Hamlet

The first is that Hamlet is differentiated from the angry young man by a certain ability to recognize and partly repudiate his own motives. For one thing, there is his naming of hell as one prompter of revenge. For another, there are the words to Ophelia, 'I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck', etc. (III.i.125-6)--supposedly lunatic, but so close to home as not to be obviously false; for a troubled man, madness is a vent as well as a façade. Yet there are hardly more than fitful bursts of light amid heavy clouds of turmoil. The second qualification, then, is that Hamlet's critical awareness of his own motives--of a virtually spontaneous ill-will that, initially at least, has small ground in others' ill-doing--is largely subliminal: it takes form, not as an element in consciousness, but as a burden which inhibits action: Hamlet's continual delay is his form of knowledge. He cannot act because his grounds for acting are too confused, a mixture of the tenable and the untenable. To a man with so powerful a hatred of Claudius, the news that Claudius is a murderer is a windfall; but it is because of a certain moral sensitivity--the very sensitivity indispensable to the tragic hero--that Hamlet cannot really accept the windfall. Hence all the hocus-pocus about proving Claudius's guilt: a way of trying to convince himself that the objective case really overrides any scruples that he may have in finding his bête noire so conveniently and gratifyingly guilty. Hamlet's sensitivity makes him, unawares, into something of a legalist: he can kill easily in 'self-defence' or in response to a threat, and have almost no qualms; he is equipped for the crime passionel, for the thoughtless thrust from the id. Such a person cannot easily translate into action a chronic resentment whose merits he apparently has doubts about, though the doubts are not articulated, and whose object, Claudius, does not present an immediate danger that makes one spring into violent counter-action. For this personality, also, there is difficulty in being the dispassionate minister of justice, a role which takes phlegm rather than fury. Tie together the private ill-will and the traditional obligation: one might expect from the union a doubly powerful drive toward dealing the death-blow. But for Hamlet they conflict rather than coalesce, as they might for a simpler man; the combination is not fusion but an uneasy mixture, from which comes no clear, over-riding call for instant action (as from the danger behind the arras, or from the Rosencrantz-Guildenstern operation). With the executive part of his consciousness Hamlet tries to reduce the ambiguity and create a peremptory situation that will cut off his temporizing: if he can get enough intensity into his awareness of Claudius as murderer, this will master his mind, channel his energies, and propel him over all obstacles to death-dealing. Really, making the case against Claudius serves two human purposes that coincide in Hamlet in a rather familiar human way: until the case is made, he can indulge in the delay to which he is prone; and when it is made, it will forcibly purge the delay about which he feels guilty. Early in the play he says emphatically to Horatio, 'It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you' (I.v.138). It seems reasonable to assume that he really has his case at this point. It is a long time later--and just after he has talked to the players and berated himself for inaction--that he first comes up with a new idea: 'The spirit that I have seen May be the devil' (II.ii.602-3) and resolves, 'the play's the thing'. After the play his exclamatory 'I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound' (III.ii.286), though it puts him no further ahead than he was two acts earlier, shows his conviction that now he will act. Then he finds Claudius defenceless, but again does not act; despite everything, he has not found singleness of motive and unequivocalness of imperative, and he invents a fiercer ideal of revenge to rationalize the latest postponement. The painful inner battle over purity of motive appears more overtly in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral: Becket wants to meet his destiny as martyr without making a good thing of martyrdom. The various errors into which he might fall are fully present to his consciousness, and his direct confrontation of them by mind and spirit is the means of his triumph over them. He has the tragic hero's knowledge, not of what he has done, but of what he might do. Hamlet also has a fear of what he might do, and hence he does not do it. But he only verges upon articulating the nature of the fear: by abusing himself for non-feasance he remains, as he wishes, obscure about the fear. He does not want to know what he would have to know if he did what he in part feels he ought to do. To phrase it thus sounds as if one were attempting a clever jest. It is not that. If Hamlet went ahead and killed Claudius, he would have to know himself in one or more of the following ways: (1) my apparently just act of vengeance was questionable in itself; (2) my motives were impure; I mingled the execution of justice and the gratification of private hate; (3) while supposedly executing justice, I really had only one motive, private hate. In this realm of possibilities would lie his tragic anagnorisis. It is what he shrinks from. Yet he does kill Claudius: he performs the act that could compel the unwanted knowing. But he does it exactly in the terms appropriate to his personality. He does it only when there can be no more knowing. He does it under the special immediate stresses that stimulate the kind of action of which he is capable--the spontaneous desperate plunge of a man in a corner. But above all, he does it after Claudius has practised such villainies against him that he can at last act with the same sense of justice he had in stabbing the man behind the arras and in despatching his chaperons to death in England. Much more than most people he has got what he wanted, though he was hardly conscious of what he wanted. What the tragic hero must come to know is that he was not innocent; it is by that movement that tragedy becomes the vehicle of the moral enlightenment appropriate to art. What Hamlet does not want to know, or to