Shakespeare's Hamlet bound with The Problem of Hamlet

A. Clutton-Brock, J. M. Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317814450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This volume combines two classic works on Hamlet, first published in 1919 and 1922.

The first book's original description says that it contains a theory which attempts to explain an everlasting problem - it insists that Hamlet is neither a failure not an accident, but a very great work of art. In a final chapter, the play is examined as an aesthetic document. It is a profoundly interesting and not unprovocative work.

The second book reviews and attempts to resolve the most interesting debate of any Shakespeare play and presents proper method for investigating the genesis of the plays in this way.

SHAKESPEARE’S “HAMLET”

BY

A. CLUTTON-BROCK

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C
LONDON

PREFACE

THE theory of Hamlet, which I state in the second chapter of this book, was first suggested to me by a performance of the play which Mr. William Poel gave some years before the war in the Little Theatre. It left out a good deal of the play and was imperfect in execution; but it seemed to me right in conception, and suddenly I understood Hamlet, or thought I did, and saw that it was not a puzzle but a masterpiece. I then tried to explain my understanding in an analysis of the play, but did not publish it because, I thought, enough and more than enough had been written about Hamlet. I am provoked to publish it now, after rewriting it, by the theories of Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr. T. S. Eliot, with which I deal in my first chapter and which imply, or assert, that Hamlet is not a masterpiece at all, but an accident or a failure. Mr. Eliot’s criticism, in particular, seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding, not only of this play, but of the whole nature of art; and I am convinced by other criticism which I have read, that such misunderstanding is a common obstacle to the experience of art. I have therefore added a last chapter on Hamlet as an aesthetic document. I must make general acknowledgments to Mr. Bradley, whose essay on Hamlet I have mentioned once or twice; for it may be that I owe more to it than I know.

A. CLUTTON-BROCK

THE RED HOUSE, GODALMING

December 28, 1921

CONTENTS

I.	THE CASE AGAINST “HAMLET”
II.	WHY HAMLET DELAYED TO KILL THE KING
III	ON “HAMLET” AS AN ÆSTHETIC DOCUMENT
APPENDIX
	DID HAMLET DELAY TO KILL THE KING?

SHAKESPEARE’S “HAMLET”

CHAPTER I

The Case against “Hamlet”

THOUGH Hamlet is the most acted, and discussed, of all Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps of all plays that have ever been written, yet there is a case against it; and that case can best be stated in a question— What is the cause of Hamlet’s delay in killing the King? It has been asked for two hundred years; in 1736 Hanmer, Mr. Bradley tells us, remarked that “there appears no reason at all in nature why this young Prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as possible”; and he continues, “If Shakespeare had made the young man go naturally to work, there would have been no play at all.”¹ If this is so, then the case against Hamlet is proved; for a play, that can be prolonged only if the hero does not go naturally to work, is bad in conception. But most of those who have discussed the delay have not accepted Hanmer’s reason for it; they have found the cause either in Hamlet’s circumstances or in his character; they say that he could not kill the King because he was so well guarded, or that he suffered from some mental impediment to the exercise of his will.

The first of these explanations would also condemn the play, if it were true; for it was Shakespeare’s business to make us see that Hamlet was prevented by circumstances. But it is not true. The King, while praying, is exposed, unguarded, to Hamlet; and Hamlet himself says that he has means enough to kill him. His difficulty, whatever it may be, is not that. But, if the impediment is in his character, Shakespeare has still to meet the charge that he has not explained what that impediment is. He draws our attention to it, for Hamlet himself wonders why he does not kill the King; and writers, who have discussed the character of Hamlet, have given many reasons, some ingenious and some absurd but most of them subject to this objection, that they are guessed or imagined as if he were a real man, a person of history, instead of a character in a play. The difficulty of the problem lies in the fact that he is a character in a play and that therefore we must look for the causes of his behaviour in that play; we know nothing about him except what is in it, for there is nothing else to know. Why then has Shakespeare left the causes of his behaviour obscure to us, if he has left them obscure; why has he insisted that they were obscure to Hamlet himself?

Mr. J. M. Robertson has lately written a book, The Problem of Hamlet, in which he returns to Hanmer’s answer, though he gives reasons for it which Hanmer did not give. The cause of the delay,¹ he says, is to be found, not in Hamlet’s character nor in his circumstances, but in the circumstances of the play. Shakespeare, when he wrote Hamlet, was revising an old play, in which the young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as possible, for the very reasons given by Hanmer. Shakespeare “simply decided to accept inexplicable delay as the formula of a play which reached him with that character apparently stamped upon it.” This old play does not exist; but, as Mr Robertson says, it certainly did exist in Shakespeare’s time and was, very likely, written by Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy—Mr. Robertson ingeniously conjectures the character of this play both from Kyd’s other works and from a German play, Der Bestrafte Brodermord, which may have been a version of it. The German play, which I have not read, appears from Mr. Robertson’s account of it to be a crude drama of revenge delayed by expedients; and, as Mr. Robertson says, we should expect from Kyd a “delayed revenge as in the Tragedy, but a revenge delayed simply—or partly—through lack of opportunity or fear of miscarriage, as in that case,” though this would not be “inexplicable delay.” Certainly we should not expect a play, or a character, at all like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It will be seen, therefore, that, since we know nothing of Kyd’s play, the extent of its influence upon Hamlet must be conjecture; and further that, if indeed the delay in Hamlet is simply an inheritance from Kyd for which Shakespeare fails to account, then Hamlet is not the masterpiece it has always been called, and the problem is not one of Hamlet’s conduct but of Shakespeare’s misconduct.

Mr. Robertson conjectures that Kyd did account for the delay in some crude, mechanical, way, such as lack of opportunity, or fear of miscarriage, but that Shakespeare, for reasons which are difficult to understand, left out Kyd’s explanation without providing one of his own; in fact left Hamlet himself wondering why he did not kill the King, and has left us all wondering ever since with good reason, since the cause was to be found, not in Hamlet at all, but in the lost work of Kyd.

If this is true, the proof of it is to be found only in Hamlet; and Mr. Robertson tries to find it there. But a great part of his ingenious attempt is irrelevant, since it is not concerned with the delay, but with other matters. He believes, for instance, that Kyd’s play was in two parts and that Hamlet is so long because Shakespeare crowded the two parts into one; but that has nothing to do with the problem of the delay, unless we suppose that Shakespeare was forced to crowd out all Kyd’s explanations of that delay; in which case he was merely incompetent. Then, he says, there are irrelevant scenes in Hamlet which survive from Kyd; but these, if they exist, also have nothing to do with the problem of the delay; and why did Shakespeare retain them if he was forced to crowd out Kyd’s explanations? One of them is the scene between Reynaldo and Polonius, which Mr. Robertson calls purposeless. But, not only does it come immediately after the great scene between Hamlet and the Ghost, to which it is a relief; it also leads into the first scene between Polonius and Ophelia; and it exhibits Polonius fussing about both of his children. We have no right to suspect it unless it is irrelevant beyond Shakespeare’s usage, which it is not.¹ But Mr. Robertson is in a difficulty with this scene since there is nothing in it that suggests Kyd’s method, let alone his style. He therefore conjectures that it was inserted by Chapman (and perhaps revised by Shakespeare) because “such irrelevant scene-writing is the speciality of Chapman.” But he has begun by supposing that the scene is irrelevant in Hamlet because it is a survival from Kyd’s play, in which there is no reason to suppose it was irrelevant. He is here torn between his desire to prove the influence of Kyd by the survival of matter irrelevant to Shakespeare’s play, and his theory that Chapman was a kind of “affable, familiar ghost” who went about inserting irrelevant scenes in other men’s plays. But he can’t have it both ways. If the irrelevance of the scene is a proof that it survives from Kyd’s play, it cannot be a product of Chapman’s passion for irrelevance. Chapman may just as well have played his tricks on Shakespeare as on Kyd.

