Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
been expressly ordered to spare (I. v. 84 f.).
(2) On the other hand, she was _not_ privy to the murder of her husband,
either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so,
and there are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the
murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts
from his throne, she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the
interview with Hamlet, when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,
'A bloody deed!' Almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king and marry with his brother,
the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently
genuine; and, if it had not been so, she would never have had the
hardihood to exclaim:
What have I done, that thou darest wag thy tongue
In noise so rude against me?
Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak
together alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her
knowledge of the secret.
The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think
little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull
and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and,
to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep
in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet
told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage
'o'er-hasty' (II. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the
feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and
see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist
in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making
everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached
to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the
throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle
compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart
was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be
happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.
Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her,
the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass
of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she
dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she
has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not
last, and so at the end of the interview (III. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a
warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.[80] It
is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off
her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse;
and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a
false account of Polonius's death, and is silent about the appearance of
the Ghost. She becomes miserable;
To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If
she had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the
King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered
torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.
The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.
She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and
she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of
sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.
These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even
more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death
because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his
success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out
that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her
energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:
No, no, the drink, the drink,--O my dear Hamlet,--
The drink, the drink! I am poison'd. [_Dies._
Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as
Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic
with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?
* * * * *
King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But
he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the
one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is
courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties
efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He
nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way
into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and
address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and
there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means
to the crown.[81] His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being
dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize
of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii.
35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.
On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance--a mildewed ear,
a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of
force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open
stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in
his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and
morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive
predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first
murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet
executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first
thought was always for himself.
I like him not, nor stands it safe with _us_
To let his madness range,
--these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His
first comment on the death of Polonius is,
It had been so with _us_ had we been there;
and his second is,
Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
It will be laid to _us_.
He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won
the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of
her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to
have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on
the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a
villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's
desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to
him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even
annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had
evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness
to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his
objects,--that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he
imagined he could trick something more than men.
This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to
his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has
fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father
to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and
more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:
till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.
Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:
Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],
he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
shaped the King's no less.
For--to return in conclusion to the action of the play--in all that
happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
_must_ fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach
the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which
seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is
apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no
other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in _Macbeth_, is this aspect so
impressive.[83]
I mention _Macbeth_ for a further reason. In _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ not
only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but
it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense,
religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too
definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it
is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a
divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally
interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare
uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in _Othello_
or _King Lear_. The horror in Macbeth's soul is more than once
represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost';
the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as
_Hamlet_ nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened
in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot