A World of Mice

How sweet it is to human haughtiness to instil into the young minds, from early childhood, the idea that the adults' generation comprises only perfect beings! Who would not be thrilled with joy upon hearing his own blood offspring speak of him in encomiastic terms? Everybody's self-esteem exults when the bourgeois "perfect education" is achieved (it actually began its triumphant march as early as Shakespeare's time), that can be synthesized in the simple statement: your parents are everything. The cult of the parents implies their worshipping by mitigation of any sense of criticism as to their nature. Mother cannot lie; father cannot be wrong; mother is fair and pure, devoid of meanness; father knows no fear, no stumbling, no defeat. They are both beautiful, brave, intelligent, sensible, balanced, faultless. The universal chorus sang such praising in a crescendo that the older society brought to a triumph in the Victorian age (what a false note, however!). The words of the hymn were being dictated by the morals of family power: how holy are my parents! The Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, would so much have become the soloist of this general music before his mother's second wedding! And, as things go with any eulogistic chorus, the praises it piles up in adulation prove so ridiculous.

The temptation of such an education is also the temptation of an unsuspected trap. The wish to be considered perfect implies being revealed as imperfect at some time or other, unless one submits to the painful trials imposed along the road to perfection, since we are all born anything but perfect; it is only by relentless personal effort that we strive for perfection. How many parents, out of their huge numbers that peopled the bourgeois centuries of Europe , actually felt a desire for self-perfection? And behold, this crowd greedy of their offsprings' praises fell into their own deception and lay exposed to the sarcasm of the same inheritors they would have seen submitted as before a God made in the image of the family head. What a sordid comedy must have been played in that Northern royal city, too, at the time when Hamlet was still playing under the table, on all (princely) four, and was not in the least prepared to become the hero of a tragedy: "Hamlet, your mother, the Queen, is a saint! Why do you upset her?" Or: "Hamlet, the King, your father, is a hero! Why do you yawn when he speaks?!"

With such leading ideas did the young, plump Prince leave for school. Years later, when suddenly recalled by a different king who claimed he was his father, the Prince found his mother living almost in incest and his true father - a rather indolent father who was cuckolded even more than in Boccaccio's Decameron - slain by his own brother; there went to pieces another myth of Hamlet's boyhood, that of the worthy and noble uncle. Did they undergo such radical changes unexpectedly? - the young philosopher wonders. Of course not, he answers himself, well-inspired. What he sees today has long been there, in their character, as a would-be. But still, he goes on tormenting his soul, what I felt yesterday in my mother's words and behaviour, what I have loved and admired all my life, why should all that have vanished? Why should motherhood be less lasting than imoral inclinations? A mother never stops being a mother unless you reveal her parricide face, which is the very thing Hamlet's father's ghost points to: "GHOST: [.] Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught. " ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene V); or: "GHOST: [.] But, look, amazement on thy mother sits: o, step between her and her fighting soul. " ( Hamlet - Act III, Scene IV). And he entrusts her to the son's care.

This is how the dychotomic-antonymical vision of reality finds its way into the thinking of the august Danish crown-prince. Likewise, Claudius enjoys the uncle aura and shows his fratricidal face. Not to mention Hamlet's father: the old King concentrates the entire Olympus in the skin of one man, as his own son heralds; but he is also a poor "old mole" ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene V). He is a "mole" not because he manages now, for fear of dawn or of "hell's punishment" to creep in no time under the face of the earth, but because he lived as one, with his eyes in the ground. Legendary him! - unaware of the exchanges of inviting eyes that took place above his absent-minded head. The shock of meeting his father's ghost and of being revealed the monstruous crime is far too terrible for Hamlet to mock the state of tormented spirit his father has reached; he only jokes bitterly referring to his father having been a "blind mole" of a husband, which led him to his tragical termination. The "mole" was to Claudius his " sleeping. brother " ( ibidem ), whose confidence he took advantage of to reach his ambitious purpose. In their relationships to Hamlet before the demise of the old monarch, the Queen was a perfect mother, the King a perfect father, and Claudius a perfect uncle. After his death, Hamlet discovers their other faces, too, those pre-existing to the discovery itself and simultaneous to the ones he knew - the faces those other people showed one another in the relationships they entertained among them: the Queen was incestuous, the King - a cuckold, and Claudius - an incestuous future fratricide. The Prince is now aware of both faces of reality. He is on the verge of a crisis in his thinking.

