Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ
may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course
is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most moral
nature, _without the strength of nerve which forms a hero_, sinks
beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?
How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful
traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no _hero_.
But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth--how could he
possibly have done what we _see_ Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
terrified friends with the cry:
Unhand me, gentlemen!
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;
the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and
forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been
formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.
This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to
Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it
is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were
indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are
indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out
of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.
Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to
his corpse:
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;
yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us,
for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:
This man shall set me packing:
I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.
There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia
was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly
feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still
less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of
his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely
an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is
such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses
Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to
soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this
embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a
soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business
was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul
unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of
conscious failure.[37]
(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, _Hamlet_ is the tragedy of
reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause
of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of
mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue
of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is
'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human
foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed,
cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
any positive, limited thing,--a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
resolution or executed a deed' (_Shakspere, his Mind and Art_, 4th ed.,
pp. 132, 133).
On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received
view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies--such
words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or
those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side
and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence
of those words of the King to Laertes (IV. vii. 119 f.), which,
if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what
was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:
that we would do
We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh
That hurts by easing.
And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the _description_
given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
but unconscious excuses.
Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we
feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.
Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
the theory, the _direct_ result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at _any_ time
and in _any_ circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
who at any _other_ time and in any _other_ circumstances than those
presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
abnormal and induced by special circumstances,--a state of profound
melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
in the _production_ of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
established, displayed, as one of its _symptoms_, an excessive
reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
the theory makes it, the _direct_ cause of the irresolution at all; nor
was it the _only_ indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
of it.
These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
will presently become so.
3
Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately