Essay: William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet and Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote

Human beings are inherently social and interdependent creatures. “Society is something that precedes the individual,” as Aristotle contends; “It comes to be for the sake of life, and exists for the sake of the good life.” Nevertheless, the individual has become increasingly dubious of the world around him, recognizing its innate facility of deception. Public interactions have become defined by skepticism with the gradual loss of human convictions and, consequently, trust. This culture of distrust can be understood through Renaissance protagonists, who poignantly question reality as they explore their individual human knowledge. William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet and Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote demonstrate this fundamental cynicism through the doubt of human interactions and the assaying of society as a whole. As these individuals attempt to find their place in a larger realm, they realize how impersonal and harsh the collective can be to the individual. Each respective masterpiece reveals the way in which the inherent tensions of relationships make society a hostile environment, unfriendly to humanity. Society, therefore, becomes a sphere of disappointment and self-loss, only welcoming to those who obey its strict boundaries.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet explores the path of Hamlet’s self-discovery in a world of fading values. Hamlet struggles as he tries to reconcile his conflicting internal sufferings with the pressures from the Royal Court of Denmark. Emotionally strained by father’s murder and his mother’s incestuous marriage, Hamlet decides to seek revenge against the agent of his suffering. He must take on a disguise of insanity in order to do so, revealing the premeditated variability on each distinct person’s public persona. Although Prince Hamlet himself believes there is something true and stable about the self, the people around him prove to be fickle and unreliable, altering their selves according to circumstance. For example, King Claudius invites Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Denmark for Hamlet’s alleged benefit, but they, in reality, are called to spy on Hamlet for the King’s ulterior motives of self-promotion. Nonetheless, the modes of expression at the time were regulated by the court and by religion, which inevitably led individuals to portray a false façade in whichever way it seems fit to the situation. So, the King woes for “Hamlet’s transformation,” besieged by his father’s death, but the reader still recognizes his hypocrisy and self-interest in his deception. Hamlet, thus, corroborates the need for distrust amidst the public realm of interaction as humans are prone to cheat their way to the top.
Moreover, courtly manners proposed the idea that outward appearance dictated one’s essence; one could basically change their substance by simply modifying their exterior form under this etiquette. The true expression of the self is inhibited as the characters of the play are defined by the Elizabethan protocol and their corresponding expectations. Hamlet recognizes the unpredictability of human behavior, an erratic force that shifts depending on interests extremely concerned with social expectations. Although the crisis of trust in Hamlet is originally engendered by fratricide, it lingers as Hamlet acknowledges the way public character mirrors one’s society as a whole. Samuel Weller Singer expresses in his work Critical Essay on Hamlet, “the arts and habits that make up the specific manners of the gentleman have come to mean little less than cool dexterity in offensiveness in one direction, balanced by efficient self-seeking complaisance in the other.” Personality is shown to be fashioned and reworked directly by the conscious individual. Hamlet nonetheless contends there is something true and unchanging about the self, stabilizing the relationship with his interior. The soul is fixed, unable to change relative to occasion. Hamlet’s “disdain for the falsehood and frivolity of etiquette and the unmixed selfishness lying below courtly manners” seeps through his sarcastic rhetoric and his suspicion of external finery.
For instance, Hamlet’s interaction with Polonius reveals a seemingly insane Hamlet, one that is not in agreement with his true inner state. Hamlet’s seeming madness does not hinder his artful wit, which still manages to baffle Polonius. Amidst their banter, he expresses his desperate cynicism, asserting, “To be honest, as this world goes, is to / be one man picked out of ten thousand.” Hamlet himself proves his previous statement and demonstrates the duplicitous nature of the human soul, swayed by scheme and deception. As soon his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter the scene, Hamlet moans, “These tedious fools!” However, he hypocritically greets them, exclaiming “My excellent friends!,” as if he were actually pleased to see them. The duplicity of Hamlet’s own nature is enough for him to understand the necessity to distrust others: in the end, everyone is only rooting for themselves. As a result, Hamlet perpetually lives questioning the world around him, doubting even the intentions of his own mother Queen Gertrude: “A bloody deed – almost as bad, good Mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother.”
Similarly, Don Quixote in Cervantes’ Don Quixote demonstrates just how surreal and fallacious one’s existence can be. Throughout the work, Don Quixote’s illusion of reality, or, in other words, his delusion, becomes his actual reality. His ability to transform the ordinary into more spectacular, fantastic interpretations compels the people around him to decide between adapting to his imaginary world or opposing and destroying it. The novel’s enigmatic narrative and the ironic screenings of interactions across social margins discloses the warped incongruities that make up reality. In his book Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Stam introduces the active role the spectator has while reading Cervantes’ masterpiece in discerning the analogous fiction and reality in the “illusion generated by the play-world of [his] art.” Hence, Cervantes doubts the individual perception of the external world and, in turn, the existence of a fixed reality. Society is called into question, then, as Don Quixote threatens its presence with his delusion and self-deception. By not being able to correctly fathom his immediate context, he exposes a harsh world discordant with his ingenuity. “The passage[s] from Don Quixote […] offer allegories of spectatorship in which an artistic representation is brought to a halt by the naïve intervention of a personage who confounds reality with spectacle.” Don Quixote’s aggressive attempts to recreate chivalric episodes bare the reality of his unaccepting society, quick to reprimand those who are discordant with it. In this way, Cervantes questions the veracity of his tangible realm, one inevitably altered by each individual’s distinct reality.
