Hamlet Reconsidered (1947) From The Wheel Of Fire By G. Wilson Knight

This essay has been taken from G. Wilson knight's The Wheel of Fire, which is an interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy. This collection of essays comes with an introduction by T.S Eliot. Read on!

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This essay, a rough preliminary draft of which I have had by me for a number of years, is intended to supplement, though not to replace, those already written (including my ‘Rose of May’ in The Imperial Theme). I hope all the essays will be read in conjunction. It is not, however, supposed that they exhaust the latent meanings of Hamlet; and I would draw the attention of my readers to Mr. Roy Walker’s very important study in imaginative interpretation, The Time is Out of Joint, being published by Andrew Dakers (which I had the privilege of seeing in typescript).

Though our approaches are basically similar, and our material in places overlaps, the clashes are, on the whole, comparatively few: an additional witness, if such be needed, of the play’s peculiar and inexhaustible wealth.

 I

 My former essays on Hamlet have for long seemed to me both inadequate and, in their emphasis, misleading. I here offer a restatement, intended, however, less to contradict than to extend and expand my earlier remarks, whilst enlisting for new attention certain scenes and speeches hitherto unjustly neglected.

I challenged the obvious reading of Hamlet as wholly—or almost wholly—sympathetic and Claudius as a thorough stage villain. To that challenge I still, in general, adhere, with this reservation; that the obvious reading is, as it were, assumed and supposed to be modified, not dispelled, by the new remarks. We all know that Hamlet starts as an admirable young man of high ideals and excellent intentions, that Claudius is a criminal opportunist, Gertrude a woman of the world and Ophelia a weakling. But this is not the whole truth. Suppose, in the war of 1914–18, one man volunteers for service and returns a mental and moral wreck, while a friend of his stays at home and builds up, by profiteering, a sound business. In 1935 the one has behind him a criminal career, the other is a respected member of society radiating health and happiness. We assume that volunteering for service is, for purposes of our parable, a high moral action: yet it leads to evil. Both men appear later before the gates of Heaven. What should St. Peter do? Such problems call naturally for dramatic exploitation. Absolute honesty was satirised in Molière’s Alceste, in Le Misanthrope; and somewhat similarly Ibsen’s Gregers in The Wild Duck spreads misery in the name of his ‘claims of the ideal’. The possibility of evil conditioning social good is the theme alike of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society and Shaw’s Major Barbara. Here is Undershaft, Shaw’s successful munition magnate:

 I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs; that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said, ‘Thou shalt starve ere I starve’; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.

We are reminded of Claudius. The problem is not, strictly speaking, ethical: it is rather the problem of ethics, or morality. Is morality autonomous? Are morals good? We are plunged into a realm beyond morality, beyond good and evil; into Nietzsche’s world; though it would be a foolishness to equate the thoughts of Shaw’s ironic comedy with the Nietzschean profundity. It is that very profundity to which Hamlet introduces us.

 

These complexities my former essays related to the more final

opposition of life and death. The play is shadowed by death, and this

we ignore at our peril. Whatever else we find within the play a primary

emphasis, in interpretation or production, must be allowed to the

imaginative weight of the Ghost scenes, the Graveyard, the final group

of dead bodies, Hamlet’s soliloquy—and clothes; to the poetic realization

of death as a living presence. Whatever else we discover, these, the

imaginative, poetic and dramatic, solidities must be preserved.

Such are the difficulties in whose toils Hamlet and the other

persons—to say nothing of the poor would-be commentator—are

caught. The drama aims to penetrate beyond good and evil by relating

the opposition to life and death, using a complex design in which the

positive of one opposition is alined with the negative of the other, so

sharply stimulating our sense of incongruity and dissatisfaction.

In my earlier essays I rather rashly—and this is symptomatic of what

I do find wanting in them—stated that on certain occasions Hamlet

showed ‘utter loss of control’; but this is surely a matter best left to the

individual reader, actor or producer. The unsatisfactory nature of my

own statements was brought home to me whilst acting the part, when

my emphases fell differently; and differently too during performances

in different productions. Shakespeare has been at great pains, as Bridges

puts it in The Testament of Beauty, to set Hamlet ‘gingerly’—excellent

word!—on the knife-edge dividing sanity from madness. The variations

of that delicate balance, which may here or there tilt one way or

the other on different readings, are not to be arbitrarily defined.

But why should Shakespeare do this? The recurrence of mad themes

in great literature, and especially in drama, or works of dramatic quality,

is obvious: in Greek and Elizabethan drama, in Dostoievsky, in

Melville, in Journey’s End (which I take to be a more important work than

is usually supposed). Madness or semi-madness may be used—and this

is especially clear in Stanhope—for dramatizing a profound insight.

The poet, by projecting and mastering mad themes in literature, is able

to make certain daring explorations without risking personal insanity.

His art is at once an adventure into and a mastery of the demonic,

Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian’ world. Now Hamlet the man has often enough

been felt to reflect, in some especial sense, the poet himself, the artistic

temperament as such; and if this be so, it is quite natural that he should

be shown in a state of variously controlled insanity. Here, as in other

matters, the play tries to strike a peculiarly subtle balance. So, like many

a poet or dramatist (e.g. Byron, Shaw), Hamlet attacks society by wit

and buffoonery, as well as by actual play-production, in order to make

an all but impossible relation or reference where disparity is clear and

the time ‘out of joint’ .Hamlet suffers for his profundity, for

his advance, prematurely hastened by his ghost-converse, beyond normality

and mortality. He is on the way to superman status in the

Nietzschean sense.

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

We must next proceed to some highly complex analyses. Many readers

must have wondered why, though the play is certainly profound,

though Hamlet is himself supposed to be a profound thinker, yet,

when we actually consider the speeches concerned, there seems little

peculiarly difficult or deep. The words are simple, the events easy to

follow. Yet somehow the whole, and even Hamlet’s own speeches,

remain inexhaustibly baffling. Part of the reason we have already attributed

to the peculiar countering of imaginative and ethical principles:

but there is more to notice. Certain key speeches remain to be considered.

As thought, the thinking in these is, superficially at least, simple;

but it reflects something other, beyond thought; it reflects, or

discusses, a state of being, and that state is not simple, nor the speeches,

if carefully inspected, easily understood. Just as we are here pushed

beyond morality, beyond good and evil—though the play never properly

succeeds in advancing beyond life and death—so we are at times

pushed, as it were, to a thinking beyond thought.

