Echoes of Hamlet in T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Once the words appear on the page, the meaning is out of the author's hands. That being said, throughout all the subsequent periods in literature, William Shakespeare has proven to be a lucrative source for allusive text. His characters and concepts have been replicated, adapted, or stretched for use in many great works. One such play,

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is often found echoing in the throes of the modernist period. The time during and around the First World War is often reflected upon as sad, nostalgic, and lost. In fact an entire generation was named thus-"The Lost Generation." The world had never before observed a massacre of such proportions and this tragedy produced some of the greatest literary voices of all time. So it comes as no surprise that a great tragedy such as

Hamlet would enter the literary world via the works of a tragic people. In several substantial works of one modernist writer, poet T. S. Eliot,

Hamlet has become a beacon of his generation.

Hamlet, as a whole, sends out signals of despair, betrayal, disorientation, and revenge. These themes are also found in modernist works, communicating the woes of those who survived "The Lost Generation." Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" contains inferences of

Hamlet's misery. The use of this well known play not only speaks of the post-World War I generation, but effectively communicates the feelings of alienation and loss.

Grover Smith, one of the leading critics of Eliot pointed out that Eliot "had been afflicted with 'an aboulie and emotional derangement'" Smith goes on to explain that aboulie is a term used by psychoanalyst Ernest Jones that describes a "paralysis of the will," which incidentally Hamlet suffered from (44). Eliot, along with much of his generation, felt the ill effects of the war on the

spiritus mundi. Despite his apparent aversion to

Hamlet as an inferior work in his essay on the problems with the play, Eliot still utilized the oft-quoted piece in several of his poems possibly as an empathetic reaction to the title character. In "Prufrock," the title character of the poem is a normal middle-aged man moving through a crisis of who he is and what type of person he has become. Throughout the poem, Prufrock debates certain instances in his mind: whether or not he will approach his love; whether he will continue upon his current path or will he "dare" to do anything at all; and even debating his existence. To a Shakespearean audience this would sound quite familiar, especially after viewing

Hamlet. Christina Britzolakis in her essay posits that "Hamlet, tottering on the brink between 'order and disorder', becomes a talisman of civilizing culture against the dreadful spectre of a continent plunged into revolutionary chaos" (232). The love song takes place solely in Prufrock's head and the "'order and disorder'" is split between the "you and I" in the opening lines of the poem. The outer Prufrock is one of order, a high-society figure that is often well-dressed and polite, while the inner Prufrock is one of disorder, falling apart and wondering which path is his own. Like Hamlet, Prufrock epitomizes the generation that attempted to hold on to culture even though a revolution was taking place. Although Prufrock denies this: "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be" (109), he has more in common with Hamlet than with the "attendant lord" that he believes is more akin to himself . He also notes that as an "attendant lord" he would complete only limited tasks:

am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the Prince; no doubt, and easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-

Almost, at times, the Fool. (110-17)

Many of the words that Prufrock uses to describe an "attendant lord" could also be used to describe Hamlet. Hamlet was an easy tool of his ghost father, he was also politic, cautious, and meticulous when dealing with Claudius. Prufrock is much of the same person as he deals with his everyday life. He is very self-conscious, citing the bald spot on his head and how he feels like a bug pinned to the wall. Prufrock often feels as if he were the Fool, but Britzolakis states that "The Shakespearean Fool (who so often has all the best lines) is outside of the action altogether, commenting upon it in a privileged space of hermetic wordplay" (236). The wisest character in a Shakespearean play is often the fool, the one who points out what every other character fails to see. Both Prufrock and Hamlet are this way: Prufrock realizes that his life is "measured out [...] coffee spoons" (51), while Hamlet warns Ophelia to hide safely until everything passes over by exclaiming "Get thee to a nunnery" (3.1.122). Even their love lives are similar in that Hamlet writes Ophelia letters proclaiming his love, but she is convinced that he is mad. Prufrock never sends the woman with whom he is infatuated a letter or a sign of his love because he believes that she will misunderstand what he is trying to say: "'That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all'" (107-8). Prufrock and Hamlet both are figures of indecision, never achieving their purpose. Prufrock never defines his love and Hamlet never kills Claudius for Claudius drank of his own accord.

Like the circle between Shakespeare's life and

Hamlet, so is the connection between Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Therefore, relatively speaking, Eliot is like Shakespeare himself-they both created characters in the likeness of their own image and those characters bare a connection, thus linking the lives of two very different authors.

Hamlet links Eliot's work to a very disillusioned society. After the horrors of the great slaughter of World War I, the world found that it was immersed in an abyss. The relation between Hamlet and modernist works is very clear: the society of Prufrock and Hamlet is stagnant and the pressures overbearing. Their indecision as a result of these new pressures causes their downfall.

Works Cited

Britzolakis, Christina. "Speaking Daggers: T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and

Hamlet."

New Essays on Hamlet. Eds. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. New York: AMS P, 1994.

Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1964.

Shakespeare, William.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: Norton, 1997.

Smith, Grover. "The Fascination of

Hamlet."

The Placing of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991.