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A.C. Bradley “Hamlet” from Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) pp. 89-128 Suppose you were to describe the
plot of Hamlet to a person quite ignorant of the play, and suppose you
were careful to tell your hearer nothing about Hamlet's character, what impression
would your sketch make on him? Would he not exclaim: 'What a sensational
story! Why, here are some eight violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a
ghost, a mad woman, and a fight in a grave! If I did not know that the play
was Shakespeare's, I should have thought it must have been one of those early
tragedies of blood and horror from which he is said to have redeemed the
stage'? And would he not then go on to ask: 'But why in the world did not
Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those eight lives?' This exclamation and this question
both show the same thing, that the whole story turns
upon the peculiar character of the hero. For without this [90]character
the story would appear sensational and horrible; and yet the actual Hamlet
is very far from being so, and even has a less terrible effect than Othello,
King Lear or Macbeth. And again, if we had no knowledge of this
character, the story would hardly be intelligible; it would at any rate at
once suggest that wondering question about the conduct of the hero; while the
story of any of the other three tragedies would sound plain enough and would
raise no such question. It is further very probable that the main change made
by Shakespeare in the story as already represented on the stage, lay in a new
conception of Hamlet's character and so of the cause of his delay. And,
lastly, when we examine the tragedy, we observe two things which illustrate
the same point. First, we find by the side of the hero no other figure of
tragic proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no one even like
Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet's absence, the remaining characters
could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all. And, secondly, we find among
them two, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are evidently designed to throw the
character of the hero into relief. Even in the situations there is a curious
parallelism; for Fortinbras, like Hamlet, is the son of a king, lately dead,
and succeeded by his brother; and Laertes, like Hamlet, has a father slain, and
feels bound to avenge him. And with this parallelism in situation there is a
strong contrast in character; for both Fortinbras and Laertes possess in
abundance the very quality which the hero seems to lack, so that, as we read,
we are tempted to exclaim that either of them would have accomplished
Hamlet's task in a day. Naturally, then, the tragedy of Hamlet with
Hamlet left out has become the symbol of extreme absurdity; while the
character itself has probably exerted a greater fascination, and certainly
has been the subject of more discussion, than any other in the whole
literature of the world. [91]Before,
however, we approach the task of examining it, it is
as well to remind ourselves that the virtue of the play by no means wholly
depends on this most subtle creation. We are all aware of this, and if we
were not so the history of Hamlet, as a stage-play, might bring the
fact home to us. It is to-day the most popular of Shakespeare's tragedies on
our stage; and yet a large number, perhaps even the majority of the
spectators, though they may feel some mysterious attraction in the hero,
certainly do not question themselves about his character or the cause of his
delay, and would still find the play exceptionally effective, even if he were
an ordinary brave young man and the obstacles in his path were purely
external. And this has probably always been the case. Hamlet seems
from the first to have been a favourite play; but until late in the
eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a critic showed that he perceived
anything specially interesting in the character.
Hanmer, in 1730, to be sure, remarks that 'there appears no reason at all in
nature why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as
possible'; but it does not even cross his mind that this apparent 'absurdity'
is odd and might possibly be due to some design on the part of the poet. He
simply explains the absurdity by observing that, if Shakespeare had made the
young man go 'naturally to work,' the play would have come to an end at once!
Johnson, in like manner, notices that 'Hamlet is, through the whole piece,
rather an instrument than an agent,' but it does not occur to him that this
peculiar circumstance can be anything but a defect in Shakespeare's
management of the plot. Seeing, they saw not. Henry Mackenzie, the author of The
Man of Feeling, was, it would seem, the first of
our critics to feel the 'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine
something of Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in [92]other circumstances would have exercised all the moral
and social virtues, placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities
of his mind serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'[32]
How significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the
slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder, beauty
and pathos of this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations began to be
visible! We do not know that they were perceived even in his own day, and
perhaps those are not wholly wrong who declare that this creation, so far
from being a characteristic product of the time, was a vision of the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to
come. But the dramatic splendour of the
whole tragedy is another matter, and must have been manifest not only in
Shakespeare's day but even in Hanmer's. It is indeed so obvious that I
pass it by, and proceed at once to the central question of Hamlet's
character. And I believe time will be saved, and a good deal of positive
interpretation may be introduced, if, without examining in detail any one
theory, we first distinguish classes or types of theory which appear to be in
various ways and degrees insufficient or mistaken. And we will confine our
attention to sane theories;—for on this subject, as on all questions relating
to Shakespeare, there are plenty of merely lunatic views: the view, for
example, that Hamlet, being a disguised woman in love with Horatio, could
hardly help seeming unkind to Ophelia; or the view that, being a very clever
and wicked young man who wanted to oust his innocent uncle from the throne,
he 'faked' the Ghost with this intent. [93]But,
before we come to our types of theory, it is necessary to touch on an idea,
not unfrequently met with, which would make it vain labour to discuss or
propose any theory at all. It is sometimes said that Hamlet's character is
not only intricate but unintelligible. Now this statement might mean
something quite unobjectionable and even perhaps true and important. It might
mean that the character cannot be wholly understood. As we saw, there
may be questions which we cannot answer with certainty now, because we have
nothing but the text to guide us, but which never arose for the spectators
who saw Hamlet acted in Shakespeare's day; and we shall have to refer
to such questions in these lectures. Again, it may be held without any
improbability that, from carelessness or because he was engaged on this play
for several years, Shakespeare left inconsistencies in his exhibition of the
character which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning.
