I do not understand this; and Shakspere seems to have [360] intended the meaning not to be more than snatched at : "By my fay, I cannot reason!"
Ib.
"The rugged Pyrrhus - he whose sable arms," &c.
This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspere's own dialogue, and authorized, too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time ("Porrex and Ferrex", "Titus Andronicus," &c.) - is well worthy of notice. The fancy, that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism: the lines, as epic narrative, are superb.
In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical: in truth, taken by itself, this is its fault that it is too poetical! - the language of the lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspere had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between "Hamlet" and the play in "Hamlet?"
Ib.
"- had seen the mobled queen," &c.
A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning cap, which conceals the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same as the night-cap, that is, it is an imitation of it, so as to answer the purpose ("I am not drest for company"), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect purity.
Ib. Hamlet's soliloquy:
"O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" &c.
[361] This is Shakspere's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet which I have before put forth.
Ib.
"The spirit that I have seen,
May be a devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps
Out of my weakness, and my melancholy,
(As he is very potent with such spirits)
Abuses me to damn me."
See Sir Thomas Brown:
"I believe - that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villainy, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world." - Relig. Med. Pt. I. Sect. 37.
Act iii. sc. 1.
"To be, or not to be, that is the question," &c.
This speech is of absolutely universal interest, - and yet to which of all Shakspere's characters could it have been appropriately given but to Hamlet? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for Iago too habitual a communication with the heart; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong, to all mankind.
Ib.
"That undiscover'd country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns -"
Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the apparition of the Ghost.
O miserable defender! If it be necessary to remove the apparent contradiction, - if it be not rather a great beauty, [362] - surely, it were easy to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or abiding-place.
Ib.
"Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest?
Oph. My lord?
Ham. Are you fair?"
Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him; - and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. "I did love you once:" - "I loved you not:" - and particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shakspere's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and outjuttings.
Ib. Hamlet's speech:-
"I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already,
all but one, shall live: the rest shall keep as they are."
Observe this dallying with the inward purpose, characteristic of one who had not brought his mind to the steady acting point. He would fain sting the uncle's mind;- but to stab his body! - The soliloquy of Ophelia, which follows, is the perfection of love - so exquisitely unselfish!
Ib. sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one of the happiest instances of Shakspere's power of diversifying the scene while he is carrying on the plot.
Ib.
"Ham. My lord, you play'd once i' the university, you say?" ( To Polonius.)
[363] To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest;- but yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he cannot let rest.
Ib. The style of the interlude here is distinguished from the real dialogue by rhyme, as in the first interview with the players by epic verse.
Ib.
"Ros. My lord, you once did love me.
Ham. So I do still, by these pickers and stealers."
I never heard an actor give this word "so" its proper emphasis. Shakspere's meaning is - "loved you? Hum! - so I do still, &c." There has been no change in my opinion:- I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildernstern - "Why, look you now," &c. - proves.
Ib. Hamlet's soliloquy:-
"Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such business as the bitter day
Would quake to look on."
The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do something:- but what to do, is still left undecided, while every word he utters tends to betray his disguise. Yet observe how perfectly equal to any call of the moment is Hamlet, let it only not be for the future.
Ib. sc. 4. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into this business, while it is appropriate to his character, still itching after former importance, removes all likelihood that Hamlet should suspect his [364] presence, and prevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in our opinion.
Ib. The king's speech:-
"O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven," &c.
This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit. The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as have watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the final - "all may be well!" is remarkable;- the degree of merit attributed by the self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the indefinite half-promise, half-command, to persevere in religious duties. The solution is in the divine medium of the Christian doctrine of expiation:- not what you have done, but what you must determine.
Ib. Hamlet's speech:-
"Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying:
And now I'll do it:- And so he goes to heaven:
And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd," &c.
Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking fiendishness! - Of such importance is it to understand the germ of the character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's speech is truly awful! And then -
"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts, never to heaven go," -
O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wishing and willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains!
Ib. sc. 4.
"Ham. A bloody deed;- almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.
Queen. As kill a king?"
[365] I confess that Shakspere has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide?
Act iv. sc. 2.
"Ros. Take you me for a spunge, my lord?
Ham. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities," &c.
Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before;- in fact, in telling home-truths.
Act iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself - she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is instanced in the close:-
"My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel."
Ib. Gentleman's speech:-
"And as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every ward -
They cry," &c.
Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgement in Shakspere, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, "rational and consequential," reflection in these lines with the anonymousness or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions.
[366] Ib. King's speech:-
"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will."
Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspere never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so.
Ib. Speech of Laertes:-
"To hell, allegiance! vows to the blackest devil!"
"Laertes is a good character, but," &c. WARBURTON.
Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh scene of this act;-
"I will do it;
And for this purpose I'll anoint my sword," &c.
uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet;-
"He being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils."
Yet I acknowledge that Shakspere evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes, - to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;- and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimulus of passion in her brother.
Ib. sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspere, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot, - but here how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion!
Ib. sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by -
[367] "Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!" -
Ib. King's speech:
"For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too much."
Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures "plethory."
I rather think that Shakspere meant "pleurisy," but involved in it the thought of plethora, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood; otherwise I cannot explain the following line -
"And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing."
In a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that "hurt by easing."
Since writing the above I feel confirmed that "pleurisy" is the right word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is often called the "plethory."
Ib.
"Queen. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes.
Laer. Drown'd! O, where?"
That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling, the Act concludes with the affecting death of Ophelia, - who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy!
Act v. sc. 1. O, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two extremes! You see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use.
Ib. sc. 1 and 2. Shakspere seems to mean all Hamlet's [368] character to be brought together before his final disappearance from the scene;- his meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yielding to passion with Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalize on all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners with Osrick, and his and Shakspere's own fondness for presentiment:
"But thou would'st not think, how ill all's here about my heart: but it is no matter."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his essay, "On Hamlet" argues: "Shakespeare wished to impress upon us the truth, that action is the chief end of existence -- that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can be considered valuable or indeed otherwise than as misfortunes, if they withdraw us from, or render us repugnant to action, and lead us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we can do anything effectually." Do you disagree or agree with Coleridge? On what grounds?
I adore the way wrote it and agree with him wholeheartedly! I think this is exactly what Shakespeare was trying to impress upon the audience. Hamlet is a very intelligent man, but it didn't matter. He over-thought what he set out to do that he did it in the most ineffectual way. He accomplished his task, but at the death of so many including himself! Had he acted when he had the opportunity as Claudius was trying to pray he would have proved more to the audience, but instead he allowed his intellect to over run the reigns and in turn the play is tragic beyond the audience's imaginations because everyone in it dies. Hamlet could have saved the lives of many had he simply acted, his intellect proved not to valuable to him or those around him in any way, his intellect proved to be the death of all.
It is true that many lives would have been spared had Hamlet just killed Claudius when he had the chance. But to do so would have gone against not only Hamlet's nature as a thinker, but also his belief (and a medieval/Renaissance/Catholic belief) of what happens when someone dies. Hamlet truly believed that Claudius was praying and that if he killed him then, Claudius would sail up to heaven, no problem. This was completely repugnant to Hamlet, who could not help but remember his father's spirit talking about how he was killed without benefit of last rites:
"Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying;
And now I'll do't. [He draws his sword.] And so 'a goes
to heaven,
And so am I revenged. That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge." (3.3)
To give Claudius such an easy end would never have sat right to Hamlet, and I don't think Hamlet would have been very believable if he had performed such an unthinking piece of "revenge."
Shakspeare's Heroines :
Characteristics of Women,
Moral, Poetical and Historical -
By Mrs. Jameson
** OPHELIA **
[153] But there was yet another possible modification of the sentiment, as combined with female nature; and this Shakspeare has shown to us. He has pourtrayed two beings, in whom all intellectual and moral energy is in a manner latent, if existing; in whom love is an [154] unconscious impulse, and imagination lends the external charm and hue, not the internal power; in whom the feminine character appears resolved into its very elementary principles - as modesty, grace , tenderness. Without these a woman is no woman, but a thing which, luckily, wants a name yet; with these, though every other faculty were passive or deficient, she might still be herself. These are the inherent qualities with which God sent us into the world: they may be perverted by a bad education - they may be obscured by harsh and evil destinies - they may be overpowered by the development of some particular mental power, the predominance of some passion; but they are never wholly crushed out of the woman's soul, while it retains those faculties which render it responsible to its Creator. Shakspeare then has shown us that these elemental feminine qualities, modesty, grace, tenderness, when expanded under genial influences, suffice to constitute a perfect and happy human creature; - such is Miranda. When thrown alone amid harsh and adverse destinies, and amid the trammels and corruptions of society, without energy to resist, or will to act, or strength to endure, the end must needs be desolation.
Ophelia - poor Ophelia! Oh, far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life! What shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her! Like a strain of sad, sweet music, which comes [155] floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear - like the exhalation of the violet, dying even upon the sense it charms - like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth - like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses; - such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply. The love of Ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrow asks not words, but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and veil our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy.
Beyond every character that Shakspeare has drawn (Hamlet alone excepted), that of Ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation. Whenever we bring her to mind, it is with the same exclusive sense of her real existence, without reference to the wondrous power which called her into life. The effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so simple, by strokes so few and so unobtrusive, that we take no thought of them. It is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in its pathos, that, as Hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old ballads; we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme and consummate triumph of art.
The situation of Ophelia in the story is that of a [156] young girl, who, at an early age, is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of a court - a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude, magnificent, and corrupted. She is placed immediately about the person of the queen, and is apparently her favourite attendant. The affection of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature is one of those beautiful and redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling, which we find only in Shakspeare. Gertrude, who is not so wholly abandoned but that there remains within her heart some sense of the virtue she has forfeited, seems to look with a kind yet melancholy complacency on the lovely being she has destined for the bride of her son; and the scene in which she is introduced as scattering flowers on the grave of Ophelia is one of those effects of contrast in poetry, in character, and in feeling, at once natural and unexpected, which fill the eye, and make the heart swell and tremble within itself, like the nightingales singing in the Grove of the Furies in Sophocles .
Again, in the father of Ophelia, the Lord Chamberlain Polonius - the shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier - have we not the very man who would send his son into the world to see all, learn all it could teach of good and evil, but keep his only daughter as far as possible from every taint of that world he knew so well? So that when she is brought to the court, she seems, in her loveliness and perfect purity, like a seraph that had wandered out of bounds, and yet breathed on earth the air of Paradise. When her [157] father and her brother find it necessary to warn her simplicity, give her lessons of worldly wisdom, and instruct her "to be scanter of her maiden presence," for that Hamlet's vows of love "but breathe like sanctified and pious bonds, the better to beguile," we feel at once that it comes too late; for from the moment she appears on the scene, amid the dark conflict of crime and vengeance, and supernatural terrors, we know what must be her destiny. Once, at Murano, I saw a dove caught in a tempest - perhaps it was young, and either lacked strength of wing to reach its home, or the instinct which teaches to shun the brooding storm, but so it was - and I watched it, pitying, as it flitted, poor bird! hither and hither, with its silver pinions shining against the black thunder-cloud, till, after a few giddy whirls, it fell, blinded, affrighted, and bewildered, into the turbid wave beneath, and was swallowed up for ever. It reminded me then of the fate of Ophelia; and now, when I think of her, I see again before me that poor dove, beating with weary wing, bewildered amidst the storm. It is the helplessness of Ophelia, arising merely from her innocence, and pictured without any indication of weakness, which melts us with such profound pity. She is so young, that neither her mind nor her person have attained maturity: she is not aware of the nature of her own feelings; they are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them; and love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. She says very little, and what she does say seems rather intended to hide than to reveal the emotions of her heart; yet in those few words we are made as perfectly acquainted with her character, and [158] with what is passing in her mind, as if she had thrown forth her soul with all the glowing eloquence of Juliet. Passion with Juliet seems innate, a part of her being, "as dwells the gather'd lightning in the cloud;" and we never fancy her but with the dark splendid eyes and Titian-like complexion of the south: while in Ophelia we recognise as distinctly the pensive, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the north, whose heart seems to vibrate to the passion she has inspired, more conscious of being loved than of loving; and yet, alas! loving in the silent depths of her young heart far more than she is loved.
When her brother warns her against Hamlet's importunities -
For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute -
No more! -
she replies with a kind of half-consciousness,
No more but so?
LAERTES.
Think it no more.
He concludes his admonition with that most beautiful passage, in which the soundest sense, the most excellent advice, is conveyed in a strain of the most exquisite poetry:
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes.
The canker galls the infants in the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed:
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
[159] She answers with the same modesty, yet with a kind of involuntary avowal that his fears are not altogether without cause:
I shall th' effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede .
When her father, immediately afterwards, catechises her on the same subject, he extorts from her, in short sentences uttered with bashful reluctance, the confession of Hamlet's love for her, but not a word of her love for him. The whole scene is managed with inexpressible delicacy: it is one of those instances, common in Shakspeare, in which we are allowed to perceive what is passing in the mind of a person without any consciousness on their part. Only Ophelia herself is unaware that while she is admitting the extent of Hamlet's courtship, she is also betraying how deep is the impression it has made, how entire the love with which it is returned.
POLONIUS.
What is between you? give me up the truth!
OPHELIA.
He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders
Of his affection to me.
POLONIUS.
Affection! puh! you speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?
[160] OPHELIA.
I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS.
Marry, I'll teach you: think yourself a baby,
That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly:
Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Wronging it thus) you'll tender me a fool.
OPHELIA.
My lord, he hath impórtuned me with love
In honourable fashion.
POLONIUS.
Ay, fashion you may call it. Go to, go to.
OPHELIA.
And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord,
With all the vows of heaven.
POLONIUS.
Ay, springes to catch woodcocks.
. . . . This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment's leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to't, I charge you: come your ways.
OPHELIA.
I shall obey, my lord.
Besides its intrinsic loveliness, the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy, when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the [161] event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably interesting: and yet I doubt whether any woman, who would have been capable of understanding and appreciating such a man, would have passionately loved him. Let us for a moment imagine any one of Shakspeare's most beautiful and striking female characters in immediate connexion with Hamlet. The gentle Desdemona would never have despatched her household cares in haste, to listen to his philosophical speculations, his dark conflicts with his own spirit. Such a woman as Portia would have studied him; Juliet would have pitied him; Rosalind would have turned him over with a smile to the melancholy Jaques; Beatrice would have laughed at him outright; Isabel would have reasoned with him; Miranda could but have wondered at him: but Ophelia loves him. Ophelia, the young, fair, inexperienced girl, facile to every impression, fond in her simplicity, and credulous in her innocence, loves Hamlet; not from what he is in himself, but for that which appears to her - the gentle, accomplished prince, upon whom she has been accustomed to see all eyes fixed in hope and admiration, "the expectancy and rose of the fair state," the star of the court in which she moves, the first who has ever whispered soft vows in her ear: and what can be more natural?
But is it not singular, that while no one entertains a doubt of Ophelia's love for Hamlet - though never once expressed by herself, or asserted by others, in the whole course of the drama - yet it is a subject of dispute whether Hamlet loves Ophelia. Though she herself allows that he had importuned her with love, and "had given countenance to his suit with almost all the holy vows of heaven;" although in the letter which [162] Polonius intercepted Hamlet declares that he loves her "best, O, most best!" though he asserts himself, with the wildest vehemence,
I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum:
still I have heard the question canvassed; I have even heard it denied that Hamlet did love Ophelia. The author of the finest remarks I have yet seen on the play and character of Hamlet, leans to this opinion. As the observations I allude to are contained in a periodical publication, and may not be at hand for immediate reference, I shall indulge myself (and the reader no less) by quoting the opening paragraphs of this noble piece of criticism, upon the principle and for the reason I have already stated in the Introduction:
"We take up a play, and ideas come rolling in upon us, like waves impelled by a strong wind. There is in the ebb and flow of Shakspeare's soul all the grandeur of a mighty operation of nature; and when we think or speak of him, it should be with humility where we do not understand, and a conviction that it is rather to the narrowness of our own mind than to any failing in the art of the great magician that we ought to attribute to any sense of weakness which may assail us during the contemplation of his created worlds.
"Shakspeare himself, had he even been as great a critic as a poet, could not have written a regular dissertation upon Hamlet. So ideal, and yet so real an existence, could have been shadowed out only in the colours of poetry. When a character deals solely or chiefly with this world and its events, when it acts and is acted upon by objects that have a palpable existence, we see it distinctly, as if it were cast in a material mould, as if it partook of the fixed and settled lineaments of the things on which it lavishes its sensibilities and its passions. We see in such cases the vision of an individual soul, as we see the vision of an individual countenance. We can describe both, and can let a stranger into our knowledge. But how tell in words so pure, so fine, so ideal an abstraction as Hamlet? We can, indeed, figure to ourselves, generally, his princely form, that outshone all others in manly beauty, and adorn it with the consummation of all liberal accomplishment. We can behold in every look, every gesture, every motion, the future king,
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,
Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state;
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
Th' observed of all observers.
"But when we would penetrate into his spirit, meditate on those things on which he meditates, accompany him even unto the brink of eternity, fluctuate with him on the ghastly sea of despair, soar with him into the purest and serenest regions of human thought, feel with him the curse of beholding iniquity, and the troubled delight of thinking on innocence, and gentleness, and beauty; come with him from all the glorious dreams cherished by a noble spirit in the halls of wisdom and philosophy, of a sudden into the gloomy courts of sin, and incest, and murder; shudder with him over the broken and shattered fragments of all the fairest creations of his fancy; be borne with him at once from calm, and lofty, and delighted speculations, into the very heart of fear, and horror, and tribulations; have the agonies and the guilt of our mortal world brought into immediate contact with the world beyond the grave, and the influence of an awful shadow hanging for ever on our thoughts; be present at a fearful combat between all the stirred-up passions of humanity in the soul of man, a combat in which one and all of these passions are alternately victorious and overcome; - I say, that when we are thus placed and acted upon, how is it possible to draw a character of this sublime drama, or of the mysterious being who is its moving spirit? In him, his character and situation, there is a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity. There is scarcely a trait of frailty or of grandeur, which may have endeared to us our most beloved friends in real life, that is not to be found in Hamlet. Undoubtedly Shakspeare loved him beyond all his other creations. Soon as he appears on the stage we are satisfied: when absent we long for his return. This is the only play which exists almost altogether in the character of one single person. Who ever knew a Hamlet in real life? yet who, ideal as the character is, feels not its reality? This is the wonder. We love him, not, we think of him, not because he is witty, because he was melancholy, because he was filial; but we love him because he existed, and was himself. This is the sum total of the impression. I believe that, of every other character, either in tragic or epic poetry, the story makes part of the conception; but of Hamlet, the deep and permanent interest is the conception of himself. This seems to belong, not to the character being more perfectly drawn, but to there being a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps any other human composition. Here is a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search. These springs rise from an unknown depth, and in that depth there seems to be a oneness of being which we cannot distinctly behold, but which we believe to be there; and thus irreconcilable circumstances, floating on the surface of his actions, have not the effect of making us doubt the truth of the general picture ."
This is all most admirable, most eloquent, most true; but the critic subsequently declares, that "there is nothing in Ophelia which could make her the object of an engrossing passion to so majestic a spirit as Hamlet."
Now, though it be with reluctance, and even considerable mistrust of myself, that I differ from a critic who can thus feel and write, I do not think so: - I do think, with submission, that the love of Hamlet for Ophelia is deep, is real, and is precisely the kind of love which such a man as Hamlet would feel for such a woman as Ophelia.
When the heathens would represent their Jove as clothed in all his Olympian terrors, they mounted him on the back of an eagle, and armed him with the lightnings; but when in Holy Writ the Supreme Being is described as coming in His glory, He is upborne on the wings of cherubim, and His emblem is the dove. Even so our blessed religion, which has revealed deeper mysteries in the human soul than ever were dreamt of by philosophy, till she went hand-in-hand with faith, has taught us to pay that worship to the symbols of purity and innocence which in darker times was paid to the manifestations of power: and therefore do I think that the mighty intellect, the capacious, soaring, penetrating genius of Hamlet may be represented, without detracting from its grandeur as reposing upon the tender virgin innocence of Ophelia, with all that deep delight with which a superior nature contemplates the goodness which is at once perfect in itself, and of itself unconscious. That Hamlet regards Ophelia with this kind of tenderness - that he loves her with a love as intense as can belong to a nature in which there is (I think) much more of contemplation and sensibility than action or passion - is the feeling and conviction with which I have always read the play of "Hamlet."
As to whether the mind of Hamlet be, or be not, touched with madness - this is another point at issue among critics, philosophers, aye, and physicians. To me it seems that he is not so far disordered as to cease to be a responsible human being - that were too pitiable: but rather his mind is shaken from its equilibrium and bewildered by the horrors of his situation - horrors which his fine and subtle intellect, his strong imagination, and his tendency to melancholy, at once exaggerate, and take from him the power either to endure, or, "by opposing end them." We do not see him as a lover, nor as Ophelia first beheld him; for the days when he importuned her with his love were before the opening of the drama - before his father's spirit revisited the earth; but we behold him at once in a sea of troubles, of perplexities, of agonies, of terrors. Without remorse he endures all its horrors; without guilt he endures all its shame. A loathing of the crime he is called on to revenge, which revenge is again abhorrent to his nature, has set him at strife with himself; the supernatural visitation has perturbed his soul to its inmost depths; all things else, all interests, all hopes, all affections, appear as futile when the majestic shadow comes lamenting from its place of torment "to shake him with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul!" His love for Ophelia is then ranked by himself among those trivial, fond records which he has deeply sworn to erase from his heart and brain. He has no thought to link his terrible destiny with hers: he cannot marry her: he cannot reveal to her, young, gentle, innocent as she is, the terrific influences which have changed the whole current of his life and purposes. In his distraction he overacts the painful part to which he had tasked himself; he is like that judge of the Areopagus, who being occupied with graver matters, flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom, and that with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it.
In the scene with Hamlet, in which he madly outrages her and upbraids himself, Ophelia says very little: there are two short sentences in which she replies to his wild, abrupt discourse -
HAMLET.
I did love you once.
OPHELIA.
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET.
You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate
our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.
OPHELIA.
I was the more deceived.
Those who ever heard Mrs. Siddons read the play of Hamlet cannot forget the world of meaning, of love, of sorrow, of despair, conveyed in these two simple phrases. Here, and in the soliloquy afterwards, where she says,
And I of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
are the only allusions to herself and her own feelings in the course of the play; and these uttered almost without consciousness on her own part, contain the revelation of a life of love, and disclose the secret burthen of a heart bursting with its own unuttered grief. She believes Hamlet crazed; she is repulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, where she had bestowed her young heart, with all its hopes and wishes; her father is slain by the hand of her lover, as it is supposed, in a paroxysm of insanity: she is entangled inextricably in a web of horrors which she cannot even comprehend, and the result seems inevitable.
Of her subsequent madness, what can be said? What an affecting, what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked! - past hope - past cure! There is the frenzy of excited passion - there is the madness caused by intense and continued thought - there is the delirium of fevered nerves; but Ophelia's madness is distinct from these: it is not the suspension, but the utter destruction of the reasoning powers; it is the total imbecility which, as medical people well know, frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is insane. Her sweet mind lies in fragments before us - a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies; her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gaiety to sadness - each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sang her to sleep with in her infancy - are all so true to life that we forget to wonder, and can only weep. It belonged to Shakspeare alone so to temper such a picture that we can endure to dwell upon it -
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness.
That in her madness she should exchange her bashful silence for empty babbling, her sweet maidenly demeanour for the impatient restlessness that spurns at straws, and say and sing precisely what she never would or could have uttered had she been in possession of her reason, is so far from being an impropriety, that it is an additional stroke of nature. It is one of the symptoms in this species of insanity, as we are assured by physicians. I have myself known one instance in the case of a young Quaker girl, whose character resembled that of Ophelia, and whose malady arose from a similar cause.
The whole action of this play sweeps past us like a torrent which hurries along in its dark and resistless course all the personages of the drama towards a catastrophe which is not brought about by human will, but seems like an abyss ready dug to receive them, where the good and the wicked are whelmed together. As the character of Hamlet has been compared, or rather contrasted, with the Greek Orestes, being, like him, called on to avenge a crime by a crime, tormented by remorseful doubts, and pursued by distraction, so, to me, the character of Ophelia bears a certain relation to that of the Greek Iphigenia, with the same strong distinction between the classical and the romantic conception of the portrait. Iphigenia led forth to sacrifice, with her unresisting tenderness, her mournful sweetness, her virgin innocence, is doomed to perish by that relentless power which has linked her destiny with crimes and contests, in which she has no part but as a sufferer; and even so poor Ophelia, "divided from herself and her fair judgement," appears here like a spotless victim offered up to the mysterious and inexorable Fates.
"For it is the property of crime to extend its mischiefs over innocence, as it is of virtue to extend its blessings over many that deserve them not, while frequently the author of one or the other is not as far as we can see, either punished or rewarded.." But there's a heaven above us.
