Hamlet, educated at a German university, embodies the competing drives: the ancient impulse to avenge a loved one’s murder and the more civilized realization that private revenge-seeking destroys a society. Hamlet’s rational Wittenberg-student self wars against his more instinctive and passionate Danish self. He desires fully the appropriate and measured familial revenge his father demands: an eye for an eye, a death for a death. At the same time, he has the more modern understanding of the destructiveness of private revenge and the threat it poses to the stability of the state. Like Orestes, he is trapped between conflicting impulses, between two “goods,” but no Athena, no dea ex machina, appears to resolve his dilemma. Instead, for him, “Denmark’s a prison.”68
Like some scenes in the Iliad and the conclusion of the Oresteia, Hamlet portrays the internal contradictions of the human psyche: the need to avenge a loved one and the knowledge that such vengeance leads to destruction and suffering. If Hamlet acts as his father desires, Denmark is threatened. And he cannot turn to the state to enact his revenge, because Claudius, the murderer, is the state. The central authority cannot play its assigned role, and when such a failure occurs, even the most civilized and educated among us may be driven to private revenge: “Man seems to take justice into his own hands when God or secular authorities fail.”69 The ghost of Hamlet’s father, like the Furies of the Oresteia, has been driven underground only to emerge when he has no vengeance.
It is the ghost’s parting words, “Remember me,”70 that most obsess Hamlet. After the ghost departs, Hamlet repeats the words until they become a kind of litany:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone will live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!….
“Remember me.”
I have sworn’t.71
Violent revenge collapses into “remember.” How is Hamlet to remember his father? His Wittenberg education has told him that violent revenge is wrong but has given him nothing to take its place if the state cannot or will not act for him. Hamlet struggles to imagine an alternative, and he fails.
Yet it seems to me that the play itself provides an overlooked alternative in its final act. Like The Spanish Tragedy and other similar but lesser plays, in the final scene of Hamlet the stage is covered with bodies of the guilty and innocent alike. Eight deaths occur—Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet are all dead by the time the play ends. But before he dies, Hamlet entreats his friend Horatio “To tell my story”:
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity for awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.72
Hamlet has never spoken truth to power; he has instead “put an antic disposition on.”73 He has forgone any opportunity to remember his father with language. And he has been unable to react with the comparable violence demanded by the old order; he never does decide to take revenge. The multiple killings at the end of the play occur only because Hamlet agrees to a contest with Laertes. It is Laertes’s undifferentiated need for bloody revenge that causes the stage to be littered with bodies and the state destroyed, in true revenge drama style. Indeed, Claudius, the crafty goader, and Laertes, the hot-headed revenge seeker, are stock revenge drama characters. Only at the end of the play, with the new state present in the character of Fortinbras, will the true story be told. Hamlet’s final words give his “dying voice”74 to Fortinbras, and Horatio asks that he may “speak to th’ yet unknowing world / How these things came about.”75 Hamlet does not ask Horatio for revenge; he asks him to tell the story.
In this final scene (too often cut from performances), this great play suggests that telling the story can end the cycle of revenge and bring a stop to the senseless deaths that we, the audience, have witnessed. Within the play, the words “if thou didst ever thy dear father love— / Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” become transformed into “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart … tell my story.” Once the story is told (as indeed it has been told to us as we watch the play), the new state, embodied in Fortinbras, can move forward. But that progress requires a witness, a Horatio, to tell the misdeeds of the corrupt state under Claudius. It is not an easy task: “in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain” (italics added).
Is, then, this kind of storytelling an alternative for contemporary democracies that also “fail” to enact retribution in traditional ways, Denmark-like states in which, for one reason or another, violence for violence is not a suitable response? Can a new state effectively remember the past without violence? Can it “speak to th’ yet unknowing world how these things came about”?
Chapter Three
Language, Violence, and Oppression
It did not matter that they might die along the way; what really mattered was that they should not tell their story.
—Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
Physical pain … is language destroying.
—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
The literary and philosophical traditions of many cultures reveal that the urge for revenge is an ancient, deep-rooted human need that has only tentatively been transferred to central authority in the form of state-sponsored retribution. If that need for revenge is not acknowledged by being in some way incorporated into formal systems of justice, as are the Furies by Athena in the Oresteia, it reemerges as private vengeance, as it does with Paulina in Death and the Maiden. It has the potentiality of “dripping poison over all the land,” as Athena fears the unsatisfied Furies will do in the Oresteia. If a state fails to enact retribution that is emotionally satisfying to victims, the victims will eventually take justice into their own hands in an attempt to reestablish a psychologically necessary balance. Like Paulina, those seeking revenge are not driven by ressentiment or by political expediency, but by personal passion, “from an elementary sense of injustice.”1 Revenge-seekers do not see themselves as evil or cruel; they see themselves as setting the world back into its proper order. The original quest for revenge was less about excess (although excess certainly sometimes occurred) and more about balancing and reciprocity. The victims’ passion is not directed at getting something new or extra for themselves, but for getting something back. Any legal forum that enacts retribution should take this passion and this need for balancing into account. Criminal sanctions against revenge seekers, moral or religious pleas to turn the other cheek, or state-ordered “forgiveness” cannot quell this deeply rooted need and can be futile and dangerous.2 In countries that “attempt