The epic reliquary in Shakespeare's Hamlet

 The characterization of Hamlet by Northrop Frye as presenting a “titanic spirit” in its main character certainly is not unusual by type, and, naturally, the adjective he uses could simply be taken as “massive.”  But the original one, or a more original one, “of the quality of the Titan’s,” may offer another and less problematically monolithic way of reading the play.  The Titans aren’t prominent in current classical discourse, but in a sense hide behind the pantheon of gods that they prefigure.  There may be no way to know now how displaced they were as literary figures by the Homeric epics, but for centuries or more, they have been, thoroughly. 

Both the Homeric and the gods appear in the monologue by the first player, or player king, who, narrating the scene between Priam and Pyrrhus, departs from the play’s focus, disrupts the unity of action, abandons Aristotelian conventions to present a gruesome scene that reinstates the theme Shakespeare would read and reread in Ovid:  the rule of all, more or less for the worse, by the unbridled wills of elites, by the passion of the gods.  Along with the return to the Ovidian, by acting and speaking the Player King’s part himself, Shakespeare backtracked from the Aristotelian to the Platonic, taking on the role of rhapsode performed by Ion in the dialogue of the same name.  Translating Homer for and to this new audience, not as any theater titan himself but as performer of a character, Shakespeare offers moments of epic reliquary, of Homeric remnants or fragments in a setting that invites an audience beyond the play. 

To focus on that moment may be to see the play not as an entity unto itself but as massively involved outside of Aristotelian confines, shadowed by its intertexts, full of multiplicities, putting characters into play who themselves are multiplicities as Deleuze and Guattari might say, none in command, none bound by or given justice, all available for a viewer to interact with multiplicitously as well.  Perhaps it actuated what was done to the playwright by the death of his son.