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(1929). The Impatience of Hamlet.

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10:270-279
The Impatience of Hamlet

Ella Sharpe

One can, perhaps, best pay tribute to the strenuous labours of the leader of the psycho-analytical
movement in England by following a path where he has led. In the field of applied psycho-analysis,
Ernest Jones has made works of creative art yield up significances inaccessible before the advent of
psycho-analysis. His essay upon the tragedy of Hamlet lucidly and comprehensively makes clear the
unresolved Oedipus conflict which is the fundamental problem in the play.
There is nothing further to contribute to this theme; but this having been so clearly elucidated, one is
left free to gather from the play the lighting-up of the regressive movement of the libido due to the
retreat from the central Oedipus difficulty. The study of the particular nature of the regression gives
us an understanding of that 'Hamlet' quality which makes the Oedipus situation in his case so
peculiarly fascinating and individual. The problem of his procrastination receives further elucidation
in the light of evidence of pre-genital fixations, and the subtlety of his behaviour becomes more
understandable.
The tragedy of Hamlet, I submit, is not a tragedy of procrastination, but, on the contrary, a tragedy of
impatience. This is true, at least in varying ways, in varying circumstances, of Romeo and Juliet,
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear. At crucial moments in these plays the heroes exhibit an impatience, a
precipitation of action, that brings life tumbling about their ears like a pack of cards. They cannot
wait. This seems paradoxical in the case of Hamlet, for the play is one long-drawn-out delay in doing
a deed for which the stage is set at the beginning. Yet blind, impetuous action betrays Hamlet in the
end, not procrastination. The following is an attempt to unravel the meaning of this.
Hamlet is presented to us at the beginning of the tragedy as the son who has been bereaved of his
father, the King. He has lost a loved object by death. He has experienced an emotional trauma in his
mother's speedy marriage. (Impatience is to be noted at the outset.) At this juncture, or shortly
afterwards, Ophelia refuses Hamlet audience at her father's bidding. Hamlet then has lost his
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father, his mother and his lover. He is rebuffed by Ophelia when he most needed a stronghold in the
reality-world. She fails him too.
The death of a beloved father alone would mean a natural withdrawal from the world and a period of
mourning. The emotional loss due to his mother's immediate re-marriage, the withdrawal of Ophelia,
immensely complicate the task of mourning. To this must be added the knowledge he has gained that
his father was murdered.
Freud and Abraham have elucidated the work of natural mourning, and have correlated with this the
mechanism of melancholia. The mourning of Hamlet was consequent on the loss of his father; the
melancholic trends followed the loss of his mother and Ophelia. In mourning, the external world is
robbed of interest.
This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory:
Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither.
In melancholia the feeling of loss becomes an internal experience. Self-depreciation and self-reproach
impoverish the mind.
I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me;
What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?
The play abounds with meditations of this type. We know from psycho-analytical researches what this
mood means. It betokens a narcissistic withdrawal of libido from external objects. Hamlet's hold on
reality remains in his narcissistic interests and affections. He lights up with eager interest at the
coming of the players. He turns in his distress to Horatio.

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice

And could of men distinguish, her election

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Hath seal'd thee for herself;

This narcissistic withdrawal, as we know, is consequent upon the introjection of the lost love-objects.
The accusations made against the self are really accusations meant for the lost love-objects. They
have become identified with the ego. The ego, thus identified, becomes the object of the sadism of the
super-ego, and peace will come when these introjections are cast out, ejected, killed. Then again the
ego can be approved by the super-ego.
The interplay of these institutions in the mind becomes clearer if one reads the tragedy as a creation of
Shakespeare's mind; if one views it, that is, as a projection of the author's conflict in dramatic form.
One needs to think in terms of the creator, not in terms of
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Hamlet. From this point of view Hamlet himself is the focus of the play, but the other characters
provide that dramatization of the conflicting institutions in the mind of the author. For Shakespeare
dramatized in Hamlet his own regression after his father's death. Some authorities state that he lost
Mary Fitton at the same time. In externalizing the introjected objects in dramatic form he delivered
himself from 'the something in his soul'. He freed himself through a sublimation, in a way that bears
analogy to the ejection, killing, of the introjections made into the ego.
The poet is not Hamlet. Hamlet is what he might have been if he had not written the play of Hamlet.
The characters are all introjections thrown out again from his mind. He is the murdered majesty of
Denmark, he is the murdered Claudius, he is the Queen, Gertrude, and Ophelia. He is Hamlet. He has
killed them and himself by writing the play. He has ejected all of them symbolically and remains a
sane man, through a sublimation that satisfies the demands of the super-ego and the impulses of the id.
The internal drama of the poet's mind seems to be externalized in the following way.
Ambivalence throughout the play is conveyed by the coupling or contrasting of characters.
The dead King is a foil to Claudius. The loving attitude to the father is direct in Hamlet's rapturous
eulogy.

See, what a grace was seated on this brow;

Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,

An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.

Claudius, this King's brother, represents the wicked aspect of the father, towards which Hamlet's
hostility is directed.

O villain, villain, smiling, damned, villain!

Like a mildew'd ear

Blasting his wholesome brother.

The ghost that walks represents this ideal father-imago. Claudius is the embodiment of that wicked
father who frustrates him and stands 'between the election and his hopes'.
When the ghost becomes a denizen of the nether world, he is 'the old fellow in the cellarge'. There he
is suffering for his sins, and the reproaches he makes against himself are in line with the self-
reproaches that Claudius makes and are to be identified with Hamlet's own. Thus we have the
entombed ghost, Hamlet and Claudius identified. This
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is representative of the incorporation of the wicked father into the ego. The ghost that walked is
symbolical of the super-ego whose sadism is directed against the ego, externalized for us as Claudius.
This theme repeats itself in another setting as the tension due to super-ego sadism increases. Laertes
carries on this rôle. He has a father killed and sister lost. He represents the gathering urgency toward
precipitate action in Hamlet's own mind.

The ocean, overpeering of his list,

Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste

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Than young Laertes.

Hamlet says earlier:—

With wings as swift

As meditation or the thoughts of love,

May sweep to my revenge.

Hamlet (in ego rôle) says to Laertes (in super-ego rôle):

Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:

If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,

And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,

Then Hamlet does it not.

Who does it, then? His madness: If't be so,

Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd:

His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.

In the final debâcle Hamlet is killed by Laertes, that is, super-ego kills ego. He is hoodwinked to his
death by Laertes, by his own super-ego. Here one remembers that Laertes acts on the suggestion of
Claudius, and we see in dramatic form what Freud has formulated in psycho-analysis, that in the
unconscious the super-ego and the id have their own alliances.
Punishment falls on Hamlet at last. He voices it as being the desert of every man.
Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?'
At that moment, he disentangles himself from the introjected object and kills Claudius.
The occasion of Hamlet's betrayal to death is the challenge to a duel with Laertes, a sadistic challenge
that he cannot resist. He is at the mercy of his own super-ego sadism. He is unconscious of it. He is
taken off his guard.

He, being remiss,

Most generous and free from all contriving,

Will not peruse the foils.

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It is this urgency of the sadism of the super-ego that leads me to assert that fundamentally the
impatience of Hamlet, not procrastination, is the central problem of the play.
Mourning needs the factor of time. Melancholia needs longer still. Hamlet could not tolerate this
waiting time, the self-depreciation, loss of love and impoverishment of spirit implicit in this state. To
penetrate to the root of this fundamental impatience we must turn for help to the dramatic
representations of the other love-objects, the mother and Ophelia.
Ophelia presents to us precisely the same problem as Hamlet. It is the same motif in the woman as in
the man. She has a father killed. Hamlet's death is a dramatized suicide, super-ego and ego rôles
being allotted to different characters. In Ophelia the different institutions of the mind are not
separated out. We are given the facts. Her father is killed; she goes mad; she drowns herself. That is
an epitome of the elaborated dramatized suicidal theme of the whole play. It implies what is explicit
in the play, namely, a narcissistic withdrawal after the father's death, the incorporation of the lost love-
object, the reproaches against this loved one directed to the self, and the swift nemesis brought about
by the super-ego sadism turned against the ego. The reproach against the father (Polonius) was clearly
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that of frustration. The living person towards whom her suicide is a hostile act, the person from whose
heart her death will wring pity and remorse, is the Queen (the mother-imago). To the Queen, Ophelia
turns first in her madness.
Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?
The Queen says
I will not speak with her.
Ophelia puts on a garland of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.

