J. Dover Wilson: Antic
Disposition
From
What Happens in Hamlet (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1959),
pp. 105-108. Copyright © 1959 by Cambridge University
Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
This study first
appeared in 1935.
[See Hamlet, II.ii.159—185 in which Polonius
proposes to use his daughter Ophelia as a bait for
Hamlet, while Polonius and Claudius conceal themselves
behind an arras; at which point Hamlet enters
unexpectedly and is spoken to by Polonius—ED.]
Everything that Hamlet here says is capable of an
equivocal interpretation reflecting upon Polonius and
Ophelia. "Fishmonger," as many commentators
have noted, means a pander or procurer;
"carrion" was a common expression at that time
for "flesh" in the carnal sense; while the
quibble in "conception" needs no explaining.
And when I asked myself why Hamlet should suddenly call
Polonius a bawd and his daughter a prostitute—for
that is what it all amounts to—I could discover but
one possible answer to my question, namely that
"Fishmonger" and the rest follows immediately
upon "loose my daughter to him." Nor was this
the end of the matter. For what might Hamlet mean by his
sarcastic advice to the father not to let the daughter
"walke i’th Sunne," or by the reference to
the sun breeding in the "carrion" exposed to
it? Bearing in mind Hamlet’s punning retort "I
am too much in the ‘son,’" in answer to
Claudius’s unctuous question at J.ii.64,
And
now my cousin Hamlet, and my son,
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
— and
recalling Falstaff’s apostrophe to Prince Hal:
"Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and
eat blackberries? a question not to be asked. Shall the
son of England prove a thief and take purses? a question
to be asked," is it not obvious that Hamlet here
means by "Sunne" the sun or son of Denmark, the
heir apparent, in other words himself? And if so,
"let her not walke i’th Sunne" is to be
paraphrased "take care that you do not loose your
daughter to me!"
What then? Hamlet must have overheard what Polonius said
to the King. The context allows no escape from this
conclusion, inasmuch as what Hamlet says to Polonius is
only intelligible if the conclusion be allowed. It
remains to examine the text in order to discover, if
possible, what Shakespeare’s intentions, clearly
impaired in some way by corruption, may have been. We are
left, of course, to conjecture, but even so we are not
entirely without clues. Says Polonius:
- You
know sometimes he walks four hours together
- Here
in the lobby;
and as he
speaks we may imagine him jerking a thumb over his
shoulder towards the inner stage before which the three
plotters stand, their faces to the audience. Words and
the action are a direct invitation to the spectators to
look in that direction; and, as they do so, Hamlet enters
the inner stage from the door at the back, his eyes upon
his book, quite unconscious at first that his uncle, his
mother, and Polonius are on the outer stage, which stands
for the audience chamber of the castle. In short,
"Here in the lobby" is equivalent to a stage
direction, and marks with practical certainty the moment
at which Hamlet comes in and the place of his entry. And
it is the right moment; for the entry should seem
unquestionably accidental, lest the audience should
suspect him of deliberate spying. It would never do, for
example, to let him linger in his place of concealment.
Between the King’s question "How may me try it
further?" and his resolve "We will try it"
there lie eight lines of dialogue. They just give Hamlet
time to enter the lobby, grow conscious of voices in the
larger chamber beyond, pause for a moment beside the
entrance thereto, compose his features, and come forward.
But brief as the period is, it is long enough for him to
take in the whole eavesdropping plot and to implicate
Ophelia beyond possibility of doubt in his ears as one of
his uncle’s minions.
***
Hamlet’s accidental discovery of the intention to
spy upon him has a bearing much wider than his attitude
towards Ophelia. Indeed, the manner in which it eases the
general working of the plot is strong testimony in its
favor. As we shall find, it constitutes the mainspring of
the events that follow in acts II and III; it renders the
nunnery scene playable and intelligible as never before;
it adds all kinds of fresh light and shade to the play
scene. In a word, its recovery means the restoration of a
highly important piece of the dramatic structure. For the
moment, however, let us confine our attention to the
matter in hand; and see what it tells us about
Hamlet’s relations with the daughter of Polonius.
Here its value is at once obvious, since it casts its
light backward as well as forward and enables us for the
first time to see these relations in proper perspective
and as a connected whole.
Ernest Jones: Hamlet and
Oedipus
From
Hamlet and Oedipus (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1949;
New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, inc., 1949), pp. 5253, 5960, and 82. Copyright © 1949
by Ernest Jones. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers. This study appeared in
its original form in 1910.
That Hamlet is suffering from an internal conflict the
essential nature of which is inaccessible to his
introspection is evidenced by the following
considerations. Throughout the play we have the clearest
picture of a man who sees his duty plain before him, but
who shirks it at every opportunity and suffers in
consequence the most intense remorse. To paraphrase Sir
James Paget’s well known description of hysterical
paralysis: Hamlet’s advocates say he cannot do his
duty, his detractors say he will not, whereas the truth
is that he cannot will. Further than this, the deficient
willpower is localized to the question of killing his
uncle; it is what may be termed a specific abulia. Now
instances of such specific abulias in real life
invariably prove, when analyzed, to be due to an
unconscious repulsion against the act that cannot be
performed (or else against something closely associated
with the act, so that the idea of the act becomes also
involved in the repulsion). In other words, whenever a
person cannot bring himself to do something that every
conscious consideration tells him he should do—and
which he may have the strongest conscious desire to
do—it is always because there is some hidden reason
why a part of him doesn’t want to do it; this reason
he will not own to himself and is only dimly if at all
aware of. That is exactly the case with Hamlet.
***
It only remains to add the obvious corollary that, as the
herd unquestionably selects from the "natural"
instincts the sexual one on which to lay its heaviest
ban, so it is the various psychosexual trends that are
most often "repressed" by the individual. We
have here the explanation of the clinical experience that
the more intense and the more obscure is a given case of
deep mental conflict the more certainly will it be found
on adequate analysis to center about a sexual problem. On
the surface, of course, this does not appear so, for, by
means of various psychological defensive mechanisms, the
depression, doubt, despair, and other manifestations of
the conflict are transferred on to more tolerable and
permissible topics, such as anxiety about worldly success
or failure, about immortality and the salvation of the
soul, philosophical considerations about the value of
life, the future of the world, and so on.
Bearing these considerations in mind, let us return to
Hamlet.
***
Now comes the father’s death and the mother’s
second marriage. The association of the idea of sexuality
with his mother, buried since infancy, can no longer be
concealed from his consciousness. As Bradley well says:
"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,’ speeding
posthaste to its horrible de. light." Feelings which
once, in the infancy of long ago, were pleasurable
desires can now, because of his repression’s, only
fill him with repulsion. The long "repressed"
desire to take his father’s place in his
mother’s affection is ~timu1ated to unconscious
activity by the sight of someone usurping this place
exactly as he himself had once longed to do. More, this
someone was a member of the same family, so that the
actual usurpation further resembled the imaginary one in
being incestuous. Without his being in the least aware of
it these ancient desires are ringing in his mind, are
once more struggling. to find conscious expression, and
need such an expenditure of energy again to
"repress" them that he is reduced to the
deplorable mental state he himself so vividly depicts.
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C. S. Lewis:
Hamlet—The Prince or the Poem?
From
Proceedings of the British Academy, XXX VIII (London:
Oxford University
Press, 1942), 1415. Copyright 1942 by Oxford University
Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
This selection is a brief
excerpt from the lecture.
