Manipulation in Hamlet and Sometimes a Great Notion

While I was reading the passage from Hamlet where he is trying to manipulate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into telling him if they were sent, I was reminded of a passage from Sometimes a Great Notion, a novel I am reading by Ken Kesey. Hamlet uses his relationship with the pair to manipulate them into confessing their motives, saying “But let me conjure you by the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth, by the obligation of our ever preserved love…if you love me hold not off.”

Obviously, Hamlet’s cunning comes to light here. He is very quick to use Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s regard for him as leverage. In Sometimes a Great Notion, Jonathan Draeger is a union representative who has a very  simplified outlook on everyone, and has no reservations in manipulation. His view is described by the narrator:

“Love—and all its complicated ramifications, Draeger believed—actually does conquer all; Love—or the Fear of Not Having It, or the Worry about Not having Enough of It, or the Terror of Losing It—certainly does conquer all. To Draeger this knowledge was a weapon; he had learned it young and for a quarter-century of mild-mannered wheeling and easy-going dealing he had used the weapon with enormous success, conquering a world rendered simple, precise, and predictable by his iron-hammered faith in that weapon’s power.”

While Draeger’s outlook if probably more intense and engrained than Hamlet’s, I think he experiences a bit of what Draeger is describing. He goes to great measures (conquering all) to find whoever killed his beloved father, and easily uses love to manipulate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  In his cynical mindset, Hamlet similarly oversimplifies the world into a set of prisons and dungeons, of which he claims Denmark is the worst.