FOOTNOTES:[5]But since Voltaire's time, and notably within the present century, the French mind has amply atoned for previous misconceptions, and its tribute to the genius of Shakspeare is rivalling England itself. Germany was earlier in this field; but, if France means to annex Shakspeare, she can afford to let Alsace and Lorraine go. The younger Hugo's study of Hamlet; the volumes of Alfred Mézières, of Philaréte Chasles; the studies of Guizot; the admirable article upon Cleopatra by Henri Blaze de Bury, in theRevue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1872; another, later, in the same review, upon "Medical Psychology in the Dramas of Shakspeare," &c.,—show a noble disposition and a thorough sympathy.[6]Obviously the proper reading. Prince Henry says, "This Doll Tear-street should be some road." First noticed by Coleridge.
FOOTNOTES:
[5]But since Voltaire's time, and notably within the present century, the French mind has amply atoned for previous misconceptions, and its tribute to the genius of Shakspeare is rivalling England itself. Germany was earlier in this field; but, if France means to annex Shakspeare, she can afford to let Alsace and Lorraine go. The younger Hugo's study of Hamlet; the volumes of Alfred Mézières, of Philaréte Chasles; the studies of Guizot; the admirable article upon Cleopatra by Henri Blaze de Bury, in theRevue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1872; another, later, in the same review, upon "Medical Psychology in the Dramas of Shakspeare," &c.,—show a noble disposition and a thorough sympathy.
[5]But since Voltaire's time, and notably within the present century, the French mind has amply atoned for previous misconceptions, and its tribute to the genius of Shakspeare is rivalling England itself. Germany was earlier in this field; but, if France means to annex Shakspeare, she can afford to let Alsace and Lorraine go. The younger Hugo's study of Hamlet; the volumes of Alfred Mézières, of Philaréte Chasles; the studies of Guizot; the admirable article upon Cleopatra by Henri Blaze de Bury, in theRevue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1872; another, later, in the same review, upon "Medical Psychology in the Dramas of Shakspeare," &c.,—show a noble disposition and a thorough sympathy.
[6]Obviously the proper reading. Prince Henry says, "This Doll Tear-street should be some road." First noticed by Coleridge.
[6]Obviously the proper reading. Prince Henry says, "This Doll Tear-street should be some road." First noticed by Coleridge.
HAMLET.
HAMLET.
Inthis play it is common to look for an exhibition of humor in the scene of the Grave-diggers; but those personages are only amusing as a couple of common men whose profession seems to have buried both their feelings and their wits. One of them is accidentally witty when he asks, "Is she to be buried in Christian burial, that wilfully seeks her own salvation?" But he and his companion do not make good the promise of this opening text: they turn out to be tedious louts who bring ale-house chatter to a churchyard and only rise to the dignity of being ghastly, although we know that the grave they dig is for Ophelia. We do not properly recollect and feel this till they disappear and the music of the funeral train is heard. Their shovelfuls of dirt and bones make coffin-like cæsuras in their singing, but the songs are too trivial to be trolled over a pot; scarce are they a setting to an empty skull. They rattle so dryly you wish they might be dumped in and covered up. The sexton-riddles have little more juice in them, for they are the kind that boozy gossips clink out of their cans, and not the gay pursuivants of wisdom. We begin to reflect that such triviality does not become interesting because it is well hit off, and that in one respect it is not well hit off, since it recurs too tiresomely; and we are on the point of voting the wholegrave-digging business to be a mouldy impertinence, when there flashes upon us the better thought that Shakspeare was here deepening pathos upon the fair maid who must be the tenant of this grave so fatuously dug. To this complexion must we all come at last, and beauty cannot repel the loutish hands which take their fee for shovelling dirt upon its clay.
There is so little comic business in this scene that actors are at their wits' end to make it hold the audience. They used to wear a dozen or two waistcoats, and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them off, one after another; wearing all the time an air as if each one was the last, until you doubted whether, instead of a man inside, there were any thing more than a yardstick to measure vest-patterns with. So Thackeray takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well-known articles of his apparel,—"under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." But the waistcoated business always secured the laugh which the clowns' insipid discussion could not raise.
This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no existence in the earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an after-thought of Shakspeare as he moulded the play to its perfection.
In the vignettes of mediæval manuscripts and the frescoes of chapels, there were ghastly drawings of the Dance of Death, or the so-calledDanse Macabre.[7]It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly man by the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood runs counter to the violent bad taste of these unfleshed processions; they contrast with the warm truth of Nature too sharply for the work of redemption. Shakspeare was anxious not to point the old moral, but to enhance our pity: he needed this contrast with Ophelia. Perhaps he was recalling those paintings when he set the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. "O rose of May, dear maid!" He purposely lifts a handful of mould to our faces, that we may smell the rose above it.
