《哈姆雷特》的新历史主义解读视角下的多元伊丽莎白时代历史实景

《哈姆雷特》的新历史主义解读视角下的多元伊丽莎白时代历史实景［摘要］关于文艺复兴中伊丽莎白时代社会与思想研究的著作大都集中于对伊丽莎白时代思想的综合总结性分析，而在统一化的结论中往往掩盖或忽略了该文化背景中多元异质的各种相互冲突的力量与声音。

本文以新历史主义视角出发，试图重新发掘并突显《哈姆雷特》作品中体现的伊丽莎白其社会与思想动荡语境中呈现的矛盾性、多元异质性。

［关键词］哈姆雷特；异质；新历史主义；多元性［Abstract］Distinguished from the previous synthetic analysis of the Elizabethan minds which reconciles and reinforces the dogmatized conceptions of the Elizabethan worldview, this paper, informed of New Historicism, aims to reevoke the contradictory and heterogeneous embroiled in the ferment of Elizabethan social and intellectual background in Hamlet and thus provides an interpretive possibility thereof.［Key words］Hamlet,heterogeneity,New Historicism,multiplicity As regards the contradictoriness that highlights the tragic conflicts in Hamlet, various scholarly attempts resort to an all-embracing historical background in philosophical thinking marked by the binary oppositions.In addressing the binary oppositions that evoke conflicts in Hamlet, Theodore Spencer demonstrates in his landmark book Shakespeare and the Nature of Man that it is in Hamlet’s character Shakespeare presents the common felt experience in Elizabethan thought: the discovery of the stark disparity between “the ideal of man as he should be and the real of man as he is” (122). In the en d, it is through the tragic real experience rather than theory, Spencer argues that Hamlet becomes more aware of the world’s order. He has transcended his own situation. During the course of the play Hamlet develops a more resigned worldview. This reconciliation has both matured and ennobled Hamlet. However, if we tpIn the book Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, McAlindon provides a more complex philosophical thinking background through his revisionist effort in modifying the fixed order proposed by Tillyard and upheld by Spencer. After the meticulous accounts of philosophical thinking generated from Platonism to Medievalism, McAlindon states that Elizabethan thought is dialectically composed of two modes of thinking: the first one is the stable order proposed by Tillyard, while the second complementary one is an unstable opposition with dual and binary forces that are thought to be interdependent and interactive, being ready to collapse into each other. (102-125) McAlindon’s is an attempt that tries to complicate the oversimplified worldview proposed in the old historical criticism in their addressing the problems of binaries in Hamlet. However, its theoreticalelaboration on Hamlet is weakly derived from elemental images that fail to unravel the play’s moral and psychological conundrums.The above efforts of Spencer and McAlindon are concentrated on the theoretical formulations and solutions of binary oppositions that characterize Shakespeare’s tragic plays. On the one hand, their interpretations help to yield a consistent intellectual foundation manifest in Shakespeare’s tragic conflicts. On the other, their effort in synthesizing the Elizabethan minds rest in and further reinforce our rigid and dogmatized conceptions of the Elizabethan worldview, thus they lose sight of the heterogeneous forces that are equally persuasive against the mainstream and also irreducible to the pure intellectual reasoning. This paper aims to re-evoke the contradictory conundrums against the ferment of Elizabethan social and intellectual background in Hamlet and provides an interpretive possibility thereof.As we all know, much of what Hamlet offers to readers is sustainably equivocal. Critics always tend to disagree with each other. Privileging either side over the other would yield tantalizing yet biased interpretation. Because in the Elizabethan age, despite our commonly conceived picture of the Elizabethan world as an “unaltered” form from the medieval, the recent scholarship has discovered that it was also an age marked by “complexity and variety, inconsistency and fluidity.” (Elton180) Stephen Greenblatt argues that in every society, various perspectives and thoughts are vying for recognition in the form of circulation. Although most of the time the dominant one would triumph over the other, the other side does not dissolve immediately rather sprouting into some form of being as opposed to the mainstream one. So critics should avoid a totalizing version of history by resisting “a historicism based upon faith in the transparency of sig ns and interpretative procedures” (Greenblatt 143).From the very beginning of the play, Hamlet has been endlessly oscillating between various conflicting sides and equally assertive points of view. Political and religious upheavals generates multi-layered and various assertive thoughts. The age of Renaissance saw the birth of humanism, skepticism, analogism and, more importantly, philosophical and theological confusions.Firstly, skepticism is a speculation brought up by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Montaigne. Montaigne writes in one of his essay of skepticism: “That the taste of Goods or Evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them.” (Knowles 1052) In the early scene, Hamlet expresses this same relativist idea once when he says to Rosencrantz: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” (II. ii. 247-248) In Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “to be or not to be”, itsmetaphysical dimension shouldn’t be ignored apart from the more prevalent understanding of its earthly contemplation of life and death. Rather than the phrase: “to live or to die”, “to be or not to be” takes on more metaphysical significance of skeptical speculation philosophically.It should also be noted that these contradictions aren’t presented only in contemplation of Hamlet but also in dubious turns of events in the play. For example, for all the seriousness of Hamlet’s prolonged ponderings over this revenge and his precious determination that he finally determines to muster up, Hamlet indignantly kills a man that is not the guilty Claudius but Polonius — a death we tend to regard almost as Hamlet does, as a bad joke. This turn of events is a sharp deconstructive element that threatens the seriousness of the play. And finally, Hamlet’s revenge achieves itself without his seeking during a duel that Hamlet fights very