Hamlet: Critical Essays

Joseph G. Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317814337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

A comprehensive collection of the best writing about this Shakespearian play, both as dramatic literature and theatrical performance, this book is an excellent resource companion to the text. This collected wisdom was originally published in 1986. It contains pieces of commentary from as far back as the late 18th Century but also highly acclaimed critical pieces from more recent years, organised into six general themes.

PART I:

The Play

G. L. Kittredge

From Shakspere: An Address, 1916, Apr. 23

As with our fellow-creatures in real life, so is it with our fellow-creatures in Shakspere. There neither is nor can be any exclusive or orthodox interpretation. Each of us must read the riddle of motive and personality for himself. There will be as many Hamlets or Macbeths or Othellos as there are readers or spectators. For the impressions are not made, or meant to be made, on one uniformly registering and mechanically accurate instrument, but on an infinite variety of capriciously sensitive and unaccountable individualities—on us, in short, who see as we can, and understand as we are. Your Hamlet is not my Hamlet, for your ego is not my ego. Yet both your Hamlet and mine are really existent; and mine is as much to my life as yours to yours—and both are justifiable, if your personality and mine have any claim to exist. You shall convert me if you can, for I am docile and accessible to reason; but, when all is said, and you have taught me whatever is teachable, there must still remain, in the last analysis, a difference that is beyond reconciliation, except in the universal solvent of our common humanity. Otherwise you and I and Hamlet are not individuals, but merely types and symbols, or (worst of worst) stark formulas, masquerading as God’s creatures in a world that is too full of formulas already.

These principles, however, give no license to capricious propaganda. For there is one corrective and restraining proviso. Somewhere there exists, and must be discoverable, the solid fact—and that fact is Shakspere’s Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello. And this actual being is not to be confused, in your apprehension or in mine, with any of the figures that we have constructed, each for himself, by the instinctive reaction of our several personalities under the poet’s art. Each of us has a prescriptive right to his own Hamlet; but none of us has a charter to impose it either upon his neighbor or upon himself as the poet’s intent. We should recognize it rather, and cherish it, as our private property—as something that we have ourselves achieved when our minds and hearts have been kindled by a spark from his altar or a tongue of flame from his Promethean fire.

* * * * * * *

In the first place, the subject of Hamlet is not the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark; it is not the tragedy of any individual: it is the tragedy of a group, of the whole royal family; and their fate involves the destruction of the family of Polonius, which is very close to the royal line, so close that the Danish mob sees nothing extraordinary in the idea of seating Laertes upon the throne.

Caps, hands, and tongues applaud it to the clouds, “Laertes shall be king—Laertes king!”

The tragic complex is almost indescribably entangled, despite the simplicity of the main plot; yet it is brought out with perfect clearness. The moving cause is not the murder: it is the guilty passion of Gertrude and Claudius, to which the murder is incidental. Claudius did not kill his brother, merely, or even chiefly, to acquire the kingdom: he killed him to possess the queen. That was his leading motive, though of course the other is not excluded. Nothing is more striking in the story than the passionate attachment of the guilty pair. And to clinch the matter, we have the words of Claudius himself in that matchless soliloquy when he tries to pray and only succeeds in reasoning himself, with pitiless logic and an intellectual honesty of which only the greatest minds are capable, into assurance of his own damnation.

But O what form of prayer

Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murther?

That cannot be, since I am still possess’d

Of those effects for which I did the murther—

My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen!

Mark the ascending series—and the queen is at the top of the climax. That is where Claudius puts her when he strips his soul bare, and forces it to appear, naked and shivering, before the all-seeing eye.

Again, consider the situation of the queen. Conscious of adultery, but innocent of all complicity in the murder, she is torn asunder by her love for her husband and her love for her son. She would have peace, peace, when there is no peace. And so would Claudius, for his wife’s sake, until he learns that somehow Hamlet has found out the truth, and that it must be war to the knife. Yet he must destroy the son without alienating the mother. And so he becomes his own Nemesis, for the queen drinks to Hamlet from the chalice prepared by Claudius for his enemy. Two lines condense the tragedy of Claudius and Gertrude:

Gertrude, do not drink!

It is the poisoned cup—it is too late!

In this web of crisscross tragic entanglements Polonius is meshed—Polonius, benevolent diplomatist and devoted father— and with him the son and daughter whom he loves with the pathetic tenderness of an old and failing man, and who return his affection as it deserves. The details need no rehearsal, but one point calls for emphasis: the deliberate parallelism of situation which makes Laertes the foil to Hamlet.

They have the same cause at heart: vengeance for a father is their common purpose. But their characters are sharply contrasted. For Laertes strikes on headlong impulse, without balancing and without scruple. If those critics are right who censure Hamlet for alleged inaction, for weakness of will, for being unequal to his task, then Laertes should be commended. For he does precisely what they seem to require of Hamlet. But I hear no praise of Laertes, even from the sternest of Hamlet’s judges. How can they praise him, indeed? For his rash singleness of purpose makes him false to his own code of honor and degrades him to the basest uses. Yet there is no alternative in logic. Laertes, I repeat, is Hamlet’s foil; and if Hamlet is wrong, Laertes must be right.

Veritably, we are at a nonplus if we regard this complex and tangle of tragic situations as a one-part play, or—what is much the same thing—as a mystery of temperament to which the sole character of the hero is the master-key.

