A dual perspective offers itself as a commentary on K. R. Eissler's Discourses on Hamlet and Hamlet: on the one hand, the cultural-historical classification of Hamlet as a figure on the threshold of two world orders; on the other hand, the philosophical interpretation of this transition as a necessarily tragic process that can only be accomplished through the death of the bearer himself.
Eissler's psychoanalytically based reading provides a particularly fruitful set of tools for this, because it understands Hamlet not merely as an individual neurotic, but as a symptom and medium of an epochal upheaval.
Eissler's central insight can be summarised as follows: Hamlet is not a "hesitant hero" but a transitional figure: a subject who carries within himself two incompatible value systems. The old world is characterised by feudal honour, blood feuds, divinely legitimised rule and an ontological certainty about meaning and order. The new world, on the other hand, heralds an order of inwardness, conscience, reflection and moral self-examination. Hamlet stands precisely between these worlds and therefore cannot remain unscathed.
His father's ghost speaks the language of the old order: revenge is a duty, being a son means execution, time and justice are clearly structured. Hamlet, however, hears this call with an already modern consciousness. He thinks, doubts, analyses, not out of weakness, but out of a new form of responsibility. For him, revenge is no longer a matter of course, but an ethical problem. This is precisely where his historical significance lies: Hamlet destroys the self-evidence of the old values without yet being able to institutionalise the new ones.
Eissler interprets this "hesitation" not as incompetence, but as a necessary transitional tension. Hamlet must think because the world is no longer clear-cut, his thinking is already more modern than the order in which he lives, this makes him a character who is ahead of his time and must therefore die.
From a philosophical point of view, Hamlet's death is not merely a tragic end, but a structural necessity. Transitional people cannot survive because they have no stable world in which to exist. Hamlet must die in order to "bequeath" what he has realised to the world. Only through his death does space become available for Fortinbras, a character who does not share Hamlet's inner life, but who benefits from the order broken by Hamlet.
This reveals a profound dialectic: Hamlet does not actively establish a new world; rather, he renders the old one impossible. His death is the negative condition of the possibility of the future. In this sense, Hamlet resembles the great figures of intellectual history who stand at transitions, they all die not in spite of, but because of their historical function.
Eissler's psychoanalytical perspective deepens this idea by reading Hamlet as the bearer of insoluble inner conflicts that are at the same time collective conflicts. The individual breaks under a burden that actually concerns the epoch.
The cultural-historical dimension of Hamlet gains additional depth when Shakespeare's own life is taken into account, in particular the death of his son Hamnet in 1596. The similarity in names is hardly coincidental. Eissler interprets Hamlet as a work in which personal grief, fantasies of guilt and the confrontation with mortality are sublimated in literary form.
Shakespeare loses his child: an experience that radically shatters his sense of meaning. Shortly afterwards, he writes a drama centred on a son who is haunted by his father's ghost. The direction of grief is reversed: it is not the father who mourns his son, but the son who is haunted by the demands of his dead father. This reversal can be read as an attempt to make death conceivable, to capture it in language, scene and reflection.
Against this backdrop, Hamlet's famous question "To be or not to be" appears less as abstract metaphysics than as an existential processing of real loss. Shakespeare writes here not only about a prince, but about the questionability of continuing to live after the death of a child, an experience that shatters old religious certainties and forces new, uncertain ways of thinking.
K. R. Eissler's Discourses on Hamlet and Hamlet is itself a child of the 20th century: influenced by psychoanalysis, depth hermeneutics and an awareness of historical ruptures. Eissler does not read Shakespeare ahistorically, but as an author on the threshold between the Middle Ages and modernity and Hamlet as the drama of this threshold. This makes the work a key text for understanding the early modern period: the transition from collectively binding systems of meaning to individual ethics of conscience.
Hamlet is the first modern man on stage, not because he acts, but because he observes himself thinking. This self-reflexivity is both progress and a curse. It makes freedom possible, but also paralysis, melancholy and guilt.
Several philosophical insights can be gained from reading Eissler: Progress is tragic, new values do not arise harmoniously, but through ruptures, losses and sacrifices.
Transitional figures are necessary and mortal: those who destroy old orders without being able to stabilise new ones become victims of history themselves.
Subjectivity is ambivalent: Hamlet's inner life is the basis of modern freedom, but also of modern loneliness.
Grief is productive: personal loss can become a source of cultural innovation, but at the price of existential turmoil.
Eissler's book invites us to read Hamlet not only as a psychological puzzle or theatrical masterpiece, but as a cultural-historical document of an epochal transition. Hamlet is the man who knows too much, feels too early and reflects too deeply to be able to live in his world. He dies so that something new can begin. From this perspective, Hamlet becomes not only the drama of an individual, but the tragedy of modernity itself.
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