout the play. For further context on the cultural resonances of "Moor" as a term in early modern England, the concept carried strong connotations of otherness and moral darkness that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized immediately.
As noted above, Gertrude has also been "besmeared" by Claudius's Moorish — malicious and treacherous — character. Parker equates Gertrude's blackness with Hamlet's perception of his mother as an impure woman, having associated herself with Claudius so soon after Old Hamlet's death (130–1). This sense of Hamlet's "stained" or "tainted" view of his mother becomes most evident in Act 3, Scene IV of the play, wherein he admonishes her:
"A bloody deed! Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother... but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty..."
Parker characterizes Gertrude's stained persona as the "adulterous declining of the queen" — an event that signifies the queen's descent into impurity. Gertrude's association with Claudius's Moorish persona also leads to the tainting of Hamlet's perception of his mother. Her case demonstrates how blackness pervades Hamlet and its characters, showing that blackness is equated not only with the deviltry associated with Claudius but also with the staining and tainting illustrated through Gertrude's trajectory. Gertrude's role in the play has been widely debated by critics, and Parker's symbolic reading adds a distinct moral-chromatic dimension to that debate.
"Blackness as threat to Ophelia's sexual purity"
"Hamlet's grief, madness, and vengeance as forms of blackness"
These depictions of blackness in the main characters of Hamlet showed how, through symbolic representations of tainting, smearing, and dirtying/muddying, Parker was able to illustrate that Hamlet was full of blackness that truly made it a tragic literary piece.
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