Shakespeare's Failure

If T.S. Eliot is going to label Shakespeare's Hamlet a failure in "Hamlet and His Problems," I believe he needs to be more specific in his definition of what constitutes an artistic "failure."




Eliot claims that the play "is most certainly an artistic failure" because the playwright is unable to provide a concrete emotion to drive the play forward, and so turns to "buffoonery" to make up for his own inadequacy.




Eliot condemns critics such as Goethe and Coleridge for "the substitution--of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's--which their creative gift effects." In other words, he finds these critics guilty of adding emotions and motives not directly in the play instead of "treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare's design."



However, Eliot bases his own critique on the foundation that Shakespeare's Hamlet "bears strong evidence" of being adapted from a play by Thomas Kyd known as Spanish Tragedy and therefore views the play not on its own terms, but on how well it holds up to Kyd's alleged original content.


In this case, to constitute the play a "failure" in this way is not only hypocritical, it is almost an irony. For not only is he reading and discussing the play, he is reading and discussing other readings and discussions of it!


If the goal of art is to cause a reaction or to stand the test of time, Shakespeare's Hamlet has gone above and beyond. Eliot can make all the claims he desires about whether or not it is a failed attempt by Shakespeare, but the fact of the matter is that he is still reading and dissecting it over 300 years after it was written, and so am I.