Or, possibly, we may be baffled because he has illustrated in it certain
strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed but of which we are
ignorant. But then all this would apply in some measure to other characters
in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant by the statement that Hamlet
is unintelligible. What is meant is that Shakespeare intended him to
be so, because he himself was feeling strongly, and wished his audience to
feel strongly, what a mystery life is, and how impossible it is for us to
understand it. Now here, surely, we have mere confusion of mind. The
mysteriousness of life is one thing, the psychological unintelligibility of a
dramatic character is quite another; and the second does not show the first,
it shows only the incapacity or folly of the dramatist. If it did show the
first, it would be very easy to surpass Shakespeare in producing a sense of
mystery: we should simply have to portray an absolutely nonsensical
character. Of course Hamlet appeals powerfully [94]to our sense of the mystery of life, but so does every
good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is an enigma to us, but
because, having a fair understanding of him, we feel how strange it is that
strength and weakness should be so mingled in one soul, and that this soul
should be doomed to such misery and apparent failure. (1) To come, then, to our typical
views, we may lay it down, first, that no theory will hold water which finds
the cause of Hamlet's delay merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable
extent, in external difficulties. Nothing is easier than to spin a plausible
theory of this kind. What, it may be asked,[33]
was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had left him with its commission of
vengeance? The King was surrounded not merely by courtiers but by a Swiss
body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at him? Was he then to accuse him publicly
of the murder? If he did, what would happen? How would he prove the charge?
All that he had to offer in proof was—a ghost-story! Others, to be sure, had
seen the Ghost, but no one else had heard its revelations. Obviously, then,
even if the court had been honest, instead of subservient and corrupt, it
would have voted Hamlet mad, or worse, and would have shut him up out of
harm's way. He could not see what to do, therefore, and so he waited. Then
came the actors, and at once with admirable promptness he arranged for the
play-scene, hoping that the King would betray his guilt to the whole court.
Unfortunately the King did not. It is true that immediately afterwards Hamlet
got his chance; for he found the King defenceless on his knees. But what
Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge, to be followed by his own
imprisonment or execution; it was public justice. So he [95]spared the King; and, as he unluckily killed Polonius
just afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the
voyage there, he discovered the King's commission, ordering the King of
England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket, he
made his way back to Denmark. For now, he saw, the proof of the King's
attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of the murder
of his father. His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and his public
arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death. A theory like this sounds very
plausible—so long as you do not remember the text. But no unsophisticated
mind, fresh from the reading of Hamlet, will accept it; and, as soon
as we begin to probe it, fatal objections arise in such numbers that I choose
but a few, and indeed I think the first of them is enough. (a) From beginning to end
of the play, Hamlet never makes the slightest reference to any external
difficulty. How is it possible to explain this fact in conformity with the
theory? For what conceivable reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so
carefully the key to the problem? (b) Not only does Hamlet
fail to allude to such difficulties, but he always assumes that he can
obey the Ghost,[34]
and he once asserts this in so many words ('Sith I have cause and will and
strength and means To do't,' iv. iv. 45). (c) Again, why does
Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising the people against the King?
Why but to show how much more easily Hamlet, whom the people loved, could
have done the same thing, if that was the plan he preferred? (d) Again, Hamlet did not
plan the play-scene in the hope that the King would betray his guilt to [96]the court. He planned it,
according to his own account, in order to convince himself by the
King's agitation that the Ghost had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear
from ii. ii. 625 ff. and from iii. ii. 80 ff. Some readers are misled by the
words in the latter passage: if his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen. The meaning obviously is, as the
context shows, 'if his hidden guilt do not betray itself on occasion of
one speech,' viz., the 'dozen or sixteen lines' with which Hamlet has
furnished the player, and of which only six are delivered, because the King
does not merely show his guilt in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped,
iii. ii. 90) but rushes from the room. It may be as well to add that,
although Hamlet's own account of his reason for arranging the play-scene may
be questioned, it is impossible to suppose that, if his real design had been
to provoke an open confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of
this design. (e) Again, Hamlet never
once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of the plan of bringing the King to
public justice; he always talks of using his 'sword' or his 'arm.' And this
is so just as much after he has returned to Denmark
with the commission in his pocket as it was before this event. When he has
told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does not say, 'Now I can convict
him': he says, 'Now am I not justified in using this arm?' This class of theory, then, we
must simply reject. But it suggests two remarks. It is of course quite
probable that, when Hamlet was 'thinking too precisely on the event,' he was
considering, among other things, the question how he could avenge his father
without sacrificing his own life or freedom. And assuredly, also, he was
anxious that his act of [97]vengeance
should not be misconstrued, and would never have been content to leave a
'wounded name' behind him. His dying words prove that. (2) Assuming, now, that Hamlet's
main difficulty—almost the whole of his difficulty—was internal, I pass to
views which, acknowledging this, are still unsatisfactory because they
isolate one element in his character and situation and treat it as the whole. According to the first of these
typical views, Hamlet was restrained by conscience or a moral scruple; he
could not satisfy himself that it was right to avenge his father. This idea, like the first, can
easily be made to look very plausible if we vaguely imagine the circumstances
without attending to the text. But attention to the text is fatal to it. For,
on the one hand, scarcely anything can be produced in support of it, and, on
the other hand, a great deal can be produced in its disproof. To take the
latter point first, Hamlet, it is impossible to deny, habitually assumes,
without any questioning, that he ought to avenge his father. Even when
he doubts, or thinks that he doubts, the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses
no doubt as to what his duty will be if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he
but blench I know my course.' In the two soliloquies where he reviews his
position (ii. ii., 'O what a rogue and peasant slave
am I,' and iv. iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he reproaches
himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he reflects on the
possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among them a moral scruple.
When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he confesses,
conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and
passion, he has let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead
that his conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to
whet his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but
does not blunt it. [98]What natural explanation of all
this can be given on the conscience theory? And now what can be set against
this evidence? One solitary passage.[35]
Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his voyage, he
asks him (v. ii. 63): Does it not, thinks't thee, stand
me now upon— He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother, Popp'd in
between the 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 damn'd To let this canker of our
nature come In further evil? Here, certainly, is a question of
conscience in the usual present sense of the word; and, it may be said, does
not this show that all along Hamlet really has been deterred by moral
scruples? But I ask first how, in that case, the facts just adduced are to be
explained: for they must be explained, not ignored. Next, let the reader
observe that even if this passage did show that one hindrance to
Hamlet's action was his conscience, it by no means follows that this was the
sole or the chief hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask
himself whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here
almost repeating the words [99]he used in vain
self-reproach some time before (iv. iv. 56): How stand I then, That have a
father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And
let all sleep? Is it not clear that he is
speculating just as vainly now, and that this question of conscience is but
one of his many unconscious excuses for delay? And, lastly, is it not so that
Horatio takes it? He declines to discuss that unreal question, and answers
simply, It must be shortly known to him
from England What is the issue of the business there. In other words, 'Enough of this
endless procrastination. What is wanted is not
reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more significant? Perhaps, however, it may be
answered: 'Your explanation of this passage may be correct, and the facts you
have mentioned do seem to be fatal to the theory of conscience in its usual
form. But there is another and subtler theory of conscience. According to it,
Hamlet, so far as his explicit consciousness went, was sure that he ought to
obey the Ghost; but in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself,
there was a moral repulsion to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his
time, which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to
avenge his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of
his time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because
this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise
it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not;
but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio. And it is just because
he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and love him.' [100]Now
I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and more
truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has more
verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to Shakespeare's
meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections to it, three which
seem to be fatal. (a) If it answers to Shakespeare's meaning, why in
the world did he conceal that meaning until the last Act? The facts adduced
above seem to show beyond question that, on the hypothesis, he did so. That
he did so is surely next door to incredible. In any case, it certainly
requires an explanation, and certainly has not received one. (b) Let
us test the theory by reference to a single important passage, that where
Hamlet finds the King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives
himself for sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him
to heaven, whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be an
unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had been
the stirrings of his deeper conscience, that could have masked itself
in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not the idea
quite ludicrous? (c) The theory requires us to suppose that, when the
Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge the murder of his father, it is laying on him
a duty which we are to understand to be no duty but the very reverse.
And is not that supposition wholly contrary to the natural impression which
we all receive in reading the play? Surely it is clear that, whatever we in
the twentieth century may think about Hamlet's duty, we are meant in the play
to assume that he ought to have obeyed the Ghost. The conscience theory, then, in
either of its forms we must reject. But it may remind us of points worth
noting. In the first place, it is certainly true that Hamlet, in spite of
some appearances to the [101]contrary,
was, as Goethe said, of a most moral nature, and had a great anxiety to do
right. In this anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is stronger in him than in
any of the later heroes. And, secondly, it is highly probable that in his
interminable broodings the kind of paralysis with which he was stricken
masked itself in the shape of conscientious scruples as well as in many other
shapes. And, finally, in his shrinking from the deed there was probably,
together with much else, something which may be called a moral, though not a
conscientious, repulsion: I mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly
on a man who could not defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the
only plan that Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the
play that he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man,
one must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and
honourable, we may presume that he did so. (3) We come next to what may be
called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a view common both among his
worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ may perhaps be found in an
unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course is not responsible for the
whole view): '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.' When this idea is isolated, developed and
popularised, we get the picture of a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive,
full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking from the
touch of everything gross and earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther,
with a face like Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in
tender pity, how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him? How, indeed! And what a foolish
Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But this conception, [102]though not without its basis in certain beautiful traits
of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet on one side,
and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience' theory at any rate
leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and even revere. But for
the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not unmingled with contempt.
Whatever else he is, he is no hero. But consider the text. This
shrinking, flower-like youth—how could he possibly have done what we see
Hamlet do? What likeness to him is there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the
Ghost, bursts from his terrified friends with the cry: Unhand me, gentlemen! By heaven, I'll
make a ghost of him that lets me; the Hamlet who scarcely once
speaks to the King without an insult, or to Polonius without a gibe; the
Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks daggers to his mother; the Hamlet
who, hearing a cry behind the arras, whips out his sword in an instant and
runs the eavesdropper through; the Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to
their death and never troubles his head about them more; the Hamlet who is
the first man to board a pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the
grave; the Hamlet of the catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the
court stands helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King,
drives his foil right through his body,[36]
then seizes the poisoned cup and forces it violently between the wretched
man's lips, and in the throes of death has force and fire enough to wrest the
cup from Horatio's hand ('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and
die? This man, the Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. [103]He would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth.
