The Marxist Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

The redness Hamlet In his article Funeral Bakd Meats amusement park and the funfairesque in Hamlet, Michael D. Bristol mingles Marxism and Bakhtins notion of double discoursed textuality into an unique reading of Shakespeares sword dissolution as a struggle between opposing economic classes. Bristol opens with a two paragraph preface on Marxism, highlighting Marxs own abnegation of Marxism Marx is famous for the contradictory claim that he was not a Marxist (Bristol 348). While he acknowledges some of the flaws inherent in Marxist criticism, Bristol uses the introductory paragraphs to assert the extensive importance of the theory of class consciousness and class struggle which Marxist theory includes (349). Having prepared readers for a discourse whose foundation lies upon the most primal idea in Marxism, Bristol recasts Hamlet as a class struggle. A strange, mutli-faceted mingling pervades Bristols argument, and, according to his thesis the drama of Hamlet as well. match t o Bristol, two contrasting texts, two opposing social worlds, flow medieval one another in the drama, forming a strange suspension of brokenheartedness and of festive laughter (350). This odd juxtaposition of opposites becomes the basis for Bristols introduction of the carnivalesque. The echoes of Carnival within Hamlet, according to Bristol, ceaselessly evolve throughout the play until they induce their most perfect representation in the grave-diggers scene of the fifth act. Bristol assigns Carnival a function that immensely strengthens his thesis Carnival opens up substitute(a) possibilities for action and helps to facilitate creativity in the social sphere (351). Bristols handling of Carnival expands in order to include the theories ... ...istol concludes his article by explaining the last end of the Carnivalesque, the dissolution, and finally the extinction of identity, the annihilation of the individual in the historical continuum (365). The bodies of the festival-maker s, the court of Hamlet, lie on the stage like slaughtered meat (364). Bristol concludes that the second culture, or the second language, of Carnival within the drama of Hamlet, supplies an alternate reading for the drama by uncrowning the shifting rationales used to explicate political intrigue, by transforming the play into a struggle between social classes as expressed by the carnivalesque (365). The doubleness of Hamlet, the mingling of tragedy and the comic, sheds new light on the drama as an ambivalent and grotesque Carnival which diametrically contrasts the power and propriety typically associated with the play.