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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 10. August 9, 1951
Dying Order
Dying Order
The representatives of dying order in Lear are only too conscious of the fact that order is dying, and that the age of the Edmunds and the Machiavels is come. Gloucester exclaims:
"Love cools; friendship falls off, brothers' divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father . . . the King falls from bias of nature . . . We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us unquietly to our graves." (Lear, 1,2).
"Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,
Crack nature's mould's, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man."
The "natural" order is disintegrating: the man of the old order and outlook secs it as the end of all. That is just the theme of Hamlet.
The play centres around the gradual formulation and execution of revenge by the son of a murdered man on the murder who is also the avenger's uncle. Both murdered and murderer are Kings. As wo see from Gloucester's speech, part of the "natural" order of medievalism was the sacred duty that bound subject to King, and blood relations one to another. The ghost of the late King Hamlet, who, as a "nemesis" ghost from Purgatory is definitely on the side of "natural order," condemns his own murder by his brother as "foul and most unnatural," and calls on Hamlet
"If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not!" (I.v).
"The cease of majesty.
Dies not alone, but like a gulf does draw
What's near with it . . .
. . . Never alone
Did the King sigh, but with a general groan." (III,3.)
Hamlet realises this, and is, too, conscious of his kinship to [unclear: huncle]. His [unclear: rat] remark on hearing of the murder shows that. He cries "O any prophetic soul,! my uncle!" (1,5).
Faced with the complete lack of scruple of the Machiavellian Claudius, Hamlet is faced with the fundamental contradiction of his own wornout philosophy. While demanding dutiful vengeance, It deplored the regicide which vengeance in this instance involved, for the villain has, albeit by an "unnatural" act, acquired a crown.
The fault is not in Hamlet's mind; it is in the incompetence of his philosophy to deal with the situation he meets, its effeteness in the times he lives in. As Edmund says in Lear, "Men are as the time is." Claudius is. So is Laertes, who scruples not to shed royal blood to avenge his father. So too is Fortinbras, who, by sheer determination and absence of moral hesitation, marches to victory at the close of the play when the stage is strewn with the corpes of nearly all the other characters in omitting this absolute contrast with Hamlet, Olivier cut out a very effective and integral part of the drama.