Chapter XVIII: Part 18

Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!"

Hamlet's grisly jest upon the worms who are eating Polonius is a variation on the same theme (iv. 3):--

"_Ham._ A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

"_King._ What dost thou mean by this?

"_Ham._ Nothing, but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar."

An attempt has been made to attribute these passages to the influence of Giordano Bruno; but, as Robert Beyersdorff has strikingly demonstrated,[3] this theory assumes that Bruno's doctrine was an atomistic materialism, whereas it was, in fact, pantheism, a perpetual insistence upon the unity of God and Nature. The very atoms, in Bruno, partake of spirit and life; it is not their mechanical conjunction that produces life; no, they are monads. While cynicism is the keynote of these utterances of Hamlet, enthusiasm is the keynote of Bruno's. Three passages from Bruno's writings (_De la Causa_ and _La Cena de le Ceneri_) have been cited as coinciding with Hamlet's words as to the transformations of matter. But in the first Bruno is speaking of the transformation of natural forms, and of the emanation of all forms from the universal soul; in the second, he is insisting that in all compound bodies there live numerous individuals who remain immortal after the dissolution of the bodies; in the third, he treats of the globe as a vast organism, which, just like animals and men, is renewed by the transformation of matter. The whole resemblance, then, between these passages and Hamlet's bitter outburst is that they treat of transformations of form and matter in Nature. In spirit they are radically different. Bruno maintains that even what seems to belong entirely to the world of matter is permeated with soul; Hamlet, on the contrary, asserts the wretchedness and transitoriness of human existence.[4]

But precisely in these points Hamlet comes very near to Montaigne, who has many expressions like those above quoted, and speaks of Sulla very much as Hamlet speaks of Alexander and Cæsar.

On a close comparison of Shakespeare's expressions with Montaigne's, their similarity is very striking. Hamlet, for example, says that Polonius is at supper, not where he eats but where he is eaten. "A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king, and your lean beggar, is but variable service; two dishes, but to one table: that's the end."

Compare Montaigne, Book ii. chap. 12:--

"He [man] need not a Whale, an Elephant, nor a Crocodile,
nor any such other wilde beast, of which one alone is of
power to defeat a great number of men: seely lice are able
to make Sulla give over his Dictatorship: The heart and life
of a mighty and triumphant Emperor, is but the break-fast of
a seely little Worm."

We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace to Bruno Hamlet's utterance as to the relativity of all concepts. In reality it may rather be traced to Montaigne. Hamlet, having remarked (ii. 2) that "Denmark is a prison," Rosencrantz replies, "We think not so, my lord;" whereupon Hamlet rejoins, "Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."[5] The passage in Montaigne is almost identical (Book i. chap. 40):--

"If that which we call evill and torment, be neither torment
nor evill, but that our fancie only gives it that qualitie,
it is in us to change it."

We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace Hamlet's saying about death, "If it be now, 'tis not to come," &c. to Bruno's words in the dedication of his _Candelajo_: "Tutto quel ch'è o è qua o è là, o vicino o lunghi, o adesso o poi, o presso o tardi." But the same course of thought which leads Hamlet to the conclusion, "The readiness is all," is found, with the same conclusion, in the nineteenth chapter of Montaigne's first book: "That to Philosophie, is to learne how to die"--a chapter which has inspired a great many of Hamlet's graveyard cogitations.[6] Montaigne says of death:--

"Let us not forget how many waies our joyes or our feastings
be subject unto death, and by how many hold-fasts shee
threatens us and them.... It is uncertaine where death
looks for us; let us expect her everie where.... I am ever
prepared about that which I may be.... A man should ever be
ready booted to take his journey.... What matter is it when
it commeth, since it is unavoidable?"

Furthermore, we find striking points of resemblance between the celebrated soliloquy, "To be or not to be," and the passage in Montaigne (Book iii. chap. 12) where he reproduces the substance of Socrates' Apology. Socrates, as we know, suggests several different possibilities: death is either an "amendment" of our condition or the annihilation of our being; but even in the latter case it is an "amendment" to enter upon a long and peaceful night; for there is nothing better in life than a deep, calm, dreamless sleep. Shakespeare seems to have had no belief in an actual amelioration of our condition at death; Hamlet does not even mention it as a possible contingency; whereas the poet makes him dwell upon the thought of an endless sleep, and on the possibility of horrible dreams. Now and then we seem to find traces in _Hamlet_ of Plato's monologue, in the vesture given to it by Montaigne. In the French text there is mention of the joy of being free in another life from having to do with unjust and corrupt judges; Hamlet speaks of freeing himself from "The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely." Some lines added in the edition of 1604 remind us forcibly of a passage in Florio's translation. Florio reproduces Montaigne's "Si c'est un anéantissement de notre être" by the phrase, "If it be a consummation of one's being." Hamlet, using a word which occurs in only two other places in Shakespeare, says, "A consummation devoutly to be wished."

