HAMLET.

In this play it is common to look for an exhibition of humor in the

scene of the Grave-diggers; but those personages are only amusing as a

couple of common men whose profession seems to have buried both their

feelings and their wits. One of them is accidentally witty when he

asks, "Is she to be buried in Christian burial, that wilfully seeks

her own salvation?" But he and his companion do not make good the

promise of this opening text: they turn out to be tedious louts who

bring ale-house chatter to a churchyard and only rise to the dignity

of being ghastly, although we know that the grave they dig is for

Ophelia. We do not properly recollect and feel this till they disappear

and the music of the funeral train is heard. Their shovelfuls of dirt

and bones make coffin-like cæsuras in their singing, but the songs are

too trivial to be trolled over a pot; scarce are they a setting to an

empty skull. They rattle so dryly you wish they might be dumped in and

covered up. The sexton-riddles have little more juice in them, for they

are the kind that boozy gossips clink out of their cans, and not the

gay pursuivants of wisdom. We begin to reflect that such triviality

does not become interesting because it is well hit off, and that in one

respect it is not well hit off, since it recurs too tiresomely; and we

are on the point of voting the whole grave-digging business to be a

mouldy impertinence, when there flashes upon us the better thought that

Shakspeare was here deepening pathos upon the fair maid who must be

the tenant of this grave so fatuously dug. To this complexion must we

all come at last, and beauty cannot repel the loutish hands which take

their fee for shovelling dirt upon its clay.

There is so little comic business in this scene that actors are at

their wits' end to make it hold the audience. They used to wear a dozen

or two waistcoats, and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them

off, one after another; wearing all the time an air as if each one was

the last, until you doubted whether, instead of a man inside, there

were any thing more than a yardstick to measure vest-patterns with. So

Thackeray takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well-known

articles of his apparel,--"under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and

then nothing." But the waistcoated business always secured the laugh

which the clowns' insipid discussion could not raise.

This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no existence in the

earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an after-thought of Shakspeare as he

moulded the play to its perfection.

In the vignettes of mediæval manuscripts and the frescoes of chapels,

there were ghastly drawings of the Dance of Death, or the so-called

_Danse Macabre_.[7] It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly

man by the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the primrose

way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood runs counter to the violent

bad taste of these unfleshed processions; they contrast with the warm

truth of Nature too sharply for the work of redemption. Shakspeare was

anxious not to point the old moral, but to enhance our pity: he needed

this contrast with Ophelia. Perhaps he was recalling those paintings

when he set the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. "O rose

of May, dear maid!" He purposely lifts a handful of mould to our faces,

that we may smell the rose above it.

"A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,

For ----, and a shrouding sheet:

Oh, a pit of clay for to be made

For such a guest is meet."

Taine mentions with surprise that the English audiences still laugh

when Hamlet traces the noble dust of Alexander to its final bier

in a bung-hole. The Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the

incongruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. But the

laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of fancy which suddenly brings

together such opposite things. The effect is like that of witnessing

any ludicrous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. Extremes

meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair should be whipped away

just as he sits down from his climax. Hamlet does not think it too

curious to consider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp: she is

not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune mischance the

less.

After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the "antic disposition" which

tints his behavior is ironical; his remarks keenly cut down to where

our laugh lies, but scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw

open the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor does. We

enjoy seeing with what superior insight he baffles all the spies who

cannot play upon a pipe, yet expect to play upon him. This gives to the

scene the flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the subacid of

cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied of its humor, and is

only an ill-savored text to a chop-fallen discourse upon mortality.

But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment when you are least

expecting it, as events transpire which ought to kill, you would think,

the very heart of such a feeling: it is, indeed, expiring,--caught as

it falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, with Horatio

and Marcellus, the scene upon the platform after Hamlet's dread

interview with a murdered father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of

manner is shaken; and we hear him writing truisms in his tablet, in a

flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may smile and be a villain.

But let us also make a note of that, as he did: it will interpret to

us the tone of his subsequent demeanor which everybody thought was

madness. In the mean time we are upon this spectre-haunted platform,

seeking with his friends to discover what news the ghost brought.