Some characters, such as the barber, the priest, and even his sidekick Sancho Panza, become quickly frustrated with Don Quixote’s refusal to abandon his eccentric life as a knight. They originally try to help Don Quixote see a more normal view of the world, but his inability to appropriately interpret what lies before him inhibits those attempts. In order to clearly communicate with him, they have to pretend to take part in his world and his intense delusions. Don Quixote, nonetheless, prevails stuck in his imagination, only able to grasp reality for a few brief moments. For instance, he encounters two Benedictine friars and a stagecoach carrying a lady whom he instead interprets as enchanters kidnapping a princess. Demonstrating his lack of lucidity, Don Quixote brutally attacks them until they run off. Cervantes’ mistrust manifests itself through the utmost disrespect of one of his society’s most important members, the clergy. He belittles their importance and mocks society as a whole through Don Quixote’s insolence. On the other hand, Sancho is, at first, apprehensive of the outcome of this event, warning Don Quixote to “take care what [he is] doing, [for] this could be one of the devil’s own tricks.” However, he quickly sees the opportunity to profit from his master’s lunacy and decides to partake in his fantasy world. In robbing the monk, Sancho pretends to believe that he is claiming the spoils of war. Sancho Panza, by indulging his greed and mocking Don Quixote, represents the impudent mob, that is, the human race. Through the crude foil amongst Sancho Panza’s avarice and Don Quixote’s intricate idealism, Cervantes critiques his own society, exposing a realm of ethical defeat.
However, unlike the products of Don Quixote’s madness, Hamlet’s Ghost is a physical, measurable reality. Although Hamlet experiments in acting the part of the madman, he is indeed sane. In reality, Hamlet’s intentions are clear to the reader, but he nonetheless strategically fills in the role of lunacy in order to conceal his plot. “[Hamlet] essentially [is] not in madness, / But mad in craft,” consciously contrived to alarm the already remorseful King and his courtiers. His deceptive madness thus attests the need of suspicion when interacting with others. Even so, Hamlet doubts the presence and purpose of the Ghost, believing it might simply be a figment of his imagination. Despite originally considering it to be “an honest ghost,” he suspects “The spirit that [he has] seen / May be a devil, and the devil hath power / T\’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps / Out of [his] weakness and [his] melancholy, / As he is very potent with such spirits, / Abuses [him] to damn [him].” In this, the Ghost literally incarnates the ever-present search for truth as Hamlet attempts to uncover reality amidst chaos and uncertainty. Although it becomes easier for him to trust the Ghost, which coincidentally resembles his deceased father, Hamlet cannot be entirely sure if that is truly him, reiterating the distrust and disillusionment ingrained in human socialization.
For non-Spanish readers, Don Quixote is simply a novel about a poor countryman who has goes insane as a result of indulging in too many chivalric romances. But it is much more than that. Cervantes’ society is challenged as a whole as Don Quixote’s knightly idealism dissects and scrutinizes the schisms between his epoch and the romanticized past. Civilization, to him, has degenerated into “these depraved times,” where “Now sloth triumphs over industry, idleness over labour, vice over virtue, presumption over valour, and theory over the practice of arms, which only lived and flourished in the golden age and amount knight errant.” In a fit of agony and frustration, Don Quixote confesses “[he is not] a madman trying to make people believe [him] sane; [he is] merely striving to make the world understand the delusion under which it labours in not renewing within itself those most happy days when the order of knight-errantry carried all before it.” As Rachel Schmidt states in her book Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century, “The protagonist Don Quixote [becomes] the author’s weapon against perniciously fantastic literature, irrational thought, and excessive enthusiasm.” Through Don Quixote’s madness, Cervantes ridicules the overly-embellished chivalric genre of his time to consider and review other aspects of his contemporary society through his text. Schmidt continues, “Cervantes was packaging a satire of his Spain for reading and discussion by the public.” Don Quixote’s fantasy utopia “of a world populated by knights and dames rather than pig herders and inn prostitutes” drives him to become harshly critical towards his own reality. Against his shallow backdrop, Don Quixote stands out as he desperately pursues an unattainable ideal in an morally flawed world.
Likewise, Shakespeare’s own Victorian society is critiqued as well through his play as Hamlet exposes the flaws of his society and eventually seeks to abolish them. Hamlet’s society is composed of reciprocity, where man’s identity is reflected onto him by his larger society. This echoing of identity differs from Hamlet’s own separate self-conception, which differs from the collective mindset of his times. By portraying a multitude of intricately defective characters, from a man murdering his brother to a woman marrying her husband’s assassin, Shakespeare demonstrates an ultimately dysfunctional society. The embodiment of these social aspects only proves their absurd, frivolous nature. Hamlet, however, refuses to be society’s puppet as everyone else and resists its effort to oppress him. “Hamlet baits and perplexes and satirizes the qualities that are really base, independently of relative position,” Weller Singer argues, as “he is in sympathy with that best democracy […] as it is the highest fact in the rights of man.” This becomes the underlying tragedy of the play for Hamlet to be unique implies he will inevitably clash with his surrounding society. The actual conflict, therefore, is that the protagonist cannot find his true self within the established patterns of his society; thus, he can only maintain his identity if he antagonizes these constrictions. Hamlet is noble in his attempt to break away from the collective demarcation, but his effort is nevertheless lost as he will unavoidably be shunned from society.
Hamlet and Don Quixote’s effort towards self-discovery leads both to find the unquestionable certainty of the existence of evil in their larger societies. The collective becomes increasingly punitive as each individual strives farther and farther away from the norm. Thus, each respective masterpiece reveals the essential tensions of human socialization, those that make society a sphere of animosity and rancor.