Freud and Hamlet?

osric deserves it.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, March 14, 2022 10:14 PM (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i disagree.

osric's chief sins are 1.) flattery and 2.) trying and failing to fit in with the manners of the nobility. he is a prosperous landowner, an image of the rising bourgeoisie who were, at shakespeare's time, trying to make inroads into the upper class. hamlet has infinite disdain for osric and his ambitions to rise above his station. but i wonder where shakespeare fits into it. shakespeare was bourgeois: the son of a glovemaker, he was sent to a school that taught latin and greek so he could fit in with the upper class. and as a theater director, he proved a canny businessman, accruing an impressive fortune in his lifetime. perhaps most pertinently, shakespeare's father was granted a coat of arms in 1596, three years before the staging of hamlet, signifying the fact that his family had made inroads into the aristocracy.

what does all this mean?

in the branaugh version, osric is stabbed by fortinbras's invading forces. this feels right to me. he is another rosencrantz, another guildenstern, another gatsby -- that is, a casualty of aristocratic recklessness.

class read on osric correct+insightful but continue to think that this--

hamlet has infinite disdain for osric and his ambitions to rise above his station

--is not quite right, or rather not complete? the first thing hamlet does is tell osric to put on his hat, which he has presumably removed because he is talking to the prince. when osric demurs, hamlet humiliates him in a reprise of the dost-thou-see-yonder-cloud exchange by "madly" contradicting himself line-to-line as his interlocutor agrees with whatever he says. when osric delivers his message, which is a trap to kill hamlet, hamlet dismisses him, describes him to horatio as someone who "complied with his dug before he sucked it" (obscure, and indeed v freudian lol, but having something to do surely with obedience as impulse that could not be embedded deeper), and says that just going along with "the tune of the time" doesn't get you anywhere. this plus the very in-character stoner musing he does here about his structural brother laertes, whom he does respect ("his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more") always makes me think hamlet's contempt is for osric's method: his willing subordination (to the king, to the times, and to the play).

of course hamlet's existential freedom (such as it is-- still in the bilboes of course) is precisely the royal prerogative. (it's why polonius warns ophelia off.) so yes he is being the snotty prince he always is, here. but i don't know that it's because osric is pretending to that prerogative himself-- instead he's contenting himself with dressing up its absence.

his structural brother laertes, whom he does respect

(but who does disappoint him in the end of course. laertes' fateful "i am satisfied in nature... but in terms of honor i stand aloof"... is being "satisfied in nature" what osric should be doing with "his dug", instead of neurotically "complying" with it? not that hamlet's the guy you think of when you think satisfied in nature lol. but this is after all act 5.)

question of whether osric is partly a mean self-portrait is fun. (i think he does this a lot w bit characters tbh-- sometimes because he's playing them.) the theater of course is not the most respectable or osrician way to build on a petitbourgeois legacy but it's definitely a way and shakes definitely did it. he also, unlike marlowe, survived it-- maybe by knowing when to turn on his osric.