Hamlet and His Problems

We must begin by setting out what we mean by an 'objective correlative.' It is a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

If the failure is complete, the emotion is evoked in the reader, but in the artist there is no emotion; the reader is moved, but the poet is not. This is a very different kind of failure from the failure in so many modern plays—the failure of people who feel; we should say that such plays are imperfect as dramas, although they may be good poetry.

But it is not merely that the emotion is not expressed; the emotion itself may not exist. The poet must feel the emotion he desires to communicate; if he does not, he must discover an 'objective correlative' which will evoke in the reader the emotion that he feels not.

It is this inability to find an adequate objective correlative which, I think, accounts for certain defects in Hamlet. Hamlet, as Shakespeare wrote him, is a brilliant and most moving presentation of that state of mind in which the will is in conflict with itself.

None of us, at any rate, can deny that Hamlet is Shakespeare's most difficult play. Many critics have been driven to explain the difficulties by supposing that the play is unfinished, that Shakespeare left gaps to be filled by later actors, or that he wrote in haste and carelessness.

I do not think that any of these explanations is necessary. The difficulties of the play arise partly from the fact that Hamlet is a play of thought; and in such a play the relation of thought to action is peculiarly complex, and the psychological analysis is apt to interfere with the action.

But the main difficulty lies deeper. Hamlet's character is not consistently sustained. He is incapable of a resolute deed because his power of resolving is weakened by self-consciousness; yet at times he seems to act vigorously and decisively.

This inconsistency is not accidental; it arises from the nature of Hamlet's mind. He is a man whose sensibility and imagination are so acute that the correspondence between feeling and action is constantly disturbed; and Shakespeare, by making him the centre of the play, has subjected the drama to the tensions of a highly subjective temperament.

The result is that the play sometimes fails to achieve the appropriate objective correlative for Hamlet's emotion. The external actions and events do not always furnish the precise counterparts required to translate Hamlet's inward states into outward drama.

When the correspondence is imperfect, we feel the break; we feel that emotion is being expressed which is not quite the emotion we have been led to expect by the incidents of the play. In such moments we are conscious of a strain between the language of thought and the language of action.