Some Things Are Universal
Hamlet and Ophelia, by Agnes Pringle (ArtUK.org)
When I’m pontificating — I need one of those “ON AIR” signs they have for radio stations, a huge flashy red one that says “PONTIFICATING” — I often make very broad statements about human behavior and motivations. I often say “we” as if I’m speaking for both you and me. I often assert that we all have the same fundamental needs, the same basic drives, and we all fall into similar defensive mechanisms and maladaptive behaviors when we’re threatened.
I say those things because I believe them to be true — it seems hilariously foolish to argue anything else, when every data point we’ve assembled from our own history demonstrates it. Human history is a lengthy series of the same mistakes made over and over with better tech and bigger explosions each time.
In every time period, every culture, every historical tale has the same beats:
People who wish to consolidate power take it from the less powerful using violence.
Those who do not wish to consolidate power drop from the historical record written by those who do, which now consists only of the pissing contests of the powerful, framed as meaningful manifestations of political and social theory by those who win. (And a middle finger for Hegel, pigheaded purveyor of the belief that power confers moral understanding and thereby justifies itself…)
People who wish to consolidate power take it from the less powerful using greater violence.
These are our human universals. They go into the Universals Bin along with “we all need food,” and “we all want to express ourselves authentically,” and “we all want and need positive connections with other humans.” We all experience the pressures of systemic power and violence, and though the systems vary in their particulars, their intention is always the same — to consolidate and retain power. Systemic power under capitalism has only one motive and goal: to maintain and increase itself.
It’s easy from a white American perspective to assume that our baseline cultural assumptions pertain everywhere; all of our media tells us so, frantically packaging and selling those cultural assumptions with one of five designer faceplates, aggressively Photoshopping out other cultures as we go — so as not to distract from the product, you understand, not for any particular (racist) reason. This effort has been so successful that most of us don’t have a lot of opportunities to see any media from outside that bubble. If you wanted to see a movie about sub-Saharan Africa made by Africans, starring African actors, intended for an African audience rather than Western consumption… I mean, name one. Go on, I’ll wait. Where would you go to find it? Which streaming service has that stuff? I feel like it’s not Disney.
The universal and the particular
The reason I’m talking about this is… I stumbled upon an article this morning, written by Laura Bohannan, an anthropologist working in West Africa in the 1960s. Just before setting off on an extended trip living with a remote West African tribe — she doesn’t specify the location or culture exactly, likely for their privacy and safety — she gets into a conversation with an English friend about Americans’ inability to understand Shakespeare.
“You Americans often have difficulty with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.”
He exhorts her to take Hamlet along with her, to study it in a different context, and in the course of her time with the tribe, she eventually finds cause to recite the story of Hamlet for her hosts at a community gathering. Here she finds that her friend was apparently correct — the men listening to her story don’t understand cultural particulars, like Western mourning periods and superstitions, and that makes her despair of even getting the story across to them. She fears that their misinterpretation of the particular is drowning the universals of the story.
But her article shows, by the end of the telling, that’s not the case. By the end, the men are telling the story of Hamlet back to HER, accurately predicting its events based on their own cultural assumptions and offering a reading of the text that is fully supported by the text even while running utterly counter to the Western interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. We see plainly that the universal themes of the story are getting across, and that the human motives that drive the action make sense even when the audience re-interprets their reasoning to more locally pertinent experiences.
The article doesn’t analyze too deeply — she’s a good cultural anthropologist, noting down exactly what happened without value judgment or interpretation. But I want to analyze the differences between these two readings of Hamlet by two wildly different cultures, and examine how they’re still the same story, the same tragedy: the destruction of a family’s future by madness and the misappropriation of power.
(From this point I’m going to assume you’ve read Bohannan’s article, so there’s another link, and you’ve a general familiarity with the plot of Hamlet — nothing deep; your accumulated cultural detritus about ‘slings and arrows’ and ‘dying Ophelia’ will be sufficient.)
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of West Africa
We run into trouble with the particulars of the story immediately. Bohannan struggles to explain the inciting incident, the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. We can’t even get as far as what the ghost has to say, because these people don’t believe in ghosts. They inform her quite firmly of this, and begin to suspect that in fact this visitation is an omen sent by a witch.
It’s a quibble over detail that reveals the deeper commonalities between our respective cultures. Whether ghosts exist — you’d also get a different answer, shaded by different influences, in every house in America. But the idea that an elder man by default is empowered to speak over a younger woman and inform her of the way of things without hesitation or doubt… I mean, you’d see that in most houses in America too.
Some families might be moving out of this old patriarchal perspective, but I’m willing to bet money there isn’t a single woman out there who hasn’t been treated exactly this way by a man who thinks exactly this way about it — he believes implicitly that he knows more, about everything, even when he is directly proven wrong, and if a woman supposes herself to know better, it’s merely an indicator of her immaturity and ignorance. Patriarchal power structure. The nouns are different, but the verbs are the same.
Before we’ve even gotten out of Scene One we’ve got another snag, because the crime that motivates the whole play — a man kills his brother, marries his brother’s wife, and assumes the throne — makes no sense in this culture. Without a basic understanding of Western family structure and how it informed hereditary monarchy, even Claudius’s status as a usurper is called into question. Hamlet’s distress at his mother’s hasty marriage is foolish in a culture where powerful men have multiple wives and survival is deeply dependent on local support and ties, giving disempowered women material reasons to quickly remarry.
Once again, a difference in minor detail causes a great rift in understanding, but the rift is caused by the particulars of the social situation, not by the underlying assumptions about where power is held and which party is considered chattel.
These assumptions — that a woman has no true personhood until a man gives her some of his by making her his legal property, that a son might see himself as empowered to judge his mother’s conduct, but that any redress of her behavior would be made by and amongst the men who own her — they’re not questioned at all. That is a bedrock assumption in West Africa just as it is here. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you met a woman who introduced herself as “Mrs. Husband’s Name?” For me it was about three months ago.
Hamlet’s relationship to Ophelia causes further confusion when it comes up. Why would Hamlet not marry Ophelia, when obviously he could marry as many women as he wished? Why would Polonius be upset by Hamlet courting his daughter, when Hamlet would, of course, have paid for his use of Ophelia and made Polonius rich?
The play, in this view, is an argument over property, a family’s fight over the will. And… wasn’t it always? Ophelia’s fate is treated as the result of Claudius’s sin and Hamlet’s madness, the illustration of their sin writ large by God, as Shakespeare has helped teach the Western mind to expect. This is the shape of a morality play, one which sets out to depict the wages of sin being meted out upon the third and fourth generations, and the death of the innocent bystander is always a breaking point for our protagonist. Like every woman in Supernatural, Ophelia has no inner life beyond her feelings for Hamlet, no aspirations but marriage to Hamlet, and her death is framed as significant only in how it galvanizes Hamlet’s supposed madness — but since the audience knows Hamlet’s madness to be less total than supposed, we also read his grief as less profound than he claims.
In either the Western or the West African view, Ophelia is property. The quarrel is about how much she’s worth and who will pay, not about whether she wants to marry. This is also how her situation is interpreted by the elders when Bohannan tells it. Here’s where their interpretation diverges hard from the text as written, because of differences in specific details — because in this culture madness can only be the work of a witch or eldritch being, and those with this kind of knowledge are usually men. Thus, Hamlet can only be mad due to the magic working of another man in his bloodline.
The major cultural difference that’s causing this re-interpretation is about our sense of self. Western culture is highly individualistic, focused on self-actualization, where this West African culture is slightly more communal in their worldview. When presented with the news that Claudius has married his brother’s wife, they praise Claudius and toast his wisdom — Claudius has, in their culture, done right by assuming the care of the family when another male in his age group has died. Claudius is perfectly interchangeable with his brother in this situation — what matters is the survival of the family, determining who will assume the material burdens carried by the patriarch and ensure the family as a whole continues to prosper.
From this the elders conclude that it must be Laertes who is responsible for Ophelia’s death — after all, only witches can make people drown. Water itself does no one any harm, it’s merely a thing you drink and bathe in, they know this. And since Ophelia can only have been enchanted by a man in her family, it must have been her brother, Laertes. Why did he do this?
Well, obviously Laertes was in debt and needed money. The natural thing for Laertes to do here would be to marry his sister off —sell his property to pay his creditors, as one does. But with Hamlet’s eye on her, who else would marry her, knowing Hamlet might commit adultery with her as he wished and they would never have the power to stop him once he assumed the throne? Laertes’ only option, clearly, was to drown his sister by witchcraft and sell her body to another witch.
This is all perfectly logical from their cultural framework, if certainly a rather extreme application of the rules. Ophelia is treated as property regardless of whether she’s alive or dead — the men in her family all have the right to swap her for goods and services like any other object. When Hamlet fights Laertes at Ophelia’s graveside, this is interpreted as him stopping Laertes from taking her body to sell on — stopping the theft of what Hamlet sees as his property.
But this is not why the elders imagine Hamlet does it—rather they imagine that “the chief’s heir, like the chief, does not wish any other man to grow rich and powerful.” The only consideration is the perpetuation of the power structure. In this view, there is no possibility that a leader might ever wish to foster the success and growth of his people, might wish to raise children wiser and better-informed than he — what would be the point, after all, when he will never listen to a word his children have to say?
Power in this structure is stratified even more rigidly than in American culture, by both gender and generation — Hamlet has no right to scold his mother, even though he may assume himself to be generally better-informed than she, because he is not in her age group. He has no right to avenge the hurts done to him and his family by harming Claudius — if Claudius did indeed kill his brother, than Hamlet should give the matter over to his father’s age-mates to address. Did he have no other uncles, was Claudius the only one? How can this be? How did Hamlet’s father even become a chief with such a tiny family?