If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed him, he would have hurled him from his
path with one sweep of his arm. This view, then, or any view that
approaches it, is grossly unjust to Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere
pathos. But, on the other side, it is too kind to him. It ignores the
hardness and cynicism which were indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in
this crisis of his life, are indubitably present and painfully marked. His
sternness, itself left out of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is
much more than stern. Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the
words addressed to his corpse: Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! I took thee for thy better: take thy
fortune: Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger; yet this was Ophelia's father,
and, whatever he deserved, it pains us, for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the
words: This man shall set me packing:
I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room. There is the same insensibility in
Hamlet's language about the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and,
observe, their deaths were not in the least required by his purpose. Grant,
again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was partly due to misunderstanding, partly
forced on him, partly feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account
for it, and still less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting
grossness of his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be
merely an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It
is such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses Desdemona.
It is a great mistake [104]to
ignore these things, or to try to soften the impression which they naturally
make on one. That this embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality,
should be induced on a soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and
Shakespeare's business was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally
beautiful soul unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the
anguish of conscious failure.[37] (4) There remains, finally, that
class of view which may be named after Schlegel and Coleridge. According to
this, Hamlet is the tragedy of reflection. The cause of the hero's
delay is irresolution; and the cause of this irresolution is excess of the
reflective or speculative habit of mind. He has a general intention to obey
the Ghost, but 'the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the [105]pale cast of thought.' He
is 'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human foresight
can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed, cripples[38]
the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards himself; his
far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of
determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in anything else.... He
loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an
almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real
action consequent upon it' (the aversion, that is to say, is consequent on
the activity). Professor Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it
neglects the emotional side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as
important as the intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the
whole to adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him
each object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of any
positive, limited thing,—a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden explains
this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play opens he has
reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received culture of every kind
except the culture of active life. During the reign of the strong-willed
elder Hamlet there was no call to action for his meditative son. He has
slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the university, a
student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on the things of life
and death, who has never formed a resolution or executed a deed' (Shakspere,
his Mind and Art, 4th ed., pp. 132, 133). On the whole, the
Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor Dowden's modification [106]and amplification) is the
most widely received view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last
into close contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama, but it
can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies—such words, for
example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or those about the
craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event. It is confirmed, also,
by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side and Laertes and Fortinbras on
the other; and, further, by the occurrence of those words of the King to
Laertes (iv. vii. 119 f.), which, if they are not in character, are all the
more important as showing what was in Shakespeare's mind at the time: that we would do We should do when
we would; for this 'would' changes, And hath abatements and delays as many As
there are tongues, are hands, are accidents; And then this 'should' is like a
spendthrift sigh That hurts by easing. And, lastly, even if the view
itself does not suffice, the description given by its adherents of
Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the last four Acts, is, on the whole
and so far as it goes, a true description. The energy of resolve is
dissipated in an endless brooding on the deed required. When he acts, his
action does not proceed from this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden
and impulsive, evoked by an emergency in which he has no time to think. And
most of the reasons he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the
true reasons, but unconscious excuses. Nevertheless this theory fails to
satisfy. And it fails not merely in this or that detail, but as a whole. We
feel that its Hamlet does not fully answer to our imaginative impression. He
is not nearly so inadequate to this impression as the [107]sentimental Hamlet, but still we feel he is inferior to
Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we come to examine the theory
we find that it is partial and leaves much unexplained. I pass that by for
the present, for we shall see, I believe, that the theory is also positively
misleading, and that in a most important way. And of this I proceed to speak. Hamlet's irresolution, or his
aversion to real action, is, according to the theory, the direct
result of 'an almost enormous intellectual activity' in the way of 'a
calculating consideration which attempts to exhaust all the relations and
possible consequences of a deed.' And this again proceeds from an original
one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by habit, and, perhaps, by years of
speculative inaction. The theory describes, therefore, a man in certain
respects like Coleridge himself, on one side a man of genius, on the other
side, the side of will, deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding
unpleasant duties, and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who
at any time and in any circumstances would be unequal to the
task assigned to Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and
travesties the play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the
text, was not naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to
affirm, a man who at any other time and in any other
circumstances than those presented would have been perfectly equal to his
task; and it is, in fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his
life comes on him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his
highest gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect
of the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it truly
describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual excess [108]of reflectiveness. The
direct cause was a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special
circumstances,—a state of profound melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness
doubtless played a certain part in the production of that melancholy,
and was thus one indirect contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again,
the melancholy, once established, displayed, as one of its symptoms,
an excessive reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was
not, as the theory makes it, the direct cause of the irresolution at
all; nor was it the only indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last
four Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
of it. These assertions may be too brief
to be at once clear, but I hope they will presently become so. 3 Let us first ask ourselves what we
can gather from the play, immediately or by inference, concerning Hamlet as
he was just before his father's death. And I begin by observing that the text
does not bear out the idea that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed
to action. Nobody who knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody
regards him as a mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed
a deed.' In a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is
the observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who are
not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently practical man,
considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most
royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a soldier' to his grave;
and Ophelia says that Hamlet was a soldier. If he was fond of acting,
an aesthetic [109]pursuit, he
was equally fond of fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously
even in his worst days.[39]
So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those bad days, he must
normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and kindly to everyone, of
whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by no means timid or
deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that he was rather the
reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and even imperious if
thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been fearless,—in the play
he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary kind. And, finally, he must
have been quick and impetuous in action; for it is downright impossible that
the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the
King's commission on the ship, boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave,
executing his final vengeance, could ever have been shrinking or slow
in an emergency. Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things! If we consider all this, how can
