of the play, the actor would instinctively endeavour to remove it, and
to bring the hero in closer relation with the main action of the stage
piece. Hamlet must not be too disengaged; he must not be too ironical. A
few omissions, a fit of misplaced fury, a too emphatic accent, a too
effective attitude, with what is called a bold grasp of character, and
Shakespeare's latest and finest work on the hero is obliterated.
Now, the great actors who have personated Hamlet have done much, and the
thrilling treatment of the ghost-story has done more, to stamp upon the
minds of learned and unlearned alike the impression that _the great
event of Hamlet's life is the command to kill his uncle_. As he does not
do this, and as he is given to much meditation and much discussion, it
is assumed that he thinks and talks in order to avoid acting. And then
the word "irresolution" leaps forth, and all is explained. This curious
assumption, that all the pains taken by Shakespeare on the work and its
hero has no other object but to illustrate this theme--a command to kill
and a delayed obedience--pervades the criticism even of those who
consider the intellectual element the great attraction of the play. And
yet, when you ask what is the dramatic situation out of which this
speculative matter arises, the German and English critics alike reply in
chorus, "Irresolution." Each one has his particular shade of it, and
finds something not quite satisfactory in the interpretations of others.
Goethe's finished portrait of Hamlet as the amiable and accomplished
young prince, too weak to support the burden of a great action, did not
recommend itself either to Schlegel or Coleridge, who take the mental
rather than the moral disposition to task. Schlegel, with some asperity,
speaks of "a calculating consideration that cripples the power of
action;" and Coleridge, with more subtlety, applies Hamlet's antithesis
of thought and resolution to the elucidation of his own character,
concluding that Hamlet "procrastinates from thought." Gervinus, while
following Schlegel as to "the bent of Hamlet's mind to reflect upon the
nature and consequences of his deed, and by this means to paralyze his
active powers," adds to this defect a deplorable conscientiousness,
which unfits Hamlet for the great duty of revenge. And Mr. Dowden, while
most ably collating these various kinds and degrees of irresolution,
concludes that Hamlet is "disqualified for action by his excess of the
reflective faculty." Mr. Swinburne alone resolutely protests against
this doctrine. He speaks of "the indomitable and ineradicable fallacy of
criticism which would find the key-note of Hamlet's character in the
quality of irresolution."[5] And he considers that Shakespeare purposely
introduces the episode of the expedition to England to exhibit "the
instant and almost unscrupulous resolution of Hamlet's character in time
of practical need." I gladly welcome this instructive remark, which,
although Mr. Swinburne calls it "the voice of one crying in the
wilderness," is more likely to gain me a patient hearing than any
arguments I can use. But before I propose my own reading, I will, as I
have given the genesis or natural history of this theory of
irresolution, compare it with the general features of Hamlet's mental
condition throughout the play.
If Hamlet "procrastinates from thought," if "the burden of the action is
too heavy for him to bear," if "by a calculating consideration he
exhausts all possible issues of the action," it should at least be
continually present to his mind. We should look for the delineation of a
soul harassed and haunted by one idea; torn by the conflict between
conscience and filial obedience; or balancing advantage and peril in an
agony of suspense and vacillation; forecasting consequence and result to
himself and others; and so absorbed in this terrible secret as to
exclude all other interests. We have two studies of such a state of
irresolution, in Macbeth and Brutus. Of Macbeth it may truly be said
that he has an action upon his mind the burden of which is too heavy for
him to bear. It is constantly before him; he is shaken with it,
possessed by it, to such a degree that
"function
Is smother'd in surmise; and nothing is
But what is not."
Now "he will proceed no further in this business," and now "he is
settled and bound up to it," and in one long perturbed soliloquy stands
before us the very picture of that irresolution which "procrastinates
from thought." Brutus thus describes his own suspense:--
"Between the action of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius, and the mortal instruments,
Are then in council: and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."
But what is the general course and scope of Hamlet's utterance, whether
to himself or others? We find musings and broodings on the possibility
of escape from so vile a world alternating with cool and keen analysis,
polished criticism, and petulant wit; we find a pervading ironical
bitterness, rising at times to fierce invective, and even to the frenzy
of passion when his mother is the theme, relapsing again to trance-like
meditations on the depravity of the world, the littleness of man and the
nullity of appearance; and when his mind does revert to this "great
action," this "dread command," which is supposed to haunt it, and to
keep it in a whirl of doubt and irresolution, it is because it is
forcibly recalled to it, because some incident startles him to
recollection, proves to him that he has forgotten it, and he turns upon
himself with surprise and indignation: Why is it this thing remains to
do? Am I a coward! Do I lack gall? Is it "bestial oblivion?" or is it
"some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event?"
On this text, so often quoted in support of the orthodox "irresolution"
theory, I will content myself at present with the remark, thats surely
no one before or after Hamlet ever accounted for his non-performance of
a duty by the double explanation that he had either entirely forgotten
it or had been thinking too much about it.
Looking then at the general features of Hamlet's talk, it is plain that
to make this command to revenge the clue to his mental condition, is to
make him utter a great deal of desultory talk without dramatic point or
pertinence; for if, except when surprised by the actors' tears or by the
gallant bearing of the troops of Fortinbras, he wholly forgets it, what
does he remember? What is the secret motive of this prolonged criticism
of the world which "charms all within its magic circle?"
The true centre will be found, I think, by substituting the word
"preoccupation" for the word "irresolution." And the "preoccupation" is
found by antedating the crisis of Hamlet's career from the revelation of
the ghost to the marriage of his mother, and the persistent mental and
moral condition thus induced. Start from this, as a fixed point, and a
dramatic situation is gained in which every stroke of satire, every
curiosity of logic, every strain of melancholy; is appropriate and
pertinent to the action.
In order to measure the full effect of this strange event, we must bring
before us the Hamlet of the earlier time, before his father's death, and
for this we have abundant material in the play.
II.
Hamlet was an enthusiast. His love for his father was not an ordinary
filial affection, it was a hero-worship. He was to him the type of
sovereignty--
"The front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;"
a link between earth and heaven--
"A combination, and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man."
To Hamlet, this "assurance of a man" was the great reality which made
other things real, which gave meaning to life, and substance to the
world. That his love for his mother was equally intense, is clearly
discernible in the inverted characters of his rage and grief. In her he
reverenced wifehood and womanhood. He sees the rose on
"the fair forehead of an innocent love."
And of his mother we are told--
"The queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks."
But this enthusiasm was connected with a habit of thought that was
rather critical than sentimental. Hamlet had a shrewd judgment, a lively
and caustic wit, an exacting standard, and a turn for satire. He was
fond of question and debate, an enemy to all illusion, impatient of
dulness,[typo for dullness?] and not indisposed to alarm and bewilder
it; and he had brought with him from Wittenberg a philosophy half
stoical and half transcendental, with whose eccentricities he would
torment the wisdom of the Court. He looked upon the machinery of power
as part of the comedy of life, and would be more amused than impressed
by the equipage of office, its chains and titles, the frowns of
authority, and the smiles of imaginary greatness. He therefore of all
men needed a personal centre in which faith and affection could unite to
give seriousness and dignity to life; and this he had found from his
childhood in the sovereign virtues of the King and Queen. So that his
criticism in these earlier days was but the fastidiousness of love, that
disparages all other excellence in comparison with its own ideal; his
philosophy was a disallowance of all other reality; and his negations
only defined and brightened his faith. Doubt, question and speculation,
mystery and anomaly, the illusions of sense, the instability of natures,
all that was irrational in life, with its certainties of logic and
hazards of chance, all that was unproven in religion, dubious in
received opinion, obscure in the destiny of man, were but glimpses of a
larger unity, vistas of truth unexplored.
Hamlet's thinking is always marked by that quality of penetration into
and through the thoughts of others, that is called free-thinking. The
discovery, as he moved in the spiritual world of established ideas and
settled doctrines, apparently immovable, that they were of the same
stuff as his own thoughts--were pliant and yielding, and could be
readily unwoven by the logic that wove them, would tempt him to move and
displace, and build and construct, until he might have a collection of
opinions large enough to be termed a philosophy. But it would be
gathered rather in the joy of intellectual activity, realizing its own
energy, and ravelling up to its own form the woof of other minds, than
with any practical bearing on life. All this was a work in another
sphere--
"of no allowance to his bosom's truth."
The light of a sovereign manhood and womanhood was reflected on the
world around him, and afar on the world of thought---their greatness
reconciled all the contradictions of life. And in pure submission to
their control all the various activities of his versatile nature, its
irony and its earnestness, its shrewdness and its fancy, its piety and
its free-thinking, harmonized like sweet bells not yet jangled or
untuned. He lived at peace with all, in fellowship with all; he could
rally Polonius without malice, and mimic Osric without contempt.
It is plain that Hamlet looked forward to a life of activity under his
father's guidance. He was no dreamer--we hear of "the great love the
general gender bear him," and the people are not fond of dreamers. In
truth, the Germans have had too much their own way with Hamlet, and have
read into him something of their own laboriousness and phlegm. But
Hamlet was more of a poet than a professor. He had the temperament of a
man of genius--impatient, animated, eager, swift to feel, to like or
dislike, praise or resent--with a character of rapidity in all his
actions, and even in his meditation, of which he is conscious when he
says, "as swift as meditation." He did not live apart as a student, but
in public as a prince--
"the observed of all observers;"
he was of a free, open, unsuspicious temper--
"remiss,
Most generous and free from all contriving."
He was fond of all martial exercises and expert in the use of the sword.
He was a soldier first, a scholar afterwards; a soldier in his alacrity
to fight
"Until his eyelids would no longer wag;"
a soldier even to
"The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;"
and, above all, a soldier in his sensibility on the point of honour, one
who would think it well
"Greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour is at stake."
And Fortinbras, type of the man of action, recognized in him a kindred
spirit--
"Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally;"
while Hamlet eyed Fortinbras with the envious longing of one who had
missed his career. What must have been the felicity of life to such a
man, whose vivacity no stress of calamity, no accumulation of sorrow
could tame, whose enthusiasm embraced Nature, art, and literature, and
whose delight was always fresh and new, "in this excellent canopy the
air, in this brave o'erhanging firmament,"' and in the spectacle of man
"so excellent in faculty, in form and moving so express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god?"
Without a warning the blow fell. His father was suddenly struck down;
and while he was indulging a grief, poignant and profound indeed, but
natural, wholesome, manly, his uncle usurped the crown. This second blow
would be acutely felt, but it would rather rouse than prostrate his
energies. There is no passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And
he had always held his uncle in slight esteem--foreboded something from
his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of
contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing--of nothing--a
farcical monarch--"a peacock"--and, in this particular act, no dread
usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or
was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy
unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly
great, and with her the tradition of the past. She was, as he gathered
from her silence, like himself, retired from the world, absorbed in
grief; but he was assured of her constancy and truth. Even the kind of
distance between them in age and sex, in mind and character, was no
barrier to this sympathetic relation. She was there with the expectation
that makes heroism possible; she was there to watch, if not to further
his enterprise, and to give it lustre with her praise. We are often
quite unconscious of the commanding influence exerted on our life by
those who are least in contact with it. To be cognizant of one steadfast
and stainless soul is to have encouragement in difficulty and support in
pain. The mere knowledge of its existence is a light within the mind,
and a secret incentive to the best action. Though silent and apart, it
is the witness of what is great, and our life is always seeking to rise
within its sphere; while, by a secret transference--for souls are not
retentive of their own goodness--our standards of living and thinking
are maintained at their highest level, like water fed by a distant
spring. All this and infinitely more than this was the Queen his mother
to Hamlet. It is impossible, therefore, to measure the effect upon him
of her marriage with his uncle. The shock of it is ever fresh throughout
the play. In the third Act the whole frame of nature is still aghast at
it:--
"Heaven's face doth glow;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act."
And this was not only after the revelation of the Ghost, but after the
confirmation of its truth by the test Hamlet had himself applied. Even
then the first paroxysm has hardly subsided. You see the whole being
measured by it, the mind stretched to give it utterance, the world
called as a witness to its enormity:--
III.
But it is at an earlier stage of this impression, when the thought of
this profanation of the sacredness of life and the sanctity of love
chills the life-blood of his heart, and then rushes burning through it
like the shame of a personal insult, that he first stands before us in
the palace of the King. In appearance nothing is changed. He sees the
same crowd, the same obsequious attitudes, the same decorous forms; the
trumpets with their usual flourish announce the arrival of the King and
Queen; the Ministers of State precede them, and the Court ladies; the
pretentious gravity of Polonius' brow; the dreamy innocence of Ophelia.
The sovereigns seat themselves, the Queen looks smilingly around her as
of old. All is easy, bright, and festive. All goes on as if this
horrible revolution were the most natural thing in the world. Oh, that
he could avoid the sight of it! Oh, that he could be quit of it all!
"Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"
Although the nervous horror of his address to the Ghost is greater,
there is no speech in which Hamlet betrays so deep an agitation as in
this. He struggles for utterance, repeats himself, mingles oaths and
axioms, confuses and then annihilates time in the breathless tumult of
his soul. "Why, she, _even she_. O Heaven!" What can he say? what is
vile enough? "A _beast_
"that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourned longer--married with my uncle."
In this opening speech we see at once the immediate relation of the
feeling of life-weariness so prevalent throughout the play to this
supreme emotion; we see also his comprehensive criticism of the world
branching from the same root--
"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world!
Fie, on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden;"
and
"Frailty, thy name is woman."
These themes are developed Act by Act, we can follow them to the
graveyard scene, and to the moment before death.
And it is not unnatural that Hamlet's grief should assume a
comprehensive form. The Queen had drawn the world in her train. Nobles
and people, councillors and courtiers, the honoured statesman, the
artless maiden, had joined her, had connived, were her accomplices. They
had, parted among them, all the vices appropriate to _her_ Court, _her_
people. The world was betrayed to Hamlet in all its meanness and
littleness: and he looked at it to see if he could discover the secret
of his mother's treason, as Lear would anatomize the heart of Regan to
account for her ingratitude. In attacking it he is attacking her guilt,
in its inferior forms and obscure disguises. It is the nest of her
depravity, and the small vices are but hers in the shell, and the whole
is a vast confederacy of evil. Here are no "superfluous activities," no
desultory talk; Hamlet's preoccupation is one throughout. He alternates
between the desire to escape from so vile a world, and the pleasure of
exposing its vice and fraud. The one gives us soliloquies, the other
dialogues. Now he looks out at an obscure eternity from a time that was
more obscure, and now the tension of the mind relieves the tension of
the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness,
whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar
talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of
man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely
connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very
attachment of the feeling to the thought.
This explains the particular bitterness with which he attacks the
Ministers and parasites of the Court. As soon as he sees them he crosses
the current of their talk, commits them to an argument, confuses them
with the evolutions of a logic too rapid for their senses to follow, and
makes their bewilderment a sport. How small their world appears in the
mirror of his ironical mind! The state-craft, the love-making, the
"absurd pomp," the "heavy-headed revels," the women that "jig and amble
and lisp," the nobles that are "spacious in the possession of dirt," the
sovereign that is a "king of shreds and patches;" as for their opinions,
"do but blow; them to their trials, and the bubbles are out;" as for
their ideas of prosperity, it is to act as "sponges and soak up the
king's countenance, his rewards and authorities;" as for their standard
of worth, "let a beast be a lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at
the king's table." It is a disgrace to live in such a world, and
contemptible to share its pleasures and prizes.
But his quarrel with it does not end here. The flaw runs through the
whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the
anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that
sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place of faith. Thought is
good and action is good, but they will not work together. Our reason is
our glory, but our indiscretions serve us best--we must either be
cowards or fools. We have a perception of infinite goodness, just
sufficient to make us conclude that we are "arrant knaves, all of us,"
and just enough belief in immortality "to perplex our wills." There is
nothing but disagreement and disproportion--a constant missing of the
mark, a stretching of the hand for that which is not. How is it possible
to take seriously such a life if you pause to think?
It is not only irrational but visionary. The evanescence and fluency of
Nature would matter little, but man himself, with his ingenuities of wit
and triumphs of ambition, is whirled from form to form in "a fine
revolution if we had the trick to see it." This is a favourite idea, it
lends itself so easily to the contempt of the world--
"Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"
is only a variation of "a man may fish with the worm that has eat of a
king, and eat of the fish that has fed on the worm."
In this collision with the world, alone and unsupported, Hamlet's
natural buoyancy returns. It is the moment of isolation, but it is the
moment also of intellectual freedom. It is desertion, but it is also
independence. Every incongruity feeds his fanciful and inventive humour.
He follows vanity and affectation with irony and mimicry, removes a mask
with the point of his dexterous wit, and exposes the pretence of virtue
or conceit of knowledge with sarcastic glee, while there is a savour of
retribution in his chastisement of vice. The vivacity of this running
comment, critical and satirical, on the ways and works of men adds much
to the charm of the play, but it is a charm that properly belongs to
the best comedy. And Shakespeare has marked this disengagement of his
hero from the sanguinary plot by reserving the exaltation of verse to
the expression of personal feeling, while the lithe and nimble movement
of his prose follows with its undulating rhythm every turn of Hamlet's
wayward mind, in subtlety of argument or caprice of fancy.
Such is the "preoccupation" of Hamlet, emotional and intellectual. I
have purposely made it seem a separate study, as thus alone could this
fatal "thought-sickness," in which Heaven and Earth seemed to partake,
be treated with the requisite clearness and fulness.
We can see at once that no other claim to the command of his spirit is
likely to succeed. His mind is already haunted. No Ghost can be more
spiritual than his own thoughts, or more spectral than the world around
him. No revelation of a particular crime can rival the revelation lately
made to him of sin in the most holy place--the seat of virtue itself and
heavenly purity. He may acknowledge the ties of filial obedience and the
duty of revenge, but there is no place, nor obligation to
hold, no world to which it may be attached, no faith or interest strong
enough within him to give it vitality, no fruit of good result to be
looked for without. The place is occupied:
"For where the greater malady is fixed
The lesser scarce is felt."
When Hamlet says, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it
so," he confesses himself an idealist--that is, one to whom ideas are
not images or opinions, but the avenues of life. They garner up
happiness and they store the harvest of pain; they make the "majestical
roof fretted with golden fire" and the "pestilential cloud." The basis
on which Hamlet's happiness had rested had been suddenly removed, and
with the sanctity of the past the promise of the future had disappeared;
the sky and the earth. He could say to his mother:
"Du hast sie zerstört
Die schöne Welt;"