In the water, symbolical of the mother's womb, she is

Like a creature native and indued

Unto that element …

Her garments are 'heavy with their drink'. She has returned to the mother, the separation from whose
breast was the pattern on which all later frustrations, with their unsolved problems of anxiety and
hostility, were built.
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The theme of 'madness' in the Hamlet rôle is worked out completely in the Ophelia rôle. Hamlet
assumes 'an antic disposition'. But there is no 'assumption' of it when Hamlet speaks to Laertes; he
confesses that he has partially lost control.

'If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,

And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,

Then Hamlet does it not.'

In Ophelia the madness is manifest, whereas in Hamlet we see the struggle being waged. This
madness is an urgency to self-destruction. Hamlet's procrastination is a vain endeavour to stem the
tide of this urgency, an ekeing-out of time. It is an elaborate slowness to combat swiftness, against
which he is battling for self-preservation. Ophelia is then the feminine aspect of Hamlet. Speaking of
Hamlet, the Queen says:

Anon, as patient as the female dove,

When that her golden couplets1 are disclos'd
His silence will sit drooping.
Hamlet speaking of himself, says:
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice.
The meaning of the feminine identification is clear in the text. The mother is the castrator. The play
abounds in symbols of this type.

'the sepulchre

Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,

To cast thee up again.

Tis now the very witching time of night

When churchyards yawn.'

Queen Gertrude has a second husband. The player Queen says:

'A second time I kill my husband dead,

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When second husband kisses me in bed.'

The feminine identification achieves the castration of the father in the feminine way. We have every
evidence of this in the play. The theme of a 'trap' occurs constantly. Polonius sets a trap to pry on his
son. Hamlet catches Polonius in a trap, when he hides behind the arras. Claudius makes a trap for
catching Hamlet in sending him to England. Hamlet is trapped into a duel with Laertes. 'Springes to
catch woodcocks', says Polonius to Ophelia, referring to Hamlet's
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overtures. 'As a woodcock to mine own Springe', says the dying Laertes. Denmark is a prison. Hell
is a trap. Death is 'an eternal cell'. Says Hamlet to Ophelia:
Hamlet:
That's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs.
Ophelia:
What is, my lord?
Hamlet:
Nothing.
The climax of the play is the performance by the players of the Murder of Gonzalo. It is the
quintessence of the story. Hamlet arranges for it to be played. He names it himself 'The Mouse-Trap'.
It is designed to 'catch the conscience of the King'. That is, Hamlet in the feminine rôle plays the part
of the entrapper, the castrator of the father. This brings us directly to the reproaches which he makes
against his mother. The first of these is haste, urgency.

'the funeral baked-meats

Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.'

'A little month, or ere those shoes were old

With which she follow'd my poor father's body,

Like Niobe, all tears …'

This reproach against his mother for the speed with which she married again is to be understood
further in the light of the infantile phantasies of sexual intercourse that are revealed.

'She would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on'.

'So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd,

Will sate itself in a celestial bed

And prey on garbage.'

'Have you eyes?

Could you on this fair mountain have to feed

And batten on this moor?'

Claudius is a drunkard.
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'The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,

Keeps wassail …

And, as he drinks his draughts of Rhenish down …'

In the final scene the Queen precipitately drinks to Hamlet's fortune. Claudius tries to stop her.
I will, my Lord. I pray you, pardon me.
We reach along this route the furthest regression of the libido to the oral zone, to the phantasies of the
relationship between the parents
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in terms of the earliest Oedipus setting, that of mutual feeding. The frustration at the breast, the loss of
love, the reproach against the mother lead to an identification with her, for she feeds on the father.
That the fundamental problem is the oral sadism attendant upon oral frustration is clear enough in the
text of the play.

