The Marxist Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

The bolshy Hamlet In his article Funeral Bakd Meats Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet, Michael D. Bristol mingles Marxism and Bakhtins notion of double dialogued textuality into an unique practice of Shakespeares period of play as a struggle between oppose sparing classes. Bristol opens with a two paragraph preface on Marxism, high sportying Marxs take in 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 cognisance and class struggle which Marxist theory holds (349). Having prepared readers for a discourse whose foundation lies upon the most fundamental idea in Marxism, Bristol recasts Hamlet as a class struggle. A strange, mutli-faceted mingling pervades Bristols argument, and, according to his dissertation the frolic of Hamlet as well. Accordin g to Bristol, two contrasting texts, two opposing kindly worlds, flow past one another in the drama, forming a strange suspension of grief and of festive laughter (350). This odd apposition of opposites becomes the basis for Bristols introduction of the carnivalesque. The echoes of Carnival within Hamlet, according to Bristol, ceaselessly train 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). Bristols 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 dissolution of the individual in the historical continuum (365). The bodies of the festival-makers, the court of Ha mlet, lie on the compass point 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 inform 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.