Tragic Balance in 'Hamlet'
From Philip Edwards, 'Tragic Balance in Hamlet'
THE BREAKDOWN in sympathy for Hamlet during the twentieth century seems to me a critical and cultural fact of some importance, and I believe it has inhibited a genuinely tragic response to the play. Yet although the criticism of our time has eroded the tragic quality of Hamlet, one can see latent within that criticism the possibilities of a renewal which might bring the play back to us as tragedy. The twentieth-century view of the play developed as an antithesis to the view which prevailed in the nineteenth century. The new view that one envisages emerges as a synthesis of the two earlier views. I shall argue that this emerging view, though necessarily a product of our own times, could restore to Hamlet something of the tragic quality that may have belonged to the play in its own day.
The nineteenth-century view, the thesis with which we begin, received its latest and greatest expression in Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904. It is a vision of a noble and generous youth who for reasons quite mysterious to himself is unable to carry out the sacred duty, imposed by divine authority, of punishing an evil man by death. It is a vision of paralysis and disablement, of ultimate victory bought at a terrible cost.
Against this I would set, rather obviously, G. Wilson Knight's powerful essay of 1930, 'The Embassy of Death' from The Wheel of Fire. Knight had important predecessors, of course, and he himself radically revised his account of the play. Nevertheless, the essay is central. Knight portrayed the Denmark of Claudius and Gertrude as a healthy, contented, smoothly-running community. Claudius is clearly an efficient administrator, and he has sensible ideas about not letting memories of the past impede the promise of the future.
Hamlet, by contrast, is a figure of nihilism and death. He has communed with the dead, and been instructed never to let the past be forgotten. As a 'sick soul commanded to heal', he is in fact a poison in the veins of the community. Knight went so far as to say that 'Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark', 'a living death in the midst of life'. He is an alien at the court, 'inhuman - or superhuman ... a creature of another world'. Neither side can understand the other.
Claudius murdered his brother, and Hamlet's mission is the punishment of a murderer. Hamlet, Knight admitted, is in the right. And if he had been able to act quickly and cleanly, all might have been well. But which of the two, he asked, Claudius or Hamlet, 'is the embodiment of spiritual good, which of evil? The question of the relative morality of Hamlet and Claudius reflects the ultimate problem of this play.' He gave his own answer: 'A balanced judgement is forced to pronounce ultimately in favour of life as contrasted with death, for optimism and the healthily second-rate, rather than the nihilism of the superman; for [Hamlet] is not, as the plot shows, safe; and he is not safe, primarily because he is right.' So Hamlet is wrong to pursue that which is right. 'Had Hamlet forgotten both the Ghost's commands [that is, to remember the past and avenge the dead] it would have been well, since Claudius is a good king, and the Ghost but a minor spirit.'
Wilson Knight said 'The ghost may or may not have been a "goblin damned"; it certainly was no "spirit of health".' This sentence is the theme of much of the Hamlet criticism which followed. A great many critics have found an element of evil in the pact between the Ghost and Hamlet. Harold Goddard, in The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), said of his ideas about Hamlet that he had been expounding them to students since the days of the First World War. The Ghost is the spirit of war and a symbol of the devil, corrupting Hamlet with his 'thirst for vengeance' and his instruction to kill. To kill whom? Claudius, a man who could have been shown the error of his ways. 'The King ... is no villain.' Shakespeare tempted us in the audience to want Claudius's death in order that we should become ashamed of ourselves and realise with Shakespeare that killing was evil. Hamlet loses in the end because he gives in to the Ghost and 'descends to the level of Laertes'.
L. C. Knights's Approach to Hamlet of 1960 was uncompromising in its hostility to the Prince and his mission. Hamlet is an immature person lacking 'a ready responsiveness to life' who is pushed by the Ghost to concentrate on death and evil. Shakespeare himself disapproved of revenge. This latter view achieved its most thorough and scholarly expression in Eleanor Prosser's Hamlet and Revenge of 1967. Here the Ghost's credentials are picked threadbare and Hamlet's identification with the bloodthirsty villains of revenge fiction is complete.
You may well say that, formidable though the battle-line of Wilson Knight, Goddard, Knights and Prosser may be, I am representing only one trend of mid-twentieth-century criticism. What of C. S. Lewis and Maynard Mack, and many others who cannot be said to share these views? It is more than a trend I am isolating; it is the common currency of Hamlet criticism to deplore, not Hamlet's failure to carry out his mission, but the mission itself. Although there are no beginnings in Hamlet criticism, I trace the movement back to the extraordinary lines of Mallarm, in his essay of 1896 on Hamlet and Fortinbras which Joyce brought to our attention in Ulysses, and his more extended view in Crayonn au thtre (1886). Hamlet is the solitary, 'tranger tous lieux o il poind'. He walks about, we remember, 'lisant au livre de lui-mme'; he denies others by looking at them, and even without willing it spreads death about him. 'The black presence of the doubter causes this poison.'
Many contemporary critics, unable to deny the damning evidence of Prosser but uneasy that the prevailing hostility towards Hamlet tends to make too little of Claudius's crime, have sought to restore a tragic balance to the play by stressing Hamlet's struggle to make a bad deed good. This is associated with the very widespread 'contamination' theory which we find in Maynard Mack. 'The act required of him, though retributive justice, is one that necessarily involves the doer in the general guilt.' A searching and sensitive expression of this view is in Nigel Alexander's Poison, Play, and Duel, (1967). The proof of the King's guilt does not solve Hamlet's problem. 'The question remains, how does one deal with such a man without becoming like him?' (p. 125).
The idea that Hamlet's problem is somehow to punish Claudius and yet transcend the sheer human violence and vindictiveness which such punishment entails goes back to 1839 and the once famous but now forgotten 'conscience' theory of Hermann Ulrici. 'It cannot,' he said, 'be an entirely innocent and heavenly spirit that would wander on earth to demand a son to avenge his death.' Hamlet has to try to convert the 'external action' of revenge 'into one that is internal, free, and truly moral'. The will to the deed must not be a matter of external pressure, it must become 'voluntarily his own'. Ideally this cannot be unless the 'moral necessity' of the deed can be seen to be 'the substance of the divine order of the universe'. Ulrici argues, very interestingly, that Hamlet actually forces the issue of the sympathy of divine power and arrogates to himself the role of providence. Here again he anticipates much modern criticism. I cannot think, however, that the neo-Ulricians have in fact rescued the play of Hamlet from being the rather dismal story of blight which it is in great danger of becoming.
At this point, I should like to summarise the four closely-related areas in which the mid twentieth century most strongly diverged from earlier opinion. The first is the authority of the Ghost; whether he is an authorised emissary of heaven, or just the spirit of an aggrieved king, or, at the extreme, a false spirit from hell. The second area is the morality of his injunction - namely, to exact vengeance for murder; the morality, therefore, of Hamlet's quest to kill Claudius. The third area is the moral and indeed material condition of Denmark and its court under Claudius. The fourth concerns Hamlet himself, how we judge his actions and behaviour generally; what we think of him as a man.
I personally cannot see a way forward in any discussion of Hamlet that does not take as a point of departure that it is a religious play. Bradley refused to call it this, but he acknowledged that the religious element in the play gave it a distinctive tone among Shakespeare's tragedies. Middleton Murry thought that Hamlet's fear of damnation was of tremendous and unrecognised potency in the play. I agree. What Keats said of King Lear would have fitted Hamlet better: 'the fierce dispute/Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay.' George Herbert spoke of himself as
A wonder tortur'd in the space
Betwixt this world and that of grace.
('Affliction', IV)
With characteristic reductiveness Hamlet asks 'What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?' The setting of a play which never moves from Elsinore is earth, heaven and hell.
0 all you host of heaven! 0 earth! what else?
And shall I cou le hell? (I.v.92-3)
When Hamlet says he is prompted to his revenge by heaven and hell, he means he is involved in the whole supernatural world of good and evil and their eternal warfare.
Hamlet when we first meet him is in a state of despair. He longs for death, and would take his own life if suicide were not forbidden by divine decree. It is at this moment that Horatio and Marcellus burst in on him with news of an apparition, seemingly a visitant from beyond the grave in the likeness of his dead father. C. S. Lewis said 'The appearance of the spectre means a breaking down of the walls of the world.' Of this equivocal figure, in the 'questionable shape' of his father, Hamlet passionately demands, 'What should we do?', a question which expands from the specific to become a general appeal for guidance, for a direction and a purpose in one's life. The Ghost's response indicates that the doings of a corrupt mortal world are integrated within an eternal world. What Gertrude has done will be taken care of: 'Leave her to heaven.' But Claudius for his crime is not to be permitted to continue among men and enjoy his booty of crown and queen: 'Bear it not.' What is unendurable to heaven is not to be endured by men. Evil is not ineradicable, and heaven may appoint an agent of its justice to pluck it out - Hamlet. Hamlet's reaction to this communication is like a conversion or a baptism. He ostentatiously wipes away all previous values, and dedicates himself as a new man.
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.
(l.v.102-4)
'As a stranger give it welcome', he says to Horatio about the visitation. He identifies himself with the stranger. He becomes a stranger by adopting the garb of madness. Like Bunyan's Christian, he considers himself a pilgrim and a stranger in his own city of Vanity Fair or Elsinore.
The French Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann scarcely mentioned Shakespeare in his 1955 study of Racine and Pascal, The Hidden God. But I found in it much food for thought about Hamlet. His theory of tragedy, for which he gives credit to the early work of Lukacs, is based on the notion of Pascal that man has to wager that God exists, for he is a hidden God whose presence is not indisputably known and whose voice is not unequivocally heard. The tragic hero longs for clear directives to govern his action; he longs for absolutes, for an existence which he can value as authentic and uncompromising.
But the God to whom he looks, in whose existence he dares to believe, whom he longs to obey, is shrouded and hidden; his voice distorted and scarcely audible, his guidance and his requirement never clearly discernible. The world in which the hero lives, which he would contract out of if he could, is our own accustomed world with our ordinary values. Conspicuously, it is a world never ruled by absolutes, but by perpetual compromise, adjustment and expediency. In this world the hero demands justice, honesty, truth. In his vain efforts to live out what he perceives as the ideals of a higher order in a world which finds his conduct scandalous, offensive, and insane, lies tragedy.
The critical element in this tragic structure is the notion that God is neither absent nor obviously present. If God is dead, or if God is clearly known, the tragedy (Goldmann says) cannot exist. The special irony of the tragic hero's position is that the difficulty of trying to live out what God wants is compounded by the difficulty of knowing what God wants, or even whether He exists.
Hamlet seems to be precisely in the position which Goldmann postulates for the tragic hero. From the very first he insists on absolutes - 'I know not seems'. The voice he hears gives him his mission, which he rapidly expands into a cleansing of the world, a setting right of disjointed time. As the scourge and minister of heaven, he wilfully seeks his own salvation by flailing others with his tongue for their moral inadequacies and redirecting their lives as he moves forward to a killing which will re-baptise the state of Denmark.
What the scholarship of this century has taught us is that the status of the voice which Hamlet hears is from first to last uncertain. The ambiguity of the Ghost is of fundamental importance. Shakespeare uses the great perplexity of his age about the origin and status of ghosts to indicate the treacherousness of a sense of communion with a higher world. Hamlet's own sense of this treacherousness seems nearly always underestimated. It is at the very end of Act II, at the conclusion of the 'rogue and peasant slave' soliloquy, that Hamlet openly expresses his fear that 'the spirit that I have seen may be a devil'. But it is on his next appearance, in, 'To be or not to be', that he most fully and profoundly expresses a much wider scepticism. He is once again in the despair of Act I, again longing for the oblivion of death. Since that time he has been given a mission, which he eagerly seized as being heaven-sent, to renovate the world by a single act. Now he rejects such a possibility. The alternative courses which Hamlet sets before himself in the first five lines of the soliloquy, asking himself which of them is the greater nobleness, are: to continue to endure the antagonisms of existence, or to escape from them in the only possible way, by the act of suicide. The only opposition which the individual can make against the mischances of existence is to take his life. No other act can end the sea of troubles. No other act can improve the condition of the world or the condition of its victims. By implication, the deed of revenge, as a creative act bringing earth nearer to heaven, is of no avail. Whether Hamlet kills the King or not, Denmark will continue to be as it is, a place of suffering ruled by fortune. If there is a nobleness in continuing to live, it is a nobleness of suffering, not a nobleness of reforming and transforming the world. This is exactly the view on the alternative o living or taking one's life put by Schopenhauer in his essay 'On Suicide'. Since no human act can improve the world and all acts contribute to its continued beastliness, Schopenhauer said that the only argument against suicide as a praiseworthy course must be that continued suffering is praiseworthy in itself.
