The Marxist Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

The Marxist crossroads In his article Funeral Bakd Meats Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet, Michael D. Bristol mingles Marxism and Bakhtins imprint of double talk aboutd textuality into an unique reading of Shakespeares drama as a struggle between opposing economic classes. Bristol opens with a two paragraph preface on Marxism, highlighting Marxs own 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 consciousness and class struggle which Marxist theory includes (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 thesis the drama of Hamlet as well. According to Bristol, two contrasting texts, two opposing cordial worlds, flow past one another in the drama, forming a strange foramen of grief and of festive laughter (350). This odd juxtaposition of opposites becomes the basis for Bristols introduction of the carnivalesque. The echoes of Carnival in spite of appearance Hamlet, according to Bristol, ceaselessly evolve throughout the play until they eliminate 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 attain 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 last the extinction of identity, the annihilation of the individual in the historical continuum (365). The bodies of the festival-makers, the cou rt of Hamlet, lie on the stage 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 explicate 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 origin and propriety typically associated with the play.