Shakspere and Montaigne Part 11

By none has the relation between Ophelia and Hamlet been better felt and described than by Goethe. He calls her 'the good child in whose soul, secretly, a voice of voluptuousness resounds.' Hamlet who--driven rudderless by his impulse, his pa.s.sion, his daimon, from one extreme to the other--drags everything that surrounds him into the abyss, also destroys the future of the woman that might truly make him happy. He disowns and rejects her whom Nature has formed for love. At a moment when fanatical thoughts have mastered his reason, he bids her go to a nunnery.

Once more we must point to the Essay in which Montaigne lays down his ideas about woman and love. French ladies, he says, study Boccaccio and such-like writers, in order to become skilful (_habiles_). 'But there is no word, no example, no single step in that matter which they do not know better than our books do. That is a knowledge bred in their very veins ... Had not this natural violence of their desires been somewhat bridled by the fear and a feeling of honour wherewith they have been provided, we would be dishonoured (_diffamez_).' Montaigne says he knows ladies who would rather lend their honour than their '_coach_.' [77]

'At last, when Ophelia has no longer any power over her own mind,' says Goethe, 'her heart being on her tongue, that tongue becomes a traitor against her.' [78]

In the scene of Ophelia's madness, we hear songs, thoughts, and phrases probably caught up by her from Hamlet. The ideal which man forms of woman, is the moral alt.i.tude on which she stands. Now, let the language be called to mind, which Hamlet, before the players'

scene, uses towards his beloved!

Ophelia's words: 'Come, my _coach_ [79]' will be understood from the pa.s.sage in Montaigne above quoted. The meaning of: 'Oh, how the _wheel_ becomes it!' has reference to a thought developed by Montaigne in Essay III. (11), [80] which we cannot render here, as it is opposed to every feeling of decency.

All commentators agree in thinking that the character of Laertes is in direct contrast to that of Hamlet. In the first quarto, the figure of Laertes is but rapidly indicated. Only that scene is worked out where he cries out against the priest who will not follow his sister to the grave:--

A ministering angel shall my sister be.

When thou liest howling.

In the second quarto only, we meet with the most characteristic speeches in which the strong-willed Laertes, [81] unmindful of any future world, calls for revenge with every drop of his indignant blood:--

To h.e.l.l, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devils!

Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!

I dare d.a.m.nation....

... Both the worlds I give to negligence, Let come what comes ...

... to cut his throat i' the church.

That pa.s.sage, too, is new, in which Ophelia's madness is explained as the consequence of blighted love:--

Nature is fine in love, and where 't is fine, It sends some precious instance of itself After the thing it loves.

Her own reason, which succ.u.mbs to her love, is the precious token.

In the same way, those words are not in the first quarto, in which Laertes gives vent to the oppressed feelings of his heart, on hearing of the death of his sister:--

Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will. When these (the tears) are gone, The woman will be out.

All those beautiful precepts, also, which Laertes gives to his sister, are wanting in the quarto of 1603. [82]

Hamlet is the most powerful philosophical production, in the domain of poetry, written at the most critical epoch of mankind--the time of the Reformation. The greatest English genius recognised that it was everyone's duty to set a time out of joint to right. Shakspere showed to his n.o.ble friends a gifted and n.o.ble man whose life becomes a scourge for him and his surroundings, because he is not guided by manly courage and conscience, but by superst.i.tious notions and formulas.

This colossal drama ranges from the th.o.r.n.y, far-stretching fields which man, only trusting in himself, has to work with the sweat of his brow, to that wonder-land of mystery--

Where these good tidings of great joy are heard. [83]

If the principles that are fought out in this drama, in tragic conflict, were to be described by catchwords, we might say: Reason stands against Dogma; Nature against Tradition; Self-Reliance against Submission.

The great elementary forces are here at issue, which the Reformation had unchained, and with which we all have to reckon.

Shakspere's loving, n.o.ble heart beautifully does justice to the defeated Hamlet by making him be borne to his grave 'like a soldier,' with all the honouring 'rites of war.' The poet who knew the human heart so well, no doubt had seen many brave and gifted men who, after having been to Wittenberg's Halls of Intellectual Freedom, and become disciples of Humanism, once more were turned into slaves of dogmas which, under a new guise, not less restricted the free use of reason than the tenets of the old faith had done:--

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not The capability and G.o.d-like reason To fust in us unused.

The life of the most gifted remains fruitless if, through fear of what may befall us in a future world, we cravenly shrink back from following the dictates of our reason and our conscience. From them we must take the mandate and commission for the task of our life; not from any mysterious messenger, nor from any ghost out of Purgatory. On the way to action, no 'goblin d.a.m.ned' must be allowed to cross our path with his a.s.sumed terrors. That which we feel to be right we must do, even if 'it be the very witching time of night, and h.e.l.l breathes contagion into the world.'

Shakspere broke with all antiquated doctrines. He was one of the foremost Humanists in the fullest and n.o.blest meaning of the word. [84]

1: Essay II. 12.

2: Essay I. 26.

3: The whole contents of this chapter may be said to be condensed into two lines of Shakspere:--

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

4: Essay III. 13.

5: See Bacon's Essay 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation,' where he says that 'dissimulation followeth many times upon secrecy by a necessity: so that he that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree,' &c.

6: The following are Hamlet's modes of a.s.severation:-- 'Angels and ministers of grace,' 'All you host of Heaven,' 'G.o.d's love,' 'G.o.d and mercy,' 'G.o.d's willing,' 'Help and mercy,' 'G.o.d's love,' 'By St. Patrick,' 'G.o.d-a-mercy,' 'By my fay (_ma foi_),'

'S' blood (G.o.d's blood),' 'S' wounds,' 'G.o.d's bodykins,' 'By'r Lady,'

'Perdy (_Pardieu_),' 'By the rood (Cross),' 'Heavenly guards,' 'For love and grace,' 'By the Lord,' 'Pray G.o.d,' &c.

7: New Shakspere Society (Stubbs, _Abuses in England_), 1879, p. 131.

8: Act ii. sc. 2.

9: Act ii. sc. i.

10: This description is wanting in the first quarto. The pa.s.sages there are essentially different; there is no allusion to Hamlet's mental struggle.

11: About various allusions and satirical hints in this scene later on.

12: Florio, 21; Montaigne, I. ii.

13: Essay III. i.

14: Isaiah, ch. iii. v. 16.

15: The word 'ecstasy,' which is often used in the new quarto, is wanting in the first edition where only madness, lunacy, frenzy--the highest degrees of madness--are spoken of.

16: In the old play their names are 'Rosencroft' and 'Guilderstone.'

_Reynaldo_, in the first quarto, is called '_Montano_.'

This change of name in a _dramatis persona_ of minor importance indicates, in however a trifling manner, that the interest excited by the name of Montaigne (to which 'Montano' comes remarkably near in English p.r.o.nunciation) was now to be concentrated on another point.

17: Essay I. 40.

18: II. 12.

19: Essay II. 27, p. 142.

20: Essay III. 4, p. 384.

21: Rather sharp translations of _songe-creux_, as Montaigne calls himself (Florio, i. 19, p. 34). 'I am given rather to dreaming and sluggishness.'