#anon i'm with you on this one every time an article brings up oedipal hamlet i'm like ohhhhh my fucking god shut up. shut up shut UP

[butchhamlet]

Hi hi you always have such excellent Shakespeare hot takes and I’m dying to hear your thoughts on the Oedipal reading of Hamlet. No interpretation makes me quite so angry and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it 👀

oh i hate it. i hate it. and i will admit that that is mostly personal preference*; i disagree with the reading but i regrettably understand WHY it exists, and i'm not trying to say that anyone who has analyzed an oedipal hamlet is evil or brainless or whatever. that said, i just... think it is such a bizarre and needless take when there is already so much happening in hamlet. i do not understand why people look at a play about mental illness + corrupt governments and surveillance + theatrics overtaking the genuine but maybe also expressing the genuine + suicide + misogyny + obsession + terror of death + questioning your reality + questioning retributive justice + deconstructing the genre norms of revenge tragedy. and go. "yeah but what if it was about incest." bro leave gertrude alone

*i have always seen hamlet's fixation on his mother's sexuality as far more a product of 1) misogyny and 2) his own tendency to obsess over uncomfortable things. re: the hamlet ocd post: a hamlet who has upsetting sexual intrusive thoughts is something that can be so personal. what i said in that post:

i also think this is a much more interesting standpoint from which to characterize hamlet’s preoccupation with incest / his mother’s sex life than “hamlet really really wanted to fuck his mom.” sexual intrusive thoughts are common; among other things, ocd can give you unwanted vivid mental images of morally awful things, sexual acts among them. the first time he brings up his mother’s ambiguously-faithful ambiguously-incestuous remarriage, in 1.2, hamlet actually moans, “let me not think on’t,” and later asks, “must i remember?” forget the o*dipal complex, man. give me a hamlet who has uncomfortable and unwanted thoughts about his mother’s sex life that he hates and wishes he could be rid of because they must make him awful, but he can’t stop thinking and he can’t get away from it and every time he sees his mother with claudius the thoughts pour back in - does he have to remember? can’t he stop thinking about it?

also, i fucking hate sigmund freud. hope this helps <3