way in which Hamlet allows himself to be influenced and driven to a
decision. This time the poet does so by bringing in a clearly expressed
dogmatic tenet whereby Hamlet's fate is sealed. It is 'ill all about
his heart.' He would prefer not going to meet Laertes. [54]
_Horatio_. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will
forestal their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
The fatalist Hamlet, whom we have seen coming ever closer to the doctrine
of Predestination, answers as follows:--
'Not a whit; we defy augury; there is special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. [55] If it be now, 'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet
it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man has aught
of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.'
This time it is a 'Let be!'--even as it was a 'Let it go' when he was
sent to England.
Now let us read Montaigne's Essay, [56] 'To Philosophise is to Learn
how to Die:'--
'Our religion has had no surer human foundation than the contempt of
life. Not only does the course of our reason lead us that way; for,
why should we fear to lose a thing which, when lost, cannot be
regretted?--but also, seeing that we are threatened by so many kinds
of death, is it not a greater inconvenience to fear them all than to
endure one? What does it matter when Death comes, since it is
inevitable?... Moreover, nobody dies before his hour. The time you
leave behind was no more yours than that which was before your birth,
and concerns you no more.'
No further comment is needed to prove that Hamlet's and Montaigne's
thoughts are in so close a connection that it cannot be a mere accident.
And the nearer we come to the conclusion of the drama, the more
striking become Shakspere's satirical hits.
Hamlet allows his hand to be put into that of Laertes by the King. He
does not think of the wrong he has done to Laertes--of the murder of
the latter's father, or the unhappiness he has criminally brought
upon Laertes' sister. In most cowardly manner, hoping that Laertes
would desist from the combat, Hamlet endeavours to excuse his conduct
at the grave of Ophelia, by pleading his own madness. Laertes insists
on the combat; adding that he would stand aloof 'till by some elder
masters of known honour' the decision were given.
Hamlet avenges the death of his father; he kills the criminal, the
enemy, when his wrath is up and aflame, and every muscle of his is
swelled with indignation--but it is _too late_. Together with
himself, he has dragged them all into the grave. It is blind passion,
unbridled by reason, which does the deed: a sublime satire upon the
words of Montaigne in Essay II. (12), 'that the most beautiful actions
of the soul proceed from, and have need of, this impulse of passion;
valour, they say, cannot become perfect without the help of wrath; and
that nobody pursues the wicked and the enemies with sufficient energy,
except he be thoroughly in anger.'
Even the kind of death by which Shakspere makes Hamlet lose his life,
looks like a satire against Montaigne. The latter, always a coward in
regard to death, and continually pondering over it, says: [57]--'I
would rather have chosen to drink the potion of Sokrates than wound
myself as Cato did.' Their 'virtuous deeds' he calls [58] 'vain and
fruitless ones, because they were done from no love of, or obedience
to, the true Creator of all things.'
Hamlet dies wounded and poisoned, as if Shakspere had intended expressing
his abhorrence of so vacillating and weak-willed a character, who places
the treacherous excesses of passion above the power of that human
reason in whose free service alone Greeks and Romans did their most
exalted deeds of virtue. [59]
The subtlety of the best psychologists has endeavoured to fix the limits
of Hamlet's madness, and to find the proper name for it. No agreement
has been arrived at. We think we have solved the problem as to the
nature of Hamlet's madness, and to have shown why thought and action,
in him, cannot be brought into a satisfactory harmony. Every fibre
in Shakspere's artistic mind would have rebelled against the idea
of making a lunatic the chief figure of his greatest drama. He wished
to warn his contemporaries that the attempt of reconciling two opposite
circles of ideas--namely, on the one hand, the doctrine that we are
to be guided by the laws of Nature; and on the other, the yielding
ourselves up to superstitious dogmas which declare human nature to be
sinful--must inevitably produce deeds of madness.
The main traits of Montaigne's character Shakspere confers upon the
Danish Prince, and places him before a difficult task of life. He is to
avenge his father's death. (Montaigne was attached to his father with
all his soul, and speaks of him almost in the same words as Hamlet
does of his own.) He is to preserve the State whose legitimate sovereign
he is. The materials for a satire are complete. And it is written in
such a manner as to remain the noblest, the most sublime poetical
production as long as men shall live.
