Hamlet by William Shakespeare, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller are separated by time, language and culture. All three are still widely performed all over the world. What is their appeal? Throughout the ages, theatre has evolved through many genres, styles and forms. However, many people would agree that all drama needs some sort of conflict in order to succeed. In my essay, I will discuss the three plays mentioned above in order to demonstrate that they all contain a mixture of conflict in the main character’s private life together with a public conflict with the society in which the protagonists live.
If we consider Hamlet’s situation at the start of the play, it is already full of conflict. He is grieving for his father who has recently died; he is trying to cope with his mother’s very hasty marriage to his uncle; and, we find out in Act One, scene 3, he is in love with Ophelia –or at least has sent her tokens of love. So he resents his uncle/step-father; he resents his mother; and he has unresolved feelings towards Ophelia. In this private sphere, there is huge conflict – and Shakespeare develops the action so that two of these strands of conflict rapidly become worse: in Act One, scene 5, he is told by a ghost (purporting to be that of his father) that he (the father) was murdered by his uncle; in addition, in Act One, scene3 , Ophelia is ordered by her father, Polonius, not to speak to Hamlet. These two developments increase the conflict in Hamlet’s life: he has even greater cause to resent his step-father, and he cannot understand why Ophelia suddenly stops talking to him. In addition, he is not sure until Act 3, scene 4, that his mother was not involved in the the murder of his father. The ghost of his father urges him to take revenge and kill Claudius, but this merely adds more conflict because Hamlet has a sense of morality and knows that murder is wrong; he is also an enlightened, intelligent man and is not sure that he should commit murder just because a ghost has told him to – he needs proof.
I have expressed my argument so far in straightforward terms to establish the very private nature of the conflict in the protagonist, but if we also consider his position, we find even more conflict with the society he lives in. His murdered father was the king of Denmark, his mother the queen, and he might have been expected to become king after his father’s death – another reason to resent Claudius, but another reason to hesitate when it comes to killing him – after all, regicide is a very serious crime. Therefore, all Hamlet’s private conflicts are played out in a very public arena, because he is a royal prince. In addition, Elsinore, the Danish court, is a place of very little privacy: some of Hamlet’s most private conversations are listened to by Polonius and Claudius, and Ophelia is later ordered to speak to Hamlet after a period of no communication. Because of his position and status, Hamlet is not sure who to trust: he quickly works out that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not really his friends, but like the rich and famous in our times, he is surrounded by sycophants. Therefore, he finds his depression about his father’s death and his mother’s marriage is made even worse by the public attention it gets. In this play, private grief brings conflict which is worsened by the protagonist’s interaction with his society.
In A Doll’s House the connection between private and public conflict is not so explicitly exposed by Ibsen – Nora, for example, is not spied upon as Hamlet is – but social conflict is an important part of the play’s impact. Thorvold’s relationship with Nora is extremely paternalistic and patronizing. He treats her like a little doll and, although Thorvald would say that he loves her, his love is conditional on her being subservient to him. She leaves him and the children at the end of the play in a bold move to find freedom and independence - to find herself too, we might add, because her role as wife to Thorvold and mother to their children has suffocated her. The private conflicts in this play develop as the play goes on and Nora slowly grows in self-awareness.
There is a social aspect to this play in Ibsen’s text, because, near the end of the play, Thorvold’s anger over the fact that Nora has defied social convention and taken out the loan, and his relief his social reputation will not be harmed is a trigger that pushes Nora to leave. Not once does he thank her for all her hard work and effort undertaken to save him – he is simply worried about the potential social embarrassment.
However, there is a wider social context that makes this play still powerful and that is the historic suppression of women and the assumption that their behaviour must conform to male expectations – here the assumption that women must fulfil the expectations that society has of them in terms of mothering. This was also enshrined in Norwegian law when the play was written which gives the play an extra dimension of social conflict.
Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman has a a lot of conflict with his elder son, Biff. Miller is careful to reveal the truth about their conflict only towards the end of the play in a flashback to the past. Biff visited Willy in Boston and caught him with a woman in his hotel room: this destroyed his confidence in his father and has left him unable to settle to a proper career. Before the revelation of Willy’s adultery the audience is aware that the two characters dislike each other and are in conflict, and the audience knows that it is connected with Biff’s failure in life. However, what we don’t understand (until the flashback to the hotel room in Boston) is why Biff suddenly dropped out of his promising future. Therefore, Willy’s betrayal of Biff’s mother, Linda, is at the heart of the personal conflict in the play.
Miller’s play has an important social dimension too, partly because it is American. Willy has other problems in the play – he is sacked from his job and it is clear from various references that he has never made much money or been as successful as he would have liked or as successful as he told people he was. Willy is presented by Miller as being obsessed by his older brother, Ben, who made a fortune in the business world. Willy believes that a man’s worth can be measured by material success and his failure to achieve the American dream of material success makes him feel a failure. Biff’s failure to even try to achieve the American dream is another source of conflict between him and Willy. Before he discovered Willy with the woman in the hotel in Boston, Biff had subscribed wholeheartedly to the values of the American dream, but his discovery of his father’s adultery destroys his faith in everything: his father, the American dream, and his sense of ambition. At the end of the play, Willy drives off to commit suicide in the mistaken belief that Biff will use the insurance money from Willy’s death to set himself up in business. However, the audience knows this is a futile gesture because Biff likes working on a ranch and has ni intention of entering the business world.
Thus we can see that all three plays combine personal conflict with some wider social conflict. This merging of private and public conflict may help to explain their continued popularity in the early 21st century.
