#oh man this line is important #i need to discuss this sometimes well good morning I hope u r ready to discuss the 'forty thousand brothers' line please
wheeeeeeeeeeee
okay this actually ties into that gertrude meta I mentioned but I REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS because it’s v important to me and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it before
okay so basically what this is is hamlet’s massive problem with idealisation and demonisation. we see it with his dad, we see it with gertrude, and hooo boy do we see it with ophelia. basically hamlet tends to be very judgemental and decisive when it comes to how he sees the people around him - they’re either bad guys or good guys. he’s extremely quick to condemn, but once someone’s gone he’s extremely quick to (for want of a better word) romanticise.
with gertrude, we see an example of the demonisation. she does something that he perceives as wrong, and bang she’s bad, she’s wanton and disgusting and needs to be saved. I imagine hamlet always really loved his mother (SHUT UP FREUD) and once she lets him down that disgust and disappointment is all he can see, it’s all-consuming. he basically writes her off because of her remarriage. demonisation, friends. (although I have to say that my opinions regarding gertrude and hamlet as a child disgusted with a parent’s actions are kinda messed up atm because of personal circumstance. I understand that part of hamlet’s mind a lot better now and so I’m rethinking a lot of stuff to do with it!)
then you’ve got pappy hamlet, who gets the opposite treatment - idealisation. now I’m not saying old hamlet was a bad dad - anyone who suggests that hamlet’s dad was disappointed in having a “‘“philosopher son”’ is stupid - but I don’t think he was the HELLA RAD AMAZING TOP OF THE POPS dad that hamlet makes him out to be. all that junk about his father being like miscellaneous gods (off the top of my head I remember mentions of mars, hyperion and jove) and all the other hyperbolic shit he says is not stuff he would have said while dad was alive. this is hamlet putting dead dad up on a pedestal now that he’s gone. when he was alive he was a good dad, a good king, a good guy. now he the BEST MAN TO EVER LIVE EVER PERIOD. idealisation.
(okay I’m getting to that line now)
ophelia gets both treatments. when she’s alive and he starts to think that she’s against him and his thoughts on women are coloured by his view of his mother, he demonises her. this girl he’s probs been pretty sweet on in the past suddenly gets the blasting he gives her in the nunnery scene, because he now sees her as completely bad. but then! she dead!! and he goes from ‘i loved you not’ to ‘FORTY THOUSAND BROTHERS WITH ALL THEIR LOVE CANNOT MAKE UP MY SUM’ (or something). that’s a pretty radical change!! because now that she’s dead she’s getting what I call the pappy hamlet treatment - total and utter idealisation. okay some people think the stuff in the graveyard was an act, but I think by this part of the play he’s moved past all that bullshit and that this is genuine. now that ophelia’s dead, she’s become this pure wonderful angel whom he loved with all his heart.
and that’s why that line is important! because it’s the clearest example of hamlet’s idealisation problem, which I think is a key to his character!
also kinda side note - I quite like the idea that this idealisation/demonisation comes from a borderline personality disorder, which is characterised by ‘black and white thinking’ (as well as ‘instability of affect (emotions)’ and ‘unusually intense sensitivity’). if you’ll permit me to quote wikipedia, ‘people with BPD often engage in idealization and devaluation of others, alternating between high positive regard and great disappointment’ like is that literally what I just spent x amount of words trying to articulate or what. like okay seriously when I did a psychology paper at uni and bpd came up I was like ‘HAMLET. THIS IS HAMLET.’
