(II. 1)
We need a rest, and Shakespeare knows it. On comes Polonius and with him his servant, Reynaldo. The theme of the new mercantile spirit of money and suspicion, which appears to characterise the court, is developed in what follows. ‘Give him this money and these notes, Reynaldo,’ instructs Polonius, and it soon becomes clear that he is talking about his son Laertes, now in Paris. Before you visit him, pursues the old councillor, I want you ‘to make inquire/ Of his behaviour’. But that is not all. Reynaldo must pursue a more active path, he must put it about that Laertes is a bit of a lad, prone to ‘such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty’. There it is again, ‘youth and liberty’ associated not with nature and growth but with dangerous excess. Nor is this all. He must suggest that Laertes is also addicted to ‘drinking, fencing, swearing/ Quarrelling, drabbing’, but – and here comes the peculiar mixture of the prudential spirit and the love of his own voice which is typical of Polonius – ‘you may go so far’ – but no further.
You must not put another scandal on him,
That he is open to incontinency –
That’s not my meaning; but breathe his faults so quaintly
That they may seem the taints of liberty,
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind … (29–33)
Commentators have struggled to distinguish ‘incontinency’ from ‘drabbing’, but that is not the point. Polonius is a man whose moral compass is infinitely wobbly, but who seems to imagine that it is as firm and clear as a diagram; a man who is constantly quibbling over words but for whom words have long since lost their moorings in life. When Reynaldo, sensibly enough, questions what he is being asked to do, Polonius goes into a long ramble about how this is ‘a fetch of warrant’, a legitimate trick; or as Jenkins glosses it (p. 239), the end justifies the means, though such realpolitik is typically couched in language that feels vaguely legal and is suitably obscure. Indeed, as Polonius proceeds we witness him losing contact more and more with both language and reality. Shakespeare is giving us a kind of Dadaist rant avant la lettre. Inevitably, when Reynaldo breaks into his monologue with ‘Very good, my lord’, Polonius suddenly finds that he has lost his way: ‘And then, sir, does a this – a does – what was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something. Where did I leave?’
This is a splendid sketch of a doddering old man losing his memory, but it is much more. It brings us to the corruption at the heart of the court, a corruption more innocent and less malicious than we find in the courts of Goneril and Regan in King Lear, but for that reason all the more disturbing – we cannot dismiss it as ‘evil’, only as the inevitable end of a culture that has lost its moral bearings. And coming so soon after Shakespeare’s reminder to us of the physical conditions of the theatre in which he is working and in which this play is unfolding, it makes us aware of a simple theatrical fact: the play we are watching will come to a halt if the actors forget their lines. This is not as radical a jolt as we get in Waiting for Godot:
Vladimir:What was I saying, we could go on from there.
Estragon:What were you saying when?
Vladimir:At the very beginning.
Estragon:The very beginning of WHAT?
Vladimir:This evening … I was saying … I was saying …
Estragon:I’m not a historian.
In Hamlet, of course, someone is at hand to remind Polonius of what he was saying, but the damage has been done. A chasm has opened at our feet as we are suddenly reminded that it is not really an old courtier standing before us and speaking but an actor, and one who could quite easily forget his lines. Of course he has been hired precisely because he is not in the habit of forgetting his lines, and we pay for our tickets precisely in order to enter another world, the world of medieval Denmark in this instance, which is also, somehow, a contemporary world – but we do not want it to be too contemporary a world, too realistic – just realistic enough for us to inhabit it for the duration of the play. In other words, a playwright may question everything, but the one thing he must not question is the pact he has made with his audience at the start: you pay and I provide you with a spectacle to dream to. You may question every form of authority – of kings, of bishops, of geniuses – but the one authority you must not question is that of the playwright himself. Of course there are other theatrical traditions, such as that of the medieval miracle plays, that of Brecht and his disciples, that of Japanese Noh drama, but in the dominant Western tradition, of which Shakespeare is both one of the earliest exemplars and the greatest representative, these principles hold. The playwright can play with it, prod it, but he must always make you feel that he is in control. And Shakespeare, who, especially in this play, prods it more than any other writer until the twentieth century, also knows, here as in his dealings with inflammatory theological issues, exactly how far he can go.
Here Polonius needs only to be given his cue and he is off again. Reynaldo is quick to remind him that where he left off was at ‘At “closes in the consequence”’, and although that is not strictly true (three more lines followed before Polonius lost his way), it is true enough, in that no one thing Polonius says makes much more sense than any other, so that he is quite happy to pick up where his servant tells him:
At ‘closes in the consequence’, ay, marry.
He closes thus: ‘I know the gentleman,
I saw him yesterday’, or ‘th’other day’,
Or then, or then, with such or such, ‘and as you say,
There was a gaming’, ‘there o’ertook in’s rouse’ …
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 direction out.
So by my former lecture and advice
Shall you my son. (54–68)
Line 53 in the Folio has Reynaldo give a cue of two lines rather than one, and Jenkins notes that this has ‘the air of an actor’s elaboration’ (p. 232), which is not surprising, since the whole exchange could clearly be lengthened or curtailed, depending on how much elaboration was felt to be needed. Margreta de Grazia has observed, very acutely, how many speeches in this play consist of lists, and how often the three texts differ in length at those points, suggesting that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, this is the most flexible as well as being the longest (in Q2 and F). And this is not surprising, for it is the most Beckettian of his plays, in the sense that a good deal of it consists of words that have little meaning but for that very reason powerfully convey the vacancy or horror that has given rise to them. All too often we want to scream at the speaker to shut up, to stop a little and think – but the play, of course, goes on.
As it goes on here, once Reynaldo has left, with the entry of Polonius’s other child, Ophelia. Here the paradox of language being inadequate to convey what is felt and yet, through its very inadequacy, powerfully conveying all that is needed is given a new twist, for the terrified Ophelia is coming to report Hamlet’s seemingly incomprehensible behaviour as he broke into her closet and confronted her,
with his doublet all unbrac’d
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d,
Ungarter’d and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors … (78–84)
This is the first glimpse we have of the new Hamlet, ‘playing’ the madman, though his attitude towards Horatio and the others in the previous scene had hinted at it, and he has indeed told them he will do so. Yet it is also a powerful evocation of a Hamlet deeply disturbed by his recent experiences: the ‘play’ and the ‘reality’, though Hamlet himself may not realise it, merge all too easily.
Polonius is convinced that this is simply a sign of love-madness, and he presses Ophelia for further details. She obliges:
He took me by the wrist and held me hard.
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
[‘He backs till he holds her at arm’s length’ – Jenkins,
p. 234.]
And with his other hand thus o’er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face
As a 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
As did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being. (87–96)
Effortlessly, Shakespeare presents us with the opposite of the scene we have just witnessed. Where Polonius spoke at length and said almost nothing, Hamlet, even though we have his actions filtered through the double prism of Ophelia’s report and his feigned madness, says nothing yet conveys much. Conveys his anguished perusal of Ophelia’s face for clues as to her true being and to an understanding of women in general and his own mother in particular. Conveys his plea to her to be what he would have her be.
Polonius, of course, only sees in this what he would like to see: ‘This is the very ecstasy of love’, an ecstasy which, he fears, ‘leads the will to desperate undertakings’. Did she encourage him in any way? he asks. No, she replies, I did what you told me, ‘I did repel his letters and denied/ His access to me’ (109–10). Castigating himself for his lack of judgement in suggesting that Hamlet was merely trifling with her affections, but only because he fears the consequences, Polonius decides that the best thing is for her to tell the King all she has told him. ‘Come,’ he ends, suddenly decisive, and they go.