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 recognize 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 reproaches of womanhood, suddenly stabs the caves dropper behind the arras, suddenly, as if under some irresistible inspiration, sends his companions on shipboard to their deaths, suddenly boards the pirates, suddenly grapples with Laertes in the grave, suddenly does execution on the guilty King, plucks the poison from Horatio's hands, and gives his dying voice to a successor to the throne.” But why then do those “healthy impulses” arise so frequently as to make Hamlet into a person of almost terrible ruthlessness, yet prevent him from doing the deed which he has sworn to the spirit of his father to do? Having caused without remorse the deaths of at least four persons in the King's entourage, why does he still seem to have come no nearer to the performance of his supreme duty? Why does the “veil of melancholy” never lift when he has an opportunity to take his revenge on the King? The spectators must feel that this is no mere coincidence, otherwise they would lose interest. There must be some hidden cause for Hamlet's reluctance to perform the required act, a reason which Hamlet himself cannot fathom, and which, maybe, only his deal will reveal. The audience remains expectant.

On looking closer, it struck me that Hamlet often does one thing instead of another. His spurts of action are not mere freaks of a temperament that alternates between feverish exploits and slothful lethargy. He not only refrains from slaughtering the King in the prayer scene, but immediately afterwards slays Polonius, mistaking him for the King and coldbloodedly shouting “a rat.” Yet he cannot be too melancholy to make a [339] thrust at the King, but sufficiently healthy to stab Polonius; his “healthy impulses” cannot intervene too late to make him act rightly, yet in time to make him act wrongly. An ebbing of will of power should not prevent a man from pressing for action in one way, while leaving him uninhibited to act eagerly in another. Eventually, Hamlet having made no preparations to destroy the King, kills him on the instant. He thus performs with zest a series of actions except the one required of him, and then unexpectedly does the deed without any sign of reluctance. The mysterious delay in killing the King still stares us in the face.

Bradley's solution missed the mark by a hair's breadth. He listed instances of Hamlet's proneness to action and added that he cats in these cases since it is not the one hateful action on which his morbid self-feeling had centered. Bradley meant, of course, the revenge on Claudius. Unfortunately, he did not follow up the clue.

The simple truth is that Hamlet does not kill his uncle because by force of circumstances and by reason of this character his aversion to living has become focused on this “one hateful action.” He is unable to decide to live. If challenged to choose between life and death, he would be undone because he cannot deliberately choose life. This, in terms of human existence, is the purport of Hamlet's melancholy.

We should not take of Hamlet's professions of wanting to die literally; they are no more than the rhetoric of an ambiguous mood. Oh no, he does not wish to die; he merely hates to live. A hero who stubbornly insisted on dying would be insupportable. There would be no conflict to follow, no play to watch, since there would be no one to obstruct him in having his way. Hamlet's elaborations on the theme “I wish I were dead” mean no more than he would refuse to settle down to the job of living, should he perchance he forced to make such a choice. But why of all living creatures should be alone be compelled to do so? The rest {opus} need not decide to live, and yet we go on living as long as we can. Hamlet, toon is [340] prepared to defend his life, and maybe all the more bravely because he does not set it at a pin's fee.

Here, I felt, lay the roots of the delay.

Hamlet has turned away from life, but it is only the appearance of the Ghost that starts the tragedy. He merely wished to withdraw from the Court and retire to Wittenberg, though at his mother's entreaties (and perhaps for Ophelia's sake) he postponed his departure, when his father's disembodied spirit appears on the battlements of Elsinore and orders him to kill the King. Events themselves are pushing him towards a decision. To obey his father's behest would involve all that living involves. He is to become King, perhaps with Ophelia for his Queen, the princely ruler of the Court of Elsinore, a radiant sun amongst a host of Rosencrantzes and Guildsterns. He knows in his bones that he will never comply. His refusal to set the world aright springs from his dread of becoming part of a world he has learned to detest with all his being. The Ghost has uttered his death sentence. He will perish before he fulfils that injunction and knows it. But in the humiliating interim he will be like the rest of us, stretching out the number of his days.

The killing of the King, O cursed spite, now stands for compulsion to live. He cannot perform this action on which his morbid self-feeling centers, not as a physical act of execution - that is indifferent - but as a deed of filial duty enjoined upon him by his father's tearful command, as a step involving him in a fatal sequence of obligations, as a gesture of obeisance that will plunge him into the maelstrom of life. Hamlet could instantly kill the King as it were by accident, off the record, under the cover of mistaken identity, through a disowned thrust, by means of any emphatically unsymbolic act; or, at the opposite end, when he himself was doomed to die, solemnly assured of his impending departure. Never, never as a deliberate act that would commit him to live. This, in a sense, is Hamlet's mort personal secret.

Actually, he attempts both: to do it, pretending it to be unintentional, and to do it, when this can no more affect his own [341] fate. He stabs Polonius in a trice, mistaking him for his better, while denying in the very act any real purpose. And, even more decisively at the end, when poisoned by Laertes's foil, he almost exultantly repeats his “I am dead,” and the skeptical dreamer turns in a twinkle into Voltaire's butcher boy, whose slaughterings are no more than mechanical acts committing him to nothing, since he, Hamlet, is now securely dead.

I suspect that in my malady Hamlet's pretended madness was for me the vortex of attraction. I must have sensed that those antics would eventually prove the vehicle of his self-destruction.

However genuine at first, Hamlet's excited doings after the encounter with the Ghost soon turn into a mere feint of his melancholy. He was moving away with all his being from the Court, from convention, from all that seems, when fate arrested his flight and hurled him back into the center of damnation. The apparition all but makes him lose his senses. But as the fit wears off - and he recovers quickly - a definite concern overmasters him and henceforth determines the use he will make of the discovery of his bent for “seeming”. That new anxiety springs from the fear of being pushed to action against his will. He turns secretive in order to remain free. This is no mere act of political caution. Of that there is no need; by confiding the secret of his “antic disposition” to his friends he proves that he trusts them implicitly. But should they as much as suspect what passed between him and the Ghost, the dread decision could not be deferred. Only as long as he alone - and later maybe Horatio, his alter ego - knows of the awful revelation is he, Hamlet, safe. In delaying the decision, Hamlet is fighting for his life. The feigned madness was his most personal response to an unexpected situation. Unhinged by horror and fear, Hamlet, the passionate lover of sincerity, has espoused insincerity as his weapon and armor. The mechanism of the plot and the rhythm of the tragedy is set by this fact.

It has been noted towards the end of the play Hamlet's gloom lifts and the assumed derangement fades away. For some unaccounatble reason - one would rather expect the opposite [342] - he now appears placid and composed. this anticlimax is one of the subtle beauties of the play. Yet, could it be otherwise? Hamlet, who imagined that he wished to die, is now ready for death. He makes no preparations to kill the King and yet appears certain that the hour of revenge is approaching. Again, how could it be otherwise? He now welcomes death, no longer from a confusion of moods that denies the meaning of life, but from a recognition of that meaning. When he strikes down the King, he proclaims himself “dead”, and death comes to him when he is ripe for it. The apparent accidents that control the course of the play are revealed as no more than a semblance; its progress is a plain as Calvary. Indeed, the figure of Hamlet has been interpreted as that of a saint. No worse misunderstandings is possible. What are witnessing is tragedy, the story of guilt and expiation. And it hsi put-on madness, that self-elected device of hovering bewteen just revenge an unjustifiable evasion, that involves him deeper in guilt.

Hamlet with a grim sense of humor stages his antics with precision. The “attic scene” (“dumb scene”) sends the crying Ophelia straight into the arms of her rather; who rushes with his discovery to the King, who on the spot decides to set a trap with Ophelia herself as the bait. Hamlet now excels in feats of romantic irony. He sets the “lawful espials” a riddle: what is the cause of his own supposed madness? He makes each guess true to character. Polonius, the pompous vacuity, displays all the self-assurance of his wordy cynism: Hamlet thwarted in seducing Ophelia has gone mad. The Queen, nearer the truth, is made to feel the guilt of her overhasty marriage. Claudius alone is on a par with the challenger and refuses to be duped by his foiled lover's frenzies. He sends for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, arranges for the trap, orders Hamlet to be put under guard, dispatches him to England, sets Laertes on his trail, and concocts the murder plot. Except for Claudius, they are so many puppets in the hands of Hamlet. He enjoys his cruel superiority: the chastisement of those fawning gigglers, [343] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even the anguish of the King caused by Hamlet's ominous conversational flashes. Eventually, Hamlet playing the madman, stages a play within the play, the effects of which on the King send him into transports of delight. And yet, all the time is helpless self is more and more entangled in guilt. In spite of his glamorous antics he knows, in his most sensitive heart, that he has lost his way.

Hamlet's tragedy is enmeshed in his love for Ophelia, whom he has sacrified. “I loved Ophelia”, he cries at her grave when suddenly he is faced by the truth. It is the turning point of Hamlet's personal drama. Up to that time external events have failed to penetrate the shroud of his melancholy; in his isolation he has hardly known himself. Now Laertes' high-pitched sorrow strikes his ear. In a flash of inhuman pain light breaks through to him. This is his horrible awakening:

What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis? Whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.

His love for Ophelia is pure and ardent. Hamlet is driven to the point of platonic frenzy by his mother's sexual debasement, which has tarred Ophelia with the same brush. But not even his mother is beyond redemption, terribly though she has sinned; how much less so the innocent Ophelia who, he must feel, is merely a victim of his own delusions. His love for her lies like a chasm between him and the others. He knows the putrid atmosphere of the Court. He knows his Laertes, the youthful lecher, who is depraving his own sister's mind. He knows his smutty Polonius, who instills vile suspicions into her confiding soul. He knows his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose horizon is boundned by lasciviousness. He knows his King and Queen, who set their hopes on Ophelia's physical charms to seduce him to become untrue to his mission. He abhors them for their calumny of all that is most truly noble. Not one but [344] has debased Ophelia's love for him and his love for her into a political counter, speculating on what there is of frailty in either.

[345] [346] [347] [348] [349] [350] [351] [352] [353] [354] [355]

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)