Making "Young Hamlet".(Critical essay)

Matthew Harkins. Making "Young Hamlet"

While youth's subordinate position in Hamlet has played a vital role within the play's critical tradition, this tradition has not questioned the ideological processes that create "youth" as a social category--that define what youth means, whom it includes, and why. Rather than portray an archetypal contest between the young and the old or portray Hamlet's developmental progression from youth to maturity, the play examines the production and application of these categories as political phenomena. By exposing the circumscribed logic that produces these categories. Hamlet fractures the ideological justifications for early modern constructions of youth and age.

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The stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology

--Roland Barthes (1)

How old is Hamlet, and why does it matter? If the first question echoes the literal-minded curiosity of both A. C. Bradley and A. A. Jack, the second question recalls more recent investigations of youth's thematic significance for the play. (2) In pairing The Tragedy of King Lear with The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Alexander Welsh remarks that one play reveals "pity for the old and the other for the young," explaining that "Hamlet shows how wretched it is to await power that only accrues from the death of parents." (3) Barbara Everett similarly argues that Hamlet's youth matters as an expression of the unenviable position of the young who "had, or resentfully wished not to have, a place in sixteenth-century society." (4) Yet Welsh's and Everett's observations raise as many questions as they answer, for Hamlet reveals young men denied power even after the death of their fathers: Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras are deliberately coded as young in order to deny them mature status and prolong their subservience. Further, in describing the limitations placed on early modern youth, Everett points to restrictive and stereotyped roles rather than the criteria and cultural processes that decided who fit into these roles. Recognizing early modern conventions of youth still leaves unsolved the problem of how to read young men such as Hamlet in relation to them. Put simply, the mystery of Hamlet's age raises a broader conceptual question about the social constructions of youth: what does it mean to call Hamlet young?

When Horatio refers to "young Hamlet" at the close of the play's first scene, he distinguishes between a father and son with the same name. (5) But beyond differentiating between generations, calling someone "young" becomes more complicated. "Young" and "old" are relative descriptors, adjectives that stem from and point to a series of social relations among people whose ages may fall anywhere on a gradual continuum. To split this continuum into discrete parts and characterize these parts in different ways is an inherently political act. While received customs and traditions mask the ideological implications of such acts, to naturalize such divisions as self-evident allows an individual or social group both to obscure and to capitalize on their political significance. Gabriel Harvey's notes on Hamlet--the earliest written criticism of the play--illustrate the processes and effects of this phenomenon perfectly: "the younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort." (6) Here, critical response splits neatly into two camps: "the younger" and "the wiser." Harvey does not worry about maintaining the consistency of his parallelism. Rather, he falls back on a binary understanding of social order that might seem self-evident to a politically connected pedagogue in his fifties: youth is the opposite of wisdom. Furthermore, this convenient pairing bolsters Harvey's taste and critical authority, establishing his approval of the play as wise by virtue of the very distinction it makes.