 

We are to concentrate now on the middle action starting with

the Players’ entry. This scene with the Players at first appears very

dubiously organic. It cannot be adequately placed by a reference to

Hamlet’s ‘character’ and the nature of his hobbies; not, anyway, without

a more profound insight than is usual into the function of hobbies

in general and this in particular. The play before the King as normally

understood has a melodramatic plot interest only. We shall observe its

deeper implications; but these alone can scarcely justify this lengthy

introduction.

 

The Player’s long Hecuba speech (ii. ii. 498), rich in epic remembrance

of a famous action concerned with the cruelty of ‘fortune’, acts

on Hamlet, as does Fortinbras’ army later, facing him with the world of

high endeavour and noble suffering to which he is not tuned. The

Player’s rant and tears suggest not an unreal emotion, but rather the use

and unleashing of real emotion where artistic emotion was more properly

in order. Hamlet is not therefore impressed by the Player’s art,

though he is an admirer of the lines themselves. His own speaking,

according to Polonius, showed ‘good accent’ and ‘discretion’ (ii. ii.

498) and he is later to give the Players a lesson in declamation. Polonius

is a sensitive critic: he it is who objects to the speech’s length and,

noting the man’s tears, calls it off; though Hamlet tactfully (‘He’s for a

jig or a tale of bawdry or he sleeps’, ii. ii. 530) does his best throughout

to support his friend. Possibly the account of the boy actors is supposed

to underline the quality of these older travelling players: the typical

‘old actor’ being superseded by these peculiarly young upstarts.1

In his soliloquy Hamlet feels inferior, not to the artist, but to the man

who feels too passionately to be a good artist:

 

What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba

That he should weep for her?

(ii. ii. 593)

 

So he feels inferior; as later he feels inferior before Fortinbras. ‘Am I a

coward?’ he asks (ii. ii. 606). From the standpoint of good art he has no

reason to feel inferior, since his speaking is better than the Player’s. He

is, too, half-way to a state higher than Fortinbras’; but such claims

to worth do not, in practice, prevent people like Hamlet—Prufrock

is a modern example—from feeling inferior. After praising the Player’s

outburst he allows, or perhaps rather forces, himself, to express

his own feelings, which stream out in a succession of vulgar

adjectives:

 

Bloody, bawdy villain!

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

(ii. ii. 616)

 

The facile alliteration and jingle underline the words’ superficial quality,

and, as later in the Graveyard scene, Hamlet is annoyed at his own

rant. What he wants is something more than curses and less, for a

reason the play never, except perhaps once (‘Is’t not perfect conscience

to quit him with this arm?’—v. ii. 67), defines, than bloodshed.

Towards the end of his soliloquy he finds it: the play before the King.

His speaking was artistic speaking and this is pre-eminently the artist’s

solution. All art is a means of relating the higher, beyond-thought,

super-state to the lower, normal, consciousness of society. It is

approach, attack, and love, all in one. Hamlet becomes therefore a critic

of society resembling Molière, Voltaire, Swift, Ibsen, Shaw, using art for

his purpose, aiming to attack from within, to raise a fifth column in the

soul of his antagonist, to awake conscience:

 

I have heard

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,

Have, by the very cunning of the scene,

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaim’d their malefactions;

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks.

I’ll tent him to the quick. If he but blench

I know my course . . .

(ii. ii. 625)

 

He wonders if such promptings as the Ghost’s are indeed trustworthy.

He wants to bring truth to light:

 

The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King!

(ii. ii. 641)

 

Let ‘King’ stand for government, for society, the world over and ‘the

play’ for dramatic art, so consistently concerned with sin and conscience,

at all times and places. We begin to see why this couplet echoes

and re-echoes in us with a more than melodramatic meaning.

It might be argued that Hamlet’s is not the highest kind of art; that it

serves a detective function, is at the best propagandist and satiric. But

something similar works within all great drama, the ‘detective’ function

there exploring the depths of the unconscious, the soul, of the

audience. There is no ultimate distinction. Elsewhere Hamlet’s view of

drama is perhaps Jonsonian rather than Shakespearian. He sees it as

eminently a social reflection:

 

They are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your

death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you

live.

(ii. ii. 555)

 

As a thinker, Hamlet is, in all these passages, still tangled in the web of

good and evil, though he has glimpses, as we shall see, of something

more important. To his mother he preaches directly, moving after the

play from stage to pulpit.

 

To return. When, after the first Players’ scene, we next meet Hamlet,

we find him, as never elsewhere, in a serene, backwater, mood, entirely

in his own world, whatever that may be. He is unhampered by contact

with others: remember his earlier sigh of relief at ‘Now I am alone

. . .’ (ii. ii. 583). But this time he does not, as before, consider his

immediate contacts and purposes: his thoughts are at once less hampered

and more universal. Here, if anywhere, we should get the real

Hamlet.

 

This soliloquy (iii. i. 56–88) at first seems reasonably clear, but

difficulties multiply on close inspection. Commentators differ as to

whether Hamlet’s

 

To be, or not to be; that is the question

 

refers to the proposed killing of Claudius or to the killing of himself.

Hitherto I have supported the latter reading, but I now think that both

are somehow included, or rather surveyed from a vantage not easy to

define. Let us leave the opening until we have studied the remainder.

The thinking is enigmatic and its sequences baffling; and our analysis

cannot avoid complexity. It will be the more easily followed if we

remember the root dualism of the play: that of (i) introspection,

deathly melancholia, and a kind of half-willing passivity and (ii) strong

government (the King), martial honour (Fortinbras) and lively normality

(Laertes). Synthesis appears impossible. There seems to be no

middle path. Our soliloquy attempts the synthesis by means of a confused

and ambiguous phraseology. Hamlet considers

 

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And, by opposing, end them.