Mr. Robertson also speculates about the Fortinbras episodes; but these, whether or no they are irrelevant, have nothing to do with the problem of Hamlet’s delay. They are, he says, “in no way necessary, as the play stands, to the final action; and, for that very reason, to suppose that Shakespeare invented them is to impute to him a kind of gratuitous mismanagement impossible to him as a practical playwright. Rather we must assume that they too were given him; and pronounce that his error lay in retaining them.” This is a curious argument coming from Mr. Robertson, who imputes to Shakespeare a gratuitous mismanagement much greater. A few superfluous scenes in an Elizabethan play matter little, if they are short; for the Elizabethan method, and particularly Shakespeare’s, is a swift succession of scenes changing easily from one into another. There is no pretence of giving a whole story but rather a search-light seems to be thrown here and there upon a moving stream of events; it is a method which must be understood if we are to understand Shakespeare’s stage-craft or the manner in which his plays should be acted. But it does matter much, in Elizabethan as in any drama, if, in the revision of a play, the delay in the main action is retained but the causes of it are not. That would indeed be gratuitous mismanagement, impossible to Shakespeare or indeed to anyone. I am not concerned to deny that the Fortinbras episodes may have been retained from the earlier play; but the fact that they are usually cut out of modern performances does not prove them irrelevant; modern performances usually reconstruct Hamlet into a different kind of play, losing the swift succession of scenes and the search-light effect for the sake of scenery and spectacle. One would need to see Hamlet performed as Shakespeare meant it to be performed, before one could judge what, if anything, was irrelevant in it. But, even if everything is irrelevant which Mr. Robertson calls so, that would only go to prove that Shakespeare did rewrite an old play, which is not denied; it would not prove that, from mere carelessness or incompetence, he decided to accept inexplicable delay as the formula of the play, especially if, in the old play, the delay was, however mechanically, explained.

But Mr. Robertson seems to think that Shakespeare was, in some way, compelled thus to retain the formula of delay, while dropping the reasons for it. “It is easy to show that, while Shakespeare is certainly capable of oversight and of occasional confusion, in this case he has suffered or accepted compulsion imposed by material which, as a stage manager revising a popular play of marked action, he did not care to reject.” What was this compulsion? If there was any compulsion at all, it must have been given a certain plot, to retain the dramatic essence of that plot and not to retain certain scenes and episodes which, according to Mr. Robertson, are clearly superfluous. There was nothing to prevent Shakespeare from cutting out the Fortinbras and the Reynaldo episodes; there was everything to prevent him from cutting out the very mainspring of the plot, without finding another to put in its place. Mr. Robertson does not suggest that Shakespeare was in a hurry; he admits that “In Hamlet, the first of the great plays in which Shakespeare fully reveals his supremacy, there is far more evidence of superabundant power, and of keen interest in the main theme than of haste or carelessness.” Therefore, if Shakespeare did ignore Kyd’s causes for the delay, he must have had his reasons for doing so; it was not a matter of compulsion at all. Shakespeare, when he wrote Hamlet, was no longer the mere “factotum” that Green called him about ten years before; he was, perhaps, the most successful playwright of his time. If he chose to rewrite an old play, he could make what he would of it; he did rewrite the whole of Hamlet, and, on Mr. Robertson’s own showing, so freely that he left out an essential part of Kyd’s play. What then becomes of the notion that, while leaving it out, he was “compelled” to put nothing else in to take its place?

(There is evidence, perhaps, that Shakespeare took more pains with Hamlet than with any other play, in the fact that there exists an earlier version of it, the Quarto of 1603. I am not concerned here to discuss the difficult problem of that earlier version, which seems to consist partly of Shakespeare’s work garbled and partly of fragments of the older play, because there is much uncertainty about the manner in which it came into being. There is, at any rate, no reason to suppose that it gives us a version of the play which was at any time Shakespeare’s own version. It seems rather a hotch-potch of Shakespeare and the older play, put together perhaps by some one who got Shakespeare’s part of it furtively as well as imperfectly. Our document for Shakespeare’s intentions and procedure is only Hamlet in its final versions; and this, I think, Mr. Robertson himself would allow. I therefore ignore the 1603 Quarto, except to say that, if it proves anything at all about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which I doubt, it proves only that he made an earlier version which he afterwards revised, and therefore that he took unusual pains with it.)

Mr. Robertson insists in the passage I have quoted from him that Kyd’s Hamlet was a play of marked action. His theory seems to be that Shakespeare was compelled to retain that marked action as being the essence of the play; he means, I suppose, that the audience would have resented the absence of incidents to which they were accustomed; they would have said it was Hamlet, not without the Prince of Denmark, but without the ghost, the madness, the sudden deaths; it was not Hamlet himself that interested them but these things. Shakespeare, however, whatever compulsion he was subject to, was interested in Hamlet himself; and he has succeeded so well in communicating his interest to us that “Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter I The Case against “Hamlet”
• Chapter II Why Hamlet delayed to kill the King
• Chapter III On “Hamlet” as an Æsthetic Document
• Appendix Did Hamlet delay to kill the King?
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• I The Æsthetic Problem
• II The Documentary Problem
• III Kyd's Probable Construction
• IV Shakespeare's Work of Transmutation
• Index