Shakespeare's Early Tragedies

Nicholas Brooke

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136567483
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism

First published in 1968. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies contains studies of six plays: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The emphasis is on the variety of the plays, and the themes, a variety which has been too often obscured by the belief in a single 'tragic experience'. The kind of experience the plays create and their quality as dramatic works for the stage are also examined. These essays develop an understanding of Shakespeare's use of the stage picture in relation to the emblematic imagery of Elizabethan poetry.

Hamlet

[1600–1]

I

I have remarked that the weight of preconception about Shakespeare lies heavily upon us: with Hamlet the weight is almost crushing. The greatest effort of forgetting has to be made, and yet we have to know what we are forgetting, or else the vague shadows of Coleridge and Bradley, for instance, and even of Ernest Jones, will continue to oppress us; it is necessary to know what they said, what we want to retain of it, and why the rest should be rejected. I am not proposing a full inquiry on these lines, only to sketch its outline as hinting at some of the bearings we must take in arriving at a view of the play.

Hamlet has always been a haunted man; but for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he was haunted by a ghost, and one can hardly say that of his more recent history, when the ghost (though rarely altogether banished from the stage) has become so much of an embarrassment. The scene chosen to illustrate the play in Rowe’s edition of 1709 is supposed to represent Betterton’s performance: it shows the prince’s second encounter with his father, in his mother’s bedchamber. Garrick still made much of that, but his greatest concentration seems to have been on the first encounter, in Act I. The ghost himself was already producing laughter in the seventeen thirties, but the confrontation remained central. Garrick, at any rate in his later years, sustained the first meeting with the aid of a mechanical wig, and however well that consorts with the Gothick taste of the mid-century, the elaboration suggests that the scene no longer fully justified its prominence. Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling, wrote (in 1780) of a Hamlet more haunted by himself than by his father, and this has been the dominant theme ever since. The great Hamlets, on the stage as well as in criticism, have for a hundred and fifty years been haunted from within far more than from without.

It is really only of historical interest to go back so far: Coleridge, for us, is the most clearly recognizable starting point.¹ His central observation about the play, and the one most justly remembered, is: ‘Hence great, enormous, intellectual activity, and a consequent proportionate aversion to real action.’² The idea that thinking, in itself, is inimical to action amounted to a profound assumption of romantic psychology, and in far more vulgar forms it became popular currency later in the century. In Hamlet was found the exemplum of one of the oddest fallacies of that (and subsequent) periods. The man of action (railway engineer or empire builder) became sharply divided from the intellectual man, and a mighty slanging match began which is dying, but dying hard, even now. The human race was divided into bloody intellectuals and moronic toughs; or the University world into absent-minded professors and those who rowed boats – it was considered a most extraordinary feat to be both. Hamlet’s popularity, on this showing, is composed of one half of the audience enjoying a demonstration of the futility of the intellectual, while the other half responds with ardent sympathy to the way this sensitive intellectual gets knocked about in the public school of life.

Coleridge did not, of course, envisage any such nonsense as that. But it is notorious how deeply anti-intellectualism has penetrated the traditions of English thought, and that it is still pervasive in public life, still influential in attitudes to education. Such vulgarity has kept Coleridge’s fallacy alive. Its origin was linked to Rousseau’s theories, and so to Wordsworth’s attitude to ‘the meddling intellect’. Its results have been very varied, but involve a general assumption that Hamlet was a potent intellectual, a philosopher who should have remained in the University of Wittenberg, which seems to rest on three forms of evidence: the stress on Hamlet as a student; his expressed ‘philosophy’, largely found in the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy; and finally two or three carefully selected lines from the play.

Student life certainly looms larger here than elsewhere in Shakespeare, but its image is not represented by Hamlet alone. He, Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern had all been at Wittenberg; Laertes returns to the University of Paris. Horatio displays no aversion to action, nor is he supposed to be thoughtless. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are certainly not offered as intellectuals. Polonius inquires into Laertes’ drinking and whoring, and we hear about his duelling. No one, anywhere, refers to their intellectual studies at all. The idea of the student offered in the play is remote indeed from that of one whose will is paralysed by thought.

The conviction has, nevertheless, somehow grown up that Hamlet offers us profound philosophical thinking, although this is not the opinion of philosophers. The point is important, and has been admirably dealt with by D. G. James in The Dream of Learning. James contrasts Bacon and Shakespeare: Bacon thinks (though he may not be a great philosopher if compared with Descartes); so does Shakespeare, but in a different mode. ‘To be or not to be’, which challenges the central values of life (why we don’t commit suicide) does it by an interconnected series of concrete images, associated by a suggested thought process (‘thus … thus …’); but regarded primarily as thought, it is the nearest thing to incoherent. It is not, in fact, philosophical exploration, it is imaginative exploration; reasonable and intelligent certainly, but not philosophy. Against that one may urge that Hamlet does use the language of reason, his syntactical formulae assert an intellectual activity; that we are, in other words, given to understand that he is (as a person in the play) meditating. In that sense it may be legitimate to call him a philosophical character; but it is a very limited sense which has been grossly exaggerated.