Many other small coincidences can be pointed out in the use of names and turns of phrase, which do not, however, actually prove anything. Where Montaigne is describing the anarchic condition of public affairs, his words are rendered in Florio by the curiously poetic expression, "All is out of frame." This bears a certain resemblance to the phrase which Hamlet, already in the 1603 edition, employs to describe the disorganisation which has followed his father's death, "The time is out of joint." The coincience may be fortuitous, but as one among many other points of resemblance it supports the conjecture that Shakespeare had read the translation before it was published.[7].

For the rest, Rushton, in _Shakespeare's Euphuism_ (1871), and after him Beyersdorff, have pointed out not a few parallels to _Hamlet_ in Lily's _Euphues_, precisely at the points where critics have sought to trace the much more improbable influence of Bruno. Beyersdorff sometimes goes too far in trying to find in _Euphues_ the origin of ideas which it would be an insult to suppose that Shakespeare needed to borrow from such a source. But sometimes there is a real analogy. It has been alleged that the King must have borrowed from Bruno's philosophy the topics of consolation whereby (i. 2) he seeks to convince Hamlet of the unreasonableness of "obstinate condolement" over his father's death. As a matter of fact, the letter of Euphues to Ferardo on his daughter's death contains precisely the same arguments:--"Knowest thou not, Ferardo, that lyfe is the gifte of God, deathe the due of Nature, as we receive the one as a benefitte, so must we abide the other of necessitie," &c.

It has been suggested that where Hamlet (ii. 2) speaks of "the satirical rogue" who, in the book he is reading, makes merry over the decrepitude of old age, Shakespeare must have been alluding to a passage in Bruno's _Spaccio_, where old men are described as those who have "snow on their head and furrows in their brow." But if we insist on identifying the "satirical rogue" with any actual author (a quite unreasonable proceeding), Lily at once presents himself as answering to the description. Again and again in _Euphues_, where old men give good advice to the young, they appear with "hoary haire and watry eyes." And Euphues repulses, quite in the manner of Hamlet, an old gentleman whose moralising he regards as nothing more than the envy of decrepit age for lusty youth, and whose intellect seems to him as tottering as his legs.

Finally, an attempt has been made to refer Hamlet's harsh sayings to Ophelia, and his contemptuous utterances about women in general ("Frailty, thy name is woman," &c.), to a dialogue of Bruno's (_De la Causa IV_.) in which the pedant Pollinnio appears as a woman-hater. But the resemblance seems trifling enough when we find that in this case woman is attacked in sound theological fashion as the source of original sin and the cause of all our woe. Many expressions in _Euphues_ lie infinitely nearer to Hamlet's. "What means your lordship?" Ophelia asks (iii. I), and Hamlet replies, "That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty." Compare in _Euphues_ Ferardo's words to Lucilla: "For oftentimes thy mother woulde saye, that thou haddest more beautie then was convenient for one that shoulde bee honeste," and his exclamation, "O Lucilla, Lucilla, woulde thou wert lesse fayre!" Again, Hamlet rails against women's weakness, crying, "Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them;" and we find in _Euphues_ exactly similar outbursts: "I perceive they be rather woe vnto men, by their falsehood, gelousie, inconstancie.... I see they will be corasiues (corrosives)."[8] Beyersdorff, moreover, is no doubt right in suggesting that the artificial style of _Euphues_ is apparent in such speeches as this of Hamlet's: "For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness."

In _Hamlet_ and elsewhere in Shakespeare we come across traces of a sort of atomistic-materialistic philosophy. In the last scene of _Julius Cæsar_, Antony actually employs with regard to Brutus the expression, "The elements so _mixd_ in him." In _Measure for Measure_ (iii. I) the Duke says to Claudio--

"Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust."

Hamlet says (i. 2)--

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and dissolve itself into a dew;"

and to Horatio (iii. 2)--

"Bless'd are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well _co-mingled._"

It has already been pointed out how far this atomism, if we can so regard it, differs from Bruno's idealistic monadism. But in all probability we have here only the expressions of the dominant belief of Shakespeare's time, that all differences of temperament depended upon the mixture of the juices or "humours." Shakespeare is on this point, as on many others, more popular and less book-learned, more naïve and less metaphysical, than book-learned commentators are willing to allow.

Writers like Montaigne and Lyly were no doubt constantly in Shakespeare's hands while _Hamlet_ was taking shape within him. But it would be absurd to suppose that he consulted them especially with _Hamlet_ in view. He did consult authorities with regard to Hamlet, but they were men, not books, and men, moreover, with whom he was in daily intercourse. Hamlet being a Dane and his destiny being acted out in distant Denmark--a name not yet so familiar in England as it was soon to be, when, with the new King, a Danish princess came to the throne-- Shakespeare would naturally seize whatever opportunities lay in his way of gathering intelligence as to the manners and customs of this little-known country.

In the year 1585 a troupe of English players had appeared in the courtyard of the Town-Hall of Elsinore. If we are justified in assuming this troupe to have been the same which we find in the following year established at the Danish Court, it numbered among its members three persons who, at the time when Shakespeare was turning over in his mind the idea of _Hamlet_, belonged to his company of actors, and probably to his most intimate circle: namely, William Kemp, George Bryan, and Thomas Pope. The first of these, the celebrated clown, belonged to Shakespeare's company from 1594 till March 1602, when he went over for six months to Henslow's company; the other two also joined Shakespeare's company as early as 1594. It was evidently from these comrades of his, and perhaps also from other English actors who, under the management of Thomas Sackville, had performed at Copenhagen in 1596 at the coronation of Christian IV., that Shakespeare gathered information on several matters relating to Denmark.

First and foremost, he picked up some Danish names, which we find, indeed, mutilated by the printers in the different texts of _Hamlet_, but which are easily recognisable. The _Rossencraft_ of the First Quarto has become _Rosencraus_ in the second, and _Rosincrane_ in the Folio; it is clearly enough the name of the ancient Danish family of _Rosenkrans_. Thus, too, we find in the three editions the name _Gilderstone, Guyldensterne_, and _Guildensterne_, in which we recognise the Danish _Gyldenstierne_; while the names given to the ambassador, _Voltemar, Voltemand, Valtemand, Voltumand_, are so many corruptions of the Danish _Valdemar_. The name _Gertrude_, too, Shakespeare must have learned from his comrades as a Danish name; he has substituted it for the _Geruth_ of the novel. In the Second Quarto it is misprinted _Gertrad_.

It is evidently in consequence of what he had learnt from his comrades that Shakespeare has transferred the action of _Hamlet_ from Jutland to Elsinore, which they had visited and no doubt described to him. That is how he comes to know of the Castle at Elsinore (finished about a score of years earlier), though he does not mention the name of Kronborg.

The scene in which Polonius listens behind the arras, and in which Hamlet, in reproaching the Queen, points to the portraits of the late and of the present King, has even been regarded as proving that Shakespeare knew something of the interior of the Castle. On the stage, Hamlet is often made to wear a miniature portrait of his father round his neck, and to hold it up before his mother; but the words of the play prove incontestably that Shakespeare imagined life-sized pictures hanging on the wall. Now we find a contemporary description of a "great chamber" at Kronborg, written by an English traveller, in which occurs this passage: "It is hanged with Tapistary of fresh coloured silke without gold, wherein all the Danish kings are exprest in antique habits, according to their severall times, with their armes and inscriptions, containing all their conquests and victories."[9] It is possible, then, though not very probable, that Shakespeare may have heard of the arrangement of this room. When Polonius wanted to play the eavesdropper, it was a matter of course that he should get behind the arras; and it was easy to imagine that portraits of the kings would hang on the walls of a royal castle, without the least knowledge that this was actually the case at Kronborg.

It is probable, on the other hand, that Shakespeare made Hamlet study at Wittenberg because he knew that many Danes went to this University, which, being Lutheran, was not frequented by Englishmen. And it is quite certain that when, in the first and fifth acts, he makes trumpet-blasts and the firing of cannon accompany the healths which are drunk, he must have known that this was a specially Danish custom, and have tried to give his play local colour by introducing it. While Hamlet and his friends (i. 4) are awaiting the appearance of the Ghost, trumpets and cannon are heard "within." "What does this mean, my lord?" Horatio asks; and Hamlet answers--

"The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge."

Similarly, in the last scene of the play, the King says--

"Give me the cups;
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth,
'Now the king drinks to Hamlet!"

Shakespeare must even have been eager to display his knowledge of the intemperate habits of the Danes, and the strange usages resulting therefrom, for, as Schück has ingeniously remarked, in order to bring in this piece of information, he has made Horatio, himself a Dane, ask Hamlet whether it is the custom of the country to celebrate every toast with this noise of trumpets and of ordnance. In answer to this question Hamlet speaks of the custom as though he were addressing a foreigner, and makes the profound remark that a single blemish will often mar a nation's good report, no less than an individual's, and that its character

"Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault."

It is evident that Denmark "took corruption" from its drinking usages in the "censure" of the better sort of Englishmen. In a notebook kept by "Maister William Segar, Garter King at Armes," we read under the date July 14, 1603--

"That afternoone the King [of Denmark] went aboord the
English ship [which was lying off Elsinore], and had a
banket prepared for him vpon the vpper decks, which were
hung with an Awning of cloaths of Tissue; every health
reported sixe, eight, or ten shot of great Ordinance, so
that during the king's abode, the ship discharged 160 shot."

Of the same king's "solemne feast to the [English] embassadour," Segar writes:--

"It were superfluous to tell you of all superfluities that were vsed; and it would make a man sick to heare of their drunken healths: vse hath brought it into a fashion, and fashion made it a habit, which ill beseemes our nation to imitate."[10]