The two circles of ideas which in the century of the Reformation began
a struggle that is not yet brought to an end, are, in that drama,
represented on the stage. The poet shows, by making the gifted
Prince perish, on which side every serious thinker ought to place
himself. That these intentions of Shakspere were understood by his more
intelligent contemporaries and friends, we shall prove when we come to
the camp of his adversaries, at whose head a Roman Catholic stood,
who launches out in very marked language against the derision of
Montaigne as contained in the character of Hamlet.
The noblemen who went to the theatre for the sake of the intellectual
attractions (the fairer sex being still excluded from acting on the
stage and therefore not forming a point of attraction) were initiated
into the innermost secret of what authors meant by their productions.
Dekker, in his 'Gulls Horn Book' (c. 6), reports that 'after the play
was over, poets adjourned to supper with knights, where they, in private,
unfolded the secret parts of their drama to them.'
As in no other of his plays, there is in Shakspere's 'Hamlet'--the drama
richest in philosophy--a perfect wealth of life. Argument is pitted
against argument; every turn of a phrase is a missile, sharp, and
hitting the mark. In not a few cases, the aim and object is no longer
recognisable. Here and there we believe we shall be able to shed the
light of day upon some dark passages of the past.
To the doughty friends of Shakspere, this French Knight of the Order of
St. Michael, who says [60] that, if his freedom were in the least
encroached upon, or 'if the laws under which he lives threatened
merely the tip of his finger, he would at once betake himself to
any other place to find better ones;' but who yet lets everything
around him go out of joint without offering a helping hand for repair,
because 'the maintenance of States is probably something beyond our
powers of understanding' [61]--verily, to Shakspere's doughty friends,
such a specimen of humanity as Montaigne must have been quite a new and
strange phenomenon. They were children of an age which achieved great
things because its nobler natures willingly suffered death when the
ideals of their life were to be realised. In them, the fire of
enthusiasm of the first Reformation, of the glorious time of Elizabeth,
was still glowing. They energetically championed the cause of Humanism.
The sublime conceptions of their epoch were not yet marred by that
dark and gloomy set of men whose mischievous members were just
beginning to hatch their hidden plans in the most remote manors of
England.
The friends of Shakspere well understood the true meaning of Hamlet's
words: [62]--'What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth
and heaven?' [63] They easily seized the gist and point of the answer
given to the King's question: [64]--'How fares our cousin Hamlet?'
when Hamlet replies:--
Excellent, i' faith; of the chameleon's dish!
Surely, some of them had read the Essay 'On the Inconsistency of our
Actions,' and had smiled at the passage:--
'Our ordinary manner is, to follow the inclination of our appetite--this
way, that way; upwards, downwards; even as the wind of the occasion
drives us. We never think of what _we would have_, but at the moment
we _would have it_; and _we change like that animal_ (the chameleon)
of which it is said that it takes the colour of the place where it
is laid down.' [65]
Shakspere's teaching is, that if the nobler-gifted man who stands at
the head of the commonwealth, allows himself to be driven about by every
wind of the occasion, instead of furthering his better aims with all
his strength and energy of will, the wicked, on their part, will all
the more easily carry out their own ends. He therefore makes the King
say: [66]--
That we would do,
We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes...
Shakspere's friends understood the allusion contained in the first act,
after the apparition of the Ghost, when Hamlet calls for his 'tablets.'
They knew that the much-scribbling Montaigne was meant, who, as he
avows, had so bad a memory that he could not receive any commission
without writing it down in his 'tablets' (_tablettes_). This defect of
his, Montaigne mentions over and over again, and may have been the
cause of his many most ludicrous contradictions. [67]
After Hamlet has written down the important fact that 'one may smile,
and smile, and be a villain--at least, I am sure it may be so in
Denmark,' he exclaims:--'Now to my word!' That 'word' undoubtedly
consists of the admonition addressed to him by the Ghost, that Hamlet,
after having heard his duty, also should fulfil it--that is:--
'So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.'
But he only recollects the last words of the Ghost; and Hamlet's parole,
therefore, is only this:--
Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me!
