The Marxist Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

The Marxist Hamlet In his article "'Funeral Bak'd Meats:'   Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet," Michael D. Bristol mingles Marxism and Bakhtin's notion of double discoursed textuality into an unique reading of Shakespeare's drama as a struggle between opposing economic classes.   Bristol opens with a two paragraph preface on Marxism, highlighting Marx's own abnegation of Marxism:   "Marx is famous for the paradoxical 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 "enormous 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 fundamental idea in Marxism," Bristol recasts Hamlet as a class struggle.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   A strange, mutli-faceted mingling pervades Bristol's argument, and, according to his thesis the drama of Hamlet as well.   According to Bristol, two contrasting texts, two opposing social worlds, flow past one another in the drama, forming a strange suspension "of grief and of festive laughter" (350).   This odd juxtaposition of opposites becomes the basis for Bristol's introduction of the carnivalesque.   The echoes of Carnival within Hamlet, according to Bristol, ceaselessly evolve throughout the play until they reach 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 alternative possibilities for action and helps to facilitate creativity in the social sphere" (351).   Bristol's discussion of Carnival expands in order to include the theories ... ...istol concludes his article by explaining the ultimate 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-makers, 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.