Could it be that we were all in Kronborg?

Ricardo T. Ricci

riccirt@fm.unt.edu.ar

There is a beautiful construction at the mouth of Oresund, the strait that separates Denmark from Sweden. Properly speaking, the great island of Sealandia (Denmark) is off the Swedish coast. 

This is a strategic place, of great economic value, where taxes had to be paid to enter into Malmö, one of the most famous ports in the south of Sweden. The strait must also be traveled to access Copenhagen, the Capital of Denmark, opposite to Malmö. Both cities are today connected by an important bridge.

There, in this crucial area, the imposing Kronborg Castle has stood since the Middle Ages. Shakespeare does not mention it directly, but instead, he refers very precisely to the area in which the castle is located. To delve us into the drama, Shakespeare places us in Elsinor.

Kronborg Castle on Elsinore, engraving from around 1688.

Two of the most important physicists of the 20th century, founders of Quantum Mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, at some unknown point around the 1930s went out for a walk in the Danish countryside and suddenly found themselves in front of the famous castle. Both were members of the strictest mainstream scientific thought of Theoretical Physics, and without a doubt, stellar representatives of hard science and strict rationality. Suddenly, standing in front of Kronborg Castle, Bohr said to Heisenberg:

“Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet's "To be or not to be." Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he, too, had to find a place on earth, here in Kronberg. And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.” 

Suddenly, the advancement of fiction over reality, of dreams over wake, of the ancestral over the conjunctural, of the emotional over the rational, are all present. In the 'real' Kromborg the words of Hamlet resonate:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.

(Act three, scene four).

These stones, these walls, these courtyards simply pose to us the crucial question of the human intellect, the access to reality. The imagined presence of Hamlet roaming the galleries and battlements. The vicious picture of Gertrude, Queen of Denmark and mother of Hamlet in licentious agreement with Claudius, current King, and uncle of Hamlet. Behind one of these curtains is the corpse of Polonius, whom the prince of Denmark mistakenly kills. We perceive Ophelia, maddened with grief, drowning in the river when she believes that Hamlet deliberately murdered her father. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern circulate silently there, showing themselves friends and executing treasons.

In Kronborg, throughout both day and night, human miseries occupy every space; passion, shame, anger, jealousy, and thirst for revenge permeate the ornaments. Desires for power give an everlasting luster to every physical object in its immediate vicinity. An innocent stone found on the side of the path we are walking on is both an inconsequential piece of mineral and a symbolic memory of our presence within those walls, of our participation in the drama.

These are the reasons that enable me to maintain that the so-called reality is the hidden and imperceptible sum of what occupies a place in space and the intangibility of the sign. Elsinor, Hamlet, Oresund, and ourselves are that inseparable mix of nature and culture, of flesh and symbol, of the definite and the imprecise.

I have never been to the castle myself, yet I can taste every emotion, every feeling, every passion. Plot and betrayal alienate Hamlet. I can understand it, it impacts me, it irritates me. I can even imagine myself crying, I can feel my irrepressible helplessness and anger, in a cold and dark corner of that mass of stones.

Yes, somehow, we were all in Kronborg! Humanity was there.

Author: Ricardo T. Ricci 

Translation: Mariana Dittborn

Publish in: https://ars-medica.mn.co/posts/could-it-be-that-we-were-all-in-kronborg