The King here spoken of is Christian IV., then twenty-six years of age. When he, three years afterwards, visited England, it seems as though the Court, which had previously been very sober, justified the fears of the worthy diarist by catching the infection of Danish intemperance. Noble ladies as well as gentlemen took to over-indulgence in wine. The Rev. H. Harington, in his _Nugæ Antiquæ_ (edit. 1779, ii. 126), prints a letter from Sir John Harington to Mr. Secretary Barlow, giving a very humorous description of the festivities in which the Danish King took part. One day after dinner, he relates, "the representation of Solomon his temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made." But alas! the lady who played the Queen, and who was to bring "precious gifts to both their Majesties, forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell at his feet, though I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean. His Majesty then got up, and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber, and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed upon his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices and other good matters." The entertainment proceeded, but most of the "presenters fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers." Now there entered in gorgeous array Faith, Hope, and Charity. Hope "did assay" to speak, but could not manage it, and withdrew, stammering excuses to the King; Faith staggered after her; Charity alone succeeded in kneeling at the King's feet, and when she returned to her sisters, she found them lying very sick in the lower hall. Then Victory made her entrance in bright armour, but did not triumph long, having to be led away a "silly captive" and left to sleep upon the ante-chamber stairs. Last of all came Peace, who "much contrary to her semblance, most rudely made war with her olive branch upon" those who tried, from motives of propriety, to get her out of the way.

Shakespeare, then, conceived intemperance in drinking, and glorification of drunkenness as a polite and admirable accomplishment, to be a Danish national vice. It is clear enough, however, that no more here than elsewhere was it his main purpose to depict a foreign people. It was not national peculiarities that interested him, but the characteristics common to humanity; and he did not need to search outside of England for the prototypes of his Polonius, his Horatio, his Ophelia, and his Hamlet.

[1] Tschischwitz: _Shakespeare-Forschungen_; König: _Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xi.

[2] Brunnhofer: _Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung und Verhängniss._

[3] _Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare_, Oldenburg, 1889, p. 26.

[4] A comic analogy to Bruno's doctrine may be found in the following lines of Hotspur's (Henry IV., Pt. I. iii. l):

"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions: oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam Earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers."

But no one will seriously attribute this passage to the philosophical influence of Giordano Bruno. Hotspur was quite capable of hitting upon this image without any suggestion from Nola or Naples.

[5] This speech first occurs in the First Folio.

[6] This was first pointed out (about 1860) by Otto Ludwig. See his _Shakespeare-Studien_, p. 373. The relation between Shakespeare and Montaigne is dwelt upon in an ill-arranged book by G. F. Stedefeld: _Hamlet, ein Tendenz-Drama_ (1871).

[7] Compare Jacob Feis, _Shakespeare and Montaigne_, pp. 64-130. Beyersdorff, _Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare_, p. 27 _et seq_.

[8] Beyersdorff, _op. cit._, p. 33. John Lyly, Evphves: _The Anatomy of Wit_, ed. Landmann, pp. 72, 75.

[9] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874, p. 513. Compare Schück, "Englische Komödianten in Skandinavien," _Skandinavisches Archiv_.

[10] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874, p. 512.

XIII

_THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN HAMLET_

In trying to bring together, as we have done, a mass of historical, dramatic, and fictional material, fragments of philosophy, and ethnographical details, which Shakespeare utilised during his work upon _Hamlet_, or which may, without his knowing it, have hovered in his memory, we do not, of course, mean to imply that the initial impulse to the work came to him from without. The piecing together of external impressions, as we have already remarked, has never produced a work of immortal poetry. In approaching the theme, Shakespeare obeyed a fundamental instinct in his nature; and as he worked it out, everything that stood in relation to it rushed together in his mind. He might have said with Goethe: "After long labour in piling up fuel and straw, I have often tried in vain to warm myself ... until at last the spark catches all of a sudden, and the whole is wrapped in flame."

It is this flame which shines forth from _Hamlet_, shooting up so high and glowing so red that to this day it fascinates all eyes.

Hamlet assumes madness in order to lull the suspicions of the man who has murdered his father and wrongfully usurped his throne; but under this mask of madness he gives evidence of rare intelligence, deep feeling, peculiar subtlety, mordant satire, exalted irony, and penetrating knowledge of human nature.

Here lay the point of attraction for Shakespeare. The indirect form of expression had always allured him; it was the favourite method of his clowns and humourists. Touchstone employs it, and it enters largely into the immortal wit of Falstaff. We have seen how Jaques, in _As You Like It_, envied those whose privilege it was to speak the truth under the disguise of folly; we remember his sigh of longing for "as large a charter as the wind to blow on whom he pleased." He it was who declared motley the only wear; and in his melancholy and longing Shakespeare disguised his own, exclaiming through his mouth--

"Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world."

In _Hamlet_ Shakespeare put this motley coat on his own shoulders; he seized the opportunity of making Hamlet, in the guise of apparent madness, speak sharp and bitter truths in a way that would not soon be forgotten. The task was a grateful one; for earnestness cuts the deeper the more it sounds like jest or triviality; and wisdom appears doubly wise when it is thrown out lightly under the mask of folly, instead of pedantically asserting itself as the fruit of reflection and experience. Difficult for any one else, to Shakespeare the enterprise was merely alluring: it was, in fact, to do what no other poet had as yet succeeded in doing--to draw a genius. Shakespeare had not far to go for his model, and genius would seem doubly effective when it wore the mask of madness, now speaking through that mouthpiece, and again unmasking itself in impassioned monologues.