No. Hamlet is not the tragedy of a weak-willed procrastinator, of the contemplative nature challenged by fate to fill the rôle of a man of action. On the contrary, it is the tragedy not of an individual but of a group; and in its structure it is balanced, in the most delicate and unstable equilibrium, between two great personages—Hamlet and the King. It is a duel to the death between well-matched antagonists; so well-matched indeed, that neither triumphs, but they destroy each other in the end. Almost everything that has been written about this drama is out of focus. For Claudius is either belittled or disregarded; and—Hamlet’s real obstacle being thus cleared from his path by a complete misrepresentation of the facts—a new obstacle is called into being to account for his delay: namely, a complete misrepresentation of his mental and moral character.

Samuel Johnson

From The Plays of William Shakespeare

If the dramas of Shakespeare were to be characterised, each by the particular excellence which distinguishes it from the rest, we must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous, that the argument of the play would make a long tale. The scenes are interchangeably diversifed with merriment and solemnity; with merriment that includes judicious and instructive observations, and solemnity, not strained by poetical violence above the natural sentiments of man. New characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth, the mournful distraction of Ophelia fills the heart with tenderness, and every personage produces the effect intended, from the apparition that in the first act chills the blood with horror, to the fop in the last, that exposes affectation to just contempt.

The conduct is perhaps not wholly secure against objections. The action is indeed for the most part in continual progression, but there are some scenes which neither forward nor retard it. Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty.

Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent. After he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him, and his death is at last effected by an incident which Hamlet has no part in producing.

The catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity, than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily have been formed, to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laertes with the bowl.

The poet is accused of having shewn little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it; and the gratification which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious.

Elmer Edgar Stoll

From Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study

Confessions in soliloquy, moreover, are generally confirmed,—are, in Shakespeare’s tragedy at least, never contradicted by the comment of other characters in a position to know, or by the confidences imparted to them by the character himself. Hamlet eventually tells Horatio of his uncle’s guilt and his own purpose, but not of his difficulties or failures in carrying it out. To Horatio (or to himself, indeed) he never complains of any specific dereliction of duty such as sparing the King at prayer. Nor to any one is he known to have a defect. No one ever ventures to speak of him slightingly or critically. Why does not the King, Laertes, or Fortinbras despise him for a scholar and dreamer, at least, instead of taking him as they all do for the worthy son of his warrior sire? Why does not the Queen once sigh, or Horatio sadly shake his head? He is a courtier, soldier, scholar, the expectancy and rose of the fair state, cries Ophelia and there is no suggestion that she is saying it as one who does not know. It is the accepted opinion. The King fears him, and shrinks from bringing him to account for Polonius’ death, he says, because of the great love the general gender bear him. The sinful Queen quails under his rebuke, and yet loves him too well to betray his confidence. And, as often in Shakespeare’s tragedies, at the end of the play judgment to the same effect is pronounced on his character by a disinterested party, like the chorus of the Greeks. The closing funeral orations, observes Professor Schick, are always spoken by the dramatist himself.¹ “Let four captains,” cries Fortibras,

Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage,

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royally; and, for his passage,

The soldiers’ music and the rites of warn

Speak loudly for him.

Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

A royal salute is given. For no one else in death has Shakespeare let the trumpets blare and cannon thunder; but this youth, says the man whom Hamlet himself had emulated, would have made a kingly king. It is like the judgment pronounced at the end by Cassio on Othello; like that pronounced by Antony on Brutus; and like that pronounced by Octavius on Antony himself and his queen. But in none of these cases is the praise so unmingled with blame, as if (were the poet to have his way) the villian, fate, and false fortune, not the hero himself, must bear the whole heavy burden. Critics there are who have thought the Fortinbras said it all in irony, but not those who are most in sympathy with Shakespeare’s art.² So the words could not have been understood; or even if they had been, they would have disturbed that note of calm and reconciliation which Shakespeare in his great tragedies always reaches at the close. No respectable person in his dramas, for that matter, consciously or unconsciously speaks lightly of the dead. The poet’s own personal humor, it would seem, did not sally across the confines of the frivolous or profane.

Here, or somewhere, one would have expected comment on Hamlet’s shortcomings, his weakness or tragic fault. Instead, there is only praise from his friends, fear and hatred from his enemies. How is it possible, then, that a tragic fault or weakness could have been intended?³ Not only do Shakespeare’s heroes know their faults, like Lear at the beginning, or Othello at the end, as Hamlet says he does not (and would seem to have none to know), but their friends and enemies know them too. The Fool and Kent know Lear’s, Lady Macbeth her husband’s, Enobarbus Antony’s, Cassius Brutus’, and Iago Othello’s;⁴ but Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, Fortinbras, who at the end avers that as a king he would have proved right royally, even Claudius himself, find in Hamlet no weakness at all! Only Horatio, of course, who alone is in the secret of the murder, could know of the procrastination or suspect it. He does not even hint at it. But Laertes might at least have belittled his swordsmanship, Polonius his statesmanship, and Claudius at times might have questioned his formidable-ness as a foe. Indeed, who so likely to know his own fault as Hamlet himself? At every other point (and at this as well!) he, like other Shakespearean characters, knows...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Play
• Part 2: Hamlet the Character
• Part 3: Scenes and Characters
• Part 4: Language
• Part 5: The Theatre
• Part 6: Hamlet in Fiction
• Bibliography