#and Mercutio and Horatio standing in similar positions of witness and critic

[hamletthedane]

Falling deeper into obsession over the parallels between Hamlet and Juliet’s characters, and how both plays are ultimately about children playing out their parents’ revenge fantasies. Protagonists placed in the position of puppets who only exist to further the ends of others.

The revenge of their stories is not their own. They did not cause the problems that they now suffer for. And somehow they ended up as the protagonists to a story already in motion.

But that’s where it gets interesting: they actively CHOOSE to struggle against the legacies and ancient grudges of their parents. The plot is not their own, but they MAKE IT SO.

The story of Hamlet is not that of Othello or Macbeth or Henry V: he is not self-motivated in his revenge, and can only be the passive participant of the inevitable plot (as R&G Are Dead points out to great effect). The things he does don’t ultimately matter: this is his father’s story, and his father’s revenge will occur in one way or another. “The readiness is all…” But he can do something: he can choose to end the story, to accept his fate and refuse to forestall his doom any longer.

The story of Juliet is not that of Rosalind or Merchant’s Portia: her defiance and cleverness, struggling against the edicts of those who raised her to create a renaissance generation, does not result in happy marriages ever-after. She dies trying to change the course of her fate and trying to defy the inevitability of a revenge plot coming to a head. She dies at her own hand, aware that only her and Romeo’s deaths can resolve the story they’re in.

Incredibly, in the inevitably of a narrative set in motion - doomed from the start - there is still an element of choice.

We have two very different characters driven by very different goals but still bound by the contract of their narrative to play out the tragedy. They’re children doomed by their parents and characters doomed by their narrative and stories doomed by the audience’s consumption of them. But what makes Hamlet and Juliet exceptional is their struggle against it. Somehow, in all the chaos and violence of the stage, they gain a small amount of power and control - for just a brief moment, they make decisions that change their story.

(And maybe those changes only work to immediately end their story, but they work nevertheless. In the horrible time-loop of a tragedy narrative, their escape is arguably the ultimate resolution of their character arcs. They “take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing, end them” at last)