For what, after all, is happening to us when we read any
of Hamlet’s great speeches? We see visions of the
flesh dissolving into a dew, of the world like an
unweeded garden. We think of memory reeling in its
"distracted globe." We watch him scampering
hither and thither like a maniac to avoid the voices
wherewith he is haunted. Someone says "Walk out of
the air," and we hear the words "Into my
grave" spontaneously respond to it. We think of
being bounded in a nutshell and king of infinite space:
but for bad dreams. There’s the trouble, for "I
am most dreadfully attended." We see the picture of
a dull and muddy mettled rascal, a Johna dreams, somehow
unable to move while ultimate dishonor is done him. We
listen to his fear lest the whole thing may be an
illusion due to melancholy. We get the sense of sweet
relief at the words "shuffled off this mortal
coil" but mixed with the bottomless doubt about what
may follow then. We think of bones and skulls, of women
breeding sinners, and of how some, to whom all this
experience is a sealed book, can yet dare death and
danger "for an eggshell." But do we really
enjoy these things, do we go back to them, because they
show us Hamlet’s character? Are they, from that
point of view, so very interesting? Does the mere fact
that a young man, literally haunted, dispossessed, and
lacking friends, should feel thus, tell us anything
remarkable? Let me put my question in another way. If
instead of the speeches he actually utters about the
firmament and man in his scene with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Hamlet had merely said, "I don’t
seem to enjoy things the way I used to," and talked
in that fashion throughout, should we find him
interesting? I think the answer is "Not very."
It may be replied that if he talked commonplace prose he
would reveal his character less vividly. I am not so
sure. He would certainly have revealed something less
vividly; but would that something be himself? It seems to
me that "this majestical roof" and "What a
piece of work is a man" give me primarily an
impression not of the sort of person he must be to lose
the estimation of things but of the things themselves
and their great value; and that I should be able to
discern, though with very faint interest, the same
condition of loss in a personage who was quite unable so
to put before me what he was losing. And I do not think
it true to reply that he would be a different character
if he spoke less poetically. This point is often
misunderstood.
We sometimes speak as if the characters in whose mouths
Shakespeare puts great poetry were poets: in the sense
that Shakespeare was depicting men of poetical genius.
But surely this is like thinking that Wagner’s Wotan
is the dramatic portrait of a baritone? In opera song is
the medium by which the representation is made and not
part of the thing represented. The actors sing; the
dramatic personages are feigned to be speaking. The only
character who sings dramatically in Figaro is Cherubino.
Similarly in poetical drama poetry is the medium, not
part of the delineated characters. While the actors speak
poetry written for them by the poet, the dramatic
personages are supposed to be merely talking. If ever
there is occasion to represent poetry (as in the play
scene from Hamlet), it is put into a different metre and
strongly stylized so as to prevent confusion.
I trust that my conception is now becoming clear. I
believe that we read Hamlet’s speeches with interest
chiefly because they describe so well a certain spiritual
region through which most of us have passed and anyone in
his circumstances might be expected to pass, rather than
because of our concern to understand how and why this
particular man entered it.
G. Wilson Knight: The
Embassy of Death
From
"The Embassy of Death," in The Wheel of Fire
(London: Methuen ~r Co.,
Ltd., 1930, rev. ed. 1954), pp. 38-39. Copyright ‘©
1954 by Methuen & Co., Ltd. Re.
printed by permission of the publisher.
Hamlet is inhuman. He has seen through humanity. And this inhuman cynicism, however justifiable in this case, on
the plane of causality and individual responsibility, is
a deadly and venomous thing. Instinctively the creatures
of earth—Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, league themselves with Claudius: they are
of his kind. They sever themselves from Hamlet. Laertes
sternly warns Ophelia against her intimacy with Hamlet,
so does Polonius. They are, in fact, all leagued against
him, they are puzzled by him or fear him: he has no
friend except Horatio, and Horatio, after the ghost
scenes, becomes a queer shadowy character who rarely gets beyond "E’en so, my lord," "My
lord—," and suchlike phrases. The other
persons are firmly drawn, in the round, creatures of
flesh and blood. But Hamlet is not of flesh and blood, he
is a spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and
misery, without faith in himself or anyone else,
murdering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity,
taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing
his mother’s heart, a poison in the midst of the
healthy bustle of the court. He is a superman among men.