The crisis bursts out. Which does not mean that he went without noticing beforehand, however sporadically, the courtiers' ambivalent behaviour. We are told about Hamlet that "his ruling passion is to think, not to act" ; with his life divided between his academic studies and the Court, he had the opportunity to observe, on the one hand, fair natures such as Horatio's, and, on the other hand, personalities with a dychotomic-antonymical behaviour which is unavoidable when it comes to intrigues that have brought Polonius, for instance, to the high position of counsellor. Advice such as he gives Reynaldo, to spy on his own blood-relative Laertes, the meditation-prone Prince must have heard or guessed many times: "LORD POLONIUS: [.] .and finding by this encompassment and drift of question that they do know my son [he refers to other Danes in Paris] , come you more nearer than your particular demands will touch it. Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him; as thus, 'I know his father and his friends, and in part him. " ( Hamlet - Act II, Scene I) a.s.o. Polonius ends up by recommending his method of slyness devoted to learning the truth. In modern times, this is called "challenging": he puts down all sorts of wrong-doings to his son, hoping to learn about the true ones.

Such approaches did not yet embarrass Hamlet: they were the customary political tools of his age. He despised them perhaps, as a scholar, but they did not concern him in any way. When he sees that the persons closest to him live by the same standards, however, his inner balance is shattered. Shattered, yes, but not broken. Obviously, he cannot go on with his life as he has so far, for the world around him is no longer the same (as it used to be reflected by his conscience, anyway). The individuals cannot remain unconcerned with society. Whenever they feels different from it, they make their best to fit in. Alienation from society leeds to self-alienation, since personality is, to a great extent, a social product. Self-alienation leeds to alienation. What if society (the social group, in this case) estranges itself from its own essence? The individuals substantiate their connection with society by doing their best to set it again on its proper course. This is the case of all genuine heroes, martyrs, artists, thinkers, and scientists. But one cannot act as a stimulus of such a vital resetting when society feels one is a stranger to it. One should borrow its image and behaviour.

However, in Hamlet's mind, there is something going on that cannot be overlooked. The image and behaviour of those around him are marked, in his eyes, with the stamp of madness because he feels that a consistent dychotomic-antonymical thinking (that is, a counterfactual one) would drive him, at least, to madness. And he reckons: the others are not different from me or, if you like, I am not different from the others; hence, if such a behaviour that would make me conceal my true nature would also drive me to madness, it would drive them as well; it follows that, to be like them, I have to pretend to be mad, in order to summon everybody back from this unanimous madness to humanity's normal way of thinking.

This is the remote purpose, the reformer's purpose. It can be recognized in the bitterness of the famous meditation: "HAMLET: [.] So, oft it chances in particular men, that for some vicious mole of nature in them, as, in their birth - wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin - by the o'ergrowth of some complexion [.] , that these men, carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, being nature's livery, or fortune's star - their virtues else be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo - shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault. " ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene IV). From this passage we may infer the situation of the individual who alienates himself from society because he remains either in his natural or in his exceptional state of being. And the no less famous observation: "HAMLET: [.] The time is out of joint; o cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!. " ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene V) gives a verdict on the moment experienced by Hamlet's contemporary society. Upon corroborating his remark with Montaigne's aphorism saying that "Things taken off the hinges of habit seem to have been taken off the hinges of judgment, too" , we reach the conclusion that Hamlet needs madness in order to be accepted by his contemporary society "taken off hinges".