Lastly, there are the specific references in the text, and they are curiously few. Hamlet twice attributes failure in action to ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’, and a third allusion has been adduced since Coleridge’s day by semantic ingenuity. The first, from the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, is:

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.

(III. i. 84–5)

But this ‘pale cast’ is not the scholar’s pasty complexion derived from too much midnight oil, and ‘thought’ is not philosophical ratiocination. ‘Thought’ here (as elsewhere in the play) carries strong suggestions of melancholy, and it relates directly to the thoughts of something after death that go before it. Hence the ‘pale cast’ is simultaneously melancholy and cowardice. The thoughts are specific ones on consequences, and not the generalizing tendency towards abstraction which Coleridge postulated.³ It is the same with the last soliloquy, with words that are often cited as direct evidence for Coleridge’s idea – ‘thinking too precisely on th’event’ (IV. iv. 41). Coleridge claimed that thinking is in its nature indefinite: Hamlet says ‘precisely’. That is, as before, that it is thinking of the consequences which induces cowardice:

A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward …(IV. iv. 42–3)

There is no fifth quarter for the inactive intellectual. The third case is from the same context as the first:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

(III. i. 83)

It has been argued, by Bradley as well as others, that ‘conscience’ here means (as it could at the time) ‘consciousness’, the process of thinking, and not the moral quality at all. But elsewhere in Hamlet the word occurs several times, and the moral quality is at least part of its meaning in each case; in one, it is the whole of it, when Hamlet says of Claudius:

is’t not perfect conscience

To quit him with this arm?(V. ii. 67–8)

I am inclined to think that we have no business to exclude the moral sense from the earlier context either, but a more precise account of this line will have to wait for a full analysis of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy later.

My contention is, then, that Coleridge was interpreting Hamlet in the context of romantic thought, quite properly; but more, that he was distorting the play, and that the image which derives from his account is quite misleading. The inactive intellectual is not the heart of Hamlet’s mystery. Bradley, in fact, did not suppose that it was. He accepted Coleridge’s notion as an account of something which happened to Hamlet, but not as a generalization about human behaviour, even as he had observed it in Universities.⁴ What had previously been thought of as cause was therefore demoted to symptom, and under it Bradley sub-imposed a new cause: a profound moral shock which withdrew him into a world of inactive imagining. The shock in question was not, of course, his father’s death, but his mother’s marriage: ‘It was the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother’s true nature.’ Bradley’s Hamlet discovered that Ellen Terry and Fanny Hill were sisters under the skin.

It is worth recalling that it was only in the late eighteenth century that the ‘problem’ of Hamlet came to be thought of as primarily a psychological one; we should not be surprised to realize that it was in the beginning of the twentieth century that this was transposed into sexual psychology, and specifically the shocking recognition of female sexuality. If the psychological stress is the right one, we must always measure it by the best understanding of contemporary psychology. That is what Coleridge did for his age, and Bradley (immediately pre-Freud) for his; and that is what Ernest Jones, Freud’s friend and biographer, did for the 1920s. The explanation offered, of course, was the Oedipus complex. Hamlet’s behaviour has puzzled people for a long time; the puzzle hinges on why Hamlet can’t get on with it and kill Claudius; Shakespeare doesn’t provide us with an answer, only a problem. Hence T. S. Eliot concluded that Hamlet is an artistic failure. Shakespeare could not himself understand what he wanted to portray, which was emotion in excess of the object, the disgust Hamlet felt at his Mother’s behaviour. Bradley, Eliot, and Jones are all in fact extensions of the same view of the play.

Jones contended that Shakespeare portrayed what he had, very keenly, observed; he didn’t ‘explain’ it, because he couldn’t; Freud could. Hamlet’s problem is psychological: he wants to murder his uncle-father, to be cruel to his mother, to abuse his girl-friend; and all this emerges in hysteria and sex-disgust. Why? The Oedipus complex works with a wonderful neatness: Hamlet (like the rest of us) responds to his father as simultaneously a benevolent patriarch and the hated rival in love for his mother. So he has always wanted and not wanted to murder his father. Claudius does murder him, and marries his mother – and thus doubly projects himself into Hamlet’s psychological conflict: he becomes Hamlet’s father, but solely in the hated sense, so Hamlet can now separate the father figures, the dead one becomes wholly benevolent while the living is now...