Hamlet trifles with them to put off their curiosity; but the scene soon

rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that is extorted

by the experience of a vision which comes to so few that mankind has

only heard of such things. But just as the human voices are about to

pledge themselves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives,

and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from the glare and

publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice comes, building this terrific

chord of a nether world up to their purpose, that it may unalterably

stand. "Swear!" The deep craves it of them; it has joined the company

uninvited, but they feel convinced that it is a comrade fated to go

with them to their graves. "Swear!" it reiterates: no change of place

can remove them from this importunity. The centre of an unatoned murder

is beneath every spot to which they shift their feet.

Now the two friends of Hamlet possess nerves which have been hitherto

tuned only by the vibrations of the sunshine or of the moon's unhaunted

silver. Even if they had known of the murder, their interest in

it would not have been personal enough to lend fortitude to help

them tolerate this unseen visitor, the murdered man himself! What

an encounter! Whose wits of earthly stoutness can sustain it? They

feel, and so do we, that the awe is accumulating into a wave that may

o'ertopple every sense.

Here mark how superior Shakspeare would have us estimate Hamlet to be,

with a capacity of self-possession and a readiness to recur to it.

He perceives their friendship to be sorely tried, and on the point

of crumbling; and as men muster to repair a dyke, so his resource is

prompt, drawn from a soul that can make even a ghost companionable, and

no match at all for any bantering mood of his. Tush, my friends! it

is no ghost at all: 'tis a "fellow in the cellarage." There's a human

phrase for which this wild weather provides a rift; it touches the

awe with a strange smile that relieves the men to complete their pact

before all the blood of friendship curdles. And we who listen are also

kept within our human kind.

"You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" What a sentence to puncture

the abyss of the supernatural!

Then Hamlet shifts his standing-place for the sake of his friends; but

the unavenged murder is underneath there awaiting them. So the Prince

lightly rallies it for its knack of burrowing: he nicknames it an old

mole, and the fancy is pleasant; for it occurs to him that he must work

under ground for the future; so he calls the mole "a worthy pioneer."

"Once more remove, good friends." Then, as he instructs them with

minute precautions against ever seeming too wise about the subterranean

disposition he may choose to follow, the awful revenge cries up again

to them. But their nerves, by this time wonted to the strangeness, no

longer need the relief of his ironical braving; so Hamlet dismisses

that vein, and lets a murdered father claim the scene to close it

with its proper color subdued to the solemn reassurance, "Rest, rest,

perturbed spirit!" Then our own spirits venture forth into calmness and

hush of the breaking day.

Not the faintest streak of Humor appears in this tragedy to reconcile

us with the drift of it. Polonius belongs to comedy, because he is an

old counsellor who was once valuable, whose wits have grown seedy on

purpose to delight us with his notion that he fathoms and circumvents

the Prince. When a man's feeling of importance has outlived his value,

so that his common-sense trickles feebly over the lees of maxims, and

his policies are absurd attempts to appear as shrewd as ever before

persons who are in better preservation, he belongs to the comic side of

life. We cannot help smiling at his most respectable recommendations;

for they are like hats lingering in fashion, but destitute of nap. He

wears one of these, and goes about conceiting that his head mounts a

gloss. There is not enough of Polonius left to tide him through this

tragedy, unless it might have been in dumb show: he must lurk behind an

arras to get himself mistaken for a king; and, as he does this after

sending a spy into France to watch his son's habits, we have not a

tear to spare. And we only think how delightfully bewildered he will

be if his ghost gets out of the body, escaping a politic convocation

of worms, in time to help receive the other ghost, and to understand

then, if any wit is left over in him, that his king was murdered and

Hamlet is harping on something besides his daughter. But his absurdity

survives, and is voiced by Hamlet in the scenes where the King tries

to discover what has become of the body.

The theories which undertake to explain the nature of the "antic

disposition" which Hamlet hinted that he might assume do not satisfy

me that the heart of that mystery has been plucked out. But the key to

it may be read engrossed upon his tablets. The subsequent behavior of

Hamlet is the exact counterpart in Irony of the conviction that was so

suddenly thrust upon him, and terribly emphasized by his father, that

a man may smile and be a villain. To this point let a few pages of

explanation be accorded.

