A Tragic Hero in Epic: Satan’s Relapse into <i>Hamlet</i>’s ‘Problems’ in <i>Paradise Lost</i>

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the infamous ‘problems’ of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of the emergent self and Rachel Eisendrath’s understanding of aesthetic form. Building on Eisendrath’s claim that ‘the play [Hamlet] points toward a coherence that lies, paradoxically, beyond the play itself’ (595) and Curtis Perry’s assertion that ‘what Shakespeare does in Hamlet is better understood as part of a complex intertextual conversation than as an isolated lightning strike of appropriative genius’ (81), I show that this coherence lies in a future literary work – in this case, John Milton’s Paradise Lost – that can better, but never completely because literature is process, contain that coherence. Specifically, Satan’s tragic template is a throwback to the secular revenge hero, which is in the process of being outmoded by the Christian epic heroism that Adam and Eve represent. There is a kind of chasm between Hamlet and Satan: Hamlet’s incongruity with his setting looks forward to a more advanced, introspective (in a word, ‘modern’) kind of tragic heroism but which his secular world is unable to accommodate, and Satan’s incongruity with his setting looks back to a heroism being superseded and which is now become tragic. Further, Milton’s constellation with Shakespeare ex post facto claims a kind of Christianity in Hamlet. My analysis of these two hyper-canonical texts reveals that the ‘secularism’ of Hamlet and Satan that critics such as Harold Bloom have marked as prescient of our modern subjectivities has all along been misleading.