Two of the three early texts of Hamlet have curious and much discussed passages, in which Shakespeare, leaving medieval Denmark behind, gives us a brief glimpse of the state of the contemporary London theatre. The earliest text, the garbled 1603 quarto, has ‘Gilderstone’ explaining to Hamlet why the actors who have arrived at Elsinore are on their travels. The adult troupe, he says, has found the competition of the boy players in the capital too hot; the ‘principall publike audience’ has deserted the public theatres in favour of the ‘private players’ in the children’s company. This passage, in a text that it is now widely assumed was memorially reconstructed by a small-part actor or actors for a provincial tour, would appear to be a part summary of the much longer passage that occurs in the folio text (1623) where, in the equivalent conversation between Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we are told that the reason the troupe is travelling is an ‘inhibition’ (presumably a Government prohibition) on their playing in the capital and that a war of words has broken out between the adult and boy companies, in which the boys have got the better of the argument. To bring the matter right home, Rosencrantz tells us, in an apparent reference to the signboard of the Globe playhouse ‘Hercules and his load’, that Shakespeare’s own company is one of the victims.
It is extremely unusual, indeed unique to these passages, for Shakespeare to use one of his plays to discuss his own affairs so openly, and we must assume that it reflects a unique concern with a threat to his professional status. Such a threat in early 1601 is understandable. When he started to write Hamlet in 1599 or early 1600 he found himself almost without serious rivals in the London theatre. Only one major dramatist older than himself, George Chapman, had survived into the new century, writing for the rival company, the Admiral’s Men. This superiority had seemed to find official recognition in June 1600 when the Privy Council decreed there should be two professional theatre companies in London, one of which was Shakespeare’s. His company, the Chamberlain’s Men, had recently constructed a large and well-appointed theatre on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark, ideally situated not only for attracting city clientele over London Bridge, but also for the ‘wiser’ and freer spending sort from the West End of London and Westminster who had easy and comfortable access by water across the Thames. Shakespeare was continuing what proved to be his steady progress up-market. He must have felt vulnerable, therefore, when, in the autumn of 1600, Henry Evans opened the ‘private’ theatre of Blackfriars on the western side of the City, charging prices that reflected not only the greater comforts of an indoor theatre, but a wish to exclude hoi polloi. To add to Shakespeare’s problems a new generation of playwrights, stimulated by the prospect of a well-educated, sophisticated audience, both for Blackfriars and the small covered theatre of the Paul’s Boys’ company that had reopened in the City centre (probably in 1599) was beginning to challenge a supremacy that had made him the most popular playwright of his day. It was not surprising that his professional concern bubbled over into print.
As a major theme of this book is to be Shakespeare’s response to these challenges and how it affected his own writing for the theatre, it might be as well to have a closer look at the two Hamlet passages in question. The passage in Q1,1 somewhat contradictorily, has Gilderstone assert both that the adult players’ ‘reputation holds as it was wont’ and that the ