Critchley and Webster Study Hamlet's Complicated Grief

 

Wow! If "[t]he violence of Hamlet is the violence of failed mourning," then I have to wonder how much violence in the United States today is the violence of failed mourning. For example, consider what is at times referred to as suicide by cop. In other words, a man (it's usually a man) starts a shootout with the police, in which the most likely outcome will be the death of the man who started the shootout. The death of such a man is tragic, a tragic loss of human life. Because the genre of dramas known as tragedies involve the tragic, we may wonder if Critchley and Webster's study of young Hamlet's tragic life and death could help us better understand the tragic loss of life of other young men in the United States today.

 

DIGRESSION: for an excellent discussion of the psychodynamics of Faulknerian tragedy, see Warwick Wadlington's READING FAULKNERIAN TRAGEDY (Cornell University Press, 1987). END OF DIGRESSION.

 

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