months. The poet gives us no other clue to the condition and the
doings of his hero than that, in the words of Polonius, [8] he 'fell
into sadness; then into a fast; thence to a watch; thence into a
weakness,' and so forth. We may therefore assume that he has followed
his inclination to go to pray; that he tries by fasting, watching,
and chastising, as so many before him, to find his way in the dreamland
which he has entered following the Ghost; sincerely striving to remain
true to his resolution to 'wipe from the table of his memory all
pressures past.'
A new passage in the monologue of Hamlet, after the Ghost has left him,
is this:--
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter; yes, by Heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
We next hear about the Prince from Ophelia after the interval which, as
mentioned above, lies between the first and the second act. [9] In the
old play she relates that, when 'walking in the gallery all alone,' he,
the lover, came towards her, altogether 'bereft of his wits.' In the
scene of the later play he comes to her closet with a purpose, appearing
before her in a state of mental struggle. No doubt, he then approaches
her with the intention, which afterwards he carries out, of renouncing
woman, the begetter of all evil in the world, which makes such monsters
of wise men. The sight of his true love has shaken him. He stands before
her: [10]
... with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors...
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being.
Thus he leaves her, not daring to speak the word which is to separate him
from her.
In the following scene between Hamlet and Polonius (act ii. sc. 2 [11])
there is again a new passage which equally proves that Hamlet's thoughts
only dwell upon one theme; that is, the sinfulness of our human nature:--
_Hamlet_. For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a
god, kissing carrion--Have you a daughter?
_Polonius_. I have, my lord.
_Hamlet_. Let her not walk i' the sun. Conception is a blessing;
but not as your daughter may conceive:--friend, look to't.
Hamlet said before, that 'To be honest, is to be one man picked out of
ten thousand.' There is method in Hamlet's madness. With correct logic
he draws from dogmas which pronounce Nature to be sinful, the conclusion
that we need not wonder at the abounding of evil in this world, seeing
that a God himself assists in creating it. He, therefore, warns Polonius
against his daughter, too, becoming 'a breeder of sinners.'
Before we follow Hamlet now to the scene with Ophelia, where, 'in an
ecstasy of divine inspiration, equally weak in reason, and violent in
persuasion and dissuasion,' [12] he calls upon her to go to a nunnery,
we must direct attention to the concluding part of an Essay [13] of
Montaigne. It is only surprising that nobody should as yet have pointed
out how unmistakeably, in that famous scene, the inconsistencies of the
whimsical French writer are scourged. In that Essay the following thought
occurs, which one would gladly accept as a correct one: 'Falsely do we
judge the _honesty_ and the _beauty_ of an action from its usefulness.
Equally wrong it is to conclude that everyone is bound to do the
same, and that it is an honest action for everybody, if it be a
useful one.'
Now, Montaigne endeavours to apply this thought to the institution of
marriage; and he descends, in doing so, to the following irrational
argument:--'Let us select the most necessary and most useful institution
of human society: _it is marriage_. Yet the counsel of the saints
deems the contrary side to be more _honest_; thus excluding the most
venerable vocation of men.'
The satire of that famous scene in 'Hamlet' is here apparent. It will
now be understood why the Danish Prince comes with a warning to his
beloved, 'not to admit _honesty_ in discourse with _beauty_,' and why
his resolution is that 'we will have no more _marriage_.' Those words
of Hamlet, too, '_this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives
it proof_,' are easy of explanation. It was not yet so long ago that
celibacy had been abolished in England. The 'time' now confirms
celibacy once more in this French book.
Most characteristic is the following passage: in this scene the only new
one. It goes far to show the intention with which the poet partly
re-wrought the play. I mean the words in which Hamlet confesses to
Ophelia that he has deceived her. The repentant sinner says: '_You
should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old
stock but we shall relish of it_.'
Can a poet who will not convert the stage into a theological Hall of
Controversy, make the soul-struggle of his hero more comprehensible?
Hamlet has honestly tried (we have seen with what means) to inoculate
and improve the sinful 'old stock.' But how far away he still feels
himself from his aim! He calls himself 'proud, revengeful, ambitious.'
These are the three sins of which he must accuse himself, when listening
to the voice of Nature which admonishes him to fulfil the duty of his
life--the deed of blood--that inner voice of his nobler nature which
impels him to seize the crown in order to guide the destinies of his
country; given over, as the latter is, to the mischievous whims of a
villain.
Yet he cries out against Ophelia, 'We are arrant knaves all; believe
none of us!' He reproaches this daughter of Eve with her own weaknesses
and the great number of her sins in words reminding us of Isaiah, [14]
where the wantonness of the daughters of Zion is reproved. He, the
ascetic, calls out to his mistress: 'Go thy ways to a nunnery!... Why
wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?'
Let us hear what his mistress says about him. This passage also,
explaining Hamlet's madness, is new:--
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth,
Blasted with ecstasy. [15]
With what other word can Hamlet's passionate utterances be designated
than that of religious ecstasy?
From the first moment when he sees Ophelia, and prays her to remember
his sins in her 'orisons,' down to the last moment when he leaves her,
bidding her to go to a nunnery, there is method in his madness--the
method of those dogmas which brand nature and humanity as sinful,
whose impulses they do not endeavour to lead to higher aims, but which,
by certain mysteries and formulas, they pretend to be able to overcome.
The soul-struggle of Hamlet arises from his divided mind; an inner
voice of Nature calling, on the one hand:--
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest;
whilst another voice calls out that, howsoever he pursues his act, he
should not 'taint his mind.'
In the English translation of the 'Hystorie of Hamblet,' from which
Shakspere took his subject, the art of dissembling is extolled, in
most naive language, as one specially useful towards great personages
not easily accessible to revenge. He who would exercise the arts of
dissembling (it is said there) must be able to 'kisse his hand whome
in hearte hee could wishe an hundredfoot depth under the earth, so hee
mighte never see him more, if it were not a thing _wholly to bee
disliked in a Christian, who by no meanes ought to have a bitter
gall, or desires infected with revenge_.'
We shall find later on that Hamlet's gall also claims its rights; all
the more so as he endeavours, by an unnatural and superstitious use of
dogmatism, to suppress and to drive away the 'excitements of the reason
and of the blood.' We have heard from Polonius that the Prince,
after his 'sadness,' fell into a 'fast.' And everything he says to
his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [16] about his frame of
mind, confirms us in the belief that he has remained faithful to the
intention declared in the first act--'Look you, I will go pray'--so
as to prepare himself, like many others, to contemplate passively
a world sinful from its very nature, and therefore not to be changed
and bettered.
This scene is, in the first quarto, a mere hasty sketch, but faintly
indicated. In the second quarto it is, so to say, a new one; and a
comparison between the two need, therefore, not be instituted.
Before his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet, for a few
moments, gives up his brain-racking thoughts of penitence; he even
endeavours to philosophise, as he may have done at the University
of Wittenberg before he allowed himself to be lured into dreamland.
He utters a thought--'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so'--which occurs in an Essay of Montaigne, and is thus given
by Florio (127):--
'If that what we call evil and torment be neither torment nor evil,
but that our fancy only gives it that quality, is it in us to change
it?' [17]
Hamlet then pictures his mental condition in words of deepest sincerity.
In order to fully understand this description, we have once more to
refer to an Essay of Montaigne, [18] in which he asserts that man is
not furthered by his reason, his speculations, his passions; that
they give him no advantage over other creatures. A divinely appointed
authority--the Church--confers upon him 'those great advantages and
odds he supposes to have over other creatures.' It is she that seals
to him the patent and privilege which authorises him to 'keep account
both of the receipts and layings-out of the world.' Ay, it is she who
convinces him that '_this admirable swinging-round of the heavenly
vaults, the eternal light of those constellations rolling so nobly over
our heads_, the terrible commotions of this infinite ocean, were
established, and have continued for so many ages, for his advantage and
his service.' To her authority he must wholly surrender himself; by her
he must allow himself to be guided. And in doing so, it is 'better for
us to have a weak judgment than a strong one; better to be smitten with
blindness than to have one's eyes open and clear-sighted.'
Striving to live up to similar views, Hamlet 'lost all his mirth.'
This is the cause of his heavy disposition; of his having 'foregone
all custom of exercise'--so 'that this goodly frame, the earth,' seems
to him 'a sterile promontory,' a mere place of preparation for gaining
the next world through penance and prayer. Verily, '_this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden
fire_,' appears to him no better 'than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours.' Quite in accordance with such tenets which
we need not qualify by name, Man, to him, is but a 'quintessence of
dust.'
Both man, and still more sinful woman, displease Hamlet. Yet he has
not succeeded in so wholly subjugating Nature within himself as to be
fully secured against her importunate claims. Now we would point out
here that Montaigne [19] mentions a tyrant of antiquity who 'could not
bear seeing tragedies acted in the theatre, from fear that his subjects
should see him sob at the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache--him
who, without pity, caused daily so many people to be cruelly killed.'
Again, Montaigne [20] speaks of actors, mentioned by Quinctilian, who
were 'so deeply engaged in a sorrowful part that they wept even after
having returned to their lodgings;' whilst Quinctilian reports of
himself that, 'having undertaken to move a certain passion in others,
he had entered so far into his part as to find himself surprised, not
only with the shedding of tears, but also with a paleness of countenance
and the behaviour of a man truly weighed down with grief.'
Hamlet has listened to the player. In the concluding monologue of the
second act--which is twice as long in the new quarto--we are told of the
effect produced upon his mind when seeing that an actor, who merely holds
a mirror up to Nature--
... but in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd....
... And all for nothing!--For Hecuba?
whilst he (Hamlet), 'a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,' [21] like
John-a-dreams, in spite of his strong 'motive and the cue for passion,'
mistrusts them and is afraid of being guided by them.
All at once, Hamlet feels the weight and pressure of a mode of thought
which declares war against the impulses of Nature, calling man a born
sinner.
Who calls me villain? ...
... Gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha!
'S wounds,[1] I should take it: for it cannot be.
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. [22]
The feelings of Hamlet, until then forcibly kept down, now get the
mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself
at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,'
who 'must fall a-cursing.'
He now will set to work and get more natural evidence of the King's
guilt. He begins to entertain doubts as to those mystic views by
which he meant to be guided. He mistrusts the apparition which he
had called an honest ghost ('true-penny'):--
The spirit that I have seen
May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape. Yea, perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this. [23]
Over weakness the Devil is potent; all flesh is weak. What mode of
thought is this? What philosophy taught this doctrine? Hamlet's
weakness, if we may believe Polonius, [24] has been brought on by
fasting and watching.
Over melancholy, too, the Devil is powerful. Are we not here in the
sombre atmosphere of those who turn away their reason from ideal
aspirations; who denounce the impulses of nature as sinful excitements;
who would fain look upon the earth as 'a sterile promontory'--having
dark death more before their mind's eye than beautiful life? Are
such thoughts not the forerunners of melancholy?
Hamlet's incessant thoughts of death are the same as those of his
model, Montaigne. In an Essay, [25] entitled 'That to Philosophise
is to Learn how to Die,' the latter explains that the Christian
religion has no surer basis than the contempt for the present life,
and that we are in this world only to prepare ourselves for death.
His imagination, he says, has occupied itself with these thoughts
of death more than with anything else. Referring to a saying of
Lykurgos, he approves of graveyards being laid out close to churches
and in the most frequented places of a city, so as to accustom the
common people, women, and children not to be scared at the sight of
a dead person, and to forewarn everyone, by this continual spectacle
of bones, tombs, and funerals, as to our real condition.
Montaigne also, like Hamlet, ponders over suicide. He devotes a whole
Essay [26] to it. Life, he observes, would be a tyranny if the liberty
to die were wanting. For this liberty, he thinks, we have to thank
Nature, as for the most favourable gift which, indeed, deprives us
of all right to complain of our condition. If--as Boiocal, the German
chieftain, [27] said--earth is wanting to us whereon to live, earth
is never wanting to us for death. [28]
That is the wisdom of Montaigne, the admirer of antiquity. But
Montaigne, the modern man, introduces the Essay in which he dares to
utter such bold thoughts with the following restriction:--
'If, as it is said, to philosophise be to doubt, with much more reason
to play pranks (_niaiser_) and to rave, as I do, must be to doubt.
For, to inquire and to discuss, behoves the disciples. The decision
belongs to the chairman (_cathédrant_). My chairman is the
authority of the divine will which regulates us without contradiction,
and which occupies its rank above those human and vain disputes.'
This chairman, as often observed, by which Montaigne's thoughts are
to be guided, is an ecclesiastic authority.
In 'Hamlet,' also, it is a 'canon' [29] fixed against self-slaughter,
which restrains him from leaving, out of his own impulse, this whilom
paradise, this 'unweeded garden' of life.
Montaigne, whose philosophy aims at making us conversant with death
as with a friend, is yet terrified by it. Altogether, he says, he would
fain pass his life at his ease; and if he could escape from blows,
even by taking refuge under a calf's skin, [30] he would not be the
man who would shrink from it.
In a few graphic words Shakspere brands this cowardly clinging to life.
In the scene where Hamlet gives to Polonius nothing more willingly
than his leave, the new quarto (in every other respect the conclusion
of this scene is identical in both editions) contains these additional
words:--'Except my life, except my life, except my life.' Of the 'calf's
skin' we hear in the first scene of act v., where those are called sheep
and calves, who seek out assurance in parchments which are made of
sheep-skins and of calves-skins too.
Montaigne, who does not cease pondering over the pale fellow, Death,
looks for consolation from the ancients. He takes Sokrates as the
model of all great qualities; and he reproduces, in his own manner,
the speech this sage, who was fearless of death, made before his
judges. First of all, he makes him say that the qualities of death
are unknown to him, as he has never seen anybody who could instruct
him in them. 'Those who fear death, presuppose that they know it....
Perhaps death may be an indifferent thing; perhaps a desirable one.
However, one may believe that, if it be a transmigration from one
place to another, it will be an amelioration ... and free us from
having any more to do with wicked and corrupt judges. If it be a
consummation (_anéantissement_) [31] of our being, it is also
an amelioration to enter into a long and quiet night. We find nothing
so sweet in life as a quiet rest--a tranquil and profound sleep without
dreams.'
Now compare the monologue, 'To be or not to be,' of the first quarto
with the one contained in the second. It will then be seen that those
Sokratic ideas, rendered by Montaigne in his own manner, have been
worked into the first quarto. In the latter we hear nothing at all
about the end of our being (a complete destruction or _consummation_)
producing an amelioration. [32] Shakspere expresses this thought by
the words that if we could say that, by a sleep, we 'end the heartache
and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to--'tis a consummation
devoutly to be wished.' [33]
Keen commentators have pointed out the contradiction in Hamlet's
monologue, where he speaks of--
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns,
whilst he saw such a traveller in his father's ghost. Certainly there
were then, even as there are now, besides the logical thinkers, also
a considerable number of inconsistent persons who believed in
supernaturally revealed messages, and who, nevertheless, now and then,
felt contradictory thoughts rising within themselves. Why should the
great master, who exhausted in his dramatic personages almost all
types of human nature, not have put such a character also on the stage?
To the poet, whose object it was to show 'to the very age and body of
time his form and pressure' (this passage is wanting in the first
quarto), the presentation of such a psychological problem of
contradictory thoughts must have been of far greater attraction than
an anticipatory description of a metaphysician aching under the heavy
burden of his philosophic speculations. The latter is the character
attributed, by some, to Hamlet. But we think that such an utterly
strange modern creature would have been altogether incomprehensible
to the energetic English mind of this period.
In the course of the drama, Shakspere makes it sufficiently clear that
the thoughts by which Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution is sicklied
o'er,' have come from the narrow cells of a superstitious Christianity,
not from the free use of his reason. According to Montaigne, however,
we ought to 'use our reason only for strengthening our belief.'
Hamlet, with Purgatory and Hell, into which he has cast a glance,
before his eyes, would fain fly, like Montaigne, from them. In his
Essay I. 19 [34] the latter says that our soul must be steeled against
the powers of death; 'for, as long as Death frightens us, how is it
possible to make a single step without feverish agitation?'
Hamlet as little attains this condition of quiet equanimity as the
pensive and pondering Montaigne. The latter, however, speaks of souls
that know no fear. It is true, he has to go to the ancients in order
to meet with this frame of mind. Quoting Horace [35]--
Non vultus instantis tyranni
Mente quatit solida, neque Auster,
Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,
Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus--
he describes such a soul as being made '_mistress over her passions
and concupiscence; having become proof against poverty and disgrace,
and all the other injuries of fortune_. Let those who can, gain this
advantage. Herein lies true and sovereign freedom that allows us to
scorn force and injustice, and to deride prisons and fetters.'
To a friend with such a soul, to a living Horace or Horatio, Hamlet
addresses himself. Horatio also is his fellow-student and friend
from the University days at Wittenberg, and he has made the views
of the new philosophical school quite his own. He does not tremble
before the fire of Purgatory and Hell. Despising death, he wishes,
in the last scene, to empty the cup of poison from which his friend
Hamlet has drunk, in order to follow him. When the latter keeps him
back, Horatio makes answer--
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.
Hamlet, trusting more to this firmer and truly antique character than
to his own, requests Horatio to aid him during the play-scene in
watching the King, so as to procure more natural evidence of his guilt.
This school-friend--how often may he have philosophised with him!--is
to him
as just a man
As e'er my conversation coped withal.
The following passage, [36] in which Horatio's character is described
by Hamlet, is wanting in the first quarto:--
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
Hath ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment 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.
How near these words of Shakspere come to those with which Montaigne
describes an intrepid man after the poem of Horace!
But, in spite of subtle reasoning, the French philosopher cannot fathom
the cause why he himself does not attain any mind's ease, and why he
has no plain and straightforward faculty (_nulle faculté simple_)
within himself. He once [37] uses the expression, 'We trouble death
with the care of life, and life with the care of death;' but he does
not succeed in firmly attaching himself to life with all the fibres of
his nature, and gathering strength from the mother-earth, like Antaeus.
He oscillates between two antagonistic views, and feels unable to decide
for either the one or the other.