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HAMLET AND TELEMACHUS

Two Sons

Telemachus and Hamlet. Both unmarried and, on the surface at least, ideal sons-in-law. Both are saddled with the task of avenging their father and restoring his honor. Both long for sufficient courage to grow within them so that they can do what a ghostly apparition asks from them. Both brood at the spectacle of their mother; her reputation is on the line since their father disappeared. Both are notorious doubters, partly because of their character, partly because of their still youthful age. Both—each according to the literary rhetoric of his day—find themselves at the beginning of the story in a contemplative and dispirited mood on account of the loss of their father, a mood that doesn’t inspire the decisive intervention to which they are challenged by the apparition.

‘Who has ever really known who gave him life?’ Telemachus sighs. ‘Would to god I’d been the son of a happy man whom old age overtook in the midst of his possessions!’ Hamlet laments that even ‘bounded in a nutshell’ he could count himself a ‘king of infinite space’, were it not for his bad dreams. Both thus torment themselves with their futile ponderings, close to collapse under the burden of fate’s charge, under the crushing example of their father, who surpassed everyone in power and courage.

As the ghostly manifestation puts it to the elder of the two sons: ‘Few sons are the equal of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.’

Telemachus at Elsinore; Hamlet on Ithaca. Picture the castle of the spinelessly murdered Danish king in an amusing thought experiment as the decor for Penelope and her suitors, and—vice versa—the court of Claudius and Gertrude flown over as it were to the Ionian Islands. The only one who would survive in one piece would probably be Laertes, the brother of Hamlet’s ill-fated love Ophelia, who would reencounter himself on the distant Greek island as the similarly named elderly father of Odysseus.

In the third scene of the first act of Hamlet, this same Laertes declares of Hamlet, his brother-in-law to be: ‘His will is not his own. / For he himself is subject to his birth.’ In a brief couplet we are presented with the thematic problem that is to torment both Hamlet and Telemachus their entire literary lives: what to do; how to do justice to one’s calling in life and to the example of an incomparable father; how to acquire knowledge of what divine fate has prescribed?

There’s doubtless much to be said against a comparison between Homer’s creation and that of Shakespeare, but from what we have said thus far we can observe at the very least that Telemachus and Hamlet are kindred literary sons. Both are overshadowed by their great mythical example Orestes. He, Orestes, at least knew what to do, and Aeschylus’ Oresteia would be far from misplaced as a set of course notes for the undecided. Indeed, Orestes took merciless revenge on Aegisthus, the cunning killer of his father Agamemnon, slain on his return from the Trojan war.

Telemachus is already presented with the bold Orestes by way of example in the first book of the Odyssey, and by none less than the goddess Athena. ‘Be as brave,’ she tells Telemachus, appearing to him in the form of the stranger Mentor, a Taphian prince. Still lacking in purpose, the young son of Odysseus, who can only stand and watch as boisterous suitors compete with ever diminishing shame for the hand of his mother, receives even more useful advice from Athena. Setting herself up as the protector of both father and son, the goddess urges Telemachus to go on a journey—a mini-Odyssey if you like—to Pylos and Sparta, the respective kingdoms of Nestor and Menelaus. He is to inquire of both kings—his father’s erstwhile companions-in-arms—whether Odysseus is still alive and on his way back from Ithaca. Whatever their response, the goddess insists that he must finally do something: ‘Take matters into your own hands,” Athena urges, offering him the choice between deception and open combat. Hamlet could have used such a goddess, someone who would have urged him to act in such an efficacious manner. Instead, Hamlet racks his brains with a theoretical dilemma: whether it be nobler to suffer or take arms against a sea of troubles.

In ‘sandy Pylos’, in Nestor’s palace, Telemachus is hammered once again with the inspiring example of Orestes. ‘See what a good thing it is,’ says the venerable king, ‘for a man to leave a son behind him to do as Orestes did, who killed false Aegisthus the murderer of his noble father. You too, then—for I see you are tall and handsome—must show your mettle and make yourself a name; then later generations will sing your praises.’

The young Telemachus responds with the following answer, so characteristic of his vacillating temperament and youthful diffidence: ‘Would that the gods might grant me the strength to exact like vengeance on the wicked suitors for their woeful misdeeds and reckless overconfidence. But the gods have no such happiness in store for me nor for my father, so I am doomed to bear it as best I can.”

In Sparta, while staying with Menelaus and Helena, Telemachus has a more purposeful and decisive air about him. It is here, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, that the exhortations and inspiration of Athena begin to have a tangible effect.

In books 5 to 14 of the twenty-four book epic, Telemachus does not play a visibly significant role. It is Odysseus’ own peregrinations the reader now hears about, which he recounts on being asked at the court of the king and queen of the Phaeacians. But in the meantime, in reality a matter of a mere few weeks, Telemachus has evolved from an indecisive boy into an intelligent and dynamic young man. He rejects an invitation to remain in Sparta longer than is necessary. As soon as he hears from Menelaus about his father’s wanderings and his involuntary stay on the island of Ogygia, detained by the nymph Calypso, he takes his leave, politely but firmly. The pressure exerted on him by the king of Sparta to stay twelve more days, and the impatience of Telemachus who experiences his call to act more urgently than before, together form a delicate counterpoint to the imprisonment his father Odysseus was forced to endure for many years on his journey home.

Menelaus likewise does not fail to mention the courageous and persevering Orestes, the avenger of his brother Agamemnon. After Athena and Nestor, Telemachus is here confronted with this explicit example for the third time in short succession.

In the meantime Odysseus arrives on Ithaca, transformed beyond recognition into an old beggar by the goddess Athena. When Telemachus returns unscathed to the island by ship shortly thereafter, the familiar denouement unavoidably unfolds, restoring Odysseus to his throne and to Penelope’s marital bed, while each of her suitors tastes defeat. Only the singer and collaborator Phemius is spared, having argued that he was forced to perform for Penelope’s suitors against his will.

Observe, however, what has happed to the young Telemachus in this relatively short period of time. After his minor odyssey in the Peloponnese and his conversations with Nestor and Menelaus, and inspired above all by the guidance of Athena, the youthful character has undergone a critical evolution. He is now more energetic, even more brazen and defiant in face of his mother’s suitors. He expresses himself with greater clarity and his presence is more robust, so much so that even Penelope concludes on his return from Sparta that at least her son no longer offers a reason for her prolonged life of widowhood. Telemachus thus functions in the story once again as a catalyst in the contest for her hand organized by Penelope among the suitors, which is won by Odysseus with flying colors. Telemachus then fights at his father’s side to secure the reputation of palace and queen, and his own reputation as his father’s son.

Time to bring in the arch-doubter Hamlet. ‘My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’ he says, spurring himself on to no avail in one of his renowned soliloquies. Hamlet remains in his bloody thoughts and becomes thereby an example of existential indecision and inertia for countless dramatic and novelistic heroes after him. Telemachus, on the other hand, manages to transform his bloody thoughts into long-anticipated deeds. In the Odyssey’s forty-one day time span, courage does indeed swell up within him. The son of Odysseus grows, perhaps even surpassing himself, from someone who believed he was ‘doomed to be patient’ into someone who knows how to win over the gods and keep them on his side, who knows how to act effectively and succeed with honors in fulfilling the supreme task to which he is predestined in the story of his life.

With respect to Telemachus, the Odyssey might be described—with a little good will—as a proto-Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, and Odysseus’ son as the young hero of this literary manifestation. Telemachus may even be the first fictional character in western literature to experience genuine personality development within a single book. Thus seen, he is clearly the more modern of the two sons juxtaposed here and thereby the most timeless. As such, he haunts the pages of many later novels and plays about sons and fathers, even Shakespeare’s tragedy about the ever-indecisive Danish prince. Instead of wandering lost over Ithaca’s rocky inclines, Telemachus paces back and forth—like an older brother, an ancient shadow—at Hamlet’s side on the misty battlements of Elsinore. Hamlet himself, who had the gift of words but not of deeds, would say: ‘The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.’