we accept the notion that Hamlet's was a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh,
but he spent ten or twelve years at a University!' Well, even if he did, it
is possible to do that without becoming the victim of excessive thought. But
the statement that he did rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40] Where then are we to look for the
seeds of danger? (1) Trying to reconstruct from the
Hamlet of the play, one would not judge that his temperament was melancholy
in the present sense of the word; there seems nothing to show that; but one
would judge that by temperament he [110]was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps
extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the
time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were
joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called
melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a
temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments
was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers,
and many of the dramatists show—that Shakespeare may quite well have given
this temperament to Hamlet consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its
developed form, a habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more
than once laughs at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love;
in Don John in Much Ado he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy
of discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio in
the Merchant of Venice a quiet but deep melancholy, for which neither
the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41]
He gives to Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy
unless under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In
the play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet is
quite different. (2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in
attributing to the Hamlet of earlier days an exquisite sensibility, to which
we may give the name 'moral,' if [111]that word is
taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though it suffers cruelly
in later days, as we saw in criticising the sentimental view of Hamlet, never
deserts him; it makes all his cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us
morbidities, and has an inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had
the soul of the youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an
unbounded delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this
from himself. The world for him was herrlich wie
am ersten Tag—'this goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy
the air, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
golden fire.' And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite
in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!' This is no commonplace to
Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled with wonder and swelling into
ecstasy. Doubtless it was with the same
eager enthusiasm he turned to those around him. Where else in Shakespeare is
there anything like Hamlet's adoration of his father? The words melt into
music whenever he speaks of him. And, if there are no signs of any such
feeling towards his mother, though many signs of love, it is characteristic
that he evidently never entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in
her,—characteristic, and significant of his tendency to see only what is good
unless he is forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere,
and find it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to
see something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a 'very
noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first [112]greeting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old
self revives, we trace the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at
their best. His love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely
the most natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure that he
was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the foils.' To the
very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be, answers
instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving the one and
hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm belief in anything,
but he is never sceptical about them. And the negative side of his
idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps even more developed in the hero of
the tragedy than in the Hamlet of earlier days. It is intensely
characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to be found elsewhere in Shakespeare
(unless in the rage of the disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same
kind as Hamlet's disgust at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his
mother's sensuality, his astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his
contempt for everything pretentious or false, his indifference to everything
merely external. This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend
of his heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with an
emphasis on 'man,' He was a man,
take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again. [113]He
will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the others speak
of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to you.' He speaks to
the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier. He is not in the least
a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and a beggar are all one to
him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and his pitilessness towards
Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is not wholly due to morbidity,
but belongs in part to his original character. Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility
there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any great shock that life might inflict on it
would be felt with extreme intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic
results. And, in fact, Hamlet deserves the title 'tragedy of moral
idealism' quite as much as the title 'tragedy of reflection.' (3) With this temperament and this
sensibility we find, lastly, in the Hamlet of earlier days, as of later,
intellectual genius. It is chiefly this that makes him so different from all
those about him, good and bad alike, and hardly less different from most of
Shakespeare's other heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important
trait in his nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell
on it at length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a genius
for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself, fitfully, in the
affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception, great agility in shifting
the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and fertility in resource; so that,
when his natural belief in others does not make him unwary, Hamlet easily
sees through them and masters them, and no one can be much less like the
typical helpless dreamer. It shows itself in conversation chiefly in the form
of [114]wit or humour; and,
alike in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is not
philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really nothing in
the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of philosophies,' unless it
be the famous lines which, comically enough, exhibit this supposed victim of
philosophy as its critic: There are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]
His philosophy, if the word is to
be used, was, like Shakespeare's own, the immediate product of the wondering
and meditating mind; and such thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no
special training to produce them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good
without respect,' i.e., out of relation, prove that she had studied
metaphysics? Still Hamlet had speculative
genius without being a philosopher, just as he had imaginative genius without
being a poet. Doubtless in happier days he was a close and constant observer
of men and manners, noting his results in those tables which he afterwards
snatched from his breast to make in wild irony his last note of all, that one
may smile and smile and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion
for generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he was
waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always considering
things, [115]as Horatio
thought, too curiously. There was a necessity in his soul driving him to
penetrate below the surface and to question what others took for granted.
That fixed habitual look which the world wears for most men did not exist for
him. He was for ever unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought,
dissolving what to others were solid facts, and discovering what to others
were old truths. There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a
thing of course that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet
it is a discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where
he felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even in his
dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet count himself
a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad dreams. If now we ask whether any special
danger lurked here, how shall we answer? We must answer, it seems to
me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but, granted the ordinary chances of life, not
much.' For, in the first place, that idea which so many critics quietly take
for granted—the idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and
speculative thought tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life—would
be found by no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the
lives of the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have
personally known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in any
intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a man
slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual peculiarities being
again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more at a loss in a sudden
and great practical [116]emergency than a soldier or a
lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and even
helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind of
irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
specially tends to produce this is really a mere illusion. In the second place, even if this
notion were true, it has appeared that Hamlet did not live the life of
a mere student, much less of a mere dreamer, and that his nature was by no
means simply or even one-sidedly intellectual, but was healthily active.
