Hamlet's Fictions

Maurice Charney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415732840
• eBook ISBN: 9781317814429
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"But in a fiction, in a dream of passion..." In an extended commentary on this passage this book offers a rationale for the excellence and primacy of this play among the tragedies. Throughout, emphasis is placed on Hamlet's fantasies and imaginations rather than on ethical criteria, and on the depiction of Hamlet as a revenge play through an exploration of its dark and mysterious aspects.

The book stresses the importance of Passion and Its Fictions in the play and attempts to explore the very Pirandellian topic of Hamlet's passion and dream of passion. It goes on to examine the organization of dramatic energies in the play - the use Shakespeare makes of analogy and infinite regress and of scene rows, broken scenes and impacted scenes, and the significance of the exact middle of Hamlet. The final section is devoted to conventions of style, imagery, and genre in the play - what is the stage situation of asides, soliloguies, and offstage speech? How is the imagery of skin disease and sealing distinctive? In what sense is Hamlet a comedy, or does it use comedy significantly?

PART I

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PASSION AND ITS FICTIONS

1

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Hamlet’s dream of passion

It is significant that “passion” should be such a key word and key image in Hamlet. It is used more frequently in this play than anywhere else in the canon, and its thirteen examples suggest some covert revelations. In Elizabethan English the passions are the emotions, and Onions in A Shakespeare Glossary (based on the OED) defines the word as “applied widely to all kinds of feeling by which the mind is powerfully moved.”¹ In the contemporary argument about the Stoics, moralists and theologians objected to Stoic doctrine because it so rigorously excluded the passions, which move men to good and evil. At the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio’s servant, Tranio declares: “Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray” (1.1.31). Since the passions apply particularly to love, the implication is that if you are not a Stoic, Ovid and his Art of Love will not “be an outcast quite abjured” (1.1.33). The neo-platonic ladder of love, as in Ficino, depends very strongly on the passions to lead one upward to spiritual states. Passion is necessary as a motive force for action. Without it we would be bland and passive, perhaps even totally rational, but hardly alive.

Most of the examples of “passion” in Hamlet occur in theatrical contexts, especially in two scenes relating to performance. There are four references in the Players’ Scene (II,ii) and six more in the Play-Within-the-Play Scene (III,ii). “Passion” is a term more at home for Shakespeare in the theater than in life, so that it looks as if Hamlet needs to understand passion and make his peace with it before he can take revenge. The histrionic point is well demonstrated by Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His professional actors are at the center of the appearance-reality conflict, and they baffle poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by their ontological presence: they never enter but are always “On,” and, of course, they never need to get into costumes to play their roles. They are always ready.

Hamlet’s first, very familiar conversation with the traveling actors who visit Elsinore is to ask for a sample of their art: “We’ll have a speech straight. Come, give us a taste of your quality. Come, a passionate speech” (2.2.440–42). Why a passionate speech? Hamlet is already experimenting with the notion that theater and life are in some ways indistinguishable. He takes seriously the idea of the play as mimesis, an imitation of real life:

I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions.

(2.2.601–4)

In other words, murder will out; voluntarily or involuntarily, there is no way of blocking it.

Hamlet is thinking of a specific passionate speech from a Dido and Aeneas play (like Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage 1585–86?), especially Aeneas’ tale to Dido when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter. As a demonstration of passion, Hamlet recites thirteen lines of a speech which seems to us highly rhetorical, formal, and decoratively violent. The figure of Pyrrhus, looking for old Priam in order to slay him, is not natural at all but superhuman, overwrought, exaggeratedly dire and heroic:

Roasted in wrath and fire,

And thus o’ersizèd with coagulate gore,

With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

Old grandsire Priam seeks. (2.2.472–75)

The grand passion of this passionate speech was beautifully rendered in Kozintsev’s Hamlet film,² where formality and heightened rhetoric were stressed.

The First Player then takes up the Pyrrhus speech on Hamlet’s command: “So, proceed you” (2.2.476). The speech is an exercise in declamatory passion, which concludes with an eloquent reference to “passion in the gods.” When they heard “The instant burst of clamor” that Hecuba made when she saw “Pyrrhus make malicious sport / In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,” even the gods, who can feel no human sorrow, would have wept tears (“made milch the burning eyes of heaven”) and felt an unaccustomed grief (“And passion in the gods”) (524–29). This is “passion” in its primary sense of suffering, as in the Passion of Christ on the Cross. It is a hypothetical postulation of passion like Ariel’s advice to Prospero about the compassion a spirit of the air might feel if it were human.

At this point the Player, like Hecuba, becomes passionate himself, turns “his color” and “has tears in’s eyes” (530–31) and must break off his speech. This is what troubles Hamlet so profoundly in his soliloquy, that the Player, “But in a fiction, in a dream of passion” (562), could produce such powerful emotional effects:

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

That from her working all his visage wanned,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit? (2.2.563–67)

The fictionality and the dream of passion in the Player baffle Hamlet, who cannot grasp where real life ends and theater begins. Why is the Player’s weeping for Hecuba so futile, “all for nothing” (567)? “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?” (569–70).

