Hamlet and his solution: "How all occasions" as objective correlative on page and screen
Abstract
One of the prizes for the 2022 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Kathryn Colvin. According to T.S. Eliot's well-known critical essay "Hamlet and His Problems," Hamlet crucially lacks what Eliot calls the "objective correlative" for his emotions: the "equivalence" of an emotion to that which precedes and produces it. Despite Eliot's disapproval, Hamlet is widely praised as a great artistic success in spite of, or even because of, the supposed impossibility of confining what Harold Bloom praises as Hamlet’s "enigmatic malaise" to the formulaic, the mechanistic, the linear. If Eliot and Bloom disagree profoundly on the artistic merit of Hamlet, they agree on the absence of equivalence, the lack of an adequate Hamlet equation, with Bloom passionately embracing the supposed mystery of the "sea-change" in Hamlet's characterization between Acts 4 and 5. A convincing objective correlative for the sea-change can be found, however, in Hamlet's Act 4 "How all occasions" soliloquy from the Second Quarto--yet its textual authority is debated, and it is often omitted from performances. Rodney Bennett's 1980 BBC television production of Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 feature film both include "How all occasions," framing it as a pivotal moment (Bennett) or even the grand, emotional climax of the film (Branagh), yet explicated Hamlets tend to be received poorly by academic critics, and Branagh's production inspired a particularly vitriolic reception. The question, thus, becomes whether we ultimately prefer Hamlet's cultural afterlife as unfathomable enigma to the Second Quarto Hamlet of Shakespeare: not whether the objective correlative can be found, but whether we want for it to be.