Umberto Eco on Aesthetic Mythopoeia (2): Hamlet (and Shakespeare)
from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
According to Eliot, Hamlet is the result of an unsuccessful
fusion of several previous versions, so the bewildering ambiguity of the
main character is due to the difficulty the author had in putting
together several topoi. Hamlet is certainly a disturbing work
in which the psychology of the character strikes us as impossible to
grasp. Eliot tells us that the mystery of Hamlet is clarified
if, instead of considering the entire action of the drama as being due
to Shakespeare’s design, we see the tragedy as a sort of poorly made
patchwork of previous tragic material.
[...]
In several ways the play is puzzling, disquieting as none of the others is. Shakespeare left in unnecessary and incongruent scenes that ought to
have been spotted on even the hastiest revision. Then there are
unexplained scenes that would seem to derive from a reworking of Kyd’s
original play perhaps by Chapman. In conclusion, Hamlet is a
stratification of motifs that have not merged, and represents the
efforts of different authors, where each one put his hand to the work of
his predecessors. So, far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the
play is an artistic failure.
NB: In fact, what T.S. Eliot says about Hamlet in "Hamlet and His Problems" can be said virtually about any other Shakespeare play, as Hamlet is neither "more disquieting" nor less "ramshackled" and "unhinged" than almost any other of the Bard's plays, specifically his "great tragedies" (not excluding even the fairly brief and compact—possibly even severly cut—Macbeth).