But Hamlet has another purpose as well: to check the truth concealed by the words of the ghost. He looks for proof, so he puts on the mask of madness, in accordance with the advice Polonius gives to the spy Reynaldo: he pretends not to know reality so he may know it better. We have covered this experiment elsewhere. Doctor Alexandru Olaru, from whom we have quoted before, expresses an original point of view in this respect: "No one has made use, the Shakespeare has in his work, of such procedures of psycho-therapy as psycho-drama and socio-drama. Whoever intends to master them has to address incessantly Shakespeare the psycho-therapist" , whom he later calls "an infallible psychiatrist" (p. 363). Referring to the said techniques initiated by "the American psychiatrist of Romanian origin J.L. Moreno" (p. 342), the shakespearologist doctor discovers them applied in detail in every play-within-play scene, in fragments of plays and, in certain cases, in entire plays. There is no place here to repeat Dr. Olaru's convincing analyses that the reader may find in his book Shakespeare and Dramatic Psychiatry , but, given what has been discussed so far, we find it necessary to add the opinion he voices in connection with the scene we are concerned with: "It is a psycho-drama that, beside his (that is, Hamlet's) inferring of the factual truth, frees him of psychic tension, strengthens his delirious conviction and thus brings him to a sort of euphoria-dominated catharsis.

Does the madness of the Danish crown-prince bear no more significance in the play? Discussing the writings of Lewinter and Groddeck, the French thinker Roland Jaccard pointed out that the disease, in the case of a great many patients (who are "proud" of it) is "a creation, like a work of art, more often than not the only one the individual proves capable of in his alienation". Another couple of authors inform us that psychoanalysis and psychosomatics manipulate the concept of "withdrawal into the disease": "Does the very fact of recognizing the efficiency of psychotherapy not mean, implicitly, that we admit a 'psychogenesis' of the disease? - they wonder, then add: "In those sectors of pathology dealing with conflicts and complex psychic adjustment to a complex environment, the disease acquires - up to a point - the features of a historical fact and leaves behind the features of a natural, reccurring, and reproducible fact. S ahleanu and Popescu-Sibiu quote the following authors as supporting these opinions: P. Cristian, V.V. Gebsattel, R. Siebeck, A. Mitscherlich, R.S. Lazarus, and G.L. Engel. Stress is the word of the day: it weakens the body's capacity to defend itself, but it can also represent a method of escaping a hopeless situation, it can be a reaction of hostility towards the environment, of seeking affection, of proving one's manhood through sufferring, of avoiding effort a.s.o.

Indeed, in the light of these results of contemporary medicine and psychology, for Hamlet, who is being denied the love of his relatives by their deceitful behaviour (which means he is being denied the certainty of survival, given the political rivalry opposing him to Claudius), the choice of pseudo-madness is not only a way of adjusting to society, not only a mask useful in descovering the truth, but a last resort whence he may state his freedom. He now depends entirely on the King, his uncle. He wants to return to the university, but is not allowed (unlike Laertes who receives permission to leave for France); he is being ordered to leave for England, which he must do. Hamlet seems to have become a puppet stringed by Claudius, so he finds a solution to avoid acting the way his strings are being pulled. He chooses freedom under the mask of madness.

Doctor Sri Swami Sivananda, founder of the Indian ashram of Rikhikesh, claimed that the persons who worry often find refuge in some imaginary disease when they meet with difficulties, that they suffer from migraines or their stomachs give them pain without cause, that they eventually go see a doctor who finds no objective disorder, that such persons may often recover if they become interested in life in general or in the living things around them in particular. Hamlet, for one, is overwhelmed by concerns. He does not go so far as to perversely call forth his own disease, as we may suspect King Lear or Don Quixote do, because they prove unable to adjust their new experiences to the old ones. But the disease he fakes certainly helps reduce some of his suffering and supplies a diversion to his burdened soul.

