Far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, and contrary to its reputation of being the greatest literary work ever produced aside from the Bible, T.S. Eliot maintained the play Hamlet is an artistic failure, that it is merely interesting as the “Mona Lisa” of Shakespeare’s works.

Eliot’s reasoning followed the schema of stratification. Shakespeare’s character Hamlet has “that within which passes show” because he is made to lament his mother’s lack of blushing modesty, basically. While this central motivation may ring true with ideas of middle-class respectability, it thereby and with the same stroke cuts itself off from an ability to recover the crude, primitive aggression that resounded in the earlier revenge plays. The resulting fragmentation where there might have been a more unified whole forced the need for invention and Shakespeare’s signature virtuosity.

The archeological angle Eliot advanced also provides some insight into a rift that persists between an artistic alienation on the one hand and a more general cultural alienation Eliot observed in his time that he sought to remedy through the recovery of an aesthetic sensibility. Yet this insight initially appears to contradict Eliot’s royalist political views, making one or the other appear incidental as opposed to a unified force that runs all the way through. William Tindall wrote of Eliot’s position as royalist that it served as “objective correlative of Midwestern aspiration,” “since even in British politics the king is no longer or hardly ever an issue.” What this suggests to me about the objective correlative is that, like generality, it need only appear accurate, or be partially accurate, or harbor some grain of truth which may be exploited in the creation of a type.

In that case, the worth of a feeling deeply held would not be in protestations of one’s sincerity or even in its appearance of inevitability in an action, however convincing the portrait may be. Which is to say, there is pure and there is “pure” concerning the stream that issues from the fountain, from the deep sleep that launders. The goings on in Conrad’s dark forest and elsewhere that Tindall referenced in his chapter on conservatism could conceivably be rendered in a badly drawn mother like that of Shakespeare’s Gertrude. Yet this appears to have been Eliot’s chief complaint about her: “it is just *because [the queen’s] character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of presenting.”

But what would serve as adequate equivalent for Hamlet’s inexpressible horror if not Gertrude’s pearl clutching, her being constantly aghast and in dismay, all the while harboring the (inaccessible) knowledge of her impunity from consequence, her exemption from moral law? Eliot seems to have overlooked that the constitutive denial underwriting customs and codes of a well-established conservatism is also what produces “intractable” material in art.

It hardly matters then whether one wears on their face indifference or spite, except in the classical sense Tindall prescribed for “evil times”: times of war, poverty, and decayed wasteland. In this context, “error” is defined as breaking with a rule-bound but arbitrary and therefore closely guarded code that permits law breaking as part of the code itself. The price of admission for this exemption is the kind of unknowing Shakespeare’s Gertrude exhibits, in my view. Yet the true cost, if Eliot was right, is that it doesn’t matter or change anything whether Gertrude atones or whether Hamlet feels at all. Their fate is inscribed in their privilege. In that case, the protections afforded by privilege do not run as deep in time as investment portfolios appear to suggest. This is only bad news for nepo babies with art degrees. On the other hand, if that which is within Hamlet passes show *because Shakespeare managed to contrive in this unrepresentability an alibi for artistic sensibility, this mirrors not only Gertrude’s unknowing but a general lack of accountability symbolized by Hamlet and his foil.

It seems to me there can’t really be an adequate equivalent for an enterprise founded on inequality, one premised on power imbalances and soaked in silence. General diction that aims for the appearance of propriety can for a time gain backing based on considerations of capacity and limits, and these might make us mindful about the placement of undue burdens. But, again, since when has man, in his intervening into nature on behalf of mankind, in his building up of civilizations, spared beasts any undue burden? This says to me more is at stake than conforming to custom and cultural propriety. It says rather that the question driving the making and upholding of moral law presently has to do with interested exemptions while leaving its semblance intact. This exemption status is what may not be shared or made available to external fact without falling apart, and to do that would cut off connection to the rights secured and authored by a primal aggression.