(iii. i. 57)

 

The first lines suggest the universal problem of man’s tragic destiny,

but the last two at least seem to indicate an actual contest: such sea imagery

is associated elsewhere in Shakespeare with the repelling of

armed invasion.1 ‘Take arms’ therefore hints the idea of hostile action

as opposed to passive endurance, though one cannot be sure that suicide,

as a violent reply to fortune, may not be present also. One could

argue that, since ‘slings and arrows’ are metaphorical, ‘take arms’ may

be so too; and that ‘sea of troubles’ in close association with ‘fortune’

suggests a universal problem that could not be adequately met by direct

action, with ‘suicide’ as a necessary corollary constituent to the

meaning. The phraseology is at once inclusive and enigmatic, and

enigmatic precisely because it is inclusive of incompatibles, since hostile

action is the direct opposite of suicide; self slaughter, in terms at

least of life, being the one ultimate and absolute retreat. It is this absolute

distinction that normally confuses Hamlet and such as he (the

pacifist to-day is an example), since there appears to be no proper

middle way; yet here it would appear that Hamlet’s mind is thinking

somehow outside, or above, this apparently vital distinction. His

phraseology is abnormal; and it is to grow more so.

 

Next, he meditates on death, not necessarily as a result of suicide—

which it is at least arguable that he has not yet considered—but purely

as a general philosophic speculation, considering carefully its possibilities

of peace and pain, and moving on explicitly to suicide as the

obvious solution to human ills could one be sure of a dreamless sleep.

This forms the main body of our soliloquy and is easy to understand,

being typical enough of our death-shadowed protagonist. But we are

finally returned, in a most peculiar manner, to the world of fine action:

from deathly and explicitly suicidal meditation, but with no sense

whatever of contrast, to the Fortinbras values. The phraseology is again

enigmatic. Fear of the future life ‘puzzles the will’ of the would-be

suicide. The phrase is clear; yet, in view of Hamlet’s central problem

throughout, we cannot avoid a semi-conscious reference to worldly

action.

 

Next, we hear that ‘conscience does make cowards of us all.’

Now ‘conscience’ may mean (i) conscience in the modern sense, as

‘Catch the conscience of the King’ (ii. ii. 642), ‘How smart a lash that

speech doth give my conscience’ (iii. i. 50), ‘They are not near my

conscience’ (v. ii. 58), and ‘Is’t not perfect conscience’ (v. ii. 67). There

may be a harking back to the earlier suicide soliloquy and its thought

of ‘the Everlasting’ fixing, ‘his canon ’gainst self-slaughter’ (i. ii. 132).

But conscience in this play is highly honoured (as at i. v. 87), and only

dubiously to be related to cowardice. Some commentators read (ii)

‘conscience’ = ‘excessive self-consciousness’; that is, the fault of ‘thinking

too precisely on the event’ (iv. iv. 41), the very words by which

Hamlet contrasts his own indecision with the valour of a Fortinbras

(‘coward’ occurs in both contexts). So we have suicide directly related

to Fortinbras’ military ardour. Can Hamlet mean that if he were as true

to his own longings as a Fortinbras is to his, he would kill, not others,

but himself? Or merely that his conscience, in the religious sense,

precludes suicide? Or both? And now things get swiftly worse; for next

we hear that, through this failure in courage, ‘the native hue of resolution

is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ The image (cp.

Fortinbras’ ‘lawless resolutes’ at i. i. 98) contrasts the chubby face of

youthful ardour with the sickly introspection of the ascetic. But what

on earth has this rosy-cheeked boy to do with suicide?—for it is he, not

the other, who is expected to take the plunge. Every line now, by careful

gradation, is directing our thoughts more and more clearly from suicide

towards the incompatible ideal of strong worldly action among

men: ‘pale cast of thought’ quite inevitably belongs to ‘thinking too

precisely on the event’ (iv. iv. 41). Lastly we are told that this is how

 

enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

(iii. i. 86)

 

(hamlet suicide cheyan ano atho claudius ne kolan ano enna oru thought verum, but ee soliloques namod parayunath oru strong worldly action anu)

 

No one can conceivably suppose that suicide is here intended. The

‘enterprises’ concerned (cp. Julius Caesar, ii. i. 133; it is a usual word) are

clearly of the same genre as the activities (called ‘enterprise’ at i. i. 99)

of a Fortinbras (e.g. his invasion of Poland).

 

We have then a sequence of abnormal thinking holding in solution,

as it were, the jarring opposites of our play. It starts from what at least

seems thought of strong action (‘take arms’, ‘oppose’), proceeds

through death and suicide, and thence returns imperceptibly, yet

through an increasing tilting of the balance, to a final emphasis on

strong action. The central thought is suicide. Suicide is the one obvious

fusion—the best Hamlet can reach at this stage—of the opposing principles

of fine action and death-shadowed passivity, will and suffering,

sanity and madness. It is the ultimate passivity, being self-negating; yet,

being a deed, it is an acted, a lived, a violent and challenging passivity.

It is a cool and carefully willed plunge into the irrational, the Dionysian,

whose approaches, mixing with affairs, make madness, crime,

tragedy. It is thus an attempt to take Nirvana by storm, and so innately

paradoxical, raising natural fears of a possible fallacy (‘Perchance to

dream’). We can at least see how naturally suicide-thinking here, as in

Dostoievsky’s Possessed, may be felt as the one perfect act of the integrated

man; and also how it rises naturally from a bedding of confused

and paradoxical phraseology; though we, like Hamlet, shall suspect the

fallacy in so negative a deed. In these terms, however, we can, provisionally,

find one sort of synthesis between the values of a Hamlet and

those of a Fortinbras: since both self-slayer and soldier possess an

integration on the border-line of life and death. The suicide, like Fortinbras,

‘makes mouths at the invisible event’ exposing ‘what is mortal

and unsure’ (iv. iv. 50) to the worst death can offer. Through him life

deliberately uses its own energy to contradict—more, to contra-act,

itself. In such terms, not unlike those, and yet how different!—since

there there is a positive aim—of Antony and Cleopatra, we approach a

synthesis of life and death.1

 

 

So Hamlet’s mind, set ‘gingerly’ between such extremes—we might

also call them the extremes of extraversion and introversion, of masculine

and feminine—is here in placid, wandering thought voyaging

through his own problems and in his reverie half-glimpsing, or rather

through enigmatic phrases and suicide thoughts half-creating, the synthesis

of his agonising incompatibles. For once these extremes intershade,

they are fluid and run into each other, like dreams. This is a

lonely reverie but, like Richard II’s reverie in prison,2 a creative state,

like poetry. It is an approach. To what? Here we can attempt a definition

of the opening.

 

‘To be’ can scarcely just mean ‘to act’; nor, surely, does Hamlet mean

anything so simple as ‘to live or die’ and nothing more. He might

mean ‘to exist or not to exist after death’, but that makes no proper

opening to a speech certainly concerned deeply with this thought but

containing others that tend to interrupt the sequence such an opening

demands: if this be its whole meaning, then it is a poor opening.

Probably all these meanings are somehow contained; but can we not

find something more precise to say about them? After all, these are

probably the most famous words in Shakespeare. Well, you may say,

was it not an opening that just occurred to Shakespeare by chance and

which he, like ourselves, recognized as neat without looking deeper?

Very probably something of the sort did happen. But what we have to

do is to interpret, not Shakespeare’s intention, but our own sense of

this being the perfect opening to the central speech in the most discussed

work in the world’s literature. Is it not likely to hold some great

thought? What, then, can it mean? What must it mean? ‘If a thing’, says

the philosopher, ‘may be, and must be, it is’.

 

Hamlet is here in momentary possession of his own universe, surveying

those opposite approaches to his goal, of fine action and endurance,

or of both—if it may be possible—in one, with which, from start

to finish, the play is mainly concerned. And the goal itself, what is that?

‘To be’: that is, not merely to live, to act, to exist, but really to be; to be,

as an integrated and whole person, not in the modern psychological

but in the Nietzschean sense. A super-state is indicated, a marriage of

the twin elements, masculine and feminine, in the soul, whereby the

personality is beyond the antinomies of action and passivity; a lived

poetry blending consciousness and unconsciousness, like Keats’ ‘might

half-slumbering on its own right arm’. In this state one is beyond fear

of death since life and death have ceased to exist as antinomies. So

Hamlet defines his major problem and proceeds, from a height, or

depth, half enjoying in a dreamlike confusion the state he aspires to, to

survey those different approaches through time and eternity that are

open to him. He does not wholly succeed. The one clear emerging

solution, suicide, felt as a way out from a bad life to a possibly unpleasant

death, is rightly suspect. After all, the state indicated is an all but

impossible integration, the Christ-state. It is no less than the final goal

of the race; and that is precisely why the opening line echoes and reechoes

from generation to generation with an ultimate authority.

 

Whilst in this mood—not ‘state’, since he does not securely possess

the integration he glimpses—he is confronted suddenly by the girl he

loves, Ophelia. Now Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and therefore also, presumably,

his Superman, is, like Christ, necessarily unmarried, since the

higher integration is a marriage within the personality that positively

precludes marriage. Hamlet is in a super-sexual, monastic, mood and

Ophelia is discovered at her devotions. We may recall the subtle

tempting of Angelo1:

 

O cunning enemy, that: to catch a saint,

With saints dost bait thy hook!

(Measure for Measure, ii. ii. 180)

 

A host of conflicting emotions necessarily swirl in Hamlet now. He

wishes to be remembered in her prayers, he denies his love, he

urges her to enter a nunnery, he rejects human life, sex and procreation

wholesale. Much of it is forced by his temporary beyond-marriage

integration; but one watches a swift decline, not unlike

that of Isabella. Super-sexual care of a loved weakling swiftly

becomes (something similar happens in his interview with his

mother) neurotic infra-sexual cynicism and ends in behaviour like

madness: the dialogue is admirably devised to underline Hamlet’s

utter failure to live the synthesis he dreams. It is, pretty nearly,

unactable: at least, the actor can do little more than go through the

paces required: the text, if properly understood, is too powerful for

dramatic exposition.

 

When we next meet Hamlet he has recovered his balance and is

addressing the Players (iii. ii. 1). The speech is not, as one might think,

an inessential. Shakespeare is not taking time off from the exigencies of

drama to have a fling on his own. Shakespeare’s own interests are

certainly being used, but they are used for a purpose relating to the

inmost nature of the drama he is composing.

 

Here Hamlet is again, and more precisely so than before, the artist.2

In artistic terms he enjoys full possession and expression of the superstate

for which he was recently groping in creative reverie. Remember

that his speaking earlier was good, though the Player’s was not. He has

now been giving the Players a lesson:

 

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on

the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as

lief the town-crier spoke my lines . . .

(iii. ii. 1)

 

Here, if nowhere else, Hamlet knows what he is talking about, and the

flow of his prose style is correspondingly assured. Now Hamlet’s

advice outlines in terms of stage artistry the conditions in which the

play’s major conflicts might be resolved. The Players are to control their

passions; they are to attain repose. The most violent actions on the stage

must be graceful and temperate:

 

Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all

gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of

passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it

smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious,

periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the

ears of the groundlings . . .

(iii. ii. 4)

 

The same is true of style in any game, of skill in any craft. Hamlet’s

phrases mirror, moreover, a truth of life-as-art. It is the same with any

artistic theory of worth: point by point references of Pope’s Essay on

Criticism to the art of living are profoundly revealing. In living, as in art,

creative action matures not from bluster and violence, but from repose.

‘Controlled emotion’ does not quite describe that repose, since it suggests

a dualism: it is precisely Hamlet’s efforts at self-control that witness

his inability to live his own artistic wisdom. The art of life is not an

ethic; ethic, like technical rules, is a makeshift. The repose, or poise,

required corresponds again to Keats’ definition of poetry as ‘might,

half-slumbering on its own right arm’; in life it will suggest a trust in

beneficent powers to do their share—Keats’ ‘negative capability’—

without over-straining, impatience and anxiety in oneself, the trust

expressed later in ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’

(v. ii. 232); in acting, it is the power of the thing left unsaid, the gesture

not made. It will always be partly unconscious and instinctive. The

beginner at golf is usually guilty of ‘thinking too precisely on the

event’; but not so the expert, whose thought is embedded in, sunk in,

dissolved throughout, the living action, mind and body functioning

as a unit. So it is with the actor: the action is to be suited to the word,

the word to the action (iii. ii. 20), far more exactly than by any

conscious planning; and so too, with ‘word’ assuming a deeper significance,

in the wholly dedicated, saintly, life. But such a life is not

necessarily passive. The actors are specifically warned that they be

‘not too tame’: they are to pursue the tight-rope course between

nature and artificiality, to set their art ‘gingerly’ between the

extremes of romantic and classic. The same note was struck by Hamlet

in his praise of the play which was ‘caviare to the general’, characterized

by ‘modesty’ and lack of affectation, ‘an honest method, as

wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine’

(ii. ii. 466–75). What we are stressing is nothing new: it is the old

doctrine of the Tao;1 the ‘nothing too much’ of ancient Greece; it

conditions the creation of Nietzsche’s Superman, a creature of superb

repose, yet ‘terrible’ in ‘goodness’; it is given fullest incarnation in

the life of Christ, in whom passivity and a listening in to Divine

purpose becomes positive and challenging activity, with victory

maturing from death. In terms of dramatic art Hamlet’s speech outlines,

as his ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy groped after, the one

positive to which the unresolved conflicts of this and all such dramas

point.

 

 

There is, of course, more in the speech, some of it less widely

significant. The necessity of truth to nature—‘ a mirror up to nature’—

is, as in Pope, central, while the image of one of ‘nature’s journeymen’

strutting and bellowing may be ironically applied to Hamlet himself

within the artistry of life, at least during the middle action.

 

Hamlet is continually feeling, through various approaches, towards

this elusive ideal. Here is an earlier expression:

 

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason; how infinite in

faculty; in form, in moving, how express and admirable; in action how

like an angel; in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world,

 

The words make no claim to any supernal insight; yet the phrase ‘in

action how like an angel’ is especially relevant.1 It suggests a certain

athletic grace and poise that, if grouped with other such passages in

Shakespeare, especially the description of ‘young Harry’ light as ‘feathered

Mercury’ leaping on his horse as an angel ‘dropped down’ from

Heaven (I Henry IV, iv. i. 104), help to define, pictorially, our aim.

Nietzsche’s Superman is likewise an angelic person, created by the

descent of ‘grace’ to the visible order. To Hamlet his own father was

such a gracious figure:

 

See, what a grace was seated on this brow!

Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,

An eye like Mars to threaten and command;

A station like the herald Mercury

New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;

A combination and a form indeed

Where every god did seem to set his seal,

To give the world assurance of a man.

(iii. iv. 55)

 

Such pictorial glimpses of man transfigured play an important part in

Hamlet’s story.

 

His feeling after human perfection may, however, be presented more

inwardly, more psychologically. Directly after his address to the Players

there follows immediately and most aptly—the sequence of Shakespeare’s

thought from art to life is beautifully clear2—Hamlet’s carefully

phrased address to Horatio, whom he considers ‘as just a man’ as

his own ‘imagination’ has encountered:

 

Dost thou hear?

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice

And could of men distinguish, her election

Hath seal’d thee for herself; for thou hast been

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;

A man, that fortune’s buffets and rewards

Has ta’en with equal thanks; and bless’d are those

Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled

That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man

That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him

In my heart’s core, ay in my heart of heart,

As I do thee.

(iii. ii. 67)

 

Horatio (whether rightly or not need not concern us—he is being used

very obviously for this purpose) is defined as a man well on the way

to integration. ‘Fortune’s finger’ recalls ‘the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune’ (iii. i. 58) in Hamlet’s soliloquy. Notice the

emphasis on invulnerable suffering. Notice, too, that Horatio does not

control his passions: rather his ‘blood’ (i.e. virility, passion) and

‘judgement’ are (as in the art of acting) ‘commingled’, a marriage of

elements, as in Nietzsche, being indicated. On the stage of life Horatio

uses all ‘gently’. Kipling’s If offers a similar insight:

 

If you can dream, and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster,

—And treat those two imposters just the same . . .

 

Such a person will, we are told, be ‘a man’:

 

And, what is more, you’ll be a man, my son.

 

For ‘man’ we must clearly read, or understand, ‘superman’, as also,

pretty nearly, in Hamlet’s description of his father as a ‘combination’

of god-like faculties which ‘give the world assurance of a man’ (iii. iv.

62). Man, as yet, has not fulfilled the purposes of God, or Nature: he is

only on rare occasions what he was meant to be, or become. So, too,

Brutus is described in terms of a synthesis of faculties recalling Hamlet’s

speech to Horatio (himself ‘more an antique Roman, than a

Dane’—v. ii. 355), and ending with an emphasis on ‘man’:

 

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, ‘This was a man’.

(Julius Caesar, v. v. 73)

 

That is, Nature could for once boast of her handiwork. True, these

speeches are not explicitly transcendental; but they are very valuable

pointers. Certainly Hamlet feels his father as, pretty nearly, a

superman:

 

He was a man; take him for all in all;

I shall not look upon his like again.

(i. ii. 187)

 

Why not? Except that to Hamlet his own father is, partly through

love—for love always has precisely this transfiguring quality—felt as an

earnest, a symptom, of what humankind should be; man not as he,

‘this quintessence of dust’ (ii. ii. 328), is to our normal awareness, but

as, given the right occasion and speaking the language of the gods, or

of Shakespeare, he may appear, sometimes, on the stage; and may be

expected to appear, one day, in full actuality, on the stage of Earth—or

Heaven.

 

Hamlet’s play before the King is provisionally successful, but leads

nowhere. Neither here, nor in his move from stage to pulpit to sermonize

his mother where, as in his dialogue with Ophelia, a noble supersexual

idealism degenerates swiftly into infra-sexual neurosis, does he

appear really effectual. He can compose a stinging, satiric and ironic

play; but he cannot live that wholeness reflected by the art itself as

opposed to its obvious content; that wholeness reflected by his address

to the Players. He is not—who is?—a ‘man’ in this highest sense. The

play’s central paradox, whereby the good person is a continual threat to

a reasonably normal society, reaches a climax in these violent yet

ineffectual scenes. Hamlet in life cannot act creatively.1 He looks back,

is critical, shows little love. His play is satiric and Jonsonian; his philosophy

death-ridden and Websterian; his sex disgust Swiftian and

Manichean. He is sunk deep in the knowledge of good and evil and

clogged by ethic. Only in reverie, artistic theory and occasional mind

pictures of transfigured man, does he glimpse a resolution. That is, he

does not attain to the Shakespearian health which puts him into action

and surveys his failure, nor to the New Testament freedom from the

Law. That is why he cannot move through society with the assurance of

a Christ, or a St. Francis; and nothing else, it might seem, would serve

his turn. He cannot even get as far as his cousins Timon and Prospero;

he cannot rise beyond what Nietzsche calls ‘the avenging mind’. He is

left divided, all but insane, spasmodic. More: he is ill-mannered which,

as we shall see, is perhaps worse.