The face of madness has another point, too: it helps Hamlet avoid another trap set before him by the sequence of events from his past, namely Ophelia's love for him. This love would definitely turn him into a slave of Polonius' counter-intelligence service. Marrying Ophelia or even making public his love for her would mean throwing himself willingly into the wolf's den. Because then talking to Polonius would no longer mean talking to a vassal, but listening to the father of his own beloved. As in the case of any permanent decision, Hamlet must free himself of any ballast that may keep him trapped by his former concerns, in order to create the necessary distance - that is, lucidity - whence he intends to evaluate his mother and uncle. How can he detach himself of Ophelia's love (because, under the new conditions, she becomes an extra ballast)? He cannot blame her for anything: she is candid and desinterested in her love for him. Madness, however, would make him unfit and unworthy of her pure love. Hence, madness is the solution to regain his freedom.

Each and every motivation above chooses madness as a unique provider of freedom.

Since we have mentioned the word "trap", let us stress the role of this image in the tragedy. A "trap" is a situational dychotomic-antonymical structure. It can be an object as well as a situation conceived in such a way as to either attract the presumable victim, or to feign indifference to it, while its other aspect represents a threat to the victim's life or freedom. It is, obviously, on the fiercest concoctions of dychotomic-antonymical thinking. There are traps of many sorts. In this here play, Shakespeare refers to the mouse-trap: " KING CLAUDIUS: What do you call the play? - HAMLET: The Mouse-trap. " ( Hamlet - Act III, Scene II), because Hamlet is disgusted with the world that surrounds him, as if it were a world of mice. And because he hopes that the play-within-play may help him catch the big mouse whose deeds have made the kingdom of Denmark all but collapse - it does that in the last scene, when Fortinbras takes the power in his hands - just like the other, lesser mice around him have gnawed at the very foundations of Danish honour and dignity.