reluctantly. This turn of events also threatens to undermine the due relationship between thought and action. There has been heated discussion of the relationship between thought and action in the play. No matter which we choose, we also neglect a third possible choice, that there is no relationship between them in some turn of events. And this verges on absurdity.As presented in Hamlet, similar traces of thought can be detected in accordance with Montaigne, yet it never means that Hamlet is aphilosophical playground for skepticism, because Hamlet is in abundance with juxtaposition of assertive oppositions rather than assimilation of the two opposite forces.Secondly, this indeterminate tone of the play Hamlet is set in the very beginning when Shakespeare deliberately places contradiction of religious confusion. The time in which Shakespeare’s Hamlet was performed was one of great religious confusing tumult for Elizabethans of the conflicting beliefs between the long-held Catholicism and the newly established Protestantism. Young Hamlet is a student in Wittenberg, an allusion to Protestantism, while old Hamlet’s ghost is placed in purgatory, an obvious allusion to Catholicism.Religious tumult was at its peak in the Elizabethan world. Even at the end of the play, most of our theological speculations of Hamlet can only be tentative or even insoluble. For example, Critics have been at some pains to make theological sense out of the situation at Elsinore, but in vain. Various scholars have argued that the court is Catholic, while others have demonstrated that it can only be Protestant. But if it is Protestant, what are we to make of a purgatorial ghost in a system of belief that rejects the existence of the purgatorial? And Ophelia’s burial ceremony is also characteristically Catholic. But if, on the other hand, the court is Catholic, why is no mention made of dissenting voices from thepublic against the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude, and what has Hamlet been doing at Wittenberg evocative of Martin Luther and Protestantism?Finally, it should be noticed that towards the end of the play, Shakespeare begins to shy away from Hamlet’s self-expression in soliloquy, a form of literary expression that is unreliable when it comes to the analysis of a character’s inner changes. The last soliloquy of Hamlet is performed when he sees Fortinbras’troop, which ends in “My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (IV. iv. 68) From then on, there’s no trace of any clear and wholly reliable inner changes expressed by Hamlet in the form of soliloquy. Shakespeare is more willing to leave Hamlet in more complex and multiple explanations than any typical characterization, because audience tends to secure a protagonist’s final state of mind from his or her last reliable inner expression. Hamlet himself also defies and resents the intrusive effort of others who think they can figure him out clearly:“Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make ofme! You would play upon me; you would seem to knowmy stops; you would pluck out the heart of mymystery; ……do you think I ameasier to be played on than a pipe? Call me whatinstrument you will, though you can fret me, yet youcannot play upon me.” (III. ii. 355-364)Samuel Johnson comments that “［Shakespeare］is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose” (Johnson 71). Though Johnson detects the irresolvable contradictions abound in Hamlet that defy moral-oriented purpose, he neglects the richness of Shakespeare’s contradictions. Shakespeare allows us to put some trust in the promise of getting at the absolute truth, but he also jostles us out of the absoluteness of ideas in some most radical ways. In To Be and Not to Be, Calderwood finds that Shakespeare juxtaposes different and sometimes even self-contradictory elements so that the audience is drawn into a world of denials and contradictions with which they deconstructing and then reconstructing into a paradox. (Taylor 89)In the tumultuous Elizabethan age, Shakespeare is posited in the circulation of conflicting and contradictory thoughts having cropped up everywhere. The Globe Theatre was constantly holding audiences with different minds. Rather than solving those complexities andcontradictions, Shakespeare exercises them to the fullest extent that excites and inspires dramatic responses from the audience. Interpretations of the play have become more reflexive of the audience’likes and dislikes rather than the author’s moralizing intention. Thus, the traditional synthesizing and one-sided reading of Hamlet’s ending is both reductive and dangerous, because it ignores other opposing tendencies or elements that are also energetically assertive, which interweave complexities and dramatic effects in Hamlet and the plenitude of what we call “Reality”.【Notes 】①For instance, Hamlet’s personal religious disorder shouldn’t be ignored. Upon Polonius’undeserved death, Hamlet soothingly says in a pacified tone ‘but heaven hath pleased it so’, which indicates his resigned view to the world’s order manifest in the early scene rather than a late acquisition as suggested by Spencer. Moreover, the irresolute contradictoriness in the play is evoked between Hamlet’s “readiness is all” (which i s too much privileged by Spencer) and his uncontrollable rage unleashed in his fight with Laertes in the graveyard scene.【References 】［1］Elton, W.R. 1971. A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies［C］//Kenneth Muir, S. Schoenbaum. London: Cambridge University Press.[2] Greenblatt, Stephen. 2007. Learning to Curse［M］.New York: Routledge.[3] Knowles, Ronald. 1999. Hamlet and Counter-Humanism ［J］.Renaissance Quarterly, 52(4).[4] McAlindon, Thomas. 1996. Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos ［M］.New York: Cambridge University Press.[5] Johnson, Samuel. 1978. Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose［M］.California: California University Press.[6] Shakespeare, William. 1999. Hamlet［M］.Foreign Languages Press.[7] Spencer, Theodore. 1942. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man ［M］.New York: Macmillan.[8] Taylor, Michael. 2001. Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century［M］.New York: Oxford University Press.。