And he is a superman because he has walked and held
converse with Death, and his consciousness works in terms
of Death and the Negation of Cynicism. He has seen the
truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the
universe: and the truth is evil. Thus Hamlet is an
element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of
his mental existence spreads outwards among things of
flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after
the other, like victims of an infectious disease. They
are strong with the strength of health —but the
demon of Hamlet’s mind is a stronger thing than
they. Futilely they try to get him out of their country;
anything to get rid of him, he is not safe. But he goes
with a cynical smile, and is no sooner gone than he is
back again in their midst, meditating in graveyards, at
home with Death. Not till it has slain all, is the demon
that grips Hamlet satisfied. And last it slays Hamlet
himself:
The
spirit that I have seen
May be the devil
(II.ii.627)
It was.
It was the devil of the knowledge of death, which
possesses Hamlet and drives him from misery and pain to
increasing bitterness, cynicism, murder, and madness. He
has indeed bought converse with his father’s spirit
at the price of enduring and spreading hell on Earth. But
however much we may sympathize with Ophelia, with
Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, the Queen, and
Claudius, there is one reservation to be made. It is
Hamlet who is right. What he says and thinks of them is
true, and there is no fault in his logic. His own mother
is indeed faithless, and the prettiness of Ophelia does
in truth enclose a spirit as fragile and untrustworthy as
her earthly beauty; Polonius is "a foolish prating
knave"; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are timeservers and flatterers; Claudius, whose benevolence
hides the guilt of murder, is, by virtue of that fact,
"a damned smiling villain." In the same way the
demon of cynicism which is in the mind of the poet and
expresses itself in the figures of this play, has always
this characteristic: it is right. One cannot argue with
the cynic. It is unwise to offer him battle. For in the
warfare of logic it will be found that he has all the
guns.
Salvador de Madariaga:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
From
On Hamlet, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd.,
1964), pp. 14-16.
Copyright 1948 by Salvador de Madariaga. Reprinted by
permission of the author
and the publisher. This study first appeared in 1948
This procrastination cannot be due to an instinctive and
fastidious repugnance to killing, for Hamlet kills
Polonius, and Laertes, and in the end the King himself;
and he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their
doom with true alacrity. Whence then does it come? The
answer will be found by examining all these cases. And
before
them all, let us look at those two lines in 1.4.
unhand
me gentlemen,
By heaven I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!
It is one
of the key points in the drawing of his character. When
it comes to doing what he is determined to do, he will
not hesitate to kill even his closest friend, for Horatio
is one of the gentlemen whom he threatens sword in hand.
Hamlet’s spontaneous tendencies are therefore
essentially individualistic; and, the point must be emphasized, not even death of others, if need be, will
stand in his way.
This the Hamlet whose behavior towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern we are now to study. They were his friends,
and we know from his mother that he had much talked of
them and that
two
men there are not living
To whom he more adheres.
The two
young men receive from the King a commission which,
whatever the King’s secret intentions may be, is
honorable. Hamlet, the King in fact tells them, is not
what he was. The cause of the change "I cannot dream
of."
Therefore,
I beg you
so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather
So much as from occasion you may glean
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus
That opened lies within our remedy.
Guildenstern’s
words show that the two young men understand their work
in an irreproachable way:
Heaven
make our presence and our practices
Pleasant and helpful to him.
They
enter upon their new duties at a later stage in the
same scene. Cordial and lighthearted, the meeting of
the three young men leads to some fencing of wits on
ambition; for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who know
nothing about King Hamlet’s murder, naturally
assume that the trouble with Hamlet is frustrated
ambition (and so in part it is): Hamlet, of course,
parries, and as he tries to move off, his two
companions, in strict obedience to their master, the
King, say: "We’ll wait upon you." This
raises his suspicions. "But, in the beaten way
of friendship, what make you at Ellsinore?" They
are put out. Very likely they had not expected this
alertness in a Hamlet the King had depicted
So much from th’understanding of himself.
They try to plot a concerted answer, but in the end
are honest to him; and to his direct question they
return a direct answer: "My lord, we were sent
for."