Hence, granted the ordinary chances of life, there would seem to be no great
danger in his intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would
go further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit him
even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if the
message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's death, I
see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as decisively as
Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more anxious
deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart from its descriptive
value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies that Hamlet's
procrastination was the normal response of an over-speculative nature
confronted with a difficult practical problem. On the other hand, under
conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's reflectiveness certainly might prove
dangerous to him, and his genius might even (to exaggerate a little) become
his doom. Suppose that violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and
suppose that under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he
began to sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and
generalising habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his
whole being [117]and mental
world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus deepened and fixed, a sudden
demand for difficult and decisive action in a matter connected with the
melancholy arose, this state might well have for one of its symptoms an
endless and futile mental dissection of the required deed. And, finally, the
futility of this process, and the shame of his delay, would further weaken
him and enslave him to his melancholy still more. Thus the speculative habit
would be one indirect cause of the morbid state which hindered action;
and it would also reappear in a degenerate form as one of the symptoms
of this morbid state. Now this is what actually happens
in the play. Turn to the first words Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn,
that is to say, to the place where the author is likely to indicate his
meaning most plainly. What do you hear? O, that this too too solid flesh
would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or
that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst
self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to
me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank
and gross in nature Possess it merely. Here are a sickness of life, and
even a longing for death, so intense that nothing stands between Hamlet and
suicide except religious awe. And what has caused them? The rest of the
soliloquy so thrusts the answer upon us that it might seem impossible to miss
it. It was not his father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but
mere grief for some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe
the world as a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the crown;
for though [118]the
subserviency of the electors might well disgust him, there is not a reference
to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any sign elsewhere that it greatly
occupied his mind. It was the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of
his mother's true nature, falling on him when his heart was aching with love,
and his body doubtless was weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however
disagreeable, to realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here
whether Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be sure,
as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his father, but
hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him As if increase of appetite had
grown By what it fed on. He had seen her following his body
'like Niobe, all tears.' And then within a month—'O God! a beast would have
mourned longer'—she married again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly
contemptible and loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was
incestuous wedlock;[43]
married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of old family
affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see in her action not
only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an eruption of coarse
sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44]
speeding post-haste to its horrible delight. [119]Is
it possible to conceive an experience more desolating to a man such as we
have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result anything but perfectly natural? It
brings bewildered horror, then loathing, then despair of human nature. His
whole mind is poisoned. He can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she
is a woman, and his mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to
him, the answer drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last
words of the soliloquy, which is wholly concerned with this subject,
are, But break, my heart, for I must
hold my tongue! He can do nothing. He must lock in
his heart, not any suspicion of his uncle that moves obscurely there, but
that horror and loathing; and if his heart ever found relief, it was when
those feelings, mingled with the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood as he stood in his mother's
chamber beside his father's marriage-bed.[45] If we still wonder, and ask why
the effect of this shock should be so tremendous, let us observe that now
the conditions have arisen under which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral
sensibility and his genius, become his enemies. A nature morally blunter
would have felt even so dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more
limited and positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world
the disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things in
one. Thought [120]is the
element of his life, and his thought is infected. He cannot prevent himself
from probing and lacerating the wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril,
holds him fast, and he cries out in agony at it, but is impotent to free
himself ('Must I remember?' 'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the
fading of his passion, the vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to
leave behind a boundless weariness and a sick longing for death. And this is the time which his
fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost weakness, this sinking of his whole
being towards annihilation, there comes on him, bursting the bounds of the
natural world with a shock of astonishment and terror, the revelation of his
mother's adultery and his father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him,
in the name of everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for
a moment, though his brain reels and totters,[46]
his soul leaps up in passion to answer this demand. But it comes too late. It
does but strike home the last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound. The time is out of joint! O cursed
spite That ever I was born to set it right,— so he mutters within an hour of the
moment when he vowed to give his life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of
the story exhibits his vain efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious
self-excuses and unavailing self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his
delay. 4 'Melancholy,' I said, not
dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was not far from insanity is very
probable. His adoption of the pretence of madness may well have been due in
part to fear [121]of the
reality; to an instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence
would enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I am
grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was no mere
common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many readers of the
play would understand it better if they read an account of melancholia in a
work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word 'disease' loosely,
Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No exertion of will could
have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at once to do the bidding of the
Ghost he would doubtless have still remained for some time under the cloud.
It would be absurdly unjust to call Hamlet a study of melancholy, but
it contains such a study. But this melancholy is something
very different from insanity, in anything like the usual meaning of that
word. No doubt it might develop into insanity. The longing for death might
become an irresistible impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling
and will might extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the
man might become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's
melancholy is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing
from the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic use of
this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly be made to
the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a tragic end. The man
who suffers as Hamlet suffers—and thousands go about their business [122]suffering thus in greater
or less degree—is considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by
himself: he is only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is
therefore, so far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane
person, at any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.[47]
And, finally, Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable
sufficiently to imagine. It is probably not further from average experience,
nor more difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello,
Antony or Macbeth. Let me try to show now, briefly,
how much this melancholy accounts for. It accounts for the main fact,
Hamlet's inaction. For the immediate cause of that is simply that his
habitual feeling is one of disgust at life and everything in it, himself
included,—a disgust which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing
for death, sinking often into weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more
than brief intervals. Such a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to any
kind of decided action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its
response is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.'