The value of Montaigne's book is harshly treated in the second scene of
the second act. To the question of Polonius as to what he is reading,
Hamlet replies:--'Words, words, words!' Indeed, Shakspere did not think
it fair that 'the satirical rogue' should fill the paper with such
remarks (whole Essays of Montaigne consist of similar useless prattle)
as 'that old men have grey beards; that their faces are wrinkled; their
eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum; and that they have a
plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.' [68]
The ideas of Shakspere as to the duties of a writer were different,
indeed, from the contents of the book which Hamlet characterises by
his exclamation.
As to Polonius' answer: 'Though this be madness, yet there's method in
it,' the public had no difficulty in finding out what was meant by
that 'madness,' and to whom it applied.
What may the great master have thought of an author who, as Montaigne
does, jots down everything in kaleidoscopic manner, just as changeful
accident brings it into his head? In Essay III. (2) we read:--
'I cannot get a fixed hold of my object. It moves
and reels as if with a natural drunkenness. I just seize
it at some point, such as I find it at the moment, when I
amuse myself with it. I do not describe its essence, but
its volatile passage ... from one minute to the other.'
Elsewhere he prides himself on his method of being able to write as long
as there is paper and ink.
Hamlet says to the players: 'We'll e'en to it like French falconers: fly
at anything we see.' Montaigne's manner of spying out and pouncing upon
things cannot be better depicted than by comparing it with a French
falconer's manner. In the first act already, Hamlet, after the
ghost-scene, answers the friends who approach, with the holla-call of
a falconer:--
Hillo, ho, ho, boy; come, bird, come!
Furthermore, Hamlet says in act ii. sc. 2:--'I am but mad
north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a
handshaw (heronshaw!).' Now, the north-west wind would drive Montaigne
back into his native province, Perigord, where, very likely according
to Shakspere's view, he ought to have remained with his sham logic.
The south wind, on the contrary, brings the able falconer to England.
The latter possesses such a penetrating glance for the nature of
things as to be able to distinguish the bird (the heronshaw) that is
to be pursued from the hawk that has been unhooded and cast.
In the second scene of the fifth act, between Hamlet and Horatio
(to the weak-minded Osrick the words spoken there are incomprehensible),
the excellent qualities of Laertes are apparently judged. [69] This
whole discussion is meant against Montaigne; and in the first quarto
the chief points are wanting. Florio calls Montaigne's Essays 'Moral,
Political, and Military Discourses.' [70] Osrick praises the qualities
of the cavalier who has returned from France; and Hamlet replies that
'to divide him inventorily would dizzy the arithmetic of memory.'
The further, hitherto utterly unexplained, words ('and yet but yaw
neither in respect of his quick sail') seem to have reference to the
sonnet [71] by which the third book of the Essays is dedicated by
Florio to Lady Grey. Montaigne is praised therein under the guise
of Talbot's name, who, 'in peace or war, at sea or land, for princes'
service, countries' good, sweetly sails before the wind.' In act ii.
sc. 2, the north-north-west and the south wind were already alluded
to, which are said to influence Hamlet's madness.
The translators and admirers of Montaigne are meant when Hamlet says
that 'to make true diction of him, his semblable' must be 'his mirror;
and, who else would trace him, his umbrage--nothing more.' That is,
one must be Montaigne, or become his absolute admirer, 'his umbrage,'
'his semblable,' in order to do justice to him. The whole scene is
full of allusions, easily explainable from the point of view we have
indicated. So also, the reference to self-knowledge ('to know himself)
--an art which Montaigne never learnt and the 'two weapons' with which
he fights, are full of deep meaning.
It was probably no small number of men that took delight in the French
essayist. No doubt, the jest of the gravedigger is directed against
them, when he says that if the mad Hamlet does not recover his wits
in England, it is no great matter there, because there the men are
as mad as he.
Montaigne, especially in Essay III. (2) and III. (5), brings forward
indecencies of the most shameless kind. We quite bear in mind what
period it was when he wrote. Our manners and ideas are totally
different from those of the sixteenth century. But what indignation
must Shakspere have felt--he who had already created his noblest female
characters, Helena and Olivia; and who had sung his paean of love,
'Romeo and Juliet'--when he read the ideas of the French nobleman
about love and women! Nowhere, and on no occasion, does Shakspere in
his dramas, in spite of phrases which to-day we qualify as obscene ones,
lower the ideal of the womanly character--of the _ewig Weibliche_.
But let us read Montaigne's view: [72]--
'I find that love is nothing else than a thirst of enjoying a desired
subject; nor that Venus is anything else but the pleasure of emptying
one's seminary vessels, similar to the pleasure which Nature has given
us in discharging other parts.'
Now, this significant quality also, of saying indecencies without shame,
Hamlet has in common with Montaigne. No character in Shakspere's dramas
uses such language as Hamlet; and in this case, let it be observed, it
is not used between men, but towards the beloved one! We shall remark
upon his relations with Ophelia later on.
The frivolous Montaigne speaks of love as one might do of a good dish to
be enjoyed at every degree of age, according to taste and inclination.
In Essay III.(4) we learn how, in his youth, 'standing in need of a
vehement diversion for the sake of distraction, he made himself
amorous by art and study.' Elsewhere he tells what great things he was
able, as a young man, to achieve in this line. [73] He, therefore,
does not agree with the sage who praises age because it frees us from
voluptuousness. [74]
He, on the contrary, says:--'I shall never take kindly to impotence,
whatever good it may do me.'
Montaigne, the old and young lover, is lashed in act v. sc. I, in
disfigured verses of a song sung by the grave-digger, which dates about
from the year 1557, and at Shakspere's time probably was very popular.
In the original, where the image of death is meant to be represented,
an old man looks back in repentance, and with great aversion, upon
his youthful days when he found pleasure in love. The original verse
stood thus:--
I lothe that I did love,
In youth that I thought swete,
As time requires for my behove,
Methinks they are not mete.
Until now, no sense could be made of the first verse which the
gravedigger sings. It runs thus:--
In youth, when I did love, did love,
Methought it was very sweet,
To contract, OH! the time, for, AH! my behove,
O, methought, there was nothing meet.
Let it be observed what stress is laid on the 'Oh!'--the proper time,
and the 'Ah!'--the delight felt at the moment of enjoyment. The meaning
of the old verse is changed in such a manner as to show that old
Montaigne looks back with pleasure upon the time of his dissolute youth,
whilst the author of the original text shrinks back from it.
The second verse [75] is a further persiflage of the old song. Its
reading, too, is changed. It is said there that age, with his stealing
steps, as clawed the lover in his clutch [76] and shipped him into the
land as if he 'never had been such.'
By none has the relation between Ophelia and Hamlet been better felt and
described than by Goethe. He calls her 'the good child in whose soul,
secretly, a voice of voluptuousness resounds.' Hamlet who--driven
rudderless by his impulse, his passion, his daimon, from one extreme to
the other--drags everything that surrounds him into the abyss, also
destroys the future of the woman that might truly make him happy. He
disowns and rejects her whom Nature has formed for love. At a moment when
fanatical thoughts have mastered his reason, he bids her go to a nunnery.
Once more we must point to the Essay in which Montaigne lays down his
ideas about woman and love. French ladies, he says, study Boccaccio
and such-like writers, in order to become skilful (_habiles_). 'But
there is no word, no example, no single step in that matter which
they do not know better than our books do. That is a knowledge bred
in their very veins ... Had not this natural violence of their desires
been somewhat bridled by the fear and a feeling of honour wherewith
they have been provided, we would be dishonoured (_diffamez_).' Montaigne
says he knows ladies who would rather lend their honour than their
'_coach_.' [77]
'At last, when Ophelia has no longer any power over her own mind,' says
Goethe, 'her heart being on her tongue, that tongue becomes a traitor
against her.' [78]
In the scene of Ophelia's madness, we hear songs, thoughts, and
phrases probably caught up by her from Hamlet. The ideal which man
forms of woman, is the moral altitude on which she stands. Now, let
the language be called to mind, which Hamlet, before the players'
scene, uses towards his beloved!
Ophelia's words: 'Come, my _coach_ [79]' will be understood
from the passage in Montaigne above quoted. The meaning of: 'Oh, how
the _wheel_ becomes it!' has reference to a thought developed
by Montaigne in Essay III. (11), [80] which we cannot render here,
as it is opposed to every feeling of decency.