It cost Shakespeare no effort to transform himself into Hamlet. On the contrary, in giving expression to Hamlet's spiritual life he was enabled quite naturally to pour forth all that during the recent years had filled his heart and seethed in his brain. He could let this creation drink his inmost heart's blood; he could transfer to it the throbbing of his own pulses. Behind its forehead he could hide his melancholy; on its tongue he could lay his wit; its eyes he could cause to glow and lighten with flashes of his own spirit.

It is true that Hamlet's outward fortunes were different enough from his. He had not lost his father by assassination; his mother had not degraded herself. But all these details were only outward signs and symbols. He had lived through all of Hamlet's experience--all. Hamlet's father had been murdered and his place usurped by his brother; that is to say, the being whom he most reverenced and to whom he owed most had been overpowered by malice and treachery, instantly forgotten and shamelessly supplanted. How often had not Shakespeare himself seen worthlessness strike greatness down and usurp its place! Hamlet's mother had married her husband's murderer; in other words, that which he had long honoured and loved and held sacred, sacred as is a mother to her son, that on which he could not endure to see any stain, had all of a sudden shown itself impure, besmirched, frivolous, perhaps criminal. What a terrible impression must it have made upon Shakespeare himself when he first discovered the unworthiness of that which he had held in highest reverence, and when he first saw and realised that his ideal had fallen from its pedestal into the mire.

The experience which shook Hamlet's nature was no other than that which every nobly-disposed youth, on first seeing the world as it is, concentrates in the words: "Alas! life is not what I thought it was." The father's murder, the mother's possible complicity, and her indecent haste in entering upon a new wedlock, were only symptoms in the young man's eyes of the worthlessness of human nature and the injustice of life--only the individual instances from which, by instinctive generalisation, he inferred the dire disillusions and terrible possibilities of existence--only the chance occasion for the sudden vanishing of that rosy light in which everything had hitherto been steeped for him, and in the absence of which the earth seemed to him a sterile promontory, and the heavens a pestilent congregation of vapours.

Just such a crisis, bringing with it the "loss of all his mirth," Shakespeare himself had recently undergone. He had lost in the previous year the protectors of his youth. The woman he loved, and to whom he had looked up as to a being of a rarer, loftier order, had all of a sudden proved to be a heartless, faithless wanton. The friend he loved, worshipped, and adored had conspired against him with this woman, laughed at him in her arms, betrayed his confidence, and treated him with coldness and distance. Even the prospect of winning the poet's wreath had been overcast for him. Truly he too had seen his illusions vanish and his vision of the world fall to ruins.

In his first consternation he had been submissive, had stood defenceless, had spoken words without a sting, had been all mildness and melancholy. But this was not his whole, nor his inmost, nature. In his heart of hearts he knew himself a power--a power! He was incomparably armed, quick and keen of fence, full of wit and indignation, the master of them all, and infinitely greater than his fate. Burrow as they might, "it should go hard but he would delve one yard below their mines." He had suffered many a humiliation; but the revenge which was denied him in real life he could now take incognito through Hamlet's bitter and scathing invectives.

He had seen high-born gentlemen play a princely part in the society of artists, players, men whom public opinion undervalued and contemned. Now he himself would be the high-born gentleman, would show how the truly princely spirit bore itself towards the poor artists, and give utterance to his own thoughts about art, and his conception of its value and significance.

He merged himself in Hamlet; he felt as Hamlet did; he now and then so mingled their identities that, in placing his own weightiest thoughts in Hamlet's mouth, as in the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy, he made him think, not as a prince, but as a subject, with all the passionate bitterness of one who sees brutality and stupidity lording it in high places. Thus it was that he made Hamlet say--

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
_The oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely_,
The pangs of despis'd love, _the law's delay_,
_The insolence of office, and the spurns_
_That patient merit of the unworthy takes_,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?"

Every one can see that this is felt and thought from below upwards, not from above downwards, and that the words are improbable, almost impossible, in the mouth of the Prince. But they embody feelings and thoughts to which Shakespeare had recently given expression in his own name in Sonnet lxvi.:--

"Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry;--
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."

The bright view of life which had prevailed in his youth was overclouded; he saw the strength of malignity, the power of stupidity, unworthiness exalted, true desert elbowed aside. Existence turned its seamy side towards him. Through what experiences had he not come! How often, in the year that had just passed, must he have exclaimed, like Hamlet in his first soliloquy, "Frailty, thy name is woman!" and how much cause had he had to say, "Let her not walk i' the sun: conception is a blessing; but not as your daughter may conceive." So far had it gone with him that, finding everything "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," he thought it monstrous that such an existence should be handed on from generation to generation, and that ever new hordes of miserable creatures should come into existence: "Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?"

The glimpse of high life which he had seen, his relations with the Court, and the gossip from Whitehall and Greenwich which circulated through the town, had proved to him the truth of the couplet--

"Cog, lie, flatter, and face
Four ways in Court to win men grace."

Sheer criminals such as Leicester and Claudius flourished and waxed fat at Court.