And the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a man
of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a certain
mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various causes of
inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would not suffice to
prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and against them there
operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and positive feelings, love of his
father, loathing of his uncle, desire of revenge, desire to do duty. But the
retarding motives acquire an unnatural strength because they have an ally in
something [123]far stronger than themselves, the
melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy motives, emerging with
difficulty from the central mass of diseased feeling, rapidly sink back into
it and 'lose the name of action.' We see them doing so; and sometimes
the process is quite simple, no analytical reflection on the deed intervening
between the outburst of passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48]
But this melancholy is perfectly consistent also with that incessant
dissection of the task assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes
so much. For those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I
deceived by the Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
consequence of attempting it—success, my death, utter
misunderstanding, mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or
noble to kill a defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world
as this?'—all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with such
a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought, an
unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a sick bed,
symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening self-contempt. Again, (a) this state
accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his lassitude, those quick
decided actions of his being the outcome of a nature normally far from
passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing healthy impulses which work
themselves out before they have time to subside. (b) It accounts for
the evidently keen satisfaction which some of these actions give to him. He
arranges [124]the play-scene
with lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and partly
because it has demonstrated his own skill (iii. ii. 286-304). He looks
forward almost with glee to countermining the King's designs in sending him
away (iii. iv. 209), and looks back with obvious satisfaction, even with
pride, to the address and vigour he displayed on the voyage (v. ii. 1-55).
These were not the action on which his morbid self-feeling had
centred; he feels in them his old force, and escapes in them from his
disgust. (c) It accounts for the pleasure with which he meets old
acquaintances, like his 'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed
(and we can observe) in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed
by 'much forcing of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his
courtesy alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
suspicion he is forced to feel. (d) It accounts no less for the
painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises, and to
the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent symptoms of such
melancholy, and (e) they sometimes alternate, as they do in Hamlet,
with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite fruitless emotion. It
is to these last (of which a part of the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a
good example) that Hamlet alludes when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as
'lapsed in passion,' and it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness
in regard to them that inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not
'passion's slave.'[49] [125]Finally,
Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be explained by
nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or 'lethargy.' We are bound to
consider the evidence which the text supplies of this, though it is usual to
ignore it. When Hamlet mentions, as one possible cause of his inaction, his
'thinking too precisely on the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial
oblivion'; and the thing against which he inveighs in the greater part of
that soliloquy (iv. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
him here and always is god-like), but this bestial oblivion or 'dullness,'
this 'letting all sleep,' this allowing of heaven-sent reason to 'fust
unused': What is a man, If his chief good
and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a
beast, no more.[50]
So, in the soliloquy in ii. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a dull and
muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of
his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51]
So, when the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of
being tardy and lapsed in time; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose
being almost blunted, and bids him not to forget (cf.
'oblivion'). And so, what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant
speeches of the player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of [126]purpose or of love.[52]
Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive but useless
mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously little about that in
the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic, brooding gloom, in which
Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not thinking of it at all, but for
the time literally forgets it. It seems to me we are driven to think
of Hamlet chiefly thus during the long time which elapsed between the
appearance of the Ghost and the events presented in the Second Act. The
Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we suppose at first for leaving with
Hamlet as his parting injunction the command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting
him, on re-appearing, with the command, 'Do not forget.'[53]
These little things in Shakespeare are not accidents. The second trait which is fully
explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is his own inability to understand why
he delays. This emerges in a marked degree when an occasion like the player's
emotion or the sight of Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his
inaction. 'Why,' he asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I
linger? Can the cause be cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too
precisely of the event? And does that again mean cowardice? What is it
that makes me sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have cause,
and will, and strength, and means, to act?' A man irresolute merely
because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel this
bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience [127]secretly condemned the act which his explicit
consciousness approved; but we have seen that there is no sufficient evidence
to justify us in conceiving Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man
stimulated for the moment to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and,
because for the moment he is free from it, unable to understand the
paralysing pressure which it exerts at other times. I have dwelt thus at length on
Hamlet's melancholy because, from the psychological point of view, it is the
centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity
is to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of
view is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight
to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be
anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but little,
if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge type
of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection between that
genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this connection which gives to
his story its peculiar fascination and makes it appear (if the phrase may be
allowed) as the symbol of a tragic mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever
this mystery touches us, wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of
man's godlike 'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,'
and at the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great ideal
movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this
tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared
only by Goethe's [128]Faust.
It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most
perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at once
the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only
circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring. FOOTNOTES: [25]
It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of this book to have by
them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in periods. No such list, of
course, can command general assent, but the following (which does not
throughout represent my own views) would perhaps meet with as little
objection from scholars as any other. For some purposes the Third and Fourth
Periods are better considered to be one. Within each period the so-called
Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies are respectively grouped together; and for
this reason, as well as for others, the order within each period does not
profess to be chronological (e.g. it is not implied that the Comedy
of Errors preceded 1 Henry VI. or Titus Andronicus). Where
Shakespeare's authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned,
widely or by specially good authority, the name of
the play is printed in italics. First Period (to 1595?).—Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; 1 Henry VI., 2 Henry
VI., 3 Henry VI., Richard III., Richard II.; Titus Andronicus,
Romeo and Juliet. Second Period (to 1602?).—Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in
Third Period?), Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry
Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.; Julius
Caesar, Hamlet. Third Period (to 1608?).—Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure;
Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus. Fourth Period.—Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, Two
Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII. [26]
The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would not exactly coincide
with the 'Third Period' of the division given in the last note. For Julius
Caesar and Hamlet fall in the Second Period, not the Third; and I may
add that, as Pericles was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1608 and
published in 1609, it ought strictly to be put in the Third Period—not the
Fourth. The truth is that Julius Caesar and Hamlet are given to
the Second Period mainly on the ground of style; while a Fourth Period is
admitted, not mainly on that ground (for there is no great difference here
between Antony and Coriolanus on the one side and Cymbeline
and the Tempest on the other), but because of a difference in
substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were admitted on grounds of form, it
ought to begin with Antony and Cleopatra. [27]
I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally admitted that Timon
of Athens also precedes the two Roman tragedies; but its precedence seems
to me so nearly certain that I assume it in what follows. [28]
That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour
after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,—a Roman simplicity perhaps. [29]
It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the fact, which seems
hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in places re-written, some
little time after its first composition. [30]
This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the
case in King Lear and Timon. [31]
The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of course, much nearer to Hamlet,
especially in versification, than to Antony and Cleopatra, in which
Shakespeare's final style first shows itself practically complete. It has
been impossible, in the brief treatment of this subject, to say what is
required of the individual plays. [32]
The Mirror, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness, Variorum Hamlet,
ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on Furness's collection of
extracts from early critics. [33]
I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still less, to do justice
to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder (Vorlesungen über
Hamlet, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's difficulties as merely
external. [34]
I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of killing him when
he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is awake in bed, when he
is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases the least obstacle (iii.
iii. 89 ff.). [35]
It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the conscience view, the line
'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,' and to observe the total
misinterpretation of the soliloquy To be or not to be, from which the
line comes. In this soliloquy Hamlet is not thinking of the duty laid upon
him at all. He is debating the question of suicide. No one oppressed by the
ills of life, he says, would continue to bear them if it were not for
speculation about his possible fortune in another life. And then,
generalising, he says (what applies to himself, no doubt, though he shows no
consciousness of the fact) that such speculation or reflection makes men
hesitate and shrink like cowards from great actions and enterprises.
'Conscience' does not mean moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection
on the consequences of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven
scruple of thinking too precisely on the event' of the speech in iv. iv. As to this use of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, s.v.
and the parallels there given. The Oxford Dictionary also gives many
examples of similar uses of 'conscience,' though it unfortunately lends its
authority to the misinterpretation criticised. [36]
The King does not die of the poison on the foil, like Laertes and
Hamlet. They were wounded before he was, but they die after him. [37]
I may add here a word on one small matter. It is constantly asserted that
Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if he did, it would make no
difference to my point in the paragraph above; but there is no warrant in the
text for the assertion. It is based on some words of the Queen (iv. i. 24),
in answer to the King's question, 'Where is he gone?':
To draw apart the body he hath
killed: O'er whom his very madness, like some ore Among a mineral of metals
base, Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done. But the Queen, as was pointed out
by Doering, is trying to screen her son. She has already made the false
statement that when Hamlet, crying, 'A rat! a rat!',
ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he heard something stir
there, whereas we know that what he heard was a man's voice crying, 'What ho!
help, help, help!' And in this scene she has come
straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated, shaken with
'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now we know what
Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that interview; and there is
assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that said those things and others.
The only sign of relenting is in the words (iii. iv. 171): For this same lord, I do repent:
but heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this and this with me, That
I must be their scourge and minister. His mother's statement, therefore,
is almost certainly untrue, though it may be to her credit. (It is just
conceivable that Hamlet wept at iii. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he
was weeping for Polonius.) Perhaps, however, he may have wept
over Polonius's body afterwards? Well, in the next scene (iv. ii.) we
see him alone with the body, and are therefore likely to witness his
genuine feelings. And his first words are, 'Safely stowed'! [38]
Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it. [39]
He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving (v. ii. 218). His
contrary statement (ii. ii. 308) is made to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. [41]
The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to me Shakespeare
simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a very touching picture
he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in the opening lines of the
play, would never drive him to suicide, but it makes him indifferent to the
issue of the trial, as all his speeches in the trial-scene show. [42]
Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in particular. 'Your' is
used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that 'your water is a sore
decayer of your ... dead body.' [43]
This aspect of the matter leaves us comparatively unaffected, but
Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious words
to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally admitted
to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the electors to
the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's mind. [44]
It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in
Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (iii. iv. 150): Repent what's past; avoid what is
to come; And do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker. [45]
If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's that precedes the
soliloquy, and is more than one line in length—the speech beginning 'Seems,
madam! nay, it is'—he will understand what, surely,
when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost boastful. It is not,
in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about his mother (I do not mean
that it is intentionally and consciously so; and still less that she
understood it so). [48]
E.g. in the transition, referred to above, from desire for vengeance
into the wish never to have been born; in the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in
the scene at Ophelia's grave. The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account
for the psychological movement in these passages. [49]
Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably intentionally
exaggerated, is another example of this want of self-control. The Queen's
description of him (v. i. 307), This is mere madness; And thus
awhile the fit will work on him; Anon, as patient as the female dove, When
that her golden couplets are disclosed, His silence will sit drooping. may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by
anxiety to excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage
see further Note G. [50]
Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas. [51]
Cf. Measure for Measure, iv. iv. 23, 'This deed ... makes me
unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.' [52]
iii. ii. 196 ff., iv. vii. 111 ff.: e.g., Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth but poor validity. [53]
So, before, he had said to him: And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe
wharf, Would'st thou not stir in this. On Hamlet's soliloquy after the
Ghost's disappearance see Note D. |