If Hamlet rejects, at least as a means of saving mankind, the killing of the King, he refuses the alternative course through fear of damnation. The soliloquy which begins as a debate on nobleness ends in a contest of cowardliness. What is one most afraid of, the possibility of damnation for taking one's life, or the certainty of suffering on earth? It is conscience, the implanted sense of right and wrong, which makes us too cowardly to embrace a course which reason tells us is noble. And it is this same conscience, this worrying about the consequences of things and the way they look in the eye of eternity, which inhibits other 'enterprises of great pitch and moment' so that they 'lose the name of action'.
Although it is only by inference and by implication, the killing of the King is twice referred to in this great soliloquy. In the later reference we gather that Hamlet has not proceeded with revenge because his conscience cannot convince him that the act is good; in the earlier that, whether the act is good or bad, it cannot change the world. To call Hamlet's mood in 'To be or not to be' a pocket of pessimism, or to speak of his doubts about the Ghost as transient, is to mistake the man whom Shakespeare has drawn. As the play progresses, different surfaces of this many-faceted character catch the light, but the make-up of the whole remains much the same; there is much less 'development' in Hamlet than is often supposed.
Doubts or no doubts, he takes his revenge. Buoyed up by the success of the ruse of the play and determined on action, he decides to spare the King as he prays, but moments later, finding him in the ignominious position of eavesdropper in Gertrude's closet, he kills him, and discovers it is Polonius he has struck. By this misdeed, he triggers off a new cycle of vengeance. By unwittingly killing Polonius Hamlet unwittingly takes his own life.
The progress from this point to the final chance-medley is complex and intricate. I argued in a lecture in 1980 that the less complex version of the latter part of the play in the Folio may well represent Shakespeare's own decision to replace both the defiance of the 'hoist with his own petar' speech and the self-recrimination of 'How all occasions do inform against me' with a silence as regards Hamlet's inner thoughts which is as challenging and mysterious as the silence that lies between Acts I and II. If I am right, tremendous weight is thrown forward on to the account of what has been going on in his mind which he gives to Horatio on his return from the sea-voyage; an account most significantly expanded in the Folio.
In recognising 'a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will', Hamlet recognises, with a clear and conscious modification of his earlier sense of his own freedom and power, that he is subject to the control of a higher power which redirects him when his own blunders have impeded his progress. The recognition is Hamlet's; not necessarily Shakespeare's; not necessarily ours. He continues with an all-important speech, the full version of which is found only in the Folio.
Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon -
He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th' election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage - is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damned
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
(V.ii.63-70)
To have this demand for assurance coming from Hamlet at this point in the play is extraordinary. Such anxiety can only be a measure of much.perplexity. Once again, the theme is conscience and damnation. Conscience formerly made great enterprises lose the name of action; now it is conscience to raise one's arm against Claudius. Damnation formerly lay in wait for Hamlet if he took his own life, or killed the king at the behest of a devil-ghost. Now it would be his meed if he failed to stop a cancerous growth in human nature by allowing Claudius to go on living.
Hamlet says 'the interim is mine', in which to carry out what he sees as a holy resolve. But of course it isn't. The interim belongs to Claudius and Laertes. It is too late for Hamlet to act on his conviction. The first time, too much in fancied control of the world's destiny, he killed the wrong man; the second time he kills the King indeed, but not until he has his own death-wound.
There can be no question about the extent of Hamlet's failure. Quite apart from his responsibility for the deaths of Polonius, Ophelia and his schoolfellows, there is the simple, inescapable fact that the attempt to rid Denmark of its villain-king has left the country in a worse state than it was at the outset. The foreigner Fortinbras, whose threat to the kingdom opens the play, takes it over at the end without firing a single shot. Fortinbras is success as Hamlet is failure. Nor should we take much comfort from Hamlet's own development. Even if we think of his persistent cruelty to Ophelia and his overbearing self-righteousness towards Gertrude as passing stages in his emotional history, we yet face some awkward moments towards the end of the play. Any suggestion that the Hamlet who returns from the voyage is in some state of sanctity has to be resisted. Here again, there is a victory for the criticism of the twentieth century. There has been an anti-Hamlet lobby in every generation but it has become so strong that it is impossible for anyone who to any degree 'believes in' Hamlet to sentimentalise him. There can be no question about the extent of Hamlet's failure. But tragedy must surely ask about the extent of his success. I have been looking at Hamlet as a somewhat fitfully inspired missionary. It is time to turn to the problem which has so engaged the criticism of the twentieth century, the quality of the mission itself. What do we say about the moral standing of the 'court party'? About the values which Hamlet seeks to reimpose on Denmark? And above all about the ethics of wishing to kill Claudius?
'There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.' What is Denmark like? If we don't see sin and crime at Elsinore we are not likely to feel that Hamlet's despair is anything but an illness, or his mission to cleanse the world other than obsession and delusion. I should like to quote a typical modern attempt to abstain from black-and-white answers to this question, by Michael Long, in The Unnatural Scene (1976). In portraying Denmark, says Dr Long, Shakespeare shows 'no ruthless desire to track down viciousness'.
No, it is 'a lucid presentation of very ordinary human failings as they prove catastrophically inept in the face of difficult moral demand...
The real "crime" in which all these characters are involved is that of participating without protest in a social normality which is hostile to the most essential needs of consciousness' (p. 140). We see the strong influence here of both Wilson Knight and L. C. Knights. I should also like to cite John Bayley's praise for Gertrude in Shakespeare and Tragedy (1981); he speaks of the 'innocence' in the play, which extends to Gertrude's marriage to Claudius, and his relations with her' (pp. 173-4).
This levelling of the score, as regards moral judgement, between Hamlet and those to whom he is opposed is characteristic of our century and our eagerness to see both sides of the question. We know too much to believe in villains and heroes. And even if we feel uneasy with this moral levelling as applied to the play of Hamlet, it is very hard not to feel more uneasy at the severity and sharpness of Hamlet's moral distinctions, at the stridency of his insistence on the beauty of his father's life and the ugliness of his uncle's. Everyone feels something excessive in his disgust at his mother's remarriage, in his charge of incest, and in his savage denunciation of his uncle as a usurper.
The question of the moral distinctions in the play seems to me of the very first importance in considering how far the criticism of our day may have blurred the tragic issue as it was presented to Shakespeare's audience. I agree entirely with Wilson Knight's words:
'The question of the relative morality of Hamlet and Claudius reflects the ultimate problem of this play.' Three times during the course of the play Shakespeare brings the story of Cain and Abel to our minds. There is the mention of 'the first corse' in II.ii; 'the primal eldest curse ... A brother's murder' in III.iii; and 'Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder' in V.i. Hamlet is the story of two royal brothers, a kingdom and a queen, given to us as a reflection of the primordial disintegration of the human family in that first murder which resulted from and betokened man's separa- tion from God. In his book Violence and the Sacred, Ren Girard describes how the dissolution of cultural order comes about from the blurring of recognised distinctions and differences, and argues that the basic mythical presentation of this cultural dissolution is in terms of the rivalry of brothers, in fratricidal conflict over something they cannot share - a throne, a woman. The result of cultural dissolution, the 'sacrificial crisis' as Girard terms it, is that violence can no longer be contained, and overflows in the unending cycle of the vendetta. The obliteration of differences and distinctions is what chiefly worries Hamlet; that Gertrude cannot distinguish between the two brothers, between Cain and Abel. 'Look here upon this picture, and on this!'
This was your husband. Look you now what follows,
Here is your husband.... Have you eyes?
(III.iv.53, 63-5)
It is abundantly clear that Claudius seduced Gertrude in the old king's lifetime. It is the thought that this complaisant woman was accustomed to sleep with either of two brothers which gives special force to the idea of 'incest'. The fierce refusal to accept the undiscriminating hospitality of Gertrude's loins is where the tragedy begins. Centuries later, the need to accept the undiscriminating hospitality of Molly Bloom's loins is where Joyce's Ulysses ends. In between lies the Romantic revolution during which Byron presented Cain as a much misunderstood figure.
'He that hath killed my king and whored my mother.' Here is plain speaking!
A murderer and a villain
A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe
Of your precedent lord, a vice of kings,
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole
And put it in his pocket -
(III.iv.96-101)
Here is a forthright recognition of distinctions!
The sense of distinction which Hamlet apprehends to be weakening has now disappeared, as I think my quotations from Wilson Knight, Michael Long, and John Bayley show. I could adduce many, many more, including those at the edges which tell what a poor fish the old king was, probably an alcoholic and possibly impotent. But, as I say, we are all in this. We can't possibly share Hamlet's sense of values. Hyperion to a satyr? A man's a man for a' that. But nor could Shakespeare necessarily or unequivocally share Hamlet's sense of values. It is in the moment of the weakening and questioning of distinctions that he writes his play. What Shakespeare could not do was to repudiate Hamlet's sense of values. We, having gone right down the road that Shakespeare was on, have turned the corner, and can't see the place where the play happened, the place where blurring has just begun, and might perhaps be stopped.
To restore to his mother her sense of difference, to eliminate the man who obliterates distinctions and dares, by murder, to claim the protection of the divinity that hedges a king, to restore to Denmark its beauteous majesty - this is the mission of Hamlet, who, in doing this, can see himself as the scourge and minister of heaven itself. In a scheme of things in which the distinctions between persons are ratified by heaven, the killing of Claudius is as far removed from the brutal poisoning of the former king as can be. It would belong in an area of sacredness which is totally foreign to us. An act of cleansing and not one of pollution, it would have the sanctity of a sacrificial offering.
That there can be a distinction between a violence which purifies, and is acceptable, and all other forms of violence, which are out- lawed, must seem to us the most dangerous concept possible. Only among terrorist circles are differences of kind among acts of violence accepted. We don't accept capital punishment if only because as Saul Bellow's hero put it, 'Nobody's hands are clean enough to throw the switch'. But, difficult though it is for us, unless we can see some sense in an idea of authorised violence, there can be little hope of recapturing the tragic sense of the play Hamlet. Oddly enough, the nineteenth century, which had its own scruples about capital punish- ment, seems to have had too little doubt about divinely-sanctioned violence in Hamlet (apart from Ulrici and his followers of course) and to that extent they diminished the tragic balance of the play. Claudius ought to be killed, they felt: it was some terrible paralysis which prevented Hamlet from doing the deed. G. K. Chesterton saw the way things were going and in an essay of 1923 leapt to the defence of the older view. We could no longer apprehend the play, he claimed, because we had ceased to believe in punishment, and had substituted pity in its stead. 'The sort of duty that Hamlet shirked is exactly the sort of duty that we are all shirking; that of dethroning injustice and vindicating truth.'
This disarming simplicity has as little to do with what we find in the play of Hamlet as has the opposing view that the execution of Claudius is too horrid even to contemplate. The only person who holds a simple view about punishing Claudius is the Ghost. 'How- somever thou pursues this act, / Taint not thy mind.' This revenge he asks for is a straightforward business, demanding courage and will, like meeting the challenge of old Fortinbras, all those years ago.
But for Hamlet nothing is simple or straightforward. His rage to re- establish the world of distinctions and sanctions which he fears is disappearing never quite certainly finds either its divine justification or its true way of proceeding. Throughout the play, to everyone, his language is teasing, riddling, punning, looking two ways at once, never directly serious or directly jesting. In almost everything he says, he reveals his incapacity for or refusal of single vision and single valuation. Hamlet's commitment to killing the king wavers constantly; he tries out the avenger's script, he clearly prefers to chasten his mother, and (for me most significantly) at the second visitation actually fears that the Ghost's presence may convert his 'stern effects' and substitute tears for blood. Because of the impossibility of total conviction, great enterprises lose the name of action. But "tis not so above. There is no shuffling.' Is there a line of communication from that higher region where uncertainty doesn't reign, authorising conduct which, though it seems terrible, brings the values of heaven into a corrupt Denmark? The play of Hamlet takes place within the possibility that there is - in the symbol of the Ghost. Neither positive that there is, nor positive that there is not.
I have for several years suggested to my students that the central dilemma in Hamlet is that which Kierkegaard describes, concerning Abraham and the intended sacrifice of Isaac, in his work Fear and Trembling. Abraham believed that he had heard God and in obedience was prepared to murder his beloved son. This indeed is faith. It is the idea of the wager again - betting that there is a God - and that trusting in what we hear enables us to fulfil a demand of the absolute, although we outgo the laws of worldly ethics.
Kierkegaard tries out many scenarios for the intense but skeletal drama provided in Genesis. What would Isaac say when he heard Abraham's explanation of his extraordinary conduct towards him? 'So you were prepared to kill me because a voice told you to?' And so on. There can be no certainty. Isaac was not killed, but Abraham was ready and willing to kill him. Either he was a murderer, or he was an obedient child of God. Faith, says Kierkegaard, is 'a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God'. But, he asks, 'If the individual had misunderstood the deity - what can save him?'