But Hecuba exists only in relation to the Player’s “passionate speech.” Hecuba marks the “taste” of the Player’s professional “quality” that Hamlet called for earlier. Hamlet’s question, therefore, misses the point: “What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?” (2.2.570–72). What Hamlet cannot understand here is that the Player cannot do any more to express Hamlet’s real passion than he does for Hecuba’s fictive passion. The Player already has all the cues for passion that he needs, and Hamlet’s ranting catalogue of exaggerated stage action only reinforces his own isolation from the passion that he himself needs. In fact, he sounds like the bad actor he warns against in his advice to the Players, tearing “a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings” (3.2.10–11). Hamlet seems to have the cue and the desire for passion without the passion itself, so that his soliloquy becomes excessive, mere ranting without authenticity.

Although Hamlet calls for a passionate speech, he is clearly of divided minds about histrionic passion. In his exacting advice to the Players, he comes out strongly against passion. The actor must, above all, maintain control, “use all gently” (3.2.5), and not become completely absorbed in his role as the First Player does in speaking about Hecuba: “in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” (5–8). A smooth and gentle passion? That sounds like Bottom promising to roar “as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you an ’twere any nightingale” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.2.82–84). In these paradoxes Hamlet’s awareness of the doubleness of acting also has implications for his own acting of revenge. One must avoid the histrionic and that is why it offends Hamlet to his soul to “hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings” (3.2.9–11). Again, this sounds like Bottom offering to play “Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.2.30–31). Hamlet’s advice to the Players functions like advice to himself on how he should play to his own audience. Passion, the actor’s motive force, must be excluded from performance, or at least there must be a temperance that governs the execution so that the actor does not wind up with “Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect” (2.2.565) and unable to continue. That is unprofessional.

In choosing Horatio as his confidant – and his confederate in the Play Scene – Hamlet wants a man “That is not passion’s slave” (3.2.74). Hamlet’s explanation of why his soul hath sealed Horatio for herself is embarrassingly full, and it bears an interesting analogy to the advice to the Players, which it immediately follows. The speech about Horatio defines those qualities of manliness that Hamlet most admires but does not necessarily imitate. Horatio is the philosophical man superior to Fortune, “A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards / Hast ta’en with equal thanks” (69–70), an equable man, modest, temperate and gentle,

Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled

That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please. (3.2.71–73)

Horatio has qualities surprisingly similar to those of the good actor; both are essentially rational and unheroic – always in control. This is not the path for the tragic protagonist, who must almost of necessity taint his mind by being passion’s slave. There is a concentration, intensity, and obsessiveness in Hamlet that are needed for him to exist in a non-rational world. Without his passion Hamlet would be lost; with it he is nevertheless puzzled about how to connect strong feeling with action.

In the dumbshow of The Mousetrap play, we are told that the Queen “makes passionate action” (3.2.140 s.d.) when she finds the King dead. Because it is a stage direction, this example is omitted from Spevack’s Concordance, although it sums up nicely the slippery character of the Player Queen: she is both passionate with grief and passionately amorous for the embraces of her lover/poisoner. The dumbshow is filled with passionate gesture, an exaggerated and stylized pantomime. The King and Queen enter “very lovingly.” Then the Queen “kneels; and makes show of protestation unto him.” Of course, it is only a “show,” not real, like the Queen’s later “passionate action.” In the dialogue immediately following, “show” is repeated four times in punning senses. The frightened and cowed Ophelia asks, “Will ’a tell us what this show meant?” (148) and the swaggering Hamlet answers: “Ay, or any show that you will show him. Be not you ashamed to show, he’ll not shame to tell you what it means” (149–51). This is “show” in the sense of “show and tell.” Like Othello in the Brothel Scene (IV, ii), Hamlet is treating Ophelia like a whore.

The Player King already intuits his Queen’s temperament when he objects to her protests against second marriage: “What to ourselves in passion we propose, / The passion ending, doth the purpose lose” (3.2.200–1). Again, we have a built-in pun on passion as strong emotion, either grief or amorousness. Our purposes therefore depend upon passion to be enacted, which resembles the King’s nostalgic speech to Laertes about the nature of love: “There lives within the very flame of love / A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it” (4.7.114–15). Therefore we should follow our passion before it cools: “That we would do / We should do when we would” (118–19).

That may be the Ghost’s voluntaristic point when it appears in the Closet Scene to chide its tardy son, “That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by / Th’ important acting of your dread command” (3.4.108–9). Why does Hamlet think himself lapsed in passion? Much depends on how we understand that theatrical word “passion.” There is clearly a wrong and a right passion. For most of the play Hamlet is so preoccupied with the rhetoric of passion – the fiction and the dream of passion – that he has difficulty dealing with his true feelings apart from their inflamed expression. When Hamlet’s revenge comes in the final scene of the play, it is different from anything he had previously imagined. And it is remarkably free of passionate rhetoric (as well as “passion” words).

We may notice two further examples of passion that are related to Ophelia, who is the most obvious slave of passion in the play; her madness expresses her unrequited and unrequitable passion. The complacent Polonius, who knows less than any other character about passion, warns his daughter against the effects of love as a mad passion, an “ecstasy,”

Whose violent property fordoes itself

And leads the will to desperate undertakings

As oft as any passions under heaven

That does afflict our natures. (2.1.103–6)

Like father, like son. In an earlier scene Laertes had rather grossly warned his sister about opening her “chaste treasure” to Ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Passion and Its Fictions
• Part II The Organization and Disposition of Dramatic Energies
• Part III Conventions of Staging, Imagery, and Genre
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index