 

Our play thus indirectly attacks ethics. Hamlet may purpose well, he

may try to control himself, he may will the good; but, though he has

intuitions of a supreme excellence, he cannot in life ‘suit the action to

the word, the word to the action’ in perfect reciprocity. We are necessarily

baffled, since it is hard to reconcile ourselves to the utter

inadequacy of such good intentions. Hamlet can indeed rouse the

King’s and his mother’s conscience, but cannot help them to advance;

since conscience alone is, like Pope’s ‘reason’, ‘a sharp accuser but a

helpless friend’ (Essay on Man, ii. 154). The point is, if your state of

being is harmonious, your deeds are creative, on one plane or another

(‘His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right’, ‘Whate’er is best

administer’d is best’, Essay on Man, iii. 306; iii. 304). Observe how

Timon, whilst urging them to excesses, most amusingly reforms the

Bandits. While, however, your own state remains divided, your highest

idealism, even an idealism willing the super, the undivided, state, may

lead to evil; and there appears to be no short cut. In all this Hamlet is a

symbol of man, with his highest idealism and best art, in our era, yet

trammelled still in concepts of the Law, justice and death. The result is a

multiplicity of murders. The Christian position—that is, the positives of

Christ and St. Paul—though not here explicitly surveyed (as they are in

Measure for Measure), are insistently suggested.

 

I would therefore not retract what I have elsewhere said concerning

the evil in Hamlet, except to admit a certain exaggeration and to

remind myself and my readers that we are judging him by a very high

standard; by the standard, indeed, of Christ. And so paradoxical is this

world of ours that it remains true that to have glimpses of the highest

good and fail of its attainment may well land you in a worse mess than

anything normal people can experience. That is why Christ regards the

admirable and necessary Pharisees as ‘whited sepulchres’; why the fine

artist may yet be an intolerable person; and why—conversely—

Nietzsche is found to interlace his idealism with satanic phrases. It may

really be necessary, in thought at least, to work through the evil, as

Hamlet is shown working through it, indeed perhaps even in some

mysterious fashion taking the responsibility of crime on himself in an

impossible situation. The beyond-ethic problem cannot be simple.

True, we can change the meaning of our words. We can say, and it is

partly true, that Hamlet is good throughout; that his faults (bitterness,

disgust, cruelty, unjust murders) are forced on him by a bad society,

are reflections of it and therefore not properly faults. Yet from that

standpoint we can say as much for many wrongdoers, since such

people are, to a profound judgement, likely enough to be the superiors

of their more normal and less adventurous brethren. But whilst we use

words in their usual sense we must surely see guilt in Hamlet’s

behaviour; a guilt directly related to the inadequacy of his good. He

cannot take the final step.

 

He is himself strongly, at this point, aware of his own limitations, as

his soliloquy after meeting Fortinbras’ captain shows (iv. iv. 32—66).

He is, too, aware that it is less a line of action than a state of being that is

at issue (cp. Pope’s ‘His (i.e. faith) can’t be wrong whose life is in the

right’ and Shelley’s ‘Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes’ at

Prometheus Unbound, iii. iv. 150):

 

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour’s at the stake.

(iv. iv. 53)

                                                                                         

Hamlet here sees the futility of Fortinbras’ enterprise, yet admires his

soul-state. He provisionally accepts the Renaissance values of ‘honour’

and ‘divine ambition’, admiring the ‘delicate and tender prince’

so inflated by immediate life in terms of ‘honour’ (to the Renaissance

mind a mediator, a lightning-conductor, of forces beyond

commonsense) that he ‘makes mouths at the invisible event’ and

willingly risks wholesale slaughter (‘fortune, death and danger’) for

a mere ‘fantasy’. Fortinbras’ lively being exists beyond the life-death

antinomy; and it is true that many a death-daring soldier may be

nearer the superman status than many an artist. Hamlet certainly

regards Fortinbras’ actions as possibly true expressions of God’s

purpose:

 

Sure, He that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god-like reason

To fust in us unus’d . . .

(iv. iv. 36)

 

When Hamlet acknowledges that ‘incitements of my reason and my

blood’ impel him to a revenge which he admits is perfectly easy, ‘reason’

covers imagination and intuition; it is wisdom, finest apprehension

(cp. ‘in apprehension, how like a god’ at ii. ii. 326).1 As against

this we have Hamlet’s own ‘thinking too precisely on the event’ (i.e. on

the outcome), which has only ‘one part wisdom and ever three parts

coward’ (cp. ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’ and ‘pale cast of

thought’ at iii. i. 83–5). Through the concept of ‘honour’ the Renaissance

made its own terms with the religion-war antinomy; ‘honour’

was at once religion and a ‘way’ in the Gospel and Confucian sense. So

Hamlet, who is a Renaissance gentleman, sees to his ‘shame’

 

The imminent death of twenty thousand men

That for a fantasy and trick of fame

Go to their graves like beds . . .

(iv. iv. 60)

 

Hamlet is not consciously beyond the current valuations of Renaissance

society. To him Fortinbras is in a state of grace.

 

 

III

 

In my former essays I showed how Hamlet’s macabre originality is

contrasted with the hum-drum world of Polonius’ advice to Laertes

and the King’s efficiency and general importance as King; on which I

might have quoted Rosencrantz’ explicit and important statement:

 

The single and peculiar life is bound

With all the strength and armour of the mind

To keep itself from noyance; but much more

That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest

The lives of many. The cease of majesty

Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw

What’s near it with it; it is a massy wheel,

Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,

To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things

Are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which, when it falls,

Each small annexment, petty consequence,

Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone

Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

(iii. iii. 11)

 

This fine speech, in the style of Troilus and Cressida, cannot be written off

as sheer flattery: certainly no Elizabethan would have understood it as

such. I have also shown (in my essay ‘Rose of May’ in The Imperial Theme)

how, when Hamlet’s stock is at its lowest after sparing the King (in

hopes of his greater damnation),1 murdering Polonius, tormenting his

mother and shocking everyone with his gruesome speeches on

death, the dramatist ranges against him all the conventional values:

Fortinbras’ army, Ophelia’s pathetic madness and flowery death, the

King’s kindly phrases and royal deportment, Laertes’ avenging

ardour; whilst especially noting the King’s crisp dialogue with

Laertes on the latter’s entry, suggesting that they can do business since

they speak the same language, are of the same world; and here we have

another at first sight superfluous scene that demands our present

attention.