The mistaken conviction of the individual that he can be above the universally accepted ethics of society, Kierkegaard calls the 'demoniacal'. He speaks of 'the knight of faith who in the solitude of the universe never hears any human voice, but walks alone with his dreadful responsibility'. Dreadful, because he may be eternally lost, for following the demoniac and not the divine. Either way, he seems mad to the world; at the very least, the world 'denounces as presumption his wanting to play providence by his actions'.
The literary criticism of the past fifty years, with its challenge to the conduct of Hamlet and the authority of the Ghost, has unintentionally moved the play right into the point of terrible balance described by Kierkegaard. Is Hamlet's sense of mission divine or demoniac? A former pupil of mine objected to my use of Kierkegaard concerning a play written when theology was dominated by Luther.
It was Wittenberg Hamlet was studying at. William Tyndale, who visited Luther at Wittenberg, will do just as well.
FAITH, is the believing of God's promises, and a sure trust in the goodness and truth of GOD; which faith justified Abraham, and was the mother of all his good works which he afterwards did. Good works are works of God's commandment, wrought in faith ... Jacob robbed Laban his uncle; Moses robbed the Egyptians; and Abraham is about to slay and burn his own son; and all are holy works, because they are wrought in faith at God's commandment. To steal, rob, and murder, are no holy works before worldly people; but unto them that have their trust in God they are holy, when God commandeth them. Holy works of man's imaginations receive their reward here, as Christ testifieth, Matt. vi.
'Holy works of man's imaginations' are what Kierkegaard would call 'demoniac' activity. Stephen Greenblatt, whose Renaissance Self- Fashioning directed me towards Tyndale, stresses the violence with which, in the Reformation debates, each side accused the other of creating God in their imaginations. I quote from Tyndale again.
These are they which Jude in his epistle called dreamers, which deceive themselves with their own fantasies. For what other thing is their imagination, which they call faith, than a dreaming of the faith, and an opinion of their own imagination wrought without the grace of God?
Both Horatio and Hamlet understood what Tyndale meant by 'imagination'. 'He waxes desperate with imagination', says Horatio; that is, with self-created ideas of what the Ghost is. And Hamlet fears that if he can't confirm the Ghost's story, 'my imaginations are as foul / As Vulcan's stithy', that is, that he has been building his views of heaven's decrees on a mental image and not on truth.
The practical effects of Hamlet's purifying violence are disastrous. Claudius sought to protect his kingdom and did it efficiently against the attacks of both Fortinbras and Laertes. Hamlet comes in, an alienated, savage, destructive force, and Denmark passes into foreign hands. Against the tangible misery which he causes have to be set the intangible values of salvation and damnation which govern his entire conduct - values which are not only intangible but unverifiable, and may belong in the end to men's imagination.
It has been my contention that the tragic value of the play Hamlet has become enfeebled through two successive, antithetical waves of criticism, and that the possibility of renewing that tragic value lies not in trying to refute or wipe away mid twentieth-century criticism but in acknowledging it, absorbing it and moving on from it with reinforcement from the nineteenth-century criticism it had tried to replace. I should make it clear that so far as I am concerned the twentieth-century critic (who, of course, like Yeats's Fisherman is 'a man who does not exist') has not only refused to follow the old-fashioned custom of identifying with Hamlet, he has positively rejected him.
In Nietzschean terms, the twentieth century has completely upset the equilibrium of Apollo and Dionysus by putting all the weight on the Apollonian side. The maintenance of social order takes precedence of all else, and Hamlet is a disturbing nuisance wrecking the social fabric by trying to bring back the past. 'Claudius is a good king, and the Ghost but a minor spirit.' The all-important question for me is, what kind of sympathy do we need to find for Hamlet in order to restore an equilibrium which I believe could have been Elizabethan, but which I think you will not easily find in nineteenth- or twentieth-century criticism?
Doubts about the Ghost, doubts about the ethics of revenge, doubts about the nastiness of Claudius, and doubts about the niceness of Hamlet, are a legacy of modern times which we need to hold fast to. But when the doubts become positive scepticism, we are as lost as we were when we supposed that the Ghost was guaranteed, that revenge was good, that Hamlet was noble and Claudius a rotter. Shakespeare, it may be said, looked at the past not only nostalgically but sentimentally. Yet those of his heroes who try to restore or even preserve the past, and oppose the future, Richard II, Brutus, Coriolanus, have an ineffectuality and a woodenness about them which betoken a grim historical realism on Shakespeare's part. It is in Hamlet above all of Shakespeare's plays that I find superbly and movingly presented an openness towards both past and future in which the possibility of restoration is balanced against the futility of trying. And this is not entirely because of the unbelievable interest of the mind which contemplates the task of bringing back the majesty of beauteous Denmark. It is also because of the great transcendental hypothesis which is the framework of the play, and the context in which past and future are seen. The sense of an order of distinction among people which is ratified in heaven, the sense that there is a communication between heaven and earth, the sense that there can be a cleansing act of violence which is both a punishment and a liberation, these are as powerfully present in the play as is the conviction that these things do not exist. Hamlet's groping attempt to make a higher truth active in a fallen world fails hopelessly. But just suppose we can entertain the possibility that he was within reach of a higher truth. 'What should we do?' he asks the Ghost. And of Horatio he asks, 'Is't not to be damned to let this canker of our nature come in further evil?' Wilson Knight, in that brilliant early essay of his, recognised the alien and inhuman prophet that Hamlet essentially is. And he repudiated him. Hamlet vexed and troubled the world and failed to change it for the better. But he continues, or he ought to continue, to vex and trouble us with the suspicion, and the fear, that although he never got there, he may have been after something worth having. It is not faith we need to understand Hamlet, but doubt about our own scepticism. We need just enough questioning to keep alive the openness of Hamlet's question to Horatio. 'Is't not to be damned to let this canker of our nature come n further evil?' And to be able to respond also to that other remark of his:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Victor Hugo’s Analysis of Hamlet
Hamlet is prince and demagogue, sagacious and extravagant, profound and frivolous, man and neuter. He has little faith in the sceptre, rails at the throne, has a student for his comrade, converses with any one passing by, argues with the first comer, understands the people, despises the mob, hates violence, distrusts success, questions obscurity, and is on speaking terms with mystery. He communicates to others maladies that he has not himself; his feigned madness inoculates his mistress with real madness. He is familiar with spectres and with actors. He jests, with the axe of Orestes in his hand. He talks literature, recites verses, composes a theatrical criticism, plays with bones in a churchyard, dumbfounds his mother, avenges his father, and closes the dread drama of life and death with a gigantic point of interrogation. He terrifies, and then disconcerts. Never has anything more overwhelming been dreamed.
This drama is stern. In it truth doubts, sincerity lies. Nothing can be vaster, nothing subtler. In it man is the world, and the world is zero. Hamlet, even in full life, is not sure of his existence. In this tragedy - which is at the same time a philosophy -–everything floats, hesitates, shuffles, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution a twilight; the action blows every moment from a different direction; the mariner’s card governs man. A work which disturbs and makes dizzy; in which the bottom of everything is laid bare; where the pendulum of thought oscillates only from the murdered king to buried Yorick; and where that which is most real is kingliness impersonated in a ghost, and mirth represented by a death’s head.
Hamlet is the supreme tragedy of the human dream.
Other works of the human mind equal Hamlet; none surpasses it. There is in Hamlet all the majesty of the mournful. A drama issuing from an open sepulchre, - this is colossal.
No figure among those that poets have created is more poignant and more disquieting. Doubt counselled by a ghost – such is Hamlet. Hamlet has seen his dead father and has spoken to him.
Is he convinced? No: he shakes his head. What shall he do? He does not know. His hands clench, then fall by his side. Within him are conjectures, systems, monstrous apparitions, bloody recollections, veneration for the ghost, hate, tenderness, anxiety to act and not to act, his father, his mother, conflicting duties, - a profound storm. His mind is occupied with ghastly hesitation. Shakespeare, wonderful plastic poet makes the grandiose pallor of this soul almost visible. Like the great spectre of Albrecht Durer, Hamlet might be named “Melancholia”. Above his head, too, there flits the disembowelled bat; at his feet are science, the sphere, the compass, the hourglass, love; and behind him, at the horizon, a great and terrible sun which seems to make the sky but darker.
Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet is anger, transport, outrage, hurricane, sarcasm to Ophelia, malediction on his mother, insult to himself. He talks with the grave-digger, almost laughs, then clutches Laertes by the hair in the very grave of Ophelia, and tramples furiously upon that coffin. Sword-thrusts at Polonius, sword-thrusts at Laertes, sword-thrusts at Claudius. At times his inaction gapes open and from the rent, thunderbolts flash out.
He is tormented by that possible life, interwoven of reality and dream, concerning which we are all anxious. Somnambulism is diffused through all his actions. One might almost consider his brain as a formation: there is a layer of suffering, a layer of thought, then a layer of dream.
It is through this layer of dream that he leefs, comprehends, learns, perceives, drinks, eats, frets, mocks, weeps, and reasons. There is between life and him a transparency – the wall of dreams; one sees beyond it, but cannot step over it. A kind of cloudy obstacle everywhere surrounds Hamlet. Have you never, while sleeping, had the nightmare of pursuit or flight, and tried to hasten on, and felt the anchylosis of your knees, the heaviness of your arms, the horrible paralysis of your benumbed hands? This nightmare Hamlet suffers while awake. Hamlet is not upon the spot where his life is. He has ever the air of a man who talks to you from the other side of a stream. He calls to you at the same time that he questions you. He is at a distance from the catastrophe in which he moves, from the passer-by he questions, from the thought he bears, from the action he performs. He seems not to touch even what he crushes. This is isolation carried to its highest power. It is the loneliness of a mind, even more than the unapproachableness of a prince. Indecision is, in fact, a solitude; you have not even your will to keep you company. It is as if your own self had departed and had left you there.
And thus, apart from men, Hamlet still has within him an undefined something which represents them all. He is the mournful man that we all are in certain situations. Unhealthy as he is, Hamlet expresses a permanent condition of man. He represents the discomfort of the soul in a life unsuited to it. He represents the shoe that pinches and stops our walking; this shoe is the body. Shakespeare delivers him from it, and rightly. Hamlet – prince if you like, but king never – is incapable of governing a people, so wholly apart from all does he exist. On the other hand he does better than to reign; he is. Take from him his family, his country, his ghost, the whole adventure at Elsinore, and even in the form of an inactive type he remains strangely terrible. This results from the amount of humanity and the amount of mystery in him. Hamlet is formidable – which does not prevent his being ironical. He has the two profiles of destiny.
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lecture on Hamlet
The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone, explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one important but particularly doubtful point.
We left Hamlet, at the close of the First Act, when he had just received his charge from the spirit of his father; and his condition was vividly depicted in the fact that, within an hour of receiving this charge, he had relapsed into the weariness of life or longing for death which is the immediate cause of his later inaction. When next we meet him, at the opening of the Second Act, a considerable time has elapsed, apparently as much as two months.1 The ambassadors sent to the King of
1In the First Act (I. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father has been dead not quite two months. In the Third Act (III. ii. 135) Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead 'twice two months.' The events of the Third Act are separated from those of the Second by one night (II. ii. 565).
Norway (I. ii. 27) are just returning. Laertes, whom we saw leaving Elsinore (I. iii), has been in Paris long enough to be in want of fresh supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in I. iii.), and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or letters. What has Hamlet done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and established a reputation for lunacy, with the result that his mother has become deeply anxious about him, and with the further result that the King, who was formerly so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to stay on at Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous to discover the cause of his 'transformation.' Hence Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been sent for, to cheer him by their company and to worm his secret out of him; and they are just about to arrive. Beyond exciting thus the apprehensions of his enemy Hamlet has done absolutely nothing; and, as we have seen, we must imagine him during this long period sunk for the most part in 'bestial oblivion' or fruitless broodings, and falling deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.
Now he takes a further step. He suddenly appears unannounced in Ophelia's chamber; and his appearance and behaviour are such as to suggest both to Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by disappointment in love. How far this step was due to the design of creating a false impression as to the origin of his lunacy, how far to other causes, is a difficult question; but such a design seems certainly present. It succeeds, however, only in part; for, although Polonius is fully convinced, the King is not so, and it is therefore arranged that the two shall secretly witness a meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet. Meanwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and at the King's request begin their attempts, easily foiled by Hamlet, to pluck out the heart of his mystery.
Then the players come to Court, and for a little while one of Hamlet's old interests revives, and he is almost happy. But only for a little while. The emotion shown by the player in reciting the speech which tells of Hecuba's grief for her slaughtered husband awakes into burning life the slumbering sense of duty and shame. He must act. With the extreme rapidity which always distinguishes him in his healthier moments, he conceives and arranges the plan of having the 'Murder of Gonzago' played before the King and Queen, with the addition of a speech written by himself for the occasion. Then, longing to be alone, he abruptly dismisses his guests, and pours out a passion of self-reproach for his delay, asks himself in bewilderment what can be its cause, lashes himself into a fury of hatred against his foe, checks himself in disgust at his futile emotion, and quiets his conscience for the moment by trying to convince himself that he has doubts about the Ghost, and by assuring himself that, if the King's behaviour at the play-scene shows but a sign of guilt, he 'knows his course.'
Nothing, surely, can be clearer than the meaning of this famous soliloquy. The doubt which appears at its close, instead of being the natural conclusion of the preceding thoughts, is totally inconsistent with them. For Hamlet's self-reproaches, his curses on his enemy, and his perplexity about his own inaction, one and all imply his faith in the identity and truthfulness of the Ghost. Evidently this sudden doubt, of which there has not been the slightest trace before, is no genuine doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay -- and for its continuance.
A night passes, and the day that follows it brings the crisis. First takes place that interview from which the King is to learn whether disappointed love is really the cause of his nephew's lunacy. Hamlet is sent for; poor Ophelia is told to walk up and down, reading her prayer-book; Polonius and the King conceal themselves behind the arras. And Hamlet enters, so deeply absorbed in thought that for some time he supposes himself to be alone. What is he thinking of? 'The Murder of Gonzago,' which is to be played in a few hours, and on which everything depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.1 His reflections have no reference to this particular moment; they represent that habitual weariness of life with which his passing outbursts of emotion or energy are contrasted. What can be more significant than the fact that he is sunk in these reflections on the very day which is to determine for him the truthfulness of the Ghost? And how is it possible for us to hope that, if that truthfulness should be established, Hamlet will be any nearer to his revenge? 2
His interview with Ophelia follows; and its result shows that his delay is becoming most dangerous
1The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by 'the Everlasting.' Even this, however, seems to have been present in the original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a line about our being 'borne before an everlasting Judge.'
2The present position of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due to an afterthought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a poet's first conceptions.
to himself. The King is satisfied that, whatever else may be the hidden cause of Hamlet's madness, it is not love. He is by no means certain even that Hamlet is mad at all. He has heard that infuriated threat, 'I say, we will have no more marriages; those that are married, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are.' He is thoroughly alarmed. He at any rate will not delay. On the spot he determines to send Hamlet to England. But, as Polonius is present, we do not learn at once the meaning of this purpose.
Evening comes. The approach of the play-scene raises Hamlet's spirits. He is in his element. He feels that he is doing something towards his end, striking a stroke, but a stroke of intellect. In his instructions to the actor on the delivery of the inserted speech, and again in his conversation with Horatio just before the entry of the Court, we see the true Hamlet, the Hamlet of the days before his father's death. But how characteristic it is that he appears quite as anxious that his speech should not be ranted as that Horatio should observe its effect upon the King! This trait appears again even at that thrilling moment when the actor is just going to deliver the speech. Hamlet sees him beginning to frown and glare like the conventional stage-murderer, and calls to him impatiently, 'Leave thy damnable faces and begin!'1
Hamlet's device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to expect. He had thought the King might 'blench,' but he does much more. When only six of the 'dozen or sixteen lines' have been spoken he starts to his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed Court. In the elation of success --
1Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion' with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' (V. i. 306).
an elation at first almost hysterical -- Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to him, with undisguised contempt. Left to himself, he declares that now he could
He has been sent for by his mother, and is going to her chamber; and so vehement and revengeful is his mood that he actually fancies himself in danger of using daggers to her as well as speaking them.1
In this mood, on his way to his mother's chamber, he comes upon the King, alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. His enemy is delivered into his hands.
He scans it; and the sword that he drew at the words, 'And now I'll do it,' is thrust back into its sheath. If he killed the villain now he would send his soul to heaven; and he would fain kill soul as well as body.
That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty generally agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind which, on the view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of Hamlet's failure here. The first five words he
Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This passage is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (III. iv. 28):
Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of complicity in the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told him she was innocent of that.
2I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put after 'revenged' in a late Quarto is right.
utters, 'Now might I do it,' show that he has no effective desire to 'do it'; and in the little sentences that follow, and the long pauses between them, the endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening return of melancholic paralysis, however difficult a task they set to the actor, are plain enough to a reader. And any reader who may retain a doubt should observe the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not think of justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more perfect vengeance. But in one point the great majority of critics, I think, go astray. The feeling of intense hatred which Hamlet expresses is not the cause of his sparing the King, and in his heart he knows this; but it does not at all follow that this feeling is unreal. All the evidence afforded by the play goes to show that it is perfectly genuine, and I see no reason whatever to doubt that Hamlet would have been very sorry to send his father's murderer to heaven, nor much to doubt that he would have been glad to send him to perdition. The reason for refusing to accept his own version of his motive in sparing Claudius is not that his sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere, and also in the opening of his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to act is due to other causes.
The incident of the sparing of the King is contrived with extraordinary dramatic insight. On the one side we feel that the opportunity was perfect. Hamlet could not possibly any longer tell himself that he had no certainty as to his uncle's guilt. And the external conditions were most favourable; for the King's remarkable behaviour at the play-scene would have supplied a damning confirmation of the story Hamlet had to tell about the Ghost. Even now, probably, in a Court so corrupt as that of Elsinore, he could not with perfect security have begun by charging the King with the murder; but he could quite safely have killed him first and given his justification afterwards, especially as he would certainly have had on his side the people, who loved him and despised Claudius. On the other hand, Shakespeare has taken care to give this perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we can hardly bring ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his minor difficulties, we have seen, probably was that he seemed to be required to attack a defenceless man; and here this difficulty is at its maximum.
This incident is, again, the turning-point of the tragedy. So far, Hamlet's delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the disasters that follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself. This central significance of the passage is dramatically indicated in the following scene by the reappearance of the Ghost and the repetition of its charge.
Polonius is the first to fall. The old courtier, whose vanity would not allow him to confess that his diagnosis of Hamlet's lunacy was mistaken, had suggested that, after the theatricals, the Queen should endeavour in a private interview with her son to penetrate the mystery, while he himself would repeat his favourite part of eavesdropper (III. i. 184 ff.). It has now become quite imperative that the Prince should be brought to disclose his secret; for his choice of the 'Murder of Gonzago,' and perhaps his conduct during the performance, have shown a spirit of exaggerated hostility against the King which has excited general alarm. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discourse to Claudius on the extreme importance of his preserving his invaluable life, as though Hamlet's insanity had now clearly shown itself to be homi-cidal.1 When, then, at the opening of the interview between Hamlet and his mother, the son, instead of listening to her remonstrances, roughly assumes the offensive, she becomes alarmed; and when, on her attempting to leave the room, he takes her by the arm and forces her to sit down, she is terrified, cries out, 'Thou wilt not murder me?' and screams for help. Polonius, behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment Hamlet, hoping the concealed person is the King, runs the old man through the body.
Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet's sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless behind the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already excited and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he has no time to 'scan' it. It is a minor consideration, but still for the dramatist not unimportant, that the audience would wholly sympathize with Hamlet's attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking to entrap him, instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to the bulk of the audience then, as now, seemed to have a 'relish of salvation in't.'
We notice in Hamlet, at the opening of this interview, something of the excited levity which followed the dénouement of the play-scene. The
1III. iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at this time, though I have not seen it noticed by critics, seems to me puzzling. It is quite clear from III. ii. 310 ff., from the passage just cited, and from IV. vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that everyone sees in the play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King. Yet no one shows any sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of murder. Surely that is strange. Are we perhaps meant to understand that they do perceive this, but out of subservience choose to ignore the fact? If that were Shakespeare's meaning, the actors could easily indicate it by their looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we may feel for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their fate would be much diminished. But the mere text does not suffice to decide either this question or the question whether the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the commission they bore to England.
death of Polonius sobers him; and in the remainder of the interview he shows, together with some traces of his morbid state, the peculiar beauty and nobility of his nature. His chief desire is not by any means to ensure his mother's silent acquiescence in his design of revenge; it is to save her soul. And while the rough work of vengeance is repugnant to him, he is at home in this higher work. Here that fatal feeling, 'it is no matter,' never shows itself. No father confessor could be more selflessly set upon his end of redeeming a fellow-creature from degradation, more stern or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager to welcome the first token of repentance. There is something infinitely beautiful in that sudden sunshine of faith and love which breaks out when, at the Queen's surrender,
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain,
he answers,
The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his uncle and acknowledges the duty of vengeance, his whole heart is never in this feeling or this task; but his whole heart is in his horror at his mother's fall and in his longing to raise her. The former of these feelings was the inspiration of his first soliloquy; it combines with the second to form the inspiration of his eloquence here. And Shakespeare never wrote more eloquently than here.
I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the Ghost in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular moment of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is raving against his uncle? There seems to be more than one reason. In the first place, Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame and contrition in his mother's breast, and is now yielding to the old temptation of unpacking his heart with words, and exhausting in useless emotion the force which should be stored up in his will. And, next, in doing this he is agonizing his mother to no purpose, and in despite of her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy. But the Ghost, when it gave him his charge, had expressly warned him to spare her; and here again the dead husband shows the same tender regard for his weak unfaithful wife. The object of his return is to repeat his charge:
but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help the mother and 'step between her and her fighting soul.'
And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by Shakespeare's choice of this particular moment. It is a moment when the state of Hamlet's mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing. He is further guarded by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by showing the same traits as were visible on his first appearance -- the same insistence on the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the Queen. And the result is that we construe the Ghost's interpretation of Hamlet's delay ('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's own interpretation. Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare's audience had any doubt of his meaning here. The idea of later critics and readers that the Ghost is an hallucination is due partly to failure to follow the indications just noticed, but partly also to two mistakes, the substitution of our present intellectual atmosphere for the Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the Queen does not see and hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal. But a ghost, in Shakespeare's day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of sparing the Queen, is obvious.1
At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of the King's design of sending him to England in charge of his two 'school-fellows.' He has no doubt that this design covers some villainous plot against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will succeed in defeating it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure to this conflict of wits. The idea of refusing to go appears not to occur to him. Perhaps (for here we are left to conjecture) he feels that he could not refuse unless at the same time he openly accused the King of his father's murder (a course which he seems at no time to contemplate); for by the slaughter of Polonius he has supplied his enemy with the best possible excuse for getting him out of the country. Besides, he has so effectually warned this enemy that, after the death of Polonius is discovered, he is kept under guard (IV. iii. 14). He consents, then, to go. But on his way to the shore he meets the army of Fortinbras on its march to Poland; and the sight of these men going cheerfully to risk death 'for an egg-shell,' and 'making mouths at the invisible event,' strikes him with shame as he remembers how he, with so much greater cause for action, 'lets all sleep'; and he breaks out into the soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me!'
1This passage in Hamlet seems to have been in Heywood's mind when, in The Second Part of the Iron Age(Pearson's reprint, vol. iii., p. 423), he makes the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to his mother's guilt. No reader could possibly think that this Ghost was meant to be an hallucination; yet Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I may add, goes further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as visible, to the privileged person.
This great speech, in itself not inferior to the famous 'To be or not to be,' is absent not only from the First Quarto but from the Folio. It is therefore probable that, at any rate by the time when the Folio appeared (1623), it had become customary to omit it in theatrical representation; and this is still the custom. But, while no doubt it is dramatically the least indispensable of the soliloquies, it has a direct dramatic value, and a great value for the interpretation of Hamlet's character. It shows that Hamlet, though he is leaving Denmark, has not relinquished the idea of obeying the Ghost. It exhibits very strikingly his inability to understand why he has delayed so long. It contains that assertion which so many critics forget, that he has 'cause and will and strength and means to do it.' On the other hand and this was perhaps the principal purpose of the speech -- it convinces us that he has learnt little or nothing from his delay, or from his failure to seize the opportunity presented to him after the play-scene. For, we find, both the motive and the gist of the speech are precisely the same as those of the soliloquy at the end of the Second Act ('O what a rogue'). There too he was stirred to shame when he saw a passionate emotion awakened by a cause which, compared with his, was a mere egg-shell. There too he stood bewildered at the sight of his own dullness, and was almost ready to believe -- what was justly incredible to him -- that it was the mask of mere cowardice. There too he determined to delay no longer: if the King should but blench, he knew his course. Yet this determination led to nothing then; and why, we ask ourselves in despair, should the bloody thoughts he now resolves to cherish ever pass beyond the realm of thought?
Between this scene (IV. iv.) and the remainder of the play we must again suppose an interval, though not a very long one. When the action recommences, the death of Polonius has led to the insanity of Ophelia and the secret return of Laertes from France. The young man comes back breathing slaughter. For the King, afraid to put Hamlet on trial (a course likely to raise the question of his own behaviour at the play, and perhaps to provoke an open accusation),1 has attempted to hush up the circumstances of Polonius's death, and has given him a hurried and inglorious burial. The fury of Laertes, therefore, is directed in the first instance against the King: and the ease with which he raises the people, like the King's fear of a judicial inquiry, shows us how purely internal were the obstacles which the hero had to overcome. This impression is intensified by the broad contrast between Hamlet and Laertes, who rushes headlong to his revenge, and is determined to have it though allegiance, conscience, grace and damnation stand in his way (IV. v. 130). But the King, though he has been hard put to it, is now in his element and feels safe. Knowing that he will very soon hear of Hamlet's execution in England, he tells Laertes that his father died by Hamlet's hand, and expresses his willingness to let the friends of Laertes judge whether he himself has any responsibility for the deed. And when, to his astonishment and dismay, news comes that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, he acts with admirable promptitude and address, turns Laertes round his finger, and arranges with him for the murder of
1I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in the way of the obvious plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him shut up or executed. It is much safer to hurry him off to his doom in England before he can say anything about the murder which he has somehow discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance, and probably Hamlet's great popularity with the people, are additional reasons. (It should be observed that as early as III. i. 194 we hear of the idea of 'confining' Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)
their common enemy. If there were any risk of the young man's resolution faltering, it is removed by the death of Ophelia. And now the King has but one anxiety -- to prevent the young men from meeting before the fencing match. For who can tell what Hamlet might say in his defence, or how enchanting his tongue might prove?1
Hamlet's return to Denmark is due partly to his own action, partly to accident. On the voyage he secretly possesses himself of the royal commission, and substitutes for it another, which he himself writes and seals, and in which the King of England is ordered to put to death, not Hamlet, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the ship is attacked by a pirate, which, apparently, finds its intended prize too strong for it, and makes off. But as Hamlet 'in the grapple,' eager for fighting, has boarded the assailant, he is carried off in it, and by promises induces the pirates to put him ashore in Denmark.
In what spirit does he return? Unquestionably, I think, we can observe a certain change, though it is not great. First, we notice here and there what seems to be a consciousness of power, due probably to his success in counter-mining Claudius and blowing the courtiers to the moon, and to his vigorous action in the sea-fight. But I doubt if this sense of power is more marked than it was in the scenes following the success of the 'Murder of Gonzago.' Secondly, we nowhere find any direct expression of that weariness of life and that longing for death which were so marked in the first soliloquy and in the speech 'To be or not to be.' This may be a mere accident, and it must be remembered that in the Fifth Act we have no soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do not appear merely in soliloquy, and
1I am inferring from IV. vii., 129, 130, and the last words of the scene.
I incline to think that Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic that this change comes too late. And, in the third place, there is a trait about which doubt is impossible -- a sense in Hamlet that he is in the hands of Providence. This had, indeed, already shown itself at the death of Polonius,1and perhaps at Hamlet's farewell to the King,2 but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind. 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in speaking of the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission. How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?
Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,
Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield to it: 'we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . the readiness is all.'
Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some critics, that they indicate any material change in his general
1III. iv. 172:
i.e. the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense elsewhere also in Shakespeare.
2IV. iii. 48:
condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the appointed duty. On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence, because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to be the will of Providence. In place of this determination, the Hamlet of the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to leave his duty to some other power than his own. This is really the main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, and which had begun to show itself before he went -- this, and not a determination to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.
For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position. On one side of him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done his best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister he has sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable attitude he must surely be informed by Horatio. What is required of him, therefore, if he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains relief in frenzied words and frenzied action -- action which must needs intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has, however unwittingly, so cruelly injured.
Yet he appears absolutely unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:
What is the reason that you use me thus?
And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery returns, and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:
I loved you ever: but it is no matter.
'It is no matter': nothing matters.
The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage and his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story is no plan of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to act?'1 And, while he asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters with an invitation to him to take part in a fencing-match with Laertes. This match -- he is expressly told so -- has been arranged by his deadly enemy the King; and his antagonist is a man whose hands but a few hours ago were at his throat, and whose voice he had heard shouting 'The devil take thy soul!' But he does not think of that. To fence is to show a courtesy, and to himself it is a relief -- action, and not the one hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness, and also in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels (and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is no matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still undone, ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and with that trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so fatally misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand, asks indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And Fate
1On this passage see p. 98. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's warning sounds, no doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And is it not so significant that, having given it, he abruptly changes the subject?
descends upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.
But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last accomplished, but Shakespeare seems to have determined that his hero should exhibit in his latest hour all the glorious power and all the nobility and sweetness of his nature. Of the first, the power, I spoke before,1 but there is a wonderful beauty in the revelation of the second. His body already labouring in the pangs of death, his mind soars above them. He forgives Laertes; he remembers his wretched mother and bids her adieu, ignorant that she has preceded him. We hear now no word of lamentation or self-reproach. He has will, and just time, to think, not of the past or of what might have been, but of the future; to forbid his friend's death in words more pathetic in their sadness than even his agony of spirit had been; and to take care, so far as in him lies, for the welfare of the State which he himself should have guided. Then in spite of shipwreck he reaches the haven of silence where he would be. What else could his world-wearied flesh desire?
But we desire more; and we receive it. As those mysterious words, 'The rest is silence,' die upon Hamlet's lips, Horatio answers:
Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one of his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when this life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might be content to imagine after life's fitful fever nothing more than release and silence, we must ask more for one whose 'godlike reason' and passionate love of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy clouds of melancholy, and yet have left us murmuring, as we bow our heads, 'This was the noblest spirit of them all'?
2
How many things still remain to say of Hamlet! Before I touch on his relation to Ophelia, I will choose but two. Neither of them, compared with the matters so far considered, is of great consequence, but both are interesting, and the first seems to have quite escaped observation.
(1) Most people have, beside their more essential traits of character, little peculiarities which, for their intimates, form an indissoluble part of their personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of fiction, such peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do so, I think, in tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one such idiosyncrasy to Hamlet.
It is a trick of speech, a habit of repetition. And these are simple examples of it from the first soliloquy:
Now I ask your patience. You will say: 'There is nothing individual here. Everybody repeats words thus. And the tendency, in particular, to use such repetitions in moments of great emotion is well known, and frequently illustrated in literature -- for example, in David's cry of lament for Absalom.'
This is perfectly true, and plenty of examples could be drawn from Shakespeare himself. But what we find in Hamlet's case is, I believe, not common. In the first place, this repetition is a habit with him. Here are some more instances: 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio'; 'Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me'; 'Come, deal justly with me: come, come'; 'Wormwood, wormwood!' I do not profess to have made an exhaustive search, but I am much mistaken if this habit is to be found in any other serious character of Shakespeare.1
And, in the second place -- and here I appeal with confidence to lovers of Hamlet -- some of these repetitions strike us as intensely characteristic. Some even of those already quoted strike one thus, and still more do the following:
Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more unmistakably individual than these replies? 2
(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed is fond of quibbles and word-play, and of 'conceits' and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom Johnson called Metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words and ideas chiefly
1It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's repetitions can hardly be said to occur at moments of great emotion, like Cordelia's 'And so l am, I am,' and 'No cause, no cause.'
Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be found in comic persons, e.g. Justice Shallow in 2 Henry IV.
2Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find something characteristic too in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor ghost!' (I. v. 4). 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (V. i. 202).
in order to mystify, thwart and annoy. To some extent, again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first present themselves (II. ii. 227), he is merely following the fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as in his love-letter to Ophelia1 he uses for the most part the fantastic language of Court Euphuism. Nevertheless in this trait there is something very characteristic. We should be greatly surprised to find it marked in Othello or Lear or Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or Coriolanus; and, in fact, we find it in them hardly at all. One reason of this may perhaps be that these characters are all later creations than Hamlet, and that Shakespeare's own fondness for this kind of play, like the fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished with time. But the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet, betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is characteristic of him and not of the later less many-sided heroes. Macbeth, for instance, has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet's to certain impressions, but he has none of Hamlet's delight in freaks and twists of thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with resemblances in the most diverse objects and ideas. Though Romeo shows this tendency, the only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is Richard II, who indeed in several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet of some critics, and may, like the real Hamlet, have owed his existence in part to Shakespeare's personal familiarity with the weaknesses and dangers of an imaginative temperament.
That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is beyond question. The very first line the hero speaks contains a play on words:
A little more than kin and less than kind.
The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially characteristic. Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the uses of word-play in moments of extreme excitement. Remember the awe and terror of the scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends and follow him into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue:
Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words? And, again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the 'poison tempered by himself'?
The 'union' was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the cup, and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in. But the 'union' is also that incestuous marriage which must not be broken by his remaining alive now that his partner is dead. What rage there is in the words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!
Much of Hamlet's play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous. That of Richard II is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous. Antony has touches of humour, and Richard III has more; but Hamlet, we may safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement. Some of his quips are, of course, poor enough, and many are not distinctive. Those of his retorts which strike one as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly because they suddenly reveal the misery and bitterness below the surface; as when, to Rosencrantz's message from his mother, 'She desires to speak with you in her closet, ere you go to bed,' he answers, 'We shall obey, were she ten times our mother'; or as when he replies to Polonius's invitation, 'Will you walk out of the air, my lord?' with words that suddenly turn one cold, 'Into my grave.' Otherwise, what we justly call Hamlet's characteristic humour is not his exclusive property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different as Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind. The truth probably is that it was the kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in some other traits of the poet's greatest creation, we come into close contact with Shakespeare the man.
3
The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right, he must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to do this. Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is of importance, he ought to say so.
This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet's love for Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of some of his words and deeds, and I question whether from the mere text of the play a sure interpretation of them can be drawn. For this reason I have reserved the subject for separate treatment, and have, so far as possible, kept it out of the general discussion of Hamlet's character.
On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. (1) Hamlet was at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven (I. iii. 110 f.). (2) When, at Ophelia's grave, he declared,
he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted that he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead, and not to imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so.
So much being assumed, we come to what is doubtful, and I will begin by stating what is probably the most popular view. According to this view, Hamlet's love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others, that he was insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to their love. This was the purpose of his appearance in her chamber, though he was probably influenced also by a longing to see her and bid her a silent farewell, and possibly by a faint hope that he might safely entrust his secret to her. If he entertained any such hope his study of her face dispelled it; and thereafter, as in the nunnery-scene (III. i.) and again at the play-scene, he not only feigned madness, but, to convince her that he had quite lost his love for her, he also addressed her in bitter and insulting language. In all this he was acting a part intensely painful to himself; the very violence of his language in the nunnery-scene arose from this pain; and so the actor should make him show, in that scene, occasional signs of a tenderness which with all his efforts he cannot wholly conceal. Finally, over her grave the truth bursts from him in the declaration quoted just now, though it is still impossible for him to explain to others why he who loved her so profoundly was forced to wring her heart.
Now this theory, if the view of Hamlet's character which I have taken is anywhere near the truth, is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so far as it supposes that Hamlet's bitterness to Ophelia was a mere pretence forced on him by his design of feigning to be insane; and I proceed to call attention to certain facts and considerations, of which the theory seems to take no account.
1. How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference whatever to Ophelia?
2. How is it that in his second soliloquy, on the departure of the Ghost, he again says nothing about her? When the lover is feeling that he must make a complete break with his past, why does it not occur to him at once that he must give up his hopes of happiness in love?
3. Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to see her and sends letters to her (II. i. 109). What really happens is that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, we know that she is simply obeying her father's order; but how would her action appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother's frailty,1 and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple than she had appeared to him? 2 Even if he remained free from this suspicion, and merely thought her deplorably weak, would he not probably feel anger against her, an anger like that of the hero of Locksley Hall against his Amy?
4. When Hamlet made his way into Ophelia's room, why did he go in the garb, the conventionally recognized garb, of the distracted lover? If it was necessary to convince Ophelia of his insanity, how was it necessary to convince her that disappointment in love was the cause of his insanity? His main object in the visit appears to have been to convince others, through her, that his insanity
1'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the first soliloquy. Cf. what he says of his mother's act (III. iv. 40):
2There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother; that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed simple and affectionate love might really have been something very different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some lines in the nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a suspicion. I do not suggest that he believed in it, and in the nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence is in conflict with it.
He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius.
was not due to any mysterious unknown cause, but to this disappointment, and so to allay the suspicions of the King. But if his feeling for her had been simply that of love, however unhappy, and had not been in any degree that of suspicion or resentment, would he have adopted a plan which must involve her in so much suffering?1
5. In what way are Hamlet's insults to Ophelia at the play-scene necessary either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to his purpose of revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means to these ends, is it conceivable that he would have uttered them, if his feeling for her were one of hopeless but unmingled love?
6. How is it that neither when he kills Polonius, nor afterwards, does he appear to reflect that he has killed Ophelia's father, or what the effect on Ophelia is likely to be?
7. We have seen that there is no reference to Ophelia in the soliloquies of the First Act. Neither is there the faintest allusion to her in any one of the soliloquies of the subsequent Acts, unless possibly in the words (III. i. 72) 'the pangs of despised love.' 2 If the popular theory is true, is not this an astonishing fact?
1Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight to Ophelia's room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just seen that on the contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it is absolutely certain that a long interval separates the events of I. v. and II. i. They think also, of course, that Hamlet's visit to Ophelia was the first announcement of his madness. But the text flatly contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time appeared totally changed (II. ii. 1-10); the King is very uneasy at his 'transformation' and has sent for his school-fellows in order to discover its cause. Polonius now, after Ophelia has told him of the interview, comes to announce his discovery not of Hamlet's madness, but of its cause (II. ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the effect Hamlet aimed at in his interview. I may add that Ophelia's description of his intent examination of her face suggests doubt rather as to her 'honesty' or sincerity than as to her strength of mind. I cannot believe that he ever dreamed of confiding his secret to her.
2If this is an allusion to his own love, the adjective 'despised' is significant. But I doubt the allusion. The other calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all specially his own.
8. Considering this fact, is there no significance in the further fact (which, by itself, would present no difficulty) that in speaking to Horatio Hamlet never alludes to Ophelia, and that at his death he says nothing of her?
9. If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the nunnery-scene nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to make the truth plain? Four words like Othello's 'O hardness to dissemble' would have sufficed.
These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet's state of mind, seem to point to two conclusions. They suggest, first, that Hamlet's love, though never lost, was, after Ophelia's apparent rejection of him, mingled with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was due in part to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this conclusion. But the question how much of his harshness is meant to be real, and how much assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to answer. For example, his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show an intention to hurt and insult; but in the nunnery scene (which cannot be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated, seems to spring from real feelings; and what is pretence, and what sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem. Something depends here on the further question whether or no Hamlet suspects or detects the presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an authentic stage tradition, this question too seems to be unanswerable.
But something further seems to follow from the considerations adduced. Hamlet's love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness, it was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by his melancholy.1 It was far from being extinguished; probably it was one of the causes which drove him to force his way to Ophelia; whenever he saw Ophelia, it awoke and, the circumstances being what they were, tormented him. But it was not an absorbing passion; it did not habitually occupy his thoughts; and when he declared that it was such a love as forty thousand brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely indeed but not truly. What he said was true, if I may put it thus, of the inner healthy self which doubtless in time would have fully reasserted itself; but it was only partly true of the Hamlet whom we see in the play. And the morbid influence of his melancholy on his love is the cause of those strange facts, that he never alludes to her in his soliloquies, and that he appears not to realize how the death of her father must affect her.
The facts seem almost to force this idea on us. That it is less 'romantic' than the popular view is no argument against it. And psychologically it is quite sound, for a frequent symptom of such melancholy as Hamlet's is a more or less complete paralysis, or even perversion, of the emotion of love. And yet, while feeling no doubt that up to a certain point it is true, I confess I am not satisfied that the explanation of Hamlet's silence regarding Ophelia lies in it. And the reason of this uncertainty is that scarcely any spectators or readers of Hamlet notice this silence at all; that I never noticed it myself till I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia; and that even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now Shakespeare wrote primarily for the theatre and not for students, and therefore great weight should be attached to the immediate impressions made by his works. And so it seems at least possible that the explanation of Hamlet's silence may be that Shakespeare, having already a very difficult task to perform in the soliloquies -- that of showing the state of mind which caused Hamlet to delay his vengeance -- did not choose to make his task more difficult by introducing matter which would not only add to the complexity of the subject but might, from its 'sentimental' interest, distract attention from the main point; while, from his theatrical experience, he knew that the audience would not observe how unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and forced not only to renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more completely convincing to me than the other, I am driven to suspend judgment, and also to suspect that the text admits of no sure interpretation.
This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare. But it must be remembered that if we could see a contemporary representation of Hamlet, our doubts would probably disappear. The actor, instructed by the author, would make it clear to us by looks, tones, gestures, and by-play how far Hamlet's feigned harshness to Ophelia was mingled with real bitterness, and again how far his melancholy had deadened his love.
4
As we have seen, all the persons in Hamlet except the hero are minor characters, who fail to rise to the tragic level. They are not less interesting on that account, but the hero has occupied us so long that I shall refer only to those in regard to whom Shakespeare's intention appears to be not seldom misunderstood or overlooked.
It may seem strange that Ophelia should be one of these; and yet Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that there is much difference of opinion regarding her, and in particular that a large number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against her. They seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been able to help Hamlet to fulfil his task. And they betray, it appears to me, the strangest misconceptions as to what she actually did.
Now it was essential to Shakespeare's purpose that too great an interest should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit, power or intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken another shape. Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty, or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore, was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and for whom on the other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound as to interfere with the main motive of the play.1 And in the love and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her character seem almost a desecration.
1This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of Hamlet's love.
Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly, to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to her. To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the thought of flowers. 'Rose of May' Laertes names her.
-- so he prays at her burial. 'Sweets to the sweet' the Queen murmurs, as she scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself gathered -- those which she gave to others, and those which floated about her in the brook -- glimmer in the picture of the mind. Her affection for her brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes. Her love for her father is deep, though mingled with fear. For Hamlet she has, some say, no deep love -- and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections have still the strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all the love of which her nature is as yet capable. Beyond these three beloved ones she seems to have eyes and ears for no one. The Queen is fond of her, but there is no sign of her returning the Queen's affection. Her existence is wrapped up in these three.
On this childlike nature and on Ophelia's inexperience everything depends. The knowledge that 'there's tricks in the world' has reached her only as a vague report. Her father and brother are jealously anxious for her because of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their anxiety chiefly because we know Hamlet better than they. Her whole character is that of simple unselfish affection. Naturally she is incapable of understanding Hamlet's mind, though she can feel its beauty. Naturally, too, she obeys her father when she is forbidden to receive Hamlet's visits and letters. If we remember not what weknow but what she knows of her lover and her father; if we remember that she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we remember that she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance surely must seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of obedience to a father was in Shakespeare's day higher than in ours.
'But she does more than obey,' we are told; 'she runs off frightened to report to her father Hamlet's strange visit and behaviour; she shows to her father one of Hamlet's letters, and tells him1 the whole story of the courtship; and she joins in a plot to win Hamlet's secret from him.' One must remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy. Consider for a moment how matters looked to her. She knows nothing about the Ghost and its disclosures. She has undergone for some time the pain of repelling her lover and appearing to have turned against him. She sees him, or hears of him, sinking daily into deeper gloom, and so transformed from what he was that he is considered to be out of his mind. She hears the question constantly discussed what the cause of this sad change can be; and her heart tells her -- how can it fail to tell her? -- that her unkindness is the chief cause. Suddenly Hamlet forces his way into her chamber; and his appearance and his behaviour are those of a man crazed with love. She is frightened -- why not? She is not Lady Macbeth. Rosalind would have been frightened. Which of her censors would be wholly unmoved if his room were invaded by a lunatic? She is frightened, then; frightened, if you will, like a child. Yes, but, observe, her one idea is to help Hamlet. She goes, therefore,
1Polonius says so, and it may be true.
at once to her father. To whom else should she go? Her brother is away. Her father, whom she saw with her own eyes and not with Shakespeare's, is kind, and the wisest of men, and concerned about Hamlet's state. Her father finds, in her report, the solution of the mystery: Hamlet is mad because she has repulsed him. Why should she not tell her father the whole story and give him an old letter which may help to convince the King and the Queen? Nay, why should she not allow herself to be used as a 'decoy' to settle the question why Hamlet is mad? It is all-important that it should be settled, in order that he may be cured; all her seniors are simply and solely anxious for his welfare; and, if her unkindness is the cause of his sad state, they will permit her to restore him by kindness (III. i. 40). Was she to refuse to play a part just because it would be painful to her to do so? I find in her joining the 'plot' (as it is absurdly called) a sign not of weakness, but of unselfishness and strength.
'But she practised deception; she even told a lie. Hamlet asked her where her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really listening behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in Desdemona to say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or pusillanimous in Ophelia to tell her lie. I will not discuss these casuistical problems; but, if ever an angry lunatic asks me a question which I cannot answer truly without great danger to him and to one of my relations, I hope that grace may be given me to imitate Ophelia. Seriously, at such a terrible moment was it weak, was it not rather heroic, in a simple girl not to lose her presence of mind and not to flinch, but to go through her task for Hamlet's sake and her father's? And, finally, is it really a thing to be taken as a matter of course, and no matter for admiration, in this girl that, from beginning to end, and after a storm of utterly unjust reproach, not a thought of resentment should even cross her mind?
Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason. And here again her critics seem hardly to realize the situation, hardly to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from her, goes mad and kills her father. They seem to forget also that Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere calamities, but followed from her action in repelling her lover. Nor do they realize the utter loneliness that must have fallen on her. Of the three persons who were all the world to her, her father has been killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the country insane, and her brother is abroad. Horatio, when her mind gives way, tries to befriend her, but there is no sign of any previous relation between them, or of Hamlet's having commended her to his friend's care. What support she can gain from the Queen we can guess from the Queen's character, and from the fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen shrinks from the very sight of her (IV. v. 1). She was left, thus, absolutely alone, and if she looked for her brother's return (as she did, IV. v. 70), she might reflect that it would mean danger to Hamlet.
Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell. In any case it was well for her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and pathetic as Ophelia's madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest stroke that now could fall on her. It is evident, I think, that this was the effect Shakespeare intended to produce. In her madness Ophelia continues sweet and lovable.
In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest sorrow, but never the agonized cry of fear or horror which makes madness dreadful or shocking.1 And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to Shakespeare when he wrote of 'the affecting death of Ophelia -- who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy'. 2
1I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the Quartos at IV. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost all modern editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and gone, lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.
2In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to have seen noticed. In the nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words pathetically betray her own feeling:
She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach. So again do those most touching little speeches:
Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but that she had repulsed him; and here, with his usual unobtrusive subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own heart is unchanged.
I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,' sing an old song containing the line,
If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.
5
I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.
The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me, practically certain. (1) She did not merely marry a second time with indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v. 41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And against this testimony what force has the objection that the queen in the 'Murder of Gonzago' is not represented as an adulteress? Hamlet's mark in arranging the play-scene was not his mother, whom besides he had been expressly ordered to spare (I. v. 84 f.).
(2) On the other hand, she was not privy to the murder of her husband, either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so, and there are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts from his throne, she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the interview with Hamlet, when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,
the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently genuine; and, if it had not been so, she would never have had the hardihood to exclaim:
Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak together alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her knowledge of the secret.
The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage 'o'er-hasty' (II. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.
Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her, the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not last, and so at the end of the interview (III. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.1 It is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse; and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a false account of Polonius's
1I.e. the King will kill her to make all sure.
death, and is silent about the appearance of the Ghost. She becomes miserable;
She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If she had sense to realize Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.
The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic. She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires. These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:
Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?
King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means to the crown.1 His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii. 35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.
On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance -- a mildewed ear, a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first thought was always for himself.
1I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV. vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy (III. iii. 55).
-- these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His first comment on the death of Polonius is,
and his second is,
He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f. ). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his objects -- that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he imagined he could trick something more than men.
This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:
Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:
he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him. He thinks he can over-reach heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it. More -- it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such things so quietly that we are apt to miss them -- when the King is praying for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.1 So we are inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end shaped the King's no less.
For -- to return in conclusion to the action of the play -- in all that happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not define
1This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he says, because if the King is killed praying he will go to heaven. On Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters:
it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end. And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy, seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he must fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in Macbeth, is this aspect so impressive.1
I mention Macbeth for a further reason. In Macbeth and Hamlet not only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense, religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in Othello or King Lear. The horror in Macbeth's soul is
1I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.
more than once represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost'; the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as Hamlet nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident has been therefore severely criticized as a lame expedient,1 but it appears probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished, because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.
Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance between Hamletand Macbeth, the appearance in each play of a Ghost -- a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would seem utterly out of place in Othello or King Lear. Much might be said of the Ghost in Hamlet, but I confine myself to the matter which we are now considering. What is the effect of the appearance of the Ghost? And, in
1The attempt to explain this meeting as prearranged by Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.
particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so majestical a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance, and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of pity for his father? Whatever the intention may have been, the result is that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a dead king who desires the accomplishment of his purposes, but also as the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the connection of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the beginning of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end, conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that the apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth
If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be agreed that, while Hamlet certainly cannot be called in the specific sense a 'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this play, just as Macbeth, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.