Let us analyze the text. The play begins with a hint: "BERNARDO: Have you had quiet guard? - FRANCISCO: Not a mouse stirring " ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene I). There is absolute peace in the kingdom. These cues are exchanged on the terrace of one of the watch-towers. So down there, inside the castle, no mouse has stirred. There is peace in a mouse-trap as long as it does not function, that is, as long as no mouse stirs. The castle itself is a huge mouse-trap. As the reader remembers, the Ghost of Hamlet's father is soon apprehended with the words "old mole", because the former king himself had fallen into the trap. When he identifies his fate with his father's, Hamlet also gets caught in one: "HAMLET: [.] .to me it [Denmark] is a prison " ( Hamlet - Act II, Scene II). In the end of the same scene, while setting the trap in which he, too, means to catch Claudius, the Prince explains: " .the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king". In the monologue in which he ponders over suicide, the object of his fear is death's trap, that may also come in the guise of sleep: "HAMLET: [.] To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream. " ( Hamlet - Act III, Scene I). In the following scene, he feels oppressed again by the danger of the trap, after having been turned, like his father before him, into a mouse by a world of mice: " HAMLET: [.] Were you not sent for? [.] You were sent for; and there is a kind of confession in your looks. I know the good king and queen have sent for you " ( Hamlet - Act II, Scene II), he tells Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz. The behavioural and situational antonymical dychotomy is crystal-clear: the mice are being hunted, the mice themselves hunt. There are traps set for Hamlet, dar he himself sets traps. Claudius sets traps, but there are also traps set for him and he is the first to fall victim of the trap set by his adversary. The Prince rejoices, for he is summoned by his mother. He goes up. They have an embarassing conversation. The Queen exclaims: "QUEEN GERTRUDE: What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help, help, ho! " ( Hamlet - Act III, Scene IV). The curtain in the royal bedroom moves, so Hamlet imagines Claudius is hiding behind it. If Francisco were there in his stead, he would shout: "A mouse has stirred!" The movement of that mouse blows up the peace of the realm. The conflict that has been smouldering since the beginning of the play now breaks loose. Polonius - for he was the one hiding - panics: "LORD POLONIUS: [Behind] What, ho! help, help, help! " ( ibidem ). And Hamlet the revenger triumphs. He draws his sword, dashes upon the velvet folds that let somebody be guessed behind them, and cries out his victory: "HAMLET: [Drawing] How now! a rat?. " ( ibidem ). He thought it was the great rat, the head, the new Cain. The tension of the murder is difficult to appease. Hamlet's mind is still seething. When he addresses Gertrude, he comes back to the key-word: "HAMLET: [.] Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed; pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse. " ( ibidem ). A "mouse", then; and further on: "HAMLET: [.] For who, that's but a queen, fair, sober, wise, would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib, such dear concernings hide?. " ( ibidem ). In one and the same cue, the King is being named both "bat" and "gib" - that is, an old male-cat. Only a while before, Hamlet felt he was the male-cat chasing mice, now he feels again he is the hunted mouse himself: "HAMLET: I must to England; you know that? - QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alack, I had forgot: 'tis so concluded on. - HAMLET: There's letters seal'd: and my two schoolfellows, whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd, they bear the mandate; they must sweep my way, and marshal me to knavery. " ( ibidem ). But, in his turn, Claudius the "gib" is bound to feel a "rat" again: QUEEN GERTRUDE: [.] .in his lawless fit, behind the arras hearing something stir, whips out his rapier, cries, 'A rat, a rat!' and, in this brainish apprehension, kills the unseen good old man. - KING CLAUDIUS: O heavy deed! It had been so with us, had we been there. " ( Hamlet - Act IV, Scene I). So Hamlet sets the trap of his play-within-play for Claudius, who sets for Hamlet the trap of leaving for England, that the latter turns into a trap for his death-bearing travel companions, so it is again Claudius' turn to set for Hamlet one last trap, devised in complicity with Laertes: the poison sword and cup. During the fight, however, after he wounds the Prince, Laertes is himself wounded by the same weapon that eventually stabs even King Claudius. The son of Polonius admits, when asked by Osric: "OSRIC: How is't, Laertes? - LAERTES: Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric; I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery " ( Hamlet - Act V, Scene II). As a conclusion of the whole tragedy, Horatio summarizes the despicable traps in which the concocters themselves were caught by telling Fortinbras and the English ambassadors: "HORATIO: [.] .in this upshot, purposes mistook fall'n on the inventors' heads. " ( ibidem ).

While Horatio naturally fears that the ghost might affect the Prince's judgment: "HORATIO: What if it. might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?. " ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene IV), Hamlet is ready and willing to tread on the slippery turf of a well-defined psychological programming: "HAMLET: [.] 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 shall live within the book and volume of my brain. " ( Hamlet - Act I, Scene V). But his henceforth dominant feature has grown deep roots in his conscience, so he presently plans his madness-to-be: "HAMLET: [.] Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, how strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, as I perchance hereafter shall think meet. swear " ( ibidem ). So there is no doubt that his madness, far from being genuine, is a metaphorical dychotomic-antonymical behaviour, well-known to the world surrounding him and bound to help him stick to his unmasking plan all the way. Hamlet manages to prove his own madness consciously and willingly, and also to avoid its trap that he has feared so much, as if it meant his own death.

William Hazlitt, op.cit. (excerpt taken from www.library.utoronto.ca ).

Michel de Montaigne, op.cit. , I, 23, p. 107.

Alexandru Olaru, op.cit. , p. 362.

Roland Jaccard, "Georg Groddeck: la voie royale de la maladie", in Le Monde , December 6 th , 1974 .

Victor S ahleanu, Ion Popescu-Sibiu , Introducere critica la psihanaliza ( A Critical Introduction to Psychoanalysis ), Cluj-Napoca, Dacia Publishing House, 1972, pp. 282-283.

Sri Swami Sivananda, "Comment vaincre les soucis", in Yoga , Bruxelles, 2 nd year, February 15 th , 1965.



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