come to know, is that he was not innocent. His longing for innocence is a passion. It is a universal passion, and that is perhaps the major though unidentified source of the extraordinary popular appeal of the play. But the hold of the play has a double root: here is a man seeking innocence in a situation that involves an apparently clear, authoritative call to action. Innocence plus action: the dream of rich fulfilment that haunts men, and creates the heroes of popular romance for men content to forgo questions. Innocence or action may be come by alone. One may have innocence: in a form that, a few decades after Hamlet, another poet would name permanently, 'fugitive and cloistered virtue'. One may have action; but action risks contamination. The two are hardly separable; Orestes is the ancient exemplar of their indivisibility. A sensitive man might well shrink before the overwhelming task of being active and innocent: Hamlet's mind is repeatedly drawn to suicide as a way out. But along with the impulse to flee there is also in Hamlet a notable toughness, an instinct for the practical solution, a kind of shrewdness--a shrewdness in countering a moral dilemma without letting it enter fully the realm of knowledge. Something of a shadow is cast upon his innocence by his hatred of Claudius. He deals with that shadow in part by not quite recognizing it, in part by turning loose the lightning blaze of accusation. Yet the shadow persists as an almost mysterious inhibitor of action, and in turn the inhibition of action prevents the enlargement of the shadow upon innocence. How, then, be a man of action' By provoking the adversary into hostile steps that will make action mandatory, automatic, and pure. Hamlet does not work this out deliberately, but he has a remarkable instinct for it; it is in this sense that we may think of him as shrewd. His toughness appears in the executive detail--in the treatment of Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the King and Queen; in nearly all the operations under the façade of madness. We think of the madness as a defensive cover; we should also think of the sheer provocativeness it makes possible. It is provocative in itself: it can seem only a highly dangerous irresponsibility. Hamlet's actions at court are full of a recklessness, intensity, and hostility that must move the King to fear and strong counter-action. To say that Hamlet is one of the most provocative men in literature is not to justify Claudius; it is simply to suggest the mechanisms by which Claudius, compelled as it were by Hamlet, comes to those evil actions by which he at last earns his death at Hamlet's hands and thus preserves the cleanness of those hands. At first Hamlet did not have a real personal case against Claudius, and he could not use the impersonal case because of his personal involvement; now at last Hamlet has his personal case against Claudius, and he can act with moral impunity, and without remorse of conscience. He acts, and he is innocent. The old dream of innocence giving the fatal thrust to corruption is fulfilled; the hero has not had to learn that he has not been innocent. He has not had, in an ultimate sense, 'to know himself', to push toward what Samuel Johnson, in explaining 'to know a man well were to know himself', called 'the utmost extent of human wisdom'. The mode is essentially that of melodrama. The singular thing about Hamlet, finally, is that we can sense two genres competing for the soul of one play: tragedy and melodrama. Tragedy provides, so to speak, a hero with the moral sensitivity to suffer from conflicting impulses, to desire the good, to accept responsibility, and to know guilt. Melodrama infuses the hero with a desire to see life as a struggle between the good man and the evil man, and provides him with an evil antagonist whose presence shores up the stance of injured innocence. Tragedy tries to make him a man of self-knowledge; melodrama tries to enclose him in the role of accuser that shuts out self-recognition. Tragedy would allow him no perfect choices; melodrama teases him with the vision of an unsullied choice. Tragedy would have him act, and then suffer and know; melodrama drives him toward creating a new situation where the act is innocent, without consequences in feeling or thought. Does not melodrama, for the most part, win' Do we not, for the most part, think of Hamlet as the good young man, the poet and philosopher, who is the sufferer from the evil of others, the noble antagonist' Does it not seem to traduce him to suggest that he is actually a more inclusive man, with his own share of less noble motives, subtly striving to fashion the circumstances that will permit him to act violently and yet not lose the image of innocence' A tragic hero has been defined as a man who wants to live in a melodrama but must learn to live in a tragedy. The question is how far Hamlet has gone in this learning process. In arriving at such a summation one does not have the illusion of having solved the problem of Hamlet. One has tried simply to examine it from a chosen perspective. That perspective permits us to see the play as a somewhat fascinating reversal of Titus: whereas Hamlet wishes to have no evil deed on his conscience, Aaron wished to have no good deed on his. The perspective permits us to see how far Hamlet advanced beyond Romeo in maturity: though in one Hamlet-like moment Romeo berates himself for not rushing into violence, he has but little of the awareness that, however sub-articulately, becomes in Hamlet a troubling sense of duplicities in the world and even in himself. The perspective permits us to see an advance upon Julius Caesar: though Hamlet has something of Brutus's complacency, it is no longer unshaken, but is now something that the hero would desperately like to hang on to. The perspective enables us to see, finally, that Hamlet, despite its greater success in the theatre and in wide-ranging fame and perhaps even in general esteem, has essentially the rôle of opening the door to the subsequent tragedies. Hamlet's impulse to be the accuser, to be the voice of just blame, continues in Othello and Lear. But in them the wrong feeling carries on into wrong action, and a new dramatic range of self-criticism opens to view. The illusion of innocence yields to knowledge.