Hamlet, advise

Dear Critic
Is it really possible to kill somebody by pouring poison into their ear?
Sincerely,
Concerned.

Dear Concerned.
Physiologically, no: it would be very difficult for a poisonous material to enter the bloodstream in sufficient quantities through the ear, unless there were extensive lacerations on the inside of the ear canal. But this is not what Shakespeare is getting at. The notion of Claudius pouring poison into Old Hamlet’s ears actually invokes the ancient trope of the Bad Advisor—the monarch’s councillor who offers bad advice, of the sort that might well prove fatal to the King. This character, the Bad Advisor pouring metaphorical, verbal ‘poison’ in a King’s ear is something that retains its potency in modern times. Think of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the damage wrought by the evil advisor Wormtongue. Think of the anxiety generated in the popular press by contemporary political advisors, the Alastair Campbells and spin doctors—unelected, unaccountable, yet capable of influencing Prime Ministers and Presidents to good or ill with their advice. How can we be sure whether the advice they are giving our leaders is good or bad?
Sincerely,
Critic


Dear Critic
I’m a student (a reader, an actor) and I have to study/read/perform Hamlet—and so I want to try to understand what’s going on in it. But it’s such a famous play, the most famous play of all; and there are so many layers upon layers of critical interpretation wrapped around it, much of it rebarbatively difficult, that I don’t know where to start. What is it about? Can you help me?
Sincerely,
Student/Reader/Actor


Dear Student/Reader/Actor
When a play has accreted as much commentary and analysis as Hamlet it does tend to become barnacled-over so thoroughly that it can barely sail any more—and yet the ‘proper’ critical answer to your question (which would go something like: ‘what is Hamlet about? It’s far too complex and enormous a text to be summarised in a brief sentence!) surely underplays precisely the power and immediacy of dramatic achievement that made the play a classic in the first place …

Hamlet is about many things: the situation in the Court at Elsinore is ‘about’ politics and the protocols of social interaction; the scenes with the ghost are ‘about’ the relations between the living and the dead; the main character is somebody who isn’t quite sure what he should do, and who is surrounded by people happy to offer him all sorts of, usually conflicting, advice. Indeed, it is advice in the broadest sense that is the heart of this play; the role of official political ‘advisors’; the advice offered to people in more general senses; by the ghost to the living Hamlet; by Hamlet to the players; by Laertes to Ophelia; by Polonius to anybody prepared to listen.

Advice is a strange thing. If you are in an undoubted position of authority you can command; but if you are not—and that’s most of us—then the best you can do is advise, and people can choose to follow your advice or not. Unsolicited advice is particularly problematic (Polonius has become a byword for offering tedious and unwanted advice), as is advice from those who don’t really know what they’re talking about offered to those who do (what right has Hamlet, who isn’t—after all—a professional actor, to advise the players—who are—on how to perform?). How often do we regard the advice we receive in our day-to-day as helpful, and act upon it? How often do we think of those who offer us advice as meddlesome, tiresome, intrusive and worse? How coercive is advice? How pertinent? These are the things that, in a deep way, Hamlet is ‘about’.

At the end of your query you ask ‘can I help you’. Is it really an academic critic’s job to be helpful? What a revolutionary notion! Some might say that it is rather to serve a higher hermeneutic truth; to excavate original critical perspectives, to make, as official academic rubrics put it, ‘a positive contribution to world knowledge.’ What this tends to boil down to is: to demonstrate how very clever and very advanced the particular academic’s critical intelligence is. You may read contemporary academic criticism and think ‘but that’s too arcane and puzzling for me to understand’ … yet would you expect to pick up and read the professional writings of an advanced mathematician, a geologist, a physicist? Why should the professional idiom of an academic literary critic be any less specialised and difficult?

Because (the retort seems obvious) whilst not just anybody can understand the higher mathematics, almost anyone can watch Hamlet with pleasure and benefit. The best literature helps us life; it offers us advice on our own lives. And what of the critic? The critic cannot command you to read a play in a certain way, and nor should s/he. The critic is the reader’s advisor, not commander, after all.
Sincerely,
Critic


Dear Critic
I am an Elizabethan living in the last years of the sixteenth-century. Do not misunderstand me—for I love and reverence my Queen—when I say that I have certain anxieties in being ruled by a female monarch. I remember still the words of John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment [ie Rule] of Women of 1558 that monarchs ‘oght to be constant, stable, prudent and doing euerie thing with discretion and reason, whiche vertues women can not haue in equalitie with men … Nature doth paint [women] furthe to be weake, fraile, impacient, feble, foolishe: and experience hath declared them to be vnconstant, variable, cruell and lacking the spirit of counsell and regiment’. Women are not made for governance; and for a Queen to refuse to take a husband leaves the sacred Authority ambiguous and fearful.

I am content that God hath anointed Elizabeth as Queen, but I fear that actual governance is performed by her advisors, those in the shadows behind the throne, men I know not, nor are they appointed to their role by divine grace. Is there a work that expresses these anxieties, that works through the subtle channels of advice and the way that advisors operate in the social and political world?
Sincerely,
Elizabethan Everyman.


Dear Elizabethan Everyman
The work you want is Hamlet by William Shakespeare, which dramatises precisely your concerns, and expands its meditations on the nature and range of Advice in an extraordinary number of ways.

The anxieties you talk about are present today, although perhaps less specifically gendered. But when the last Pope, suffering in the last stages of Parkinson’s disease, is widely thought incompetent to offer spiritual authority, some Catholics worry ‘but who, then, is commanding the Church? Which shadowy advisor is the real power behind the Papal throne?’ The American President Ronald Reagan occupied his office whilst suffering from the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and contemporaries joked that it was his wife, and her astrologer, were the ones really running the world: but these were jokes that betrayed their anxieties. Increasingly today the model for political authority adheres to that dramatised in Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the notional President is a charismatic but ineffectual figure, an actor whose job is to distract attention; real power if wielded from behind the scenes, the hidden figure, the advisor; and because Power is perceived as hidden, as advising rather than commanding, as oblique rather than direct, then it becomes the locus for cultural anxieties. But of course I cannot expect you to know who these people are of whom I speak.
Sincerely,
Critic


Dear Critic
I’m concerned about the trivialisation of contemporary culture—which is to say, our early twenty-first century culture—and in particular the cancerous metastisation of Advice as a discursive category. It’s as if we can’t make up our minds any more without writing to a magazine agony aunt, or tuning into to a TV show on which an ‘expert’ offers us advice on living, loving and everything else, or a newspaper astrology column advising us about our coming day without knowing anything about us—everywhere we turn, some self-appointed advisor is spouting some pious sententious cliché. It infuriates me. I appreciate the irony of writing to you, asking your advice on what to do about advice, but—what can I do? Can you help?
Sincerely,
Angered


Dear Angered
But this is not a new thing: the discourse of Advice has been a cultural dominant since before Shakespeare’s day: homilies, sermons, books of precepts—via the conduct manuals of the Victorian age—to magazine articles today offering ‘ten ways to keep your marriage fresh’ and ‘fifteen routes to a younger you’ … offering advice to readers has been one of the most important facets of print culture. It is surprising, in fact, that nobody has yet written a cultural history of advice, from Greek sybils to modern-day pundits, experts, agony aunts and advisors.
Sincerely
Critic