What did men do at Court but truckle to the great? What throve except wordy morality, mutual espionage, artificial wit, double-tongued falsity, inveterate lack of principle, perpetual hypocrisy? What were these great ones but flatterers and lipservers, always ready to turn their coats according to the wind? And so Polonius and Osrick, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, took shape in his imagination. They knew how to bow and cringe; they were masters of elegant phrases; they were members of the great guild of time-servers. "To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand."

And the Danish Court was only a picture in little of all Denmark--that Denmark in whose state there was something rotten, and which was to Hamlet a prison. "Then is the world one?" says Rosencrantz; and Hamlet does not recoil from the conclusion: "A goodly one," he replies, "in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons." The Court-world of _Hamlet_ was but an image of the world at large.

But if this is how matters stand, if a pure and princely nature is thus placed in the world and thus surrounded, we are necessarily confronted with the great and unanswerable questions: "How comes it?" and "Why is it?" The problem of the relation of good and evil in this world, an unsolved riddle, involves further problems as to the government of the world, as to a righteous Providence, as to the relation between the world and a God. And thought--Shakespeare's no less than Hamlet's--beats at the locked door of the mystery.

XIV

_THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET_

Though there are in _Hamlet_ more direct utterances of the poet's inmost spiritual life than in any of his earlier works, he has none the less succeeded in thoroughly disengaging his hero's figure, and making it an independent entity. What he gave him of his own nature was its unfathomable depth; for the rest, he retained the situation and the circumstances much as he found them in his authorities. It cannot be denied that he thus involved himself in difficulties which he by no means entirely overcame. The old legend, with its harsh outlines, its mediæval order of ideas, its heathen groundwork under a varnish of dogmatic Catholicism, its assumption of vengeance as the unquestionable right, or rather duty, of the individual, did not very readily harmonise with the rich life of thoughts, dreams, and feelings which Shakespeare imparted to his hero. There arose a certain discrepancy between the central figure and his surroundings. A Prince who is the intellectual peer of Shakespeare himself, who knows and declares that "no traveller returns" from beyond the grave, yet sees and holds converse with a ghost. A royal youth of the Renaissance, who has gone through a foreign university, whose chief bent is towards philosophic brooding, who writes verses, who cultivates music, elocution, and rapier-fencing, and proves himself an expert in dramatic criticism, is at the same time pre-occupied with thoughts of personal and bloody vengeance. Now and then, in the course of the drama, a rift seems to open between the shell of the action and its kernel.

But Shakespeare, with his consummate instinct, managed to find an advantage precisely in this discrepancy, and to turn it to account. His Hamlet believes in the ghost and--doubts. He accepts the summons to the deed of vengeance and--delays. Much of the originality of the figure, and of the drama as a whole, springs almost inevitably from this discrepancy between the mediæval character of the fable and its Renaissance hero, who is so deep and many-sided that he has almost a modern air.

The figure of Hamlet, as it at last shaped itself in Shakespeare's imagination and came to life in his drama, is one of the very few immortal figures of art and poetry, which, like Cervantes' Don Quixote, exactly its contemporary, and Goethe's Faust of two centuries later, present to generation after generation problems to brood over and enigmas to solve. If we compare the two great figures of Hamlet (1604) and Don Quixote (1605), we find Hamlet undoubtedly the more enigmatic and absorbing of the two. Don Quixote belongs to the past. He embodies the naïve spirit of chivalry which, having outlived its age, gives offence on all hands in a time of prosaic rationalism, and makes itself a laughing-stock through its importunate enthusiasms. He has the firm, easily-comprehensible contours of a caricature. Hamlet belongs to the future, to the modern age. He embodies the lofty and reflective spirit, standing isolated, with its severely exalted ideals, in corrupt or worthless surroundings, forced to conceal its inmost nature, yet everywhere arousing hostility. He has the unfathomable spirit and ever-changing physiognomy of genius. Goethe, in his celebrated exposition of Hamlet (_Wilhelm Meister_, Book iv. chap. 13), maintains that in this case a great deed is imposed upon a soul which is not strong enough for it:--

"There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should
have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots
expand, the jar is shivered. A lovely, pure, noble, and most
moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a
hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must
not cast away."

This interpretation is brilliant and thoughtful, but not entirely just. One can trace in it the spirit of the period of humanity, transforming in its own image a figure belonging to the Renaissance. Hamlet cannot really be called, without qualification, "lovely, pure, noble and most moral"--he who says to Ophelia the penetratingly true, unforgettable words, "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me." The light of such a saying as this takes the colour out of Goethe's adjectives. It is true that Hamlet goes on to ascribe to himself evil qualities of which he is quite innocent; but he was doubtless sincere in the general tenor of his speech, to which all men of the better sort will subscribe. Hamlet is no model of virtue. He is not simply pure, noble, moral, &c., but is, or becomes, other things as well--wild, bitter, harsh, now tender, now coarse, wrought up to the verge of madness, callous, cruel. No doubt he is too weak for his task, or rather wholly unsuited to it; but he is by no means devoid of physical strength or power of action. He is no child of the period of humanity, moral and pure, but a child of the Renaissance, with its impulsive energy, its irrepressible fulness of life and its undaunted habit of looking death in the eyes.

Shakespeare at first conceived Hamlet as a youth. In the First Quarto he is quite young, probably nineteen. It accords with this age that he should be a student at Wittenberg; young men at that time began and ended their university course much earlier than in our days. It accords with this age that his mother should address him as "boy" ("How now, boy!" iii. 4--a phrase which is deleted in the next edition), and that the word "young" should be continually prefixed to his name, not merely to distinguish him from his father. The King, too, in the early edition (not in that of 1604) currently addresses him as "son Hamlet;" and finally his mother is still young enough to arouse--or at least to enable Claudius plausibly to pretend--the passion which has such terrible results. Hamlet's speech to his mother--

"At your age
The hey-day of the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment,"

does not occur in the 1603 edition. The decisive proof, however, of the fact that Hamlet at first appeared in Shakespeare's eyes much younger (eleven years, to be precise) than he afterwards made him, is to be found in the graveyard scene (v. I). In the older edition, the First Gravedigger says that the skull of the jester Yorick has lain a dozen years in the earth; in the edition of 1604 this is changed to twenty-three years. Here, too, it is explicitly indicated that Hamlet, who as a child knew Yorick, is now thirty years old; for the Gravedigger first states that he took to his trade on the very day on which Prince Hamlet was born, and a little later adds: "I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years." It accords with this that the Player-King now mentions thirty years as the time that has elapsed since his marriage with the Queen, and that Ophelia (iii. I) speaks of Hamlet as the "unmatch'd form of blown [_i.e._ mature] youth."

The process of thought in Shakespeare's mind is evident. At first it seemed to him as if the circumstances of the case demanded that Hamlet should be a youth; for thus the overwhelming effect produced upon him by his mother's prompt forgetfulness of his father and hasty marriage seemed most intelligible. He had been living far from the great world, in quiet Wittenberg, never doubting that life was in fact as harmonious as it is apt to appear in the eyes of a young prince. He believed in the realisation of ideals here on earth, imagined that intellectual nobility and fine feelings ruled the world, that justice reigned in public, faith and honour in private, life. He admired his great father, honoured his beautiful mother, passionately loved the charming Ophelia, thought nobly of humankind, and especially of women. From the moment he loses his father, and is forced to change his opinion of his mother, this serene view of life is darkened. If his mother has been able to forget his father and marry this man, what is woman worth? and what is life worth? At the very outset, then, when he has not even heard of his father's ghost, much less seen or held converse with it, sheer despair speaks in his monologue:

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew:
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"

Hence, also, his naïve surprise that one may smile and smile and yet be a villain. He regards what has happened as a typical occurrence, a specimen of what the world really is. Hence his words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth." And those others: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! ... in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world!" These words express his first bright view of life. But that has vanished, and the world is no longer anything to him but a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." And man! What is this "quintessence of dust" to him? He has no pleasure in man or woman.

Hence arise his thoughts of suicide. The finer a young man's character, the stronger is his desire, on entering life, to see his ideals consummated in persons and circumstances. Hamlet suddenly realises that everything is entirely different from what he had imagined, and feels as if he must die because he cannot set it right.

He finds it very difficult to believe that the world is so bad; therefore he is always seeking for new proofs of it; therefore, for instance, he plans the performance of the play. His joy whenever he tears the mask from baseness is simply the joy of realisation, with deep sorrow in the background--abstract satisfaction produced by the feeling that at last he understands the worthlessness of the world. His divination was just--events confirm it. There is no cold-hearted pessimism here. Hamlet's fire is never quenched; his wound never heals. Laertes' poisoned blade gives the quietus to a still tortured soul.[1].

All this, though we can quite well imagine it of a man of thirty, is more natural, more what we should expect, in one of nineteen. But as Shakespeare worked on at his drama, and came to deposit in Hamlet's mind, as in a treasury, more and more of his own life-wisdom, of his own experience, and of his own keen and virile wit, he saw that early youth was too slight a framework to support this intellectual weight, and gave Hamlet the age of ripening manhood.[2]

Hamlet's faith and trust in humankind are shattered before the Ghost appears to him. From the moment when his father's spirit communicates to him a far more appalling insight into the facts of the situation, his whole inner man is in wild revolt.

This is the cause of the leave-taking, the silent leave-taking, from Ophelia, whom in letters he had called his soul's idol. His ideal of womanhood no longer exists. Ophelia now belongs to those "trivial fond records" which the sense of his great mission impels him to efface from the tablets of his memory. There is no room in his soul for his task and for her, passive and obedient to her father as she is. Confide in her he cannot; she has shown how unequal she is to the exigencies of the situation by refusing to receive his letters and visits. She actually hands over his last letter to her father, which means that it will be shown and read at court. At last, she even consents to play the spy upon him. He no longer believes or can believe in any woman.

He intends to proceed at once to action, but too many thoughts crowd in upon him. He broods over that horror which the Ghost has revealed to him, and over the world in which such a thing could happen; he doubts whether the apparition was really his father, or perhaps a deceptive, malignant spirit; and, lastly, he has doubts of himself, of his ability to upraise and restore what has been overthrown, of his fitness for the vocation of avenger and judge. His doubt as to the trustworthiness of the Ghost leads to the performance of the play within the play, which proves the King's guilt. His feeling of his own unfitness for his task leads to continued procrastination.