'I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave's offal'.

'Now could I drink hot blood'

'We fat all creatures, else to fat us'

'The ocean

Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste

Than young Laertes'.

Oral frustration, oral impatience, oral sadism are inseparable.
The super-ego sadism turns upon the ego and destroys it when that ego is identified with the
frustrating love-objects. Yet the sadistic super-ego, as we know, being unconscious, has its alliances
with the destructive, hostile, aggressive id-impulses that in the oral stage manifest themselves in eating
phantasies directed against the parents.

'Now could I drink hot blood'.

'Woo't drink up Esill? eat a crocodile?

I'll do't'.
In this oral stage the loved object is a property. The mother is a breast, the father a penis, both of them
adjuncts only to the baby's need for food, love, protection. The necessity to keep them as personal
property is rooted in the anxiety that hostility causes when frustration occurs.
The theme of personal property is not only to be found in the Hamlet theme, but we find that also for
the murdered King and for Claudius the Queen is a 'possession'.

'Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand

Of life, of crown, of Queen, at once despatch'd'.

'Since I am still possess'd

Of those effects for which I did the murder,

My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.

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May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?'

There was a popular superstition in Shakespeare's time that spirits returned to earth to guard hidden
treasure.
Horatio, in addressing the ghost, says:
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'If thou hast uphoarded in thy life

Extorted treasure in the womb of earth

For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,

Speak of it'.
The 'prostitute' theme swings to and fro between the man and woman. Claudius is 'the bloat King'
who 'paddles in your neck with his damned fingers'. The Queen 'battens on this moor'. Proud Death
holds the final feast in her eternal cell.
The 'prostitute', male and female, is rooted at the oral level, where mother and father are merged into
one figure. 'My mother: father and mother is man and wife: man and wife is one flesh: and so, my
mother'.
From this parasitic dependence we see the constant struggles towards freedom.

'Duller should'st thou be than the fat weed

That roots itself in ease on Lethe's wharf,

Would'st thou not stir in this?'

'O liméd soul, that struggling to be free

Art more engag'd!'

Hamlet's other self is Horatio. He is what Hamlet wishes to be.
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing.
He is not

'A pipe for fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please'.

As Horatio takes the poisoned cup to drink it, Hamlet dashes it from him.

'As thou'rt a man

Give me the cup: let go: by heaven, I'll have't'.

'As thou'rt a man'. Horatio must speak for Hamlet; Horatio must do what Hamlet has not been able to
do. The whole story of the tragedy lies in Hamlet's injunction to Horatio:

'Absent thee from felicity awhile

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story'.
This absence from felicity, the breath of pain in a harsh world, Hamlet could not bear.

'Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, death,

Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—

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But let it be!'

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The tragedy of Hamlet is one of impatience. Fortinbras takes the stage. He succeeds to the kingdom
left by the deaths of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet.

'I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,

Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.'

So Shakespeare, having externalized and elaborated the inner conflict on his father's death, kept the
course of sanity. It is perhaps the range and depth of this power to dramatize the inner forces of the
soul that made him at once the world's greatest playwright and a simple normal man.
To read Freud and Abraham on the subject of mourning and melancholia alongside with Hamlet is to
be impressed again with the majesty of human achievement. Science and art here fit exactly; they are
completely wedded.
In the endeavour to probe the working of the human mind, science and art are both indispensable.
Scientists will fail unless there is fused with science something of creative art; the artist will fail unless
he has the detachment and objectivity of the scientist. Psychoanalysis is both science and art. Freud,
and the followers of Freud with something of courage akin to his, lay bare in their own minds and the
minds of others the dramas that the great poets project on to the world's stage.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Sharpe, E. (1929). The Impatience of Hamlet. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 10:270-279