Bohannan must be telling the story wrong, they conclude — not that she’s lying, but her elders here in America have not properly explained the story to her, not told her all the genealogical details or taught her how magic functions. They know this for a fact — after all, they say, “we believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; there are always witches and we, the elders, know how witches work.”
They agree with Bohannan’s friend in England: people are the same everywhere. And I too agree: everywhere, elders will happily discard truth when it’s offered by those younger than them, comfortable in the certainty that knits together their identity, the certainty that there is nothing important about the world that they don’t already know. Everywhere, people will interpret stories in the manner that flatters and satisfies them, and discard any detail that doesn’t support that view.
I’m doing it here, aren’t I? I mean, I’m not going through Hamlet line-by-line — there absolutely will be portions of the text that make the tribal elders’ interpretation nonsensical. But that’s not terribly pertinent to the point, because the details of how we describe a specific situation often appear detached from or even at odds with the underlying social dynamics and power structures that inform that situation. We can draw conclusions about how people as a group interpret literature without agreeing on the definitions of each and every word. But I am, it must be said, discarding detail that doesn’t support my thesis. It’s universal.
A tale of two tragedies
So Hamlet is a tragedy… but for two different reasons depending on your perspective. In the Western view, the tragedy is that Hamlet and Ophelia are denied self-actualization, their stories robbed of their ending, their love robbed of a wedding. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy has often been dragged for its whiny, narcissistic tone, and that’s fair — it’s a college kid dramatically saying, “Like, I’d kill myself, but what if death sucks even worse than life?” The soliloquy is him debating suicide, and it’s just as self-obsessed as any other existential quandary — it does nothing for anyone else, admits the perspective of no one else, and cannot inform his actual life in any meaningful way until he decides who he is and what he wants. I say this with love as an absurdist — it’s just part of my deal to be constantly aware of how self-involved and ridiculous even my own philosophy is.
Hamlet is the perfect Western hero — self-absorbed, manipulative, certain of his own superior intellect, fully focused on his own self-actualization to the point that he sees all others as vehicles or obstacles to that goal. And his tragedy is that the flailing attempts of the villain Claudius result in the death of his whole family. The wages of sin — Claudius’s behavior was so morally egregious that only the destruction of all the issue of that line can cleanse it.
Yet… there’s that same obsession with bloodlines again. In the West African view evident from this article, the tragedy is that of a family destroyed by the careless and wanton behavior of youngsters with too much power. The proper ending to the play, the elders assert, would be if Claudius and Gertrude survived — the poison was obviously meant for the survivor of the fight between Laertes and Hamlet, regardless of who won, because either would have been a threat to Claudius’s power, and neither has the right to threaten Claudius across the age gap. Thus the family would be preserved, and the sins of the restless, dissolute youth punished. Clearly the boys should not have gotten themselves into trouble, tried to use magic to fix it, and so needlessly drawn the elders into a childish conflict resulting in their deaths. The family unit cannot continue now — whether Hamlet self-actualizes is irrelevant in this view, because what matters is the health of the family.
The power structure that killed Ophelia remains, unquestioned, at the heart of the story, assumed by every audience to be the story’s very bones, understood implicitly because at every fireside in the world, one can look around and see a similar power structure.
Every aspect of our culture says to us in a thousand subliminal ways, “The hierarchy is natural, and those who are above you were made to be above you. Love them for their supremacy, treasure and compete for their largesse, and take their direction as your plan in life.”
Whether the goal is the actualization of the individual or the family unit, the inherent necessity for a hierarchical system that rejects the input of all but the top strata is just… assumed. Obviously that’s how things are, which makes it natural, and natural is how it’s meant to be. Or, as the tribal elders tell Bohannan when they don’t have a good answer to her questions: “That is the way it is done, so that is how we do it.”
The tragedy of not questioning received wisdom
These are the universals that Shakespeare passed down to us. Along with the quotes everyone thinks came from the Bible, along with the wildly gay poetry re-interpreted by a cis-het audience, we also got all the basic assumptions that a white dude writing in Elizabethan England would have. We got the exoticized depictions of people of color, the comfortable support of colonialism, and the complete, unquestioning acceptance of oligarchy as the natural state of man, beyond and more fundamental than any moral perspective.
Perhaps we should have guessed — after all, who better than an Englishman to impress upon us how successfully he and his forbears have marketed their own superiority around the world. Look how well it worked! Men who were themselves subjugated by that hierarchy, thousands of miles away, nod and smile, saying, “Yes, we agree. This world you propose, in which humans can be owned, in which human needs are less important than the maintenance of power structures, in which laws are made to protect property rather than people… yes, this is the only world. It is a good and just world, because I am comfortable in it. This is a universal truth that must not be forgotten.”
I agree with that much — it’s a universal truth that must not be forgotten: people who profit from commodifying human lives are everywhere, and they will always interpret anything they see as justification for their own supremacy.
