Hamlet

[336] A brief reminiscence at the outset will serve a twofold purpose. It should reduce to the vanishing point the literary claims of this piece of amateur writing, while adding a note of authenticity to the author’s reasons for putting off publication for almost a lifetime.

Nearly forty years ago I was serving as an officer in the old Austro-Hungarian Army. The Russian winter and the blackish steppe made me feel sick at heart. It happened that at the time my personal life had taken a turn towards darkness; daylight seemed bounded in a narrowing disk that grew dimmer and dimmer. At one time, I remember, the cold was so intense that when my horse stumbled and fell I was too apathetic to get out of the saddle. Fortunately - though I may not have thought so then - the gaunt stiff creature, a yellow Cossack mare that we had picked up, jerked herself onto her long legs and I was saved, for had she rolled over I might have been crushed to death. For companionship I had nothing but a volume of Shakespeare's plays; in my desolation I found myself reading and rereading one: “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Altogether, I must have read it through well over a score of times. My soul was numbed and fell under the spell of a recurrent daydream. I read my “Hamlet”, and every word, phrase, and intonation of the hero's ravings came through to me, simple and clear.

For many years the memory of those bleak months haunted me. I could not rid myself of Hamlet's secret. I knew why he did not kill the King. I knew what it was he feared. I knew why he so swiftly ran Polonius through the body when he mistook him for the King, pretending he was only after a rat. I knew [337] what is confused words to Ophelia meant. But even while I still felt I knew, I was already fast forgetting. My days were clearing up and, as light broke in, knowledge passed into shadowy recollection. This, in it turns, faded into a mere intellectual understanding. I was now happy again and could only faintly remember what once had formed part of my being: Hamlet's inhuman sufferings.

Yet something in me insisted that my theories on Hamlet's indecision and forced antics were not merely the morbid offspring of my late malady. I saw proof of this in my excessive reaction to the opinions of the great A.C. Bradley, whose insights into Hamlet's character, as I chanced to come across them, struck me by their resemblance to my own. But Bradley, who was on the right track, had stopped just short of the solution. By a slight inconsistency, he failed to recongize the obvious.

Hamlet's inaction, so he thought, was to be explained by the influence of a profound melancholy. He is shocked by his mother's gross sensuality into utter disgust of life. It is in this state that the revelation of his father's murder and the command of revenge reach him. His mind is poisoned and paralyzed, hence his endless procrastinations. The other inner obstacles to action - his moral sensibility, intellectual genius, temperamental instability - are either the causes of the effects of this pervasive melancholy. It alone accounts for the course of the play, together with the periods of normal behavior during which his “healthy impulses”, remnants of a virile personality, break through.

In this picture I recognized my Hamlet. At the same time I knew that Bradley had not penetrated the twin secret of Hamlet the person and “Hamlet” the play. For the key, which I firmly believed, to be sure, there is the inaction which the hero can neither justify nor account for; but there is also the enigma of how so exciting a show could ever have been staged about inaction. Let me try to make myself clearer.

At first glance, Hamlet's melancholy explains both his dilatory [338] behavior and his lack of comprehension of himself. in his utter dejection he is averse to any kind of action. He indulges in mechanical puns, in trivial backchat, repeating sometimes the speaker's words without irony or wit, like a man too benumbed to hear what he himself is saying. Yet, this selfsame emotionally shocked and mentally absent person, as the critic Edward Dowden remarked, “suddenly conceives of the possibility of unmasking the King's guilt, on the accidental arrival of the players, and proceeds without delay to put the matter to the test, suddenly overwhelms Ophelia with his

narrowing disk that grew dimmer and dimmer

to get out the saddle

daydream

ravings

as I chanced to come across them

his mother's gross sensuality into utter disgust of life

are either the causes or the effects of this pervasive melancholy. It alone accounts

to fit both locks

how so exciting a show could ever have been staged about inaction.

Text in English to type

In his utter dejection

He indulges in mechanical puns

Text Informations

Reference:
Original Publication: “Hamlet”, The Yale Review, vol. 43, n°3, 1954, p. 336-350
KPA:

• 36/08 (copy of the original)
• 22/09 (Notes – Hamlet, 1947-1954)
• 36/07 (Draft article – “Hamlet”, n. d)
• 42/08 (“Hamlet” in Hungarian, copy of original and typed draft)