 

I refer to the King’s unnecessarily elaborated discussion with Laertes

concerning the Norman, Lamond, and his excelling horsemanship:

 

King. Two months since

Here was a gentleman of Normandy:

I’ve seen myself, and served against, the French,

And they can well on horseback; but this gallant

Had witchcraft in’t; he grew unto his seat,

And to such wondrous doing brought his horse,

As he had been incorps’d and demi-natur’d

With the brave beast. So far he topp’d my thought,

That I, in forgery of shapes and tricks,

Come short of what he did.

Laertes. A Norman was’t?

King. A Norman.

Laertes. Upon my life, Lamond.

King. The very same.

Laertes. I know him well; he is the brooch indeed

And gem of all the nation.

King. He made confession of you;

And gave you such a masterly report

For art and exercise in your defence . . .

(iv. vii. 81)

 

Observe here the characterizing of Lamond’s horsemanship as a perfect

unity, a magical skill beyond technique which baffles all attempts at

definition. It is an athletic analogue to Hamlet’s speech to the Players;

and both suggest, as does ‘style’ in any game or art, a prefiguring of

some potentiality in life. We may recall young Harry’s horsemanship

described in angelic terms.

 

Now the King and Laertes enjoy a world of accepted values from

which Hamlet is cut off: or we can say that they, like Fortinbras, make

the contact through ‘honour’ and horsemanship that Hamlet seeks

through reverie and art. His ghost-converse has jerked Hamlet beyond

the world of military ambition, though he is himself a good fencer (iv.

vii. 103; v. ii. 220) and might have been a good soldier (v. ii. 411);

beyond court life, codes of honour, pleasure in travel (like Laertes’). So,

after the grim middle action and its talk of worms and death, our

contrasting series of bright, life-charged incidents reaches a climax in

this pure dialogue of club-room conversation, the quintessence of

healthy-mindedness. This is the wider world (suggested by the name

Lamond) beyond the prison (‘Denmark’s a prison’, ii. ii. 253) of

thought, from which Hamlet’s introspective and idealistic agony shuts

him. The King and Laertes have almost forgotten, for a moment, the

occasion, the King expanding his description quite unnecessarily. The

two are happy in recognition of their own world reflected in each

other. It is a relief to the audience; its lucid contemporary realism gives

a reference to the whole play, it forms an apt preliminary to what

follows. For soon we return to Hamlet again—in a graveyard; from

noble action to suicide and damnation (in the Priest’s speech, v. i.

248—60), the balanced opposites of Hamlet’s soliloquy; from the fine

flowers of chivalry and courtesy to the skull.

 

Hamlet’s sea-adventures (which I have previously compared to Stavrogin’s

voyage into the far north) may be allowed (though the text

itself gives no explicit warrant for it) to serve vaguely some symbolic

purpose: certainly he comes back a subtly changed man. His graveyard

meditations show a new repose. True, he is thinking of death and that is

easy stuff for him; it is the more complex business of life that gets him

down. However, his words on Yorick show perhaps his only words in

the play of really convincing love. Though this repose is temporarily

shattered by his tussle with Laertes, it returns in his dialogue with

Horatio and his banter—it is no worse, a mild, good-natured

ragging—of Osric. Here, as in the graveyard) there is a vein of refined,

suave, courtly satire to be distinguished from his earlier disgust: he is

above his antipathies.

 

We are approaching the play’s conclusion. How should we ourselves,

if we had the choice, end it? Were Hamlet to rouse himself and,

imitating Laertes and Fortinbras, prove active for immediate revenge,

we should say that here was a satisfying melodrama, if no more. If he

were to remain bitter like Timon and embrace a tragic end, we should

approve the artistic logic. Were he to show signs of developing the

magic powers of a Prospero, we should note a too-rapid development

of his mystic propensities, but might accept the philosophic implications,

whilst taking pleasure in seeing the student prove a match for the

politician. If he returned with a sense of artistic superiority, washed his

hands of the whole nasty business and confined himself to writing a

Ph.D. thesis at Wittenberg on satiric literature; or, better still, set himself

to compose explosive dramas calculated to terrify all the kings of

Europe, we, to-day, should be very pleased with him indeed. Some of

us, of religious leanings, might like him to turn Christian, take the load

of evil on himself, transmute it in silent endurance and lend all his

efforts to creating peace: such is the solution which Shakespeare

appears to survey in Measure for Measure. But he does none of these.

Instead, he accepts the wager and, in obedience to his mother’s advice,

proceeds to offer Laertes an official apology (probably for both the

murder of Polonius and his graveyard attack), even going so far as to

confess, in all seriousness and at great length (v. ii. 239–58), that he has

been sadly afflicted with madness. Nothing could more clearly support

my earlier contention that Hamlet is, or has been, in relation to his

society, thoroughly abnormal and dangerous. What has happened?

Hamlet has himself realized this. He has always admitted, though

instinctively untuned to them, the courtly values of his society. Here,

without somehow ceasing to be himself, he respects, outwardly at

least, the people he has hitherto scorned. Laertes answers with a provisional

acceptance of the apology, whilst making some highly technical

reservations concerning the need to hand over the case to ‘elder

masters of known honour’ (v. ii. 262) before a final commitment.

‘Honour’, with its manifold technicalities, bulks large; and Hamlet,

one feels, subscribes, even contributes, to the dominating courtliness.

But now, as never before, he calmly and confidently means to execute

the Ghost’s command: ‘The interim is mine’ (v. ii. 73).

 

On his return, Hamlet’s words witness a new poise. His manners too

have changed. Social conventions are a ritual to which man submits his

personal instincts; they are a way of attuning one to necessities beyond

one’s conscious egotism. They are a kind of acting, an attempt if not to

live at least to express something of the artistic grace and balance. Thus

Hamlet’s words on Osric are, though satiric, yet courtly. Hearing of his

mother’s advice that he use some ‘gentle entertainment’ to Laertes, he

answers: ‘She well instructs me’ (v. ii. 218). His letter to the King (iv.

vii. 42) showed perhaps a certain irony (‘High and mighty’, ‘beg leave

to see your kingly eyes’); but his use later of ‘your Grace’ (v. ii. 275)

rings true; so does his instinctive ‘good Madam’ (v. ii. 304) to the

Queen during the fencing. The stage tradition of elaborate salutes to the

throne before the match is therefore sound. Our chief persons enter on

this last occasion in a ritualistic, one might almost say a dreamlike,

state, as though half-consciously submitting their quarrel to some

higher court of appeal. To each other, they are polite; the harmonious

quality of their engagements is preluded by Hamlet’s and Laertes’

embracing of friendship under the King’s personal direction, with the

stately occasion marked by the King’s signals of drum and cannon.

True, all these effects, including Hamlet’s manners, are superficial, since

on both sides hostility lurks beneath; but that is, precisely, the whole

point of manners; and it is expressly this superficiality, this acted conventionality,

that is here so important, for only within its frame can a

conclusion be reached. Hamlet is at last willing to stop being profound.

The ‘time’ is no longer ‘out of joint’; a relation has been established.

 

What, on Hamlet’s side, does this mean? He has attained humility

before his society, the world as it is; that is, therefore, before the King

as King. Surely the reader has been struck, during our talk of beyond ethic

possibilities and compulsions, by the thought that, failing a kingdom

of heaven on earth, morals are an essential? Law and order must

be preserved. The second-best is needed to avoid disaster. But Hamlet

has pushed beyond the second-best; and what is he to do? What are

others, such as he, Nietzscheans, to do? Art and reverie are not enough.

Is there not a second-best for them to live by? There is. It is simple. It is

love; love of a very simple and realistic kind; a love which is humility

before not God’s ideal for the race but God’s human race as it is, in

one’s own time and place. Hamlet has somehow reached it and hence

his new courtesy before men and acceptance before God:

 

Not a whit, we defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a

sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be

now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no

man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

(v. ii. 232)

 

Hamlet has accepted not only his surroundings, but himself. We may

suppose that he now knows himself neither saint nor soldier, but a

Renaissance gentleman of finely tuned sensibility; and that is saying a

lot. He now knows intuitively that he will do the work before him; and

mark what happens. As soon as he attains this state of being, the contact

formerly missing is at once established and everything falls into line for him.

The actual duel sums up, as I have shown elsewhere, the play’s general

quality of indecision and oscillation, of insecure balance—remember

the importance of our balanced opposites in Hamlet’s reverie and the

stress on balance in the address to the Players—of actions returned ‘on

the inventors’ heads’ (v. ii. 399), in sharp and significant play; it is at

once ritual and symbol. Then Hamlet gets his one perfect opportunity:

first, he catches the King at a moment of extreme and patent crime—

always his desire—with victims, dead and dying, littered all around;

second, the King is accused in public by someone else; thirdly Hamlet

has himself been worked up to sudden, instinctive action, which he has

always found easy; and lastly he is already, and knows it, on the brink

of that ‘felicity’ (v. ii. 361) of death to which he has long been more

attuned than to life. There is thus a suicidal quality in his revenge,

which recalls the blend of suicide and fine action in his soliloquy. By a

pretty irony the King’s plot (claudius laertes chernn undakiya plot,

ath hamlet nu thuna ayi)has been developed to make Hamlet’s

action easy and inevitable. Hamlet has won this success by humility and

acceptance. In his own, Renaissance, terms, he has attained to his Kingdom

of Heaven and all the rest is at once added: ‘To be, or not to be:

that is the question’.

 

So we work up to the formal conclusion; the dead bodies, Hamlet on

the throne, prince now among the dead; the new life in Fortinbras,

military and young; and between, as mediator, Horatio. This formality,

together with the effect here and earlier (at i. iv. 6) of sounds, I have

discussed in my Shakespearian Production.

 

 

IV

 

It is true that this conclusion is not one which an age that regards Henry

V as a pot-boiler and Henry VIII as an enigma will most readily appreciate;

but I believe that it is good for us to observe it. We must remember

that the courtly values of the Renaissance touched the hem at least of

religion, as that text-book of contemporary idealism, Castiglione’s Il

Cortegiano, shows. Their importance in Hamlet as a standard of reference

is clear from Ophelia’s speech attributing to Hamlet ‘The courtier’s,

soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword’ (iii. i. 160). In its conclusion,

moreover, Hamlet only the more clearly shows itself to be, what it is

generally supposed, the hub and pivot of Shakespeare’s whole work in

its massed direction: for both the Duke in Measure for Measure and Prospero

return finally to take up their ducal responsibilities, and Shakespeare

himself concludes his great sequence of more personal works

with the nationalistic and ritualistic Henry VIII.

 

Fortinbras dominates at the end, as he did in Horatio’s early

speech.1 The psychological action is framed in steel and given a warrior

setting: such is the background for the working out of some hints,

both in Hamlet’s unease and Claudius’ preference of diplomacy to

warfare (in his dealings with Fortinbras), of the beyond-warrior or integration.

Hints: for the greatest drama can offer no more. For what is

involved? No less than the attempt to lift the old revenge-theme, rooted

in drama from Aeschylus to O’Neill, rooted too in our ways of life, in

our courts of justice and international relationships, indeed, in the very

structure of our thought, beyond its stark oppositions; to heave over

human affairs from the backward time-consciousness of Nietzsche’s

‘avenging mind’ into the creative inflow. Such an attempt involves

finally the will to fuse Church and State, the Sermon on the Mount with

international action; it is a will towards the Nietzschean synthesis,

Ibsen’s ‘Third Empire’. This troubled theme is, as in Aeschylus, pushed

to a ritualistic close; raised, that is, from intellect to life, from thought

to being, and there we must leave it.

 

That these deeper issues were not planned out by Shakespeare is

likely enough; it is probable that he could not have planned them. The

poet, as such, does not think thoughts; he makes them; though it may

be for us to think the thoughts which he has made. The meanings here

discussed are not insisted on by the poetry; they emerge only to a

sensitive and listening enquiry. They are rather suggested than said. But

that is no reason why we, with due care, should not proceed to say

them: it is our business to say them.