In the first place, I notice that the behavior of Hamlet, which has

the reputation of being feigned, is a genuine exercise of Irony, and

consequently covers a feeling and purpose that are directly opposite

to its tone of lightness; but it results organically from Hamlet's new

experience, and does not require to be premeditated as madness would

be. We see his vigorous and subtle mind set open by the revelations

of the ghost; but it is too well hung to be slamming to and fro in

gusts of real madness, and its normal movement shuts out the need of

feigning. When his father first tells that he has been murdered, we

find that Hamlet thinks himself quite capable of decision: there is no

infirmity of purpose in that early mood to sweep to his revenge "with

wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love." What is it that

converts this mood into an irresoluteness which contrives the whole

suspense, and in fact gives us the whole tragedy? First, partly, that

his father tells Hamlet he was murdered by his own brother. Then the

question of revenge becomes more difficult to settle, especially as

it involves widowing his mother; and it is noticeable that the father

himself, who afterwards deplored Hamlet's irresolution, had previously

made suggestions to him which hampered his action by constraining him

to feel how complicated the situation was. The father's caution runs

thus:--

"But, howsoever thou pursu'st this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught: leave her to Heaven,

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,

To prick and sting."

This does not inhibit Hamlet from dealing retribution on the uncle, but

clogs a mind so sensitive with the drawback of consideration for the

wife: she is evidently no accomplice or confidant of the murder; that

is clear from the uniform respect, and even tenderness, which the ghost

craves for her.

But though Hamlet thinks that he is capable of decision, he is so only

when the case presented to his meditation is so direct and plain that

no chance for a fencing-match of motives is involved. The conviction

which justifies his prophetic soul half disarms it. When the uncle is

at his prayers, Hamlet might "do it, pat;" but the opportunity is too

favorable: it paralyzes a mind of his consideration. He cannot bear to

rush upon a man's back whose face is bent towards an act that has a

savor of salvation in it. But when Polonius was concealed behind the

arras and cried out, Hamlet impulsively utilized the moment of hatred

of the supposed eavesdropper; but, finding he had killed the wrong man,

his swift action passes into that impetuous arraignment of his mother

which follows, and thus expends itself upon the nearest object. He took

Polonius for his better, but his resolve is "sicklied o'er" by this

mistake; and an almost blunted purpose proves seasonable armor for the

King. People of far less nice reflection than Hamlet had would feel

hampered by such an accident. It is in the nature of all of us to find

a passion grow cool beneath the drift of an untoward cloud; so that I

cannot conceive that Shakspeare meant to develop the whole tragedy out

of an over-scrupulosity of speculation. The ghost himself, whose latest

visitation is but to whet Hamlet's revenge, again diverts him from

that point by bidding him turn and look where amazement sits upon his

mother:--

"Oh, step between her and her fighting soul!

Speak to her, Hamlet."

And an arrowy current from a long accumulating heart sweeps through the

midnight hours. Then, by the light of the succeeding day, we observe

that Hamlet's mind has recovered its strain of irony: it passes for the

flightiness that gets him despatched to England, where all the people

are as mad as he. But Hamlet's nerves, though delicately spun, are

spun of some toughness that never snaps nor ravels. His pulse "doth

temperately keep time, and makes as healthful music" as any man's.

Throughout the play, a refined superiority is the keynote of his

character. The "heavy-headed revel" of the Danes seems to him a custom

"more honored in the breach than the observance," though he is to

the manner born and has a head not easily overthrown. He says to his

fellow-students, "We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart." But he

keeps himself aloof from contracting a habit. The same speech contains

traces of the observation exercised by a soul that is sustained by the

sound pith of virtue. It often chances, he says, that one vicious mole

of nature is the fly in the ointment of the apothecary, and undoes all

the noble substance. His tendency to speculate upon suicide belongs

to a mind in which conscience is so supreme and strong that its ideal

makes life scarcely tolerable. But there is no feeble whimper in the

tone, nor when his friends are trying to dissuade him from following

the ghost; he routs them and all our cowardice at once:

"Why, what should be the fear?

I do not set my life at a pin's fee;

And, for my soul, what can it do to that,

Being a thing immortal as itself?"

Yes, we--already the ghosts--are a match for any ghost. Self-poised

and self-sufficing, his ambition is to occupy the kingdom of a mind.

"O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of

infinite space." And, in the midst of the torrent that bursts from him

to overwhelm his mother, there is that smooth, still eddy, "Forgive me

this my virtue," and all the stars of his soul look down into it.

Shakspeare plainly meant us to infer that Hamlet had inherited the

traits of a noble father: for who but such a son could describe with

impetuous remembrance the kingly qualities which had given birth to

him? In his mind's eye, he could always see this father:--

"Look here, upon this picture, and on this:

See what a grace was seated on this brow!

A combination and a form, indeed,

Where every god did seem to set his seal,

To give the world assurance of a man.

This was your husband."

He is that man's son, and not his mother's.

"Ha! have you eyes?"

What devil was it that made you seize upon this other man in a game of

blindfold?

"A slave, that is not twentieth part the tithe

Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings!

A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,

That from a shelf the precious diadem stole

And put it in his pocket."

Look there! The dear hallucination of fatherhood! "What would you,

gracious figure?" The ghost has come to put this sketch of memory into

italics; as if filial appreciation had projected it upon the midnight,

in the intensity of recalling his majestic soul. Only a son who was

in all respects worthy to be born of Nature's nobleman could pay this

debt of being nobly born, and give Imagination's birth to such a sire.

See there, he is born! the son is father and mother: inbred posterity

conceives its ancestor.

Thus I venture to suppose that, when Hamlet came to his mother,

Shakspeare had not deliberated that the ghost would join the party.

But his brain kindled with the midnight passion, streamed over

down into the pen, and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's

reminiscence into the vaporous outline, which always startles us

because it startled Shakspeare,--a sudden whiteness running high along

the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. The scene then shudders with

deference to this unexpected presence, which only the son who conceived

it can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become merely a coast to

help the great wave fall back and subside.

It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so greatly absorbed as

to obliterate our knowledge that the father's custom is to take his cue

from the climax of his son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce

the thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe and silence,

and they suddenly drew him to their ghost.

I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and enigmatic style

into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not a deliberate effort to sustain

the character of a madman, because such a person as Hamlet could find

no motive in it: he could not need it to mask his desire to avenge the

ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the palace, and supernaturally

elected to be master of the situation. He says he has "cause and will

and strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that his mind,

driven from its ordinary gravity, and the channel of his favorite

thoughts diverted, instinctively saves itself by this sustained gesture

of irony; and it appears to be madness only to those who do not know

that he is well informed of the event, and is struggling to set free

from it a purpose. And why should a man of such a well-conditioned

brain, a noticer of nice distinctions, have selected for a simulation

of madness a style which, nicely estimated, is not mad? He could not

calculate that everybody would interpret this difference from his

usual deportment into an unsettling of his wits; for the style shows

unconsciousness and freedom from premeditation. If he wished to feign

distraction, he would have taken care to mar the appositeness of his

ironical allusions, which are always in place and always logical. And,

if he was half unhinged without knowing it, his speech would have

betrayed the same inconsequence. Nowhere is he so abrupt, or delivers

matter so remote from an immediate application, that he seems to us to

wander, because we too have been admitted to the confidences of the

ghost, and share that advantage over the other characters.

Since this essay was written, I have found, in the highly suggestive

"Shakspeare-Studien" of Otto Ludwig, the following remarks, which are

closely related to my own treatment of the subject, and provide some

additional reflections:--

"Hamlet's subjective tendency is so predominant that we are surprised

when he alleges no motive for assuming madness; nor is it elsewhere

accounted for. It would have served his purpose much better if he

had feigned a comfortable and contented, rather than an unsettled,

mind. And, on the whole, one cannot at any point detect a reason why

he chooses any active dissimulation. For he merely needed to remain

undiscovered.

"We never hear him once reflecting upon his intention, though he runs

to reflection on all topics. Just after the apparition, he merely

remarks to his friends that, if he should appear to them to do strange

things, they need not remark upon it so as to betray his object."

Ludwig here alludes to the lines,--

"As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet

To put an antic disposition on."

Hamlet tells them not to seem too wise about it. The theory of

premeditated madness rests upon this passage, and upon one other, which

will be noticed. But suppose that Shakspeare did at first entertain a

purpose, borrowed from the old chronicle, of disguising Hamlet in some

unusual vein, the psychological necessities of his character decided

what that vein must be, as they also decided against the old chronicle

in the matter of introducing a ghost. And Hamlet's mental quality

is really shown by the vein into which it imperatively runs. He was

overmastered and completely occupied by this mood of indignation at all

the villainous cants of a smiling world. The temper grew so compactly

beneath Shakspeare's pen that he could not interpolate into it any

amateur simulations. The poet would not, if he could, have so diluted

the terribly gathering sincerity which left that epithet of "antic"

beached high up and disqualified for floating on its tide.