All commentators agree in thinking that the character of Laertes is in
direct contrast to that of Hamlet. In the first quarto, the figure of
Laertes is but rapidly indicated. Only that scene is worked out where
he cries out against the priest who will not follow his sister to
the grave:--
A ministering angel shall my sister be.
When thou liest howling.
In the second quarto only, we meet with the most characteristic speeches
in which the strong-willed Laertes, [81] unmindful of any future world,
calls for revenge with every drop of his indignant blood:--
To Hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devils!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation....
... Both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes ...
... to cut his throat i' the church.
That passage, too, is new, in which Ophelia's madness is explained as
the consequence of blighted love:--
Nature is fine in love, and where 't is fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
Her own reason, which succumbs to her love, is the precious token.
In the same way, those words are not in the first quarto, in which
Laertes gives vent to the oppressed feelings of his heart, on hearing
of the death of his sister:--
Nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will. When these (the tears) are gone,
The woman will be out.
All those beautiful precepts, also, which Laertes gives to his sister,
are wanting in the quarto of 1603. [82]
Hamlet is the most powerful philosophical production, in the domain of
poetry, written at the most critical epoch of mankind--the time of the
Reformation. The greatest English genius recognised that it was
everyone's duty to set a time out of joint to right. Shakspere showed
to his noble friends a gifted and noble man whose life becomes a
scourge for him and his surroundings, because he is not guided by manly
courage and conscience, but by superstitious notions and formulas.
This colossal drama ranges from the thorny, far-stretching fields which
man, only trusting in himself, has to work with the sweat of his brow,
to that wonder-land of mystery--
Where these good tidings of great joy are heard. [83]
If the principles that are fought out in this drama, in tragic conflict,
were to be described by catchwords, we might say: Reason stands against
Dogma; Nature against Tradition; Self-Reliance against Submission.
The great elementary forces are here at issue, which the Reformation
had unchained, and with which we all have to reckon.
Shakspere's loving, noble heart beautifully does justice to the defeated
Hamlet by making him be borne to his grave 'like a soldier,' with all
the honouring 'rites of war.' The poet who knew the human heart so
well, no doubt had seen many brave and gifted men who, after having
been to Wittenberg's Halls of Intellectual Freedom, and become disciples
of Humanism, once more were turned into slaves of dogmas which, under
a new guise, not less restricted the free use of reason than the tenets
of the old faith had done:--
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
The capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
The life of the most gifted remains fruitless if, through fear of what
may befall us in a future world, we cravenly shrink back from following
the dictates of our reason and our conscience. From them we must take
the mandate and commission for the task of our life; not from any
mysterious messenger, nor from any ghost out of Purgatory. On the way
to action, no 'goblin damned' must be allowed to cross our path with
his assumed terrors. That which we feel to be right we must do, even if
'it be the very witching time of night, and hell breathes contagion into
the world.'
Shakspere broke with all antiquated doctrines. He was one of the
foremost Humanists in the fullest and noblest meaning of the word. [84]
1: Essay II. 12.
2: Essay I. 26.
3: The whole contents of this chapter may be said to be condensed
into two lines of Shakspere:--
'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'
4: Essay III. 13.
5: See Bacon's Essay 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation,' where
he says that 'dissimulation followeth many times upon secrecy by
a necessity: so that he that will be secret must be a dissembler in
some degree,' &c.
6: The following are Hamlet's modes of asseveration:--
'Angels and ministers of grace,' 'All you host of Heaven,' 'God's
love,' 'God and mercy,' 'God's willing,' 'Help and mercy,' 'God's
love,' 'By St. Patrick,' 'God-a-mercy,' 'By my fay (_ma foi_),'
'S' blood (God's blood),' 'S' wounds,' 'God's bodykins,' 'By'r Lady,'
'Perdy (_Pardieu_),' 'By the rood (Cross),' 'Heavenly guards,' 'For
love and grace,' 'By the Lord,' 'Pray God,' &c.
7: New Shakspere Society (Stubbs, _Abuses in England_), 1879,
p. 131.
8: Act ii. sc. 2.