The Reception of Hamlet

Summary

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -

Almost, at times, the Fool.

T. S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Prufrock speaks for much of the twentieth century in his inability to conceive of being Hamlet the Prince. By 1917, when this poem was published, Hamlet the prince had been deflected into a Prufrock figure, ever failing to make decisions: 'There will be time to murder and create . . . And time yet for a hundred indecisions'; and in the end Prufrock will not dare to 'Disturb the universe'. Although our first impression from the poem is of someone like Polonius, and although Prufrock denies he is Prince Hamlet, reminding us of a royal authority figure, there is no prince in the poem, but only, as the centre of attention and of self-consciousness, Prufrock, who presents himself as an embodiment of what had become known as Hamletism. Perhaps no other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in any other author's works, have been converted into a noun expressive of an attitude to life or 'philosophy', as we say, and a verb (to Hamletize). Adjectives like Falstaffian, and nouns like Micawberism, relate to the idiosyncrasies of these characters, whereas Hamletism has a wider resonance, representing a body of ideas abstracted from a character already extrapolated from the play Hamlet.

Hamletism as a term had become established by the 1840s, and came to have a range of meanings, all interconnected, and developed from an image of Hamlet as well-intentioned but ineffectual, full of talk but unable to achieve anything, addicted to melancholy, and sickened by the world around him, - in short, the Hamlet of the first and third soliloquies: Hamlet contemplating self-slaughter, speaking of death as a kind of sleep, or confronting death as he examines the skulls in the graveyard scene.