This scene is typical. Bearing in mind that, for
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the King was their
legitimate sovereign, and that for all they knew,
Hamlet was at least "queer,~~ the two young men
acquit themselves of their delicate duties with skill
and dignity. They do make mistakes later, and, as
Guildenstern openly avows: "0 my lord, if my
duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly."
But this other scene is one in which Hamlet’s
whole in considered egotism shows itself unashamed. He
is, of course, excited by the triumph of his
stratagem, the play, whereby he has proved the Ghost
right and the King a criminal; yet this circumstance
merely raises the pitch of his mood, without in any
way altering the essence of his character. His
behavior towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is rude
in the extreme. "This courtesy is not of the
right breed," says Guildenstern; and when
Rosencrantz points out to him "you once did love
me," his answer is: "And do still, by these
pickers and stealers." He has a case; of course
he has a case. And he puts it with unforgettable
beauty and truth in his apologue on the recorder.
"‘Blood, do you think I am easier to be
played on than a pipe?" And one can conceive his
irritation at being followed and accompanied when he
would prefer to be alone. But, when all is said and
pondered on his behalf, the scene remains an
exhibition of complete selfcenteredness and of utter
disregard for the feelings of others.
Peter
Alexander: The Complete Man
From
Hamlet, Father and Son (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1955), pp. 183-185 Copyright © 1955 by the Clarendon
Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and the
publisher. This selection is the ending of the final
chapter, "The Complete Man."
Tragedy, Shakespeare had come to see when he was
writing Hamlet, is a kind of consecration of the
common elements of man’s moral life. Shakespeare
introduces the common man in Hamlet not for what we
are apt to think of as his "commonness" but
for this strange power however you care to name it
that he possesses—we have used art, or virtue,
or we might have borrowed from Henry James "the
individual vision of decency." In Tragedy there
is no longer a Chorus moving round the altar of a
god; but if Proust is right the spectators are still
participants in a supernatural ceremony.
Perhaps I may put the aspect of Tragedy I wish to
keep before you more clearly by drawing on Professor
Harbage’s study of Shakespeare’s ideal man.
Collecting the approving references he finds that
this ideal man is soldierly, scholarly, and honest.
If these men seem to lack the larger idealism that is
so common and abundant in our own generation, there is
no suspicion that Shakespeare’s men will fail to
back with their own skin their apparently modest
programs. As Professor Harbage says: "All
soldierly, scholarly, honest men are potential
martyrs —you can substitute for
"martyrs" tragic figures. Of that Shakespearean type Hamlet is the ideal. Shakespeare
had before him in Saxo and Belleforest what was
presented as an ideal type. This type Shakespeare
transformed. To what may be called the instinctive wisdom of antiquity and her heroic passions,
represented so impressively by Hamlet’s father,
Shakespeare has united the meditative wisdom of later
ages in Hamlet himself. There is no surrender of the
old pieties, and the idea of the drama comes from the
impact of new circum1stances upon the old forms of
feeling and estimation; there is a conflict between
new exigencies and old pieties, that have somehow to
be reconciled. The play dramatizes the perpetual
struggle to which all civilization that is genuine is
doomed. To live up to its own ideals it has to place
itself at a disadvantage with the cunning and
treacherous. The problem Mr. Chandler (1)
sets his hero is infinitely complicated in
Hamlet—to be humane without loss of toughness.
The hero must touch both extremes: without one he is
just brutal, lacking the other he is merely wet. The
problem Mr. Chandler has posed for the writer of the
story of crime Shakespeare solved, I am suggesting to
you, just after his thirtyfifth year, when he
finally transformed the ancient sagalike story
preserved for us by Saxo into the play we know as
Hamlet.
1)
Raymond Chandler, a modern writer of detective
stories, who describes his fictional hero in terms
also applicable to Hamlet: a man who is typical of
humanity and yet unusual, a humane and honorable
person with a disgust for sham who must combat human
meanness by sometimes ruthless means—ED.
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