Shakespearean Tragedy Part 7

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 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 G.o.dlike '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 _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 circ.u.mscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 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 a.s.sent, 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 _t.i.tus 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.; _t.i.tus 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; Oth.e.l.lo, King Lear, _Timon of Athens_, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriola.n.u.s.

_Fourth Period._--_Pericles_, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, _Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, _Henry VIII._]

[Footnote 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 _Coriola.n.u.s_ 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_.]

[Footnote 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 a.s.sume it in what follows.]

[Footnote 28: That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,--a Roman simplicity perhaps.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 30: This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the case in _King Lear_ and _Timon_.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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 uber Hamlet_, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's difficulties as _merely_ external.]

[Footnote 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.).]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 37: I may add here a word on one small matter. It is constantly a.s.serted 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 a.s.sertion. 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 a.s.suredly 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'!]

[Footnote 38: Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 40: See Note B.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.']

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 46: See Note D.]

[Footnote 47: See p. 13.]

[Footnote 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 pa.s.sages.]

[Footnote 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 pa.s.sage see further Note G.]

[Footnote 50: Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]

[Footnote 51: Cf. _Measure for Measure_, IV. iv. 23, 'This deed ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.']

[Footnote 52: III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.: _e.g._,

Purpose is but the slave to _memory_, Of violent birth but poor validity.]

[Footnote 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.]