This seems to me to be the problem with most critics across all four plays: they elucidate the action and character but do not get to the real issue of why this is a tragedy. What makes this action and character tragic?
Is there a suggestion that Denmark is a “morally sick state”? (Levine, 1962, p. 541) and must be saved (with Hamlet setting himself this task)? In that it is marked by compulsion, by observance and fealty to the King, by giving up one’s freedom to choose to obey the King and the rules of Denmark.
In killing Polonius, which appears to be an “out of the blue” action, has its purpose to show that Hamlet can act according to his free will and in asserting it he is asserting his freedom to choose (or not to drive his sword into the curtains). But what does he achieve through such action other than to demonstrate his free agency?
Does Hamlet achieve salvation in the final actions? Or is it still that ineffability of existence that remains as the mystery because he cannot speak of anything that could explain his journey from the first to the last even though he attempts to make sense of it, and through it his existence; he is still in the realm of the mystery of his existence where if he cannot speak of his meaning for existence then he cannot pass judgement on any other character either (his failure to act when Claudius is praying, for example).
Have I been misreading it and in the final act Hamlet achieves his freedom? That is, freedom from any imperative of the Danish Court? As Mallette (1994, pp. 354-355) notes,
At the end he [Hamlet] has recognized that his will is restricted by the only impediment it truly has, death itself. He has become a being-toward-death throughout the final scenes, a creature who recognizes death as the supreme consideration of human existence, the one to which all others are subordinate. Hamlet has more fully accepted the enigma of death, its tragic finality, and that acceptance has freed him. Heaven, then, is ordinant? when the creature has accepted mortality. Hamlet's embrace of the mystery of his mortality has mysteriously liberated his will. Death is neither meaningless nor absurd; nor is it a call to a divine judgment hereafter. Death rather demands from Hamlet acceptance of its inevitability, its teleological Tightness, that which gives a riddling and ambiguous meaning to life, allows one to act with readiness and willfully to seek one's own salvation.
What we have is Hamlet even unto his death still struggling to assert his free will; and the play ends on that note of ineffability of existence because he cannot articulate what ontological freedom means for him or for others. While he insists that others are constrained in their freedom of choice, of their agency for free will, he prevaricates between adhering to imperatives and therefore of giving up his freedom (which he barely recognises but has some intuitive thought that he is being “played” and resists having his freedom of choice determined by others).
(to be continued)