- P&P
- So it begins . . . Hamlet, that is. Before we begin it, let us hear what a few of the critics have to say about this mysterious drama (see below the HW)
- Let's discuss J4
- Finish J4 (reading posted on Focus)
VOLTAIRE: from 'Dissertation sur la
Tragédie', 1748
Englishmen believe in ghosts no more
than the Romans did yet they take pleasure in the tragedy of Hamlet, in which
the ghost of a king appears on the stage.... Far be it from me to justify
everything in that tragedy; it is a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not
be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy. Hamlet becomes crazy
in the second act, and his mistress becomes crazy in the third; the prince
slays the father of his mistress under the pretence of killing a rat, and the
heroine throws herself into the river, a grave is dug on the stage, and the
grave-diggers talk quodlibets worthy of themselves, while holding skulls in
their hands; Hamlet responds to their nasty vulgarities in silliness no less
disgusting. In the meanwhile another of the actors conquers Poland. Hamlet, his
mother, and his father-in-law, carouse on the stage; songs are sung at table;
there is quarrelling, fighting, killing - one would imagine this piece to be
the work of a drunken savage. But amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which
to this day make the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be
found in Hamlet, by a bizarrerie still greater, some sublime passages, worthy
of the greatest genius. It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of
Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever
witless vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable.
J. W. VON GOETHE: from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, I 795-6
The time is out of joint, 0 cursd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
In these words, I imagine, will be found the key to Hamlet's whole procedure. To me it is clear that Shakspeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed. There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered.
A lovely, pure, noble 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. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and tums, and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind.
S.T. COLERIDGE: from Table Talk, 24 June 1827:
HAMLET'S character is the prevalence
of the abstracting an generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want
courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and
it is curious, and, at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the
play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident to
effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.
A maxim is a conclusion upon
observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective: an Idea, or, if
you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.
Polonius is a man of maxims. Whilst he is descanting on matters of past
experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his
travels, he is admirable; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere
dotard. You see, Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him.
T. S. ELIOT: from 'Hamlet' 1919
Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet
the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the charcter only secondary. And
Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous
type of critic .... These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for
their own artistic realization.
Such a mind had Goethe, who made of
Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and
probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first
business was to study a work of art. . . .
The only way of expressing emotion
in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of
that particular emotion; such that when the extemal facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find
this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth
walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's
death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were
automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic
'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion;
and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is
dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess
of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his
author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of
objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his
creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the
difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is
not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is
thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it
therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible
actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can
express Hamlet for him.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: from Postscript
(1945) to 'Back to Methuselah', 1921
HE took up an old play about the
ghost of a murdered king who haunted his son crying for revenge, with comic
relief provided by the son pretending to be that popular curiosity and
laughing- stock, a village idiot. Shakespear, transfiguring this into a tragedy
on the ancient Athenian level, could not have been quite unconscious of the
evolutionary stride he was taking. But he did not see his way clearly enough to
save the tons of ink and paper and years of 'man's time' that have been wasted,
and are still being wasted, on innumerable volumes of nonsense about the
meaning of Hamlet, though it is now as clear as daylight. Hamlet as a
prehistoric Dane is morally bound to kill his uncle, politically as rightful
heir to the usurped throne, and filially as 'the son of a dear father murdered'
and a mother seduced by an incestuous adulterer. He has no doubt as to his duty
in the matter. If he can convince himself that the ghost who has told him all
this is really his father's spirit and not a lying devil tempting him to
perdition, then, he says, 'I know my course'.
But when fully convinced he finds to
his bewilderment that he cannot kill his uncle deliberately. In a sudden flash
of rage he can and does stab at him through the arras, only to find that he has
killed poor old Polonius by mistake. In a later transport, when the unlucky
uncle poisons not only Hamlet's mother but his own accomplice and Hamlet
himself, Hamlet actually does at last kill his enemy on the spur of the moment;
but this is no solution of his problem: it cuts the Gordian knot instead of
untying it, and makes the egg stand on end only by breaking it. In the
soliloquy beginning 'O, what a rogue and peasant slave am l' Shakespear
described this moral bewilderment as a fact (he must have learnt it from his
own personal development); but he did not explain it, though the explanation
was staring him in the face as it stares in mine. What happened to Hamlet was
what had happened fifteen hundred years before to Jesus. Bom into the
vindictive morality of Moses he has evolved into the Christian perception of
the futility and wickedness of revenge and punishment, founded on the simple
fact that two blacks do not make a white. But he is not philosopher enough to
comprehend this as well as apprehend it. When he finds he cannot kill in cold
blood he can only ask 'Am I a coward?' When he cannot nerve himself to recover
his throne he can account for it only by saying 'I lack ambition'. Had
Shakespear plumbed his play to the bottom he would hardly have allowed Hamlet
to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death by a forged death warrant
without a moment's scruple.
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