During the course of the play it is sufficiently proved that he is not, in the main, incapable of action. He does not hesitate to stab the eavesdropper behind the arras; without wavering and without pity he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain death; he boards a hostile ship; and, never having lost sight of his purpose, he takes vengeance before he dies. But it is clear, none the less, that he has a great inward obstacle to overcome before he proceeds to the decisive act. Reflection hinders him; his "resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," as he says in his soliloquy.

He has become to the popular mind the great type of the procrastinator and dreamer; and far on into this century, hundreds of individuals, and even whole races, have seen themselves reflected in him as in a mirror.

We must not forget, however, that this dramatic curiosity--a hero who does not act--was, to a certain extent, demanded by the technique of this particular drama. If Hamlet had killed the King directly after receiving the Ghost's revelation, the play would have come to an end with the first act. It was, therefore, absolutely necessary that delays should arise.

Shakespeare is misunderstood when Hamlet is taken for that entirely modern product--a mind diseased by morbid reflection, without capacity for action. It is nothing less than a freak of ironic fate that _he_ should have become a sort of symbol of reflective sloth, this man who has gunpowder in every nerve, and all the dynamite of genius in his nature.

It was undeniably and indubitably Shakespeare's intention to give distinctness to Hamlet's character by contrasting it with youthful energy of action, unhesitatingly pursuing its aim.

While Hamlet is letting himself be shipped off to England, the young Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, arrives with his soldiers, ready to risk his life for a patch of ground that "hath in it no profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it." Hamlet says to himself (iv. 4):

"How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge!...
... I do not know
Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do.'"

And he despairs when he contrasts himself with Fortinbras, the delicate and tender prince, who, at the head of his brave troops, dares death and danger "even for an egg-shell":

"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake."

But with Hamlet it is a question of more than "honour," a conception belonging to a sphere far below his. It is natural that he should feel ashamed at the sight of Fortinbras marching off to the sound of drum and trumpet at the head of his forces--he, who has not carried out, or even laid, any plan; who, after having by means of the play satisfied himself of the King's guilt, and at the same time betrayed his own state of mind, is now writhing under the consciousness of impotence. But the sole cause of this impotence is the paralysing grasp laid on all his faculties by his new realisation of what life is, and the broodings born of this realisation. Even his mission of vengeance sinks into the background of his mind. Everything is at strife within him--his duty to his father, his duty to his mother, reverence, horror of crime, hatred, pity, fear of action, and fear of inaction. He feels, even if he does not expressly say so, how little is gained by getting rid of a single noxious animal. He himself is already so much more than what he was at first--the youth chosen to execute a vendetta. He has become the great sufferer, who jeers and mocks, and rebukes the world that racks him. He is the cry of humanity, horror-struck at its own visage.

There is no "general meaning" on the surface of _Hamlet_. Lucidity was not the ideal Shakespeare had before him while he was producing this tragedy, as it had been when he was composing _Richard III_. Here there are plenty of riddles and self-contradictions; but not a little of the attraction of the play depends on this very obscurity.

We all know that kind of well-written book which is blameless in form, obvious in intention, and in which the characters stand out sharply defined. We read it with pleasure; but when we have read it, we are done with it. There is nothing to be read between the lines, no gulf between this passage and that, no mystic twilight anywhere in it, no shadows in which we can dream. And, again, there are other books whose fundamental idea is capable of many interpretations, and affords matter for much dispute, but whose significance lies less in what they say to us than in what they lead us to imagine, to divine. They have the peculiar faculty of setting thoughts and feelings in motion; more thoughts than they themselves contain, and perhaps of a quite different character. _Hamlet_ is such a book. As a piece of psychological development, it lacks the lucidity of classical art; the hero's soul has all the untranspicuousness and complexity of a real soul; but one generation after another has thrown its imagination into the problem, and has deposited in Hamlet's soul the sum of its experience.

To Hamlet life is half reality, half a dream. He sometimes resembles a somnambulist, though he is often as wakeful as a spy. He has so much presence of mind that he is never at a loss for the aptest retort, and, along with it, such absence of mind that he lets go his fixed determination in order to follow up some train of thought or thread some dream-labyrinth. He appals, amuses, captivates, perplexes, disquiets us. Few characters in fiction have so disquieted the world. Although he is incessantly talking, he is solitary by nature. He typifies, indeed, that solitude of soul which cannot impart itself.

"His name," says Victor Hugo, "is as the name on a woodcut cut of Albert Dürer's: _Melancholia_. The bat flits over Hamlet's head; at his feet sit Knowledge, with globe and compass, and Love, with an hour-glass; while behind him, on the horizon, rests a giant sun, which only serves to make the sky above him darker." But from another point of view Hamlet's nature is that of the hurricane--a thing of wrath and fury, and tempestuous scorn, strong enough to sweep the whole world clean.