T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare Criticism: Is Hamlet An Artistic Failure?

Abstract

T. S. Eliot, in his 1919 essay, argues that only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative,' and that there is no objective correlative in Hamlet which is formular of that particular emotion. The particular emotion here means Hamlet's emotion toward his mother, Gertrude, and it is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother. Eliot argues that this is the essential emotion of the play, but Hamlet is dominated by an inexpressible emotion, the disgust towards his mother which he cannot understand and objectify. Thus, Eliot regards Hamlet as an artistic failure because of the absence of an objective equivalent to Hamlet's feeling. However, his argument that Hamlet is an artistic failure might not be a legitimate claim, because it is only based on his theory of an objective correlative. Hamlet might be evaluated in other ways if the theory of impersonality is applied. T. S. Eliot declares that progress of artist is continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. However, this impersonality theory anticipates the unstable relationship between signifier and signified. Furthermore, the essential emotion of the play is Hamlet's frustration and melancholy, derived from the loss of his father and the absence of the ideal mother figure, rather than the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother. As a result, in the text of Hamlet, there are objective correlatives signifying these feelings of frustration, melancholy, and loss.