life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain
efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing
self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.
4
'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was
not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of
madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an
instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would
enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I
am grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was
no mere common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many
readers of the play would understand it better if they read an account
of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word
'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No
exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at
once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to
call _Hamlet_ a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.
But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in
anything like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop
into insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible
impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might
extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might
become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy
is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing from
the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic
use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly
be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a
tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers--and thousands go
about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree--is
considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is
only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is therefore, so
far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at
any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.[47] And, finally,
Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to
imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more
difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony
or Macbeth.
Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.
It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the _immediate_
cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at
life and everything in it, himself included,--a disgust which varies in
intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into
weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such
a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to _any_ kind of decided
action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response
is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And
the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a
man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a
certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would
not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and
against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and
positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of
revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an
unnatural strength because they have an ally in something far stronger
than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy
motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased
feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.' We
_see_ them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple, no
analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48] But this melancholy is
perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task
assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For
those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the
Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
consequence of attempting it--success, my death, utter misunderstanding,
mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a
defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as
this?'--all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with
such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought,
an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening
self-contempt.
Again, (_a_) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a
nature normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing
healthy impulses which work themselves out before they have time to
subside. (_b_) It accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which
some of these actions give to him. He arranges the play-scene with
lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and
partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III. ii.
286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King's
designs in sending him away (III. iv. 209), and looks back with
obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he
displayed on the voyage (V. ii. 1-55). These were not _the_
action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them
his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust. (_c_) It accounts
for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his
'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe)
in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed by 'much forcing
of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy
alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
suspicion he is forced to feel. (_d_) It accounts no less for the
painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises,
and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent
symptoms of such melancholy, and (_e_) they sometimes alternate, as they
do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite
fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the
soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes
when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as 'lapsed in _passion_,' and
it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that
inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's
slave.'[49]
Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
(IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
him here and always is god-like), but this _bestial_ oblivion or
'_dullness_,' this 'letting all _sleep_,' this allowing of heaven-sent
reason to 'fust unused':
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to _sleep_ and feed? a _beast_, no more.[50]
So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
_dull_ and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when
the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
tardy and lapsed in _time_; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
almost _blunted_, and bids him not to _forget_ (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of
love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
thinking of it at all, but for the time literally _forgets_ it. It seems
to me we are driven to think of Hamlet _chiefly_ thus during the long
time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
command, 'Do not forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not
accidents.
The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '_Why_,' he
asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
event? And does _that_ again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have _cause,
and will, and strength, and means_, to act?' A man irresolute merely
because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly
condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
it exerts at other times.
I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to
omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make
Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view
is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight
to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may
be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but
little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge
type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection
between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this
connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes
it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at
the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great
ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century,
this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and
shared only by Goethe's _Faust_. It was not that _Hamlet_ is
Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that
_Hamlet_ most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's
infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that
infinity but appears to be its offspring.
FOOTNOTES:
[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 assent, but the
following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would
perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other. For
some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be
one. Within each period the so-called Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies
are respectively grouped together; and for this reason, as well as for
others, the order within each period does not profess to be
chronological (_e.g._ it is not implied that the _Comedy of Errors_
preceded _1 Henry VI._ or _Titus Andronicus_). Where Shakespeare's
authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned, widely or
by specially good authority, the name of the play is printed in italics.
_First Period_ (to 1595?).--Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; _1 Henry VI._, _2 Henry
VI._, _3 Henry VI._, Richard III., Richard II.; _Titus Andronicus_,
Romeo and Juliet.
_Second Period_ (to 1602?).--Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in
Third Period?), _Taming of the Shrew_, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry
Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.;
Julius Caesar, Hamlet.
_Third Period_ (to 1608?).--Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure;
Othello, King Lear, _Timon of Athens_, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus.
_Fourth Period._--_Pericles_, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, _Two
Noble Kinsmen_, _Henry VIII._]
[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 _Coriolanus_
on the one side and _Cymbeline_ and the _Tempest_ on the other), but
because of a difference in substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were
admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with _Antony and
Cleopatra_.]
[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 assume 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 über 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 asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if
he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above;
but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion. It is based on
some words of the Queen (IV. i. 24), in answer to the King's
question, 'Where is he gone?':
To draw apart the body he hath killed:
O'er whom his very madness, like some ore
Among a mineral of metals base,
Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.
But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her
son. She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying,
'A rat! a rat!', ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he
heard _something stir_ there, whereas we know that what he heard was a
man's voice crying, 'What ho! help, help, help!' And in this scene she
has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated,
shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now
we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that
interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that
said those things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words
(III. iv. 171):
For this same lord,
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it
may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at
III. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for
Polonius.)
Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards?
Well, in the _next_ scene (IV. ii.) we see him _alone_ with the
body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his
first words are, 'Safely stowed'!]
[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 passages.]
[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 passage 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.]
LECTURE IV
HAMLET
The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To
attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if
I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now
to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially
illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one
important but particularly doubtful point.
1