"A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,For ——, and a shrouding sheet:Oh, a pit of clay for to be madeFor such a guest is meet."
Taine mentions with surprise that the English audiences still laugh when Hamlet traces the noble dust of Alexander to its final bier in a bung-hole. The Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the incongruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. But the laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of fancy which suddenly brings together such opposite things. The effect is like that of witnessing any ludicrous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. Extremes meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair should be whipped away just as he sits down from his climax. Hamlet does not think it too curious to consider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp: she is not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune mischance the less.
After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the "antic disposition" which tints his behavior is ironical; his remarks keenly cut down to where our laugh lies, but scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw open the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor does. We enjoy seeing with what superior insight he baffles all the spies who cannot play upon a pipe, yet expect to play upon him. This gives to the scene the flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the subacid of cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied of its humor, and is only an ill-savored text to a chop-fallen discourse upon mortality.
But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment when you are least expecting it, as events transpire which ought to kill, you would think, the very heart of such a feeling: it is, indeed, expiring,—caught as it falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, with Horatio and Marcellus, the scene upon the platform after Hamlet's dread interview with a murdered father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of manner is shaken; and we hear him writing truisms in his tablet, in a flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may smile and be a villain. But let us also make a note ofthat, as he did: it will interpret to us the tone of his subsequent demeanor which everybody thought was madness. In the mean time we are upon this spectre-haunted platform, seeking with his friends to discover what news the ghost brought. Hamlet trifles with them to put off their curiosity; but the scene soon rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that is extorted by the experience of a vision which comes to so few that mankind has only heard of such things. But just as the human voices are about to pledge themselves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives, and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from the glare and publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice comes, building this terrific chord of a nether world up to their purpose, that it may unalterably stand. "Swear!" The deep craves it of them; it has joined the company uninvited, but they feel convinced that it is a comrade fated to go with them to their graves. "Swear!" it reiterates: no change of place can remove them from this importunity. The centre of an unatoned murder is beneath every spot to which they shift their feet.
Now the two friends of Hamlet possess nerves which have been hitherto tuned only by the vibrations of the sunshine or of the moon's unhaunted silver. Even if they had known of the murder, their interest in it would not have been personal enough to lend fortitude to help them tolerate this unseen visitor, the murdered man himself! What an encounter! Whose wits of earthly stoutness can sustain it? They feel, and so do we, that the awe is accumulating into a wave that may o'ertopple every sense.
Here mark how superior Shakspeare would have us estimate Hamlet to be, with a capacity of self-possession and a readiness to recur to it. He perceives their friendship to be sorely tried, and on the point of crumbling; and as men muster to repair a dyke, so his resource is prompt, drawn from a soul that can make even a ghost companionable, and no match at all for any bantering mood of his. Tush, my friends! it is no ghost at all: 'tis a "fellow in the cellarage." There's a human phrase for which this wild weather provides a rift; it touches the awe with a strange smile that relieves the men to complete their pact before all the blood of friendship curdles. And we who listen are also kept within our human kind.
"You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" What a sentence to puncture the abyss of the supernatural!
Then Hamlet shifts his standing-place for the sake of his friends; but the unavenged murder is underneath there awaiting them. So the Prince lightly rallies it for its knack of burrowing: he nicknames it an old mole, and the fancy is pleasant; for it occurs to him that he must work under ground for the future; so he calls the mole "a worthy pioneer." "Once more remove, good friends." Then, as he instructs them with minute precautions against ever seeming too wise about the subterranean disposition he may choose to follow, the awful revenge cries up again to them. But their nerves, by this time wonted to the strangeness, no longer need the relief of his ironical braving; so Hamlet dismisses that vein, and lets a murdered father claim the scene to closeit with its proper color subdued to the solemn reassurance, "Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!" Then our own spirits venture forth into calmness and hush of the breaking day.
Not the faintest streak of Humor appears in this tragedy to reconcile us with the drift of it. Polonius belongs to comedy, because he is an old counsellor who was once valuable, whose wits have grown seedy on purpose to delight us with his notion that he fathoms and circumvents the Prince. When a man's feeling of importance has outlived his value, so that his common-sense trickles feebly over the lees of maxims, and his policies are absurd attempts to appear as shrewd as ever before persons who are in better preservation, he belongs to the comic side of life. We cannot help smiling at his most respectable recommendations; for they are like hats lingering in fashion, but destitute of nap. He wears one of these, and goes about conceiting that his head mounts a gloss. There is not enough of Polonius left to tide him through this tragedy, unless it might have been in dumb show: he must lurk behind an arras to get himself mistaken for a king; and, as he does this after sending a spy into France to watch his son's habits, we have not a tear to spare. And we only think how delightfully bewildered he will be if his ghost gets out of the body, escaping a politic convocation of worms, in time to help receive the other ghost, and to understand then, if any wit is left over in him, that his king was murdered and Hamlet is harping on something besides his daughter. But his absurdity survives,and is voiced by Hamlet in the scenes where the King tries to discover what has become of the body.
The theories which undertake to explain the nature of the "antic disposition" which Hamlet hinted that he might assume do not satisfy me that the heart of that mystery has been plucked out. But the key to it may be read engrossed upon his tablets. The subsequent behavior of Hamlet is the exact counterpart in Irony of the conviction that was so suddenly thrust upon him, and terribly emphasized by his father, that a man may smile and be a villain. To this point let a few pages of explanation be accorded.
In the first place, I notice that the behavior of Hamlet, which has the reputation of being feigned, is a genuine exercise of Irony, and consequently covers a feeling and purpose that are directly opposite to its tone of lightness; but it results organically from Hamlet's new experience, and does not require to be premeditated as madness would be. We see his vigorous and subtle mind set open by the revelations of the ghost; but it is too well hung to be slamming to and fro in gusts of real madness, and its normal movement shuts out the need of feigning. When his father first tells that he has been murdered, we find that Hamlet thinks himself quite capable of decision: there is no infirmity of purpose in that early mood to sweep to his revenge "with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love." What is it that converts this mood into an irresoluteness which contrives the whole suspense, and in fact gives us the whole tragedy? First, partly, that hisfather tells Hamlet he was murdered by his own brother. Then the question of revenge becomes more difficult to settle, especially as it involves widowing his mother; and it is noticeable that the father himself, who afterwards deplored Hamlet's irresolution, had previously made suggestions to him which hampered his action by constraining him to feel how complicated the situation was. The father's caution runs thus:—
"But, howsoever thou pursu'st this act,Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contriveAgainst thy mother aught: leave her to Heaven,And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,To prick and sting."
This does not inhibit Hamlet from dealing retribution on the uncle, but clogs a mind so sensitive with the drawback of consideration for the wife: she is evidently no accomplice or confidant of the murder; that is clear from the uniform respect, and even tenderness, which the ghost craves for her.
But though Hamlet thinks that he is capable of decision, he is so only when the case presented to his meditation is so direct and plain that no chance for a fencing-match of motives is involved. The conviction which justifies his prophetic soul half disarms it. When the uncle is at his prayers, Hamlet might "do it, pat;" but the opportunity is too favorable: it paralyzes a mind of his consideration. He cannot bear to rush upon a man's back whose face is bent towards an act that has a savor of salvation in it. But when Polonius was concealed behind the arras and cried out, Hamlet impulsively utilized the moment of hatred of the supposed eavesdropper; but, finding he had killed the wrong man, his swift action passes into that impetuous arraignment of his mother which follows, and thus expends itself upon the nearest object. He took Polonius for his better, but his resolve is "sicklied o'er" by this mistake; and an almost blunted purpose proves seasonable armor for the King. People of far less nice reflection than Hamlet had would feel hampered by such an accident. It is in the nature of all of us to find a passion grow cool beneath the drift of an untoward cloud; so that I cannot conceive that Shakspeare meant to develop the whole tragedy out of an over-scrupulosity of speculation. The ghost himself, whose latest visitation is but to whet Hamlet's revenge, again diverts him from that point by bidding him turn and look where amazement sits upon his mother:—
"Oh, step between her and her fighting soul!Speak to her, Hamlet."
And an arrowy current from a long accumulating heart sweeps through the midnight hours. Then, by the light of the succeeding day, we observe that Hamlet's mind has recovered its strain of irony: it passes for the flightiness that gets him despatched to England, where all the people are as mad as he. But Hamlet's nerves, though delicately spun, are spun of some toughness that never snaps nor ravels. His pulse "doth temperately keep time, and makes as healthful music" as any man's.
Throughout the play, a refined superiority is the keynote of his character. The "heavy-headed revel" ofthe Danes seems to him a custom "more honored in the breach than the observance," though he is to the manner born and has a head not easily overthrown. He says to his fellow-students, "We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart." But he keeps himself aloof from contracting a habit. The same speech contains traces of the observation exercised by a soul that is sustained by the sound pith of virtue. It often chances, he says, that one vicious mole of nature is the fly in the ointment of the apothecary, and undoes all the noble substance. His tendency to speculate upon suicide belongs to a mind in which conscience is so supreme and strong that its ideal makes life scarcely tolerable. But there is no feeble whimper in the tone, nor when his friends are trying to dissuade him from following the ghost; he routs them and all our cowardice at once:
"Why, what should be the fear?I do not set my life at a pin's fee;And, for my soul, what can it do to that,Being a thing immortal as itself?"
Yes, we—already the ghosts—are a match for any ghost. Self-poised and self-sufficing, his ambition is to occupy the kingdom of a mind. "O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space." And, in the midst of the torrent that bursts from him to overwhelm his mother, there is that smooth, still eddy, "Forgive me this my virtue," and all the stars of his soul look down into it.
Shakspeare plainly meant us to infer that Hamlet had inherited the traits of a noble father: for who but sucha son could describe with impetuous remembrance the kingly qualities which had given birth to him? In his mind's eye, he could always see this father:—
"Look here, upon this picture, and on this:See what a grace was seated on this brow!A combination and a form, indeed,Where every god did seem to set his seal,To give the world assurance of a man.This was your husband."
He is that man's son, and not his mother's.
"Ha! have you eyes?"
What devil was it that made you seize upon this other man in a game of blindfold?
"A slave, that is not twentieth part the titheOf your precedent lord; a vice of kings!A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,That from a shelf the precious diadem stoleAnd put it in his pocket."
Look there! The dear hallucination of fatherhood! "What would you, gracious figure?" The ghost has come to put this sketch of memory into italics; as if filial appreciation had projected it upon the midnight, in the intensity of recalling his majestic soul. Only a son who was in all respects worthy to be born of Nature's nobleman could pay this debt of being nobly born, and give Imagination's birth to such a sire. See there, he is born! the son is father and mother: inbred posterity conceives its ancestor.
Thus I venture to suppose that, when Hamlet came to his mother, Shakspeare had not deliberated that theghost would join the party. But his brain kindled with the midnight passion, streamed over down into the pen, and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's reminiscence into the vaporous outline, which always startles us because it startled Shakspeare,—a sudden whiteness running high along the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. The scene then shudders with deference to this unexpected presence, which only the son who conceived it can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become merely a coast to help the great wave fall back and subside.
It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so greatly absorbed as to obliterate our knowledge that the father's custom is to take his cue from the climax of his son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce the thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe and silence, and they suddenly drew him to their ghost.
I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and enigmatic style into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not a deliberate effort to sustain the character of a madman, because such a person as Hamlet could find no motive in it: he could not need it to mask his desire to avenge the ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the palace, and supernaturally elected to be master of the situation. He says he has "cause and will and strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that his mind, driven from its ordinary gravity, and the channel of his favorite thoughts diverted, instinctively saves itself by this sustained gesture of irony; and it appears to be madness only to those who do not know that he iswell informed of the event, and is struggling to set free from it a purpose. And why should a man of such a well-conditioned brain, a noticer of nice distinctions, have selected for a simulation of madness a style which, nicely estimated, is not mad? He could not calculate that everybody would interpret this difference from his usual deportment into an unsettling of his wits; for the style shows unconsciousness and freedom from premeditation. If he wished to feign distraction, he would have taken care to mar the appositeness of his ironical allusions, which are always in place and always logical. And, if he was half unhinged without knowing it, his speech would have betrayed the same inconsequence. Nowhere is he so abrupt, or delivers matter so remote from an immediate application, that he seems to us to wander, because we too have been admitted to the confidences of the ghost, and share that advantage over the other characters.
Since this essay was written, I have found, in the highly suggestive "Shakspeare-Studien" of Otto Ludwig, the following remarks, which are closely related to my own treatment of the subject, and provide some additional reflections:—
"Hamlet's subjective tendency is so predominant that we are surprised when he alleges no motive for assuming madness; nor is it elsewhere accounted for. It would have served his purpose much better if he had feigned a comfortable and contented, rather than an unsettled, mind. And, on the whole, one cannot at any point detect a reason why he chooses any active dissimulation. For he merely needed to remain undiscovered.
"We never hear him once reflecting upon his intention, though he runs to reflection on all topics. Just after the apparition, he merely remarks to his friends that, if he should appear to them to do strange things, they need not remark upon it so as to betray his object." Ludwig here alludes to the lines,—
"As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meetTo put an antic disposition on."
Hamlet tells them not to seem too wise about it. The theory of premeditated madness rests upon this passage, and upon one other, which will be noticed. But suppose that Shakspeare did at first entertain a purpose, borrowed from the old chronicle, of disguising Hamlet in some unusual vein, the psychological necessities of his character decided what that vein must be, as they also decided against the old chronicle in the matter of introducing a ghost. And Hamlet's mental quality is really shown by the vein into which it imperatively runs. He was overmastered and completely occupied by this mood of indignation at all the villainous cants of a smiling world. The temper grew so compactly beneath Shakspeare's pen that he could not interpolate into it any amateur simulations. The poet would not, if he could, have so diluted the terribly gathering sincerity which left that epithet of "antic" beached high up and disqualified for floating on its tide.
On Elsinore's platform, Hamlet felt that the suddencomplication would put him into strange behavior; he did not know exactly what, but he perceived it coming on. Such a man estimates himself more shrewdly than the crowd imagines. He was aware of a mind that over-refined and idealized, and of a disposition to avoid too close realities. Any hint of nature or society sufficed to sequester him in a monologue. But now he felt some modification passing through him; it is scarcely yet articulate, but it is inevitable to a man of his quality. Hamlet may call his mood by whatever phrases suit the different emergencies; but, in the main, it is the breaking-up of his mind's customary exercise into ironical scorn at discovering the rottenness of Denmark.
The Greek word εἱρωνεἱα, whence our Irony is derived with its special meaning, had not yet been modernly grafted on the Saxon stem. Ben Jonson says:—
"Most Socratic lady!Or, if you will, ironick!"
For the wordsirony,ironick, were at first used in English, and quite sparingly, to express the method of Socrates in conducting an argument; that is, by eliciting from an opponent his own refutation by asking him misleading questions. The words, in any sense, are not found in Shakspeare. Lord Bacon, in one instance, usesironynearly in the modern sense; and that is Socratic only so far as a thing is said with an intent the reverse of its ostensible meaning.
The other passage upon which the theory of premeditated madness rests occurs in the great scene with his mother, Act III. 4, during which she becomes convinced that Hamlet is out of his senses by seeing him kill the good Polonius, and hearing him rave as if he saw a spectre. She was the earliest of the critics and experts who are profoundly convinced of his madness. At the close of the scene, it occurs to him to avail himself of her misapprehension to procure continued immunity from any suspicion of design against the King. How shall he do this,—how contrive to clinch her conviction of his madness, and send her reeking with it to inform the King? His subtle intelligence does at this point invent the only simulation of madness that the play contains. He is just about to bid the Queen good-night: "So, again, good-night." Then the device occurs to him: "One word more, good lady;" and the Queen, turning, says, "What shall I do?"
"Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed;Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,Make you to ravel all this matter out,That I essentially am not in madness,But mad in craft. 'Twere good you let him know."
This is the very craftiness of a madman, to try to convince people that, if he ever seems to be insane, it is for a sane motive. Hamlet reckons that the Queen is so deeply imbued with the idea of his insanity as to interpret this disclaimer of his into the strongest confirmation. Hamlet, moreover, not only seems to beaccounting for symptoms of madness, but to be making a confidant of his mother; he begs her not to betray the secret object of his strange behavior. This seems to her to be the very quintessence of madness, to confess to her that he is feigning it out of craft, and to suppose that she would not apprise her husband, who must be the special object of that craft and most in danger from it. He must be indeed preposterously mad; so in parting she pretends to receive his confidential disclosure:—
"Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,And breath of life, I have no life to breatheWhat thou hast said to me."
She may safely promise that, when she means to repair to the King with quite a different version of Hamlet's condition, the very one upon which he counts to keep the King deceived. And in the next scene she conveys her strong impression to him:—
King.What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?Queen.Mad as the sea and wind, when both contendWhich is the mightier. In his lawless fit,Behind the arras hearing something stir,He whips his rapier out, and cries, "A rat!"And in his brainish apprehension killsThe unseen good old man.
She is the mother of the physiological criticism which issues from insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is not an inmate: and Hamlet himself, by deceiving his mother, furnished to psychological criticism the text that he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to neither school.
Hamlet gives us unconsciously an opportunity to infer his ability to frame the incoherences which real madness suggests to one who would feign it. It occurs directly upon the Queen's suspicion, who, being unable to see her husband's ghost standing in her chamber, exclaims,—
"This is the very coinage of your brain:This bodiless creation ecstasyIs very cunning in."
Hamlet, repelling the insinuation, says,—
"It is not madnessThat I have uttered: bring me to the test,And I the matter will re-word, which madnessWould gambol from."
And herein he implies that as he can construct the phrases of sanity, being all the time of a sound mind, so the soundness would serve him to invent thenon sequitursof madness. If, then, he purposed to feign it when he said that perhaps he might hereafter put on an antic disposition, the reader may ask why so subtle a person did not carry out his plan. No doubt, it occurred to him that, as he travelled towards his purpose, his demeanor must be of the kind that would cover up his traces. But he could baffle Polonius and the other spies by the natural penetration of a mind that suspicion had sharpened. Those emergencies did not call for any style of feigning. It is enough for him to finger the ventages of a recorder and invite Guildenstern to play upon it; the latter understands that he knows no touch of Hamlet, and leaves the heart of that mystery to be voiced by the varying breaths of critics.
When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading slanders, and then describes the old man himself as having a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus set down,—"For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward,"—Polonius, who is nothing if not satirical upon himself, muses apart, saying, "Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't;" and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret as he did into his own death.
And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to be conscious of the manɶuvre to throw Ophelia in his way that the King and Polonius may mark his tone from the place where they hide? Shakspeare has left no loop-hole for this supposition that Hamlet, observing the trick, assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, in order to throw off the spies and make them infer that he is mad. The scene being over, the King is wrong when he says,—
"Love! his affections do not that way tend;"
but right when he adds,—
"Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,Was not like madness."
Of course it was not; and the whole scene with Ophelia is ruined for Shakspeare's purpose by this modern contrivance of the theatre to deprive Hamlet of his spontaneous and uncalculating mood.
Otto Ludwig notices that his madness is "alluded to by Ophelia as having broken out between the first andsecond acts; and that is another strange thing in Shakspeare. Then, too, the style, if it was dissimulation, is such as to bring to pass the opposite of what he seems to have intended. So far from being disguised by it he is rather betrayed. And what is the use of any feigning when he does things like that of contriving the mock play? For that betrays him to the King more than it does the King to him. It makes the situation all awry, because the King must now know on what footing he is with Hamlet. At all events, the courtiers keep telling how danger is threatened to the King from Hamlet: they have no means of fathoming the King's offence. They merely presage some danger to the King, and they manifest no surprise. Hamlet must be conscious that he would be in great peril if the King knew that he knew every thing; the King would be put on his defence, and he was quite capable of contriving another murder to forestall retribution for the first one. Why, then, does he keep on feigning? Yet we do not observe that he hits upon any expedients to meet this possible case; it does not even occur to him before he concocts the trial-scene."
Ophelia thinks that she sees
"That noble and most sovereign reason,Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh,"
because she cannot understand his unflattering talk that appears to be disclaiming any regard for her and any desire to marry her. In all those sentences that make such a coarse rupture with love and soil the previous sentiment of their intercourse, there is no trace of a distracted mind. How could we expect this maid to be prepared to entertain such monstrous irony? It was as much Shakspeare's intention to have him misunderstood as to represent him so occupied by the sweeping scepticism that follows the disclosure of villainy. This irony of the most sombre kind, the mental mood that corresponds to such a harsh awakening, was not customary with Hamlet, who was by nature mirthful before this murder happened.
And notice how this ironical tone is kept up by him all through Ophelia's misconception, into which she falls because Hamlet's mood is too overpowering, and she thinks he has a wrecked brain from which she can rescue nothing to enable her to claim the salvage of loving him. When he meets her after many days of unaccountable neglect, she returns the few remembrances which were messengers of the happier hours of his affection, but he casts discredit upon these sacred tokens. He never meant them, in fact he never gave her any thing. But she says, "Yes,"
"And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd,As made the things more rich."
Has the bloom been rubbed from them, and their perfume lost? Then, says the self-respecting maid, tearing the presents by bleeding roots out of the heart where they had lodged to fructify, take them again,
"For to the noble mindRich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind."
"I did love you once," he says. "Indeed, my lord,you made me believe so." Hamlet is enraged at his own love, and appears to have discarded it, for that too may smile and be a villain, or hers may. "You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it." That is to say, if I had felt true love grafted on my stem I should have received and imparted its flavor of sincerity. But nothing is sincere: "I loved you not."
Hamlet's observation of human nature had furnished him with elements which only needed provocation to develop into this uncompromising irony. His mother, married to that satyr of an uncle,
"Or ere those shoes were old,With which she follow'd my poor father's body,"
might well cast a slur upon the sex in his opinion, and prompt the text which cynics use, "Frailty, thy name is woman,"—all but Ophelia: it does not include her until all life's illusions vanished with the ghost. Then she would do well not to walk in the sun, and would be safest in a nunnery.
Previous to that, he had dispatched a missive to her, which is commonly supposed to have been written on purpose to foster the notion that he was mad. But its tone does not seem to me to have been rightly interpreted. It begins in the style of Pistol: "To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia." Then comes a verse fit for a valentine,—
"Doubt thou the stars are fire,Doubt that the sun doth move;Doubt truth to be a liar,But never doubt I love."
So far the mocking spirit of his irony does not fail him. But the mood changes, for this was written just after the scene in Ophelia's chamber when he seemed to bid her an eternal farewell. Remembering this, he breaks the tone and adds, "O dear Ophelia! I am ill at these numbers: I have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, oh! most best, believe it." So with impetuous emphasis he confessed afterward upon Ophelia's grave. Nothing could more precisely convey to us his mental condition than this mixture of moods.
In the churchyard scene, we observe that Hamlet recurs unconsciously to his ordinary mental disposition, because he is alone there with Horatio, whose grave and silent friendship is congenial. It is the foil to Hamlet's restless speculation; it calls a truce to the civil war between his temper and his purpose. He is pacified in the society of Horatio, who gives him a chance to recur to his native mental habit. As he naively pours out his thoughts, how little does Horatio answer! as little as the ground beneath their feet, less laconic than the lawyer's skull. He is a continent upon which Hamlet finds that he can securely walk, the only domain in Denmark that is not honeycombed with pitfalls. Turning toward Horatio's loyal affection, he feels a response that is articulated without words. As little need the forest reply to her lover save in dumb show and in obscure reflex of feeling.
The artless nature solicits confidence: its still air disarms and dissipates the unrelenting irony. Then we see that Hamlet was naturally more inclined to that useof satire which indicates an ideal far lifted above the methods by which men live. He puts that fine sense into the skulls of the politician, the courtier, and the lawyer, and we acknowledge the satirical tone of an exalted mind. And this lends to that scene a feeling that in it Hamlet recurs to himself, and resumes the usual tone which always advertised him to his friends. To them his long maintenance of ironical behavior, broken by so few sallies of his healthy satire, was additional confirmation of his madness because it was so unusual with him. Old friends remembered nothing of the kind; they were first puzzled, then convinced, and we saw that Polonius hurried to show his insapiency by attributing the craze to love for his daughter. 'Tis very likely, they all thought, for they could refer to no other probable cause for it.
It is by unconsciously remanding Hamlet to Irony that Shakspeare has expressed the effect of an apparition, and of the disenchanting news it brought, upon a mind of that firm yet subtle temper. Lear's noble mind tottered with age before grief struck it into the abyss of madness. Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all tears, or sits with sorrow; but she was a too finely tempered woman to drip into craziness, till health, hope, and life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of being overthrown by passion the most exigent or events the most heart-rending. They preserve their sanity to suffer, as all great souls must do to make us worship them with tears. So Hamlet, being incapable of madness and lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives to every thing the complexion of the news which has revolted his moral sense,—that is, the King, his uncle, is not what he seems; his own mother's husband does not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is rotten with this irony. No wonder that his brain took on the color of the leaf on which it fed. Oh, every thing is not what it appears to be, but only an indication of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction! He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals it. With the mood into which he has been plunged, his own love is no more worth being seriously treated than is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent well,—he is a fishmonger; that is, not that he is a person sent to fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but that he is a dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as those who only vend stale fish.
If we return to a period in the play which follows closely upon the scene of the taking of the oath, Ophelia herself will discover for us the turning mood in Hamlet's character. The time and action of the piece allow us to suppose that he soon went from the oath-taking to visit Ophelia. Naturally, he turned from that bloodless and freezing visitation to see life heaving in a dear bosom and reddening in lips which he had love's liberty to touch. The disclosures of the ghost had worked upon him like a turbid freshet which comes down from the hills to choke the running of sweet streams, deface with stains of mud all natural beauties, and bury with the washings of sunless defiles the meadows spangled with forget-me-nots. His love for Ophelia was the most mastering impulse of his life: it stretched like a broad, rich domain, down to which he came from the shadowy places of his private thought to fling himself in the unchecked sunshine, and revel in the limpid bath of feeling. How often, in hours which only over-curious brooding upon the problems of life had hitherto disquieted, had he gone to let her smile strip off the shadow of his thought, and expose him to untroubled nature! The moisture of her eyes refreshed his questioning; her phrases answered it beyond philosophy; a maidenly submission of her hand renewed his confidence; an unspoken sympathy of her reserve, that flowed into the slight hints and permissions of her body, nominated him as lover and disfranchised him as thinker; and a sun-shower seemed to pelt through him to drift his vapors off. But this open gladness has disappeared underneath the avalanche of murder which a ghostly hand had loosened. He ventures down to the place where he remembers that it used to expect him; but we know that it has disappeared. His air and behavior announce it to us. The catastrophe seems to have swept even over his person, to dishevel the apparel upon that "mould of form." In this ruin of his life Ophelia is the first one buried; for she was always more resident in his soul than maintained within a palace, and his soul is no longer habitable.
Polonius has just been giving those scandalous instructions to his pimp to waylay the Danes in Paris, and, by insinuations of ill-conduct in Laertes, worm outof them possible admissions of its truth. He wants to know how his son is spending money in the gay capital, how many times he gamed, was overtaken in drink, or visited "a house of sale." The pimp is to draw on his fellow-countrymen by pretending that Laertes is given to all these things: he knows the man; 'tis the common talk about him at home; you cannot surprise him by any thing you say. Says the old manœuvrer:
"See you now;Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,With windlasses, and with assays of bias,By indirections find directions out."
No wonder that Hamlet in the churchyard, kicking the pate of a politician, called it something "that would circumvent God." The state-craft of old Polonius has lived so long without a change that its garments are dropping from its limbs. Now see what an indecent forked radish it is. But the scene is eminently in its place, and has nothing incongruous with what transpires before or after; for the incident is cunningly contrived to prepare us to find him applying his principle of the windlass and indirect purchase to the relation of Hamlet with his daughter; and it breeds in us a contempt for the notion that the Prince has been made mad by love.
Ophelia enters to her father:
"Oh, my lord, my lord! I have been so affrighted!"
Then she describes Lord Hamlet entering with garments all disordered,
"And with a look so piteous in purport,As if he had been loosed out of hell,To speak of horrors....He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;Then goes he to the length of all his arm;And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,He falls to such perusal of my face,As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so;At last,—a little shaking of mine arm,And thrice his head thus waving up and down,—He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound,That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,And end his being. That done, he lets me go:And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd,He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;For out of doors he went without their help,And, to the last, bended their light on me."
Polonius decides that it is the very ecstasy of love. Yes, it is, but ecstasy that has made an assignation with despair. The two feelings meet at the rendezvous of Ophelia's description, where they display to us the yearning scrutiny that a man throws into the eyes of an expiring love: it is too passionately dear to be surrendered into the inane; it is too selfishly personal to be consistent with his future purpose. For he had married a bride at midnight who is still expecting him. It is the consummation of one murder by another. For such a bridal as that, to leave her cheeks on which the color comes and goes between her love and his renunciation, "like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set," seems to shatter and end his being. But let him fall to such perusal of her face as he may, he sees the complexion of the ghost through each warm feature; and its pallor stands even there to wave him apart to aninterview in which all seeming becomes debatable, for rascally things may smile. He shades his brow, and his eyes are two magnets which he detaches from her heart, as he surrenders his last confidence in a stale and unprofitable world.
The irony reaches its most powerful exercise in the second scene of the third act, where Hamlet avails himself of the arrival of play-actors to test the King with his mouse-trap of an interlude. The Athenian mechanics played Pyramus and Thisbe with the simple intention of contributing their duty and homage to the nuptials. We see the humor of its juxtaposition with courtly scenes and weddings. But Hamlet, in his interlude, pretends amusement and mimics a murder to conceal his knowledge of the real one. "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence in the world." His light talk with Ophelia is nothing but the audacity of excitement and expectation. His baffling of Guildenstern with the pipe; his making Polonius see a camel, a weasel, and a whale in a cloud,—covers the dreadful necessity which drives him, in the witching time of night, to that upbraiding of a mother, and that second meeting with a dead father, which will make men's breath bate and their veins creep while English is spoken in this world.
What other mood than Irony could a soul with such a secret for its guest spread for entertainment? Too strongly built and level to be cracked with the earthquake of madness; too awfully overclouded to sparkle with imaginings of wit; too daunted and saddened withthe thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to break into the geniality of Humor,—all his mirth lost of late, there is no resource, no method of relief to the mind that is strained to live with dissemblers and swear vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too with an irony as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his wits which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all distraught, by unconsciously assuming that love, marriage, chastity, all honorable things, and friendship too, are crazes, and he that banters them alone is sane.
But when he knows that the grave, near which he stood and satirized the careers which men pursue, was another piece of irony, since Nature by keeping Ophelia alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it destroys his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth with an intense sincerity; then we take the point of his previous behavior.
"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothersCould not, with all their quantity of love,Make up my sum."
And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious and ennobling things,—too much so to grow deranged, enough so to create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.
The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about Laertes,—"an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whosemacaronic manner he assumes to indicate his aversion from it. "Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more."
I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily picked up this obscure and fantastic passage as a specimen of his craft in feigning.
But Osrick belonged to the prosaic sort of minds which took up so readily with the theory of Hamlet's madness; all of them incapable of irony, therefore not competent to fly into his meaning; limited, like the dodo and other wingless birds, to running along the plain appearance. "Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him," says Osrick.
So Hamlet could sport, who went towards his death with a presentiment which his soul was great enough to put aside, and also give him breath to say how great it was: "We defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." No crotchet of real or assumed madness could lurk in the repose of such a man.