9

Shakespeare’s rhetoric of consciousness

The being of men is founded in language. But this only becomes actual in conversation.

(Heidegger, ‘Holderlin and the essence of poetry’)

If Claudio and Angelo have often been compared with Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, it might be useful finally to turn to a character from the great tragedies, to analyze a tragic soliloquy proper to discover shared features of style and rhetorical play which link the comic and tragic soliloquy and demonstrate the conventions of realistic characterization which I have argued characterize Angelo and Claudio’s speech.

Perhaps no character of Shakespeare’s plays has been more often noted for his self-consciousness, for his inner life, than Hamlet. The multiplicity of Hamlet’s mind has indeed often been said to account for his tragedy – his indecisiveness, his recognition of the conflicting claims of the subjective self and the objective world. Without pretending to address the interpretive problems of Hamlet, a task which the limits of this study preclude, I would like nevertheless to look at a particular soliloquy of Hamlet in order to illustrate the conventions of realistic characterization and the portrayal of the inner life which I have shown so far only within the generic boundaries of comedy.

In II, ii, after the player’s speech on the death of Priam, Hamlet in soliloquy attacks his cowardice and inaction in a speech which manifests all the features of dialogue we have elsewhere analyzed, and creates the effect of a mind in conflict with itself through what I have termed a rhetoric of consciousness:

Ay, so, God buy to you. Now I am alone.
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,	545
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting	550
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion	555
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.	560
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing – no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life	565
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs – who does me this?	570
Ha!
’Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ha’ fatted all the region kites	575
With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,	580
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion! Fie upon’t! Foh!
About, my brains. Hum –I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play	585
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions.
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players	590
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick. If a do blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power	595
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this. The play’s the thing	600
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.1
	(II, ii, 543–601)

The soliloquy may be divided conveniently into six sections or movements, each representing a shift in Hamlet’s thought. In the first, to line 566, Hamlet compares his real situation with the imagined conceit of the player whose impassioned performance moves Hamlet; the second movement suggests self-examination per se. Hamlet, having moved away from his analysis of the player’s response and comparison of it to his own, now looks inward at his own situation, which he conceives as a challenge or affront; this self-contemplation breaks off at line 571 in swearing, which leads him to compare himself to a whore; finally at line 584 we have the plan for the presentation of the Murder of Gonzaga, and the logical move thereafter at line 594 to questioning the spirit itself to determine whether or not it is an agent of the devil sent to bring about Hamlet’s damnation. Each shift of thought takes place in the middle of the line; similarly, each rhetorical question in the first section is not end stopped, but breaks the rhythmic line. Such pauses heighten the naturalistic over the poetic, suggesting interrupted thought by playing the pattern of thought against the poetic line.

Shakespeare establishes a dialogue with self emphatically in the second half of Hamlet’s opening line, ‘Now I am alone.’ The self-accusing apostrophe ‘O, what a rogue’ constitutes the speech as inner debate, and what follows is appropriately an extended rhetorical question which establishes the I/you dichotomy characteristic of dialogue. By casting the opening description of the player in the interrogative mood, Shakespeare avoids the distancing reportorial dimension such a description might otherwise create. The shift in line 544 to modal verbs ‘should’, ‘would’ (lines 554, 556) from the opening descriptive movement establishes the judgmental tone of self-recrimination that characterizes the soliloquy until Hamlet formulates his plan. We also find many of the features of dialogue we have remarked in earlier Shakespearean soliloquies, the demonstrative pronouns and adverbs, temporal markers and verb tenses which connect these lines to the preceding players’ scene. The first half-line, for example, assumes Rosencrantz’s goodbye, and the ‘this’ and ‘here’ in line 545 refer emphatically to the player who has just enacted the death of Priam. Later in line 574 ‘ere this’ situates the audience by reminding us of the time passed since old Hamlet’s appearance to his son. The ‘this slave’ which follows requires us to supply the antecedent to understand the reference to Claudius in the series on ‘villain’ which follows.

As in Angelo’s speech with which we began, the most complex aspect of dialogue, what Mukařovský calls semantic reversals, suggests the unhomogeneous relation of speakers in a dialogue. Such reversals are manifested in lexical oppositions and logical jumps of many kinds. In the first section of Hamlet’s speech, we have not only a general opposition established between Hamlet and the player, but a further contrast between the player as Hamlet (‘had he the motive’) and the ‘general ear’ which is also divided into a series of opposing groups, the ‘guilty’ who are made mad/the ‘free’ who are appalled; the ‘ignorant’ who are ‘confounded’/those ‘faculties’ which are ‘amazed’. The allusion to the ‘general ear’ of course, draws us as audience into the debate – into what category do we fall? And the allusion to making mad the guilty recalls the decision already taken to enact the Gonzaga interlude and foreshadows the extended explanation of Hamlet’s plan which follows. The rhythmically disruptive adversative, ‘Yet I’, emphasizes the opposition between Hamlet and the player which he goes on to elaborate from his own rather than the player’s perspective.

The diction in this speech is intentionally low, in part certainly to convey Hamlet’s psychological state, his selfdenigration, but also I think to ensure a realistic or naturalistic balance to the tone of melodrama or high tragedy. Shakespeare juxtaposes words such as rogue, peasant slave, muddy-mettled rascal, John-a-dreams, pate, tweaks, swounds, pigeon-liver’d, ass, drab, and scullion, to the heightened language of passion, distraction, heaven, bell, soul, and malefactions. The soliloquy becomes, in Bakhtin’s formulation, ‘a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents’.² Hamlet’s name-calling (rogue, peasant slave, John-a-Dreams, ass) here is oddly incongruous with the sweet prince’s character as it has so far been presented, and particularly in the immediately preceding conversation with the players and Polonius. Such language represents Hamlet’s perception of self, an imagined relation to his situation not justified by logic or reason; the names are correlatives which communicate Hamlet’s state of mind rather than describe his person or behavior. Both Angelo’s metaphors and Hamlet’s self-recrimination are designed to communicate their emotional states. Here also, as in Angelo’s speech, we find the aposiopetic interjections, Ha, Fob, and Hum which emphasize mental conflict.

Though emphatically distinct in their substance – revenge versus desire – Hamlet’s and Angelo’s soliloquies manifest shared rhetorical features and organization. But Hamlet’s soliloquy differs from Angelo’s speech, for unlike Angelo, whose soliloquy is an inner debate of the divided self, with the I and you of dialogue represented directly in self-address (‘What art thou, Angelo?’), Hamlet creates scenarios, addressing himself indirectly in his name-calling and in his imagined roles as player, challenged or insulted party, whore, and finally melancholic. He plays parts even in his mind. Hamlet’s dialogic and histrionic imagination paralyzes him, inhibits action simply by the multiple possibilities his imagination offers and which Shakespeare here represents rhetorically.

As Harry Levin has observed, in this soliloquy Hamlet ‘ponders not only the technique of acting, but the actual nature of the aesthetic process’.³ Hamlet meditates on the relationship of the player to the play, but perhaps more interesting for our purposes is the implied question about characterization this soliloquy poses: how can being and emotion be communicated dramatically? The soliloquy has a metadramatic dimension in its exploration of the problem of how character is expressed on stage, not only through gesture and physical presence, but through spoken language.

We began this study with the problem of characters as beings, and in closing we might return to the problem of being from a slightly different, but nevertheless suggestive perspective. In his essay ‘The influence of language on the development of scientific thought’, Cassirer makes the following observations:

For Aristotle, it has long been recognized that the particular categories of being he distinguishes are closely related to the categories of language and grammar. Aristotle’s theory of categories sets out to describe and determine being to the extent to which it is somehow made explicit and analyzed according to the different forms of the enunciations. But all enunciating requires first of all a subject to which it can be connected, a thing about which one expresses a predicate. Therefore the category of being is placed at the head of the theory of categories. Aristotle defines this being [ousia] in a sense that is both ontological and linguistic… The unity of physis and logos appears thus in Aristotle’s system not as accidental but as necessary.⁴

In the Categories, Aristotle sets out to describe being as it is expressed, or ‘the ways of saying being’.⁵ Though the categories of thought Aristotle names are not homologous with linguistic categories, there is a remarkable congruence between the questions of rhetoric – the sitne, quid sit and quale sit, the predications which can be made about a debate or controversy, or for legal or dramatic purposes, a character – and the categories of thought he enumerates in the Organon and the Metaphysics.

Cassirer, like other philosophers who study the relationship between ontology and language in Aristotle,⁶ observes that being precedes the categories themselves. But what is of interest to us is the recognized close relationship between being and enunciation:

Categories are figures (skhemata) by means of which being properly speaking is expressed…. The system of categories is the system of the ways in which being is construed. It relates the problematic of the analogy of being … with the problematic of the metaphor in general.⁷

Rhetoric, the language of tropes and schemes, is a means of expressing being.

Contemporary theorists of character claim that characters lack being; they are functions, formal constructs, patterns, as if our pain at the death of Cordelia or pleasure at the marriage of Rosalind were simply pain or pleasure at the end of a pattern.⁸ But this close relationship between physis and logos, between being and language, suggests that being is constituted for us in its expressions, and perhaps particularly, its linguistic expressions. To argue that language constitutes being is no doubt abusive, for as Cassirer suggests, language cannot precede its subject, the enunciator. Such a claim argues for a truth or universal status or ontology of language which is problematic. But in the world of poetry, in the practice of dramatic character, language in large measure constitues being, creates characters. If, as anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists claim, the self is ‘a construct, the result of systems of conventions’,⁹ perhaps the critical gulf between characters and persons is less wide than we once imagined. In reading and watching Shakespeare’s plays, in attending to the words his characters speak and to their interior dialogues, their conversations with the self, we are not only experiencing patterns, forms, and structures of plot and action, but being expressed in language.