ABSTRACT
As Hamlet deeply mourns the loss of his father and struggles to make sense of the world around him, his soul becomes intoxicated by his unruly emotions, pushing him to the edge of madness. Truly in this Dionysian state of pure ecstasy, Hamlet transcends the natural and ordinary bounds of existence. By immersing himself in anger, confusion, and harbored contemptuousness toward his uncle-turned-king, Claudius, and the injustices surrounding the legitimacy of his kingship, Hamlet desperately searches for order and truth in the world around him but is left disappointed and without a spirit-satisfying answer. The young Nietzsche’s profound insights into the dark and wild nature of Hamlet’s soul in The Birth of Tragedy tastefully characterizes Hamlet as courageous in his willfulness to glance into the nauseating and unsettling truth of reality, but in spite of his willful bravery, there is also a will-negation, hence Hamlet’s inability to move to action because he cannot distance himself from his melancholy. “In this sense,” writes Nietzsche,
To authentically glance into reality to the point at which the ground of the soul, that once found its solace in comfort and familiarity, is unsettled and jolted, is to move the soul in a peculiar and gripping way that illuminates in terror and grief, the absurdity of existence. When the soul is imperiled in this way and finds itself at a juncture, ironically churned by its lethargic state, this is where art bewitches the soul and serves as a redemptive and healing “enchantress.” Art alone for Nietzsche has the power to transform these horrible reflections on the terror and absurdity of existence into “notions” in which living becomes palatable. For Nietzsche, “these are the representations of the sublime as the artistic conquest of the awful, and of the comic as the artistic discharge from the disgust of the absurd.”3 The conquest of Hamlet’s soul to transform his gut-wrenching experiences is necessary if he is ever to become fit to take his rightful place as the one true King of Denmark. It so happens that in the bittersweet gift of madness, Hamlet wrestles his demons into disciplined action and puts his disordered soul back into its proper order, opposed to being ruled by his inordinate passions and emotions, and despairing over his initial juvenile submission. Hamlet does not merely feign madness, other than the single instance where he pretends to be mad for the gross, empty laughter of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.4 Even then, Hamlet’s soul is still muddled with confusion-sick with resentment, stricken with grief, bereft of all common sense; his soul is inflicted by a thousand tugs and pulls, this way and that, making “driving” quite impossible in his inebriated state.5