On Elsinore's platform, Hamlet felt that the sudden complication would

put him into strange behavior; he did not know exactly what, but he

perceived it coming on. Such a man estimates himself more shrewdly

than the crowd imagines. He was aware of a mind that over-refined and

idealized, and of a disposition to avoid too close realities. Any hint

of nature or society sufficed to sequester him in a monologue. But

now he felt some modification passing through him; it is scarcely yet

articulate, but it is inevitable to a man of his quality. Hamlet may

call his mood by whatever phrases suit the different emergencies; but,

in the main, it is the breaking-up of his mind's customary exercise

into ironical scorn at discovering the rottenness of Denmark.

The Greek word εἱρωνεἱα, whence our Irony is derived with its special

meaning, had not yet been modernly grafted on the Saxon stem. Ben

Jonson says:--

"Most Socratic lady!

Or, if you will, ironick!"

For the words _irony_, _ironick_, were at first used in English, and

quite sparingly, to express the method of Socrates in conducting an

argument; that is, by eliciting from an opponent his own refutation by

asking him misleading questions. The words, in any sense, are not found

in Shakspeare. Lord Bacon, in one instance, uses _irony_ nearly in the

modern sense; and that is Socratic only so far as a thing is said with

an intent the reverse of its ostensible meaning.

The other passage upon which the theory of premeditated madness rests

occurs in the great scene with his mother, Act III. 4, during which she

becomes convinced that Hamlet is out of his senses by seeing him kill

the good Polonius, and hearing him rave as if he saw a spectre. She was

the earliest of the critics and experts who are profoundly convinced

of his madness. At the close of the scene, it occurs to him to avail

himself of her misapprehension to procure continued immunity from

any suspicion of design against the King. How shall he do this,--how

contrive to clinch her conviction of his madness, and send her reeking

with it to inform the King? His subtle intelligence does at this point

invent the only simulation of madness that the play contains. He is

just about to bid the Queen good-night: "So, again, good-night." Then

the device occurs to him: "One word more, good lady;" and the Queen,

turning, says, "What shall I do?"

"Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:

Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed;

Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;

And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,

Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,

Make you to ravel all this matter out,

That I essentially am not in madness,

But mad in craft. 'Twere good you let him know."

This is the very craftiness of a madman, to try to convince people

that, if he ever seems to be insane, it is for a sane motive. Hamlet

reckons that the Queen is so deeply imbued with the idea of his

insanity as to interpret this disclaimer of his into the strongest

confirmation. Hamlet, moreover, not only seems to be accounting for

symptoms of madness, but to be making a confidant of his mother; he

begs her not to betray the secret object of his strange behavior. This

seems to her to be the very quintessence of madness, to confess to her

that he is feigning it out of craft, and to suppose that she would not

apprise her husband, who must be the special object of that craft and

most in danger from it. He must be indeed preposterously mad; so in

parting she pretends to receive his confidential disclosure:--

"Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,

And breath of life, I have no life to breathe

What thou hast said to me."

She may safely promise that, when she means to repair to the King with

quite a different version of Hamlet's condition, the very one upon

which he counts to keep the King deceived. And in the next scene she

conveys her strong impression to him:--

KING. What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?

QUEEN. Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend

Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit,

Behind the arras hearing something stir,

He whips his rapier out, and cries, "A rat!"

And in his brainish apprehension kills

The unseen good old man.

She is the mother of the physiological criticism which issues from

insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is not an inmate: and Hamlet

himself, by deceiving his mother, furnished to psychological criticism

the text that he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine

Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to neither school.

Hamlet gives us unconsciously an opportunity to infer his ability to

frame the incoherences which real madness suggests to one who would

feign it. It occurs directly upon the Queen's suspicion, who, being

unable to see her husband's ghost standing in her chamber, exclaims,--

"This is the very coinage of your brain:

This bodiless creation ecstasy

Is very cunning in."