180 Ideals in the Modern World
Hamlet is the great exception. He is often a true thinker, brooding
in terms that would have impressed Plato with aspirations to touch
the absolute. He is a warrior also, though a rather confl icted one.
He takes seriously the commandment of his father to avenge him
and do it quickly, but he cannot quite bring himself to the deed.
Hamlet is not always religious in the senses that Jesus commends
when he tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. But Hamlet does
express res pect bordering on awe for the fi gure he calls “the Ever-
lasting” and takes quite seriously the Christian injunction against
suicide. When Polonius says he will use the visiting players after
their deserts, Hamlet rebels. “Use every man after his deserts,” he
says “and who shall scape whipping?” Mercy, not justice: though
the context is casual, Hamlet’s view is clear. It’s a sentiment the Gos-
pels would endorse. Hamlet, I think, exemplifi es all three of the
great ideals, at least to a certain degree (though he exemplifi es the
religious ideal least), and the tragedy of his suff ering and death is
in part the tragedy of the destruction of hope for humanity to live
for principles larger than a given individual. Hamlet the idealist is
a sympathetically drawn exemplar of that which Shakespeare the
play wright works to destroy, and no little of the play’s pathos comes
from precisely this fact.
After glory, what? After Othello and Hotspur and Hector, who
inherits the world? Shakespeare shadows forth an answer to that
question, beginning at least with the Merchant of Venice, though
the answer may well disturb him.
Late in Antony and Cleopatra, the old warrior Antony fi nds him-
self cornered by Caesar Augustus and his troops. Antony’s forces
are in disarray; the god Mars has left him; his friend Enobarbus has
gone over to Caesar. What is there for Antony to do? He challenges
the mighty Caesar to a hand- to- hand fi ght, single combat, as any
angry old honor- bound warrior must do. And of course young