Why T.S. Eliot hated Hamlet

T.S. Eliot advocated a myriad of contrarian views on literary criticism which still shock readers today.

His intellectual confidence and analytical precision allowed him to casually make radical decrees. In his essays and articles, he rained on the Romantic poets, made Milton into a grand but empty figure and defended the dense school of Metaphysical verse. And, most astoundingly, he lacerated the legacy of one of the world’s most celebrated plays – Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

In the essay Hamlet and His Problems, Eliot asserts that all oddities and incongruities critics lovingly ascribe to the eponymous prince are reflections of deeper issues within the form and characterisation in the play. In Eliot’s view, much of the blame for Hamlet’s undue idolatry comes from critics who were artistically inclined. He argued that poets like Coleridge and Goethe projected their creative egos on to the appealing obscurity that is Hamlet’s character and failed to notice fundamental problems which unsettle the plot.

Eliot noted that different versions of Hamlet would have adhered to certain rules of dramatic fiction and, like a literary Sherlock Holmes, deduced from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, what Kyd’s earlier and lost rendition of Hamlet must have looked like. Extrapolating from Kyd’s other works, Eliot believed the motive of previous Hamlets was a simple desire for revenge, that the action and delay of his aims were practically explained by the presence of guards around his intended victim, and that a pre-Shakespearean Hamlet feigned madness to escape suspicion.

In Shakespeare, Hamlet’s motives appear more complex and important than mere revenge. Because of the opacity of his motives, the madness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is awkwardly used to arouse suspicion rather than to rationally deflect it. Eliot thought these Shakespearean alterations “unconvincing” and felt forced to label the ultimate epic of the Elizabethan age an “artistic failure”.

This magisterial dismissal of Hamlet allowed Eliot to expatiate his theories on what he called an “objective correlative”. According to Eliot, an “objective correlative” shows a character’s emotions rather than describes them. In other words, an external event, setting or atmosphere symbolises a character’s internal state; it can subtly yet simply be explained as the feelings of a character being sufficiently supported by their story. In this regard, Eliot deemed Hamlet lamentably deficient. He used Lady Macbeth’s madness and demise to represent an adequate explanation of emotions and actions which leave the audience, not surprised but convinced when they hear of her suicide. He insisted that it was impossible to localise the essential mood of Hamlet in a single action or articulation, which thereby creates an elusive dissonance.

I contend that events often pose questions that no one meant to ask. In Hamlet’s case, the murder of his father and the perceived treachery of his mother urged him to utter the dangerous query of “is life worth living?” in his famous “To be, or not to be” monologue. The inevitable ennui that comes from being incapable of answering that question is evident in speeches like “I have of late- but wherefore I know not-” in which he expresses the dissatisfying disparity between man’s glorious potential and man’s miserable performance.

Regardless of whether a few moments in Shakespeare’s longest play appear to explain the prevailing tone of this endlessly fascinating drama, Eliot saw Hamlet as “full of stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” He believed Shakespeare had encountered a problem he could not solve. In Eliot’s eyes, Shakespeare invested emotions into a character he had inherited, but those emotions “exceeded the facts” of the character’s experience.

I disagree with Eliot’s treatment of Hamlet, but it did always strike me as strange that upon learning the identity of his father’s assassin Hamlet didn’t act more swiftly. Instead, he pauses for some four theatrical hours before doing what we knew he would do ten minutes after the start of the play.