As I've been looking at myths and archetypes in Shakespeare's works recently, I thought that an interesting Archetype to study more thoroughly is an idea of Archetypal Critic, Carl Jung. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, one of his main Archetypes, which he studied extensively, was that of 'the shadow.' Jung believed that each person had a shadow inside of themselves. The shadow was that suppressed, artistic, almost radical part of people. He believed that if the shadow was ignored, the person repressing it would only be 'half of a person.' I did a post earlier in the semester on the shadow archetype in Richard III, examining how Richard was destroyed by his shadow because he let it overrun him. Instead of ruling his ambition he gave into it and became a very cruel and almost lost character in Shakespeare's tragedy.
I was looking up quotes in Shakespeare I found one that really intrigued me in Hamlet 2:2.
Hamlet
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and
Count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Gildenstern
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
Substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow
Of a dream.
Hamlet
A dream itself is but a shadow.
Rosencrantz
Truly, and I hold ambition of so air and light a
Quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Hamlet
Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs
And outstretched heroes the beggar’s shadows.
As I was reading through Hamlet's discussion of the shadow it reminded me of Jung's Shadow Archetype. Hamlet has the problem of being split, he isn't sure how to act and does repress his actions and feelings. In these quotes Rosencrantz compares ambition to the shadow of a shadow. If Hamlet were doing what he actually thinks he should be doing, would he (or his ambitions) no longer trouble him as bad dreams, or haunt him as shadows? Is he himself the shadow that Rosencrantz talks about? If the shadow's shadow is Hamlet's ambition, then Hamlet is the shadow. As Jung states, "Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected."
Does Hamlet realize that he is fighting within himself? Sometimes I think Hamlet was meant to do great things, but stood in his own way and in the end accomplished much less than his potential - which is the true tragedy of the play.
Bibliography
Jung, Carl. "Psychology and Religion: West and East" (1938). Print. 