August
Wilhelm Schlegel “Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature” (1809) Hamlet is: ·
A tragedy of thought
inspired by continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the
dark perplexity of the events of this world. ·
An irrational
equation in which a fraction of unknown magnitude always remains, that will
in no way admit of solution ·
No thinking head who
anew expresses himself on it will entirely coincide with his predecessors. Plot
Summary: (i.e. what Schlegel finds striking) ·
The dread appearance
of the Ghost ·
the play within the
play ·
the alarm with which
it fills the King; ·
Hamlet's pretended
and Ophelia's real madness; ·
her death and
burial; ·
the meeting of Hamlet and Laertes at her
grave; ·
their combat and the grand determination; ·
lastly, the
appearance of the young hero Fortinbras ·
the interspersion of
comic characteristic scenes with Polonius, the courtiers, and the
grave-diggers THESIS: ·
in the last
scenes the main action inevitably either stands still or appears to retrograde ·
A calculating
consideration exhausts all the relations and possible consequences of a deed
and must cripple the power of acting. ·
“And thus the native
hue of resolution Hamlet’s
Character: ·
Schlegel disagrees with the ‘Goethe
school’ which describes Hamlet as 'a lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve
which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must
not cast away.' Schlegel: ·
he does himself only justice when he implies that there is no greater
dissimilarity than between himself and Hercules. ·
his
far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of
determination ·
Regarding his ‘harshness
in repulsing the love of Ophelia’: Others have argued that ‘he is too much overwhelmed with his own
sorrow to have any compassion to spare for others’, but Schlegel argues that
Hamlet demonstrates ‘a malicious joy… in getting rid of his enemies, more through necessity and
accident, which alone are able to impel him to quick and decisive measures,
than by the merit of his own courage.’ ·
‘Hamlet has no firm
belief either in himself or
in anything else: from expressions of religious confidence he passes over to sceptical doubts;
he believes in the Ghost of his father as long as he sees it, but as soon as
it has disappeared, it appears to him almost in the light of a deception.’ ·
"there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so;" : ‘the poet loses himself
here in labyrinths of thought, in which neither end nor beginning is
discoverable’ ·
‘A voice from another world,
commissioned it would appear, by heaven, demands vengeance for a monstrous
enormity, and the demand remains without effect; the criminals are at last
punished, but, as it were, by an accidental blow, and not in the solemn way
requisite to convey to the world a warning example of justice’ ·
‘irresolute
foresight, cunning treachery, and impetuous rage, hurry on to a common
destruction; the less guilty and the innocent are equally involved in the
general ruin’ ·
‘The destiny of humanity is there exhibited
as a gigantic Sphinx, which threatens to precipitate into the abyss of scepticism all who are unable to solve her dreadful
enigmas.’ ·
Incomprehensible: Shakespeare’s intention in devising the style in which the player's speech about Hecuba is
conceived |