HAMLET ESSAY

Jacob Fowler

Period 5

Hamlet and Performative Utterance

              In his play Hamlet, William Shakespeare created one of the most interesting and relatable characters in the last five hundred years of literature, however there are problems deciphering his title character and they all relate to this idea of “performative utterance”. To call Hamlet insane would be an inaccurate shortcut that does not fully describe Hamlet’s character. We see throughout the play, Hamlet is a very intelligent character that makes clear cut and concise choices in his mind, the aspect of his character that fails him is his inability to escape his “cognitive paralysis” as Fredik deBoer calls it in his essay titled “The Performative Utterance in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”.  Fredik deBoer also uses J.L Austin’s ideas in his book How to do Things with Words; his ideas state that language is divided into three main forces. Performative utterance, cognitive paralysis, and Austin’s theory are ideas that are relevant in not only literature but have real world applications.

This cognitive paralysis is usually confused as madness, but in actuality it is Hamlet’s ineptitude of vocally conveying his ideas to both the audience and the other characters in the play. In Act I, after the ghost of Hamlet’s father informs him of his uncle’s crimes, Hamlet knows exactly what needs to be done, he sits down at his stationary and immediately begins plotting how to exact his revenge.  The next scene he is in the king’s court obeying his mother and her new husband King Claudius, the murderer. How can our vigilante be submitting to the orders of the man who killed his father? It must be his indecisiveness and as readers this subtlety might be lost on us. However if we were to see this performed on stage as it was intended, we could see how Hamlet interacts with his mom and step father, his cognitive paralysis would be visible through his facial expressions and body language and we would be able to interpret his actions not as weakness, but as genius.

We see in his soliloquys that Hamlet is a very sentimental and emotional man that is struggling with the death of his father, this is a very significant detail that seems to be overlooked by some that are analyzing this piece of literature. This is a young man dealing with the death of his father and we criticize him for his sporadic behavior, and this being said, he still composes himself in most social situations throughout the play. The other characters call him mad and insane because they do not know what he really is thinking as a result of his intricate scheming. Different characters think he is mad for an assortment of reasons, no one can agree on the reason for his insanity; this is purposefully devised by Hamlet so Claudius will never expect his looming attack. Hamlet isn’t crazy, but it’s hard for readers to understand this because words on paper can be misleading sometimes, Hamlet is a play that was intended to be both seen and heard and we need to remember that crucial fact.

Hamlet had to deal with a lot throughout the course of the play, in every situation he had to meticulously plan out and think through his actions, and the most effective way to plot out is to talk to yourself. J.L Austin’s theories can be applied to the way Hamlet thought through his actions; the audience can see the three forces of language in full effect. The first force, the locutionary force, is the ability to deliver a message through words. We see that Hamlet is incredibly efficient in the locutionary force through his elegant soliloquys; his speeches to other characters, even his “mad ramblings” serve a purpose to further both the plot and the pathos Shakespeare creates. The second force, the illocutionary force, is the words that make action happen, his orders that he gives to others and to himself are very crucial to Shakespeare’s intentions. Finally, the prelocutionary force is when action occurs and we see Hamlet act and while most of his actions are murders, we see that through his conversations with both himself and other characters push him to action for a cause.

Performative utterance exists beyond the end of Shakespeare’s quill, we all struggle with both the concept of performative utterance and this idea of cognitive paralysis. The reason that memorizing the “To be or not to be” soliloquy is not to have thirty five lines worth of Victorian era English filling up your mind, but to be able to relate to a character that was created half a millennium ago. In those words that Hamlet spoke to himself he was able to “self-overhear”, this idea is a concept vital to learning. Using this technique we are forced to vocalize our ideas and actually listen to ourselves. We all struggle with vocalizing our ideas, whether it is creating a mission statement for a business or collaborative working group, asking a girl out, or making a speech before a big game, the hardest transition for ideas is the from the mind to actual words. Our thinking, or Hamlet’s thinking for that matter, is much like a football play, a quarterback tells the others what he wants to do and then they all go and run the play as a team, they act based on words they just heard.  To truly succeed you have to break free of your cognitive paralysis and whether you need a ten million dollar check, a pat on the back, words of encouragement, or just a platform for your ideas to be recognized, you must be able to convert ideas into words and words into actions and those actions will produce results.

Hamlet is a five hundred year old play about a young man whose father had poison poured down his ear, yet it left us with one of the most relatable and important characters in the history of literature. Through a story of revenge and death, Shakespeare is able to dive into the human condition and make a commentary on the difficulties of standing behind your beliefs and ideas. Hamlet struggled overcoming his cognitive paralysis, as he did the audience was able to watch as his thoughts turned into words, his words into actions, and finally by the end of the piece those actions resulted in consequences. We see this concept of performative utterance that reigns in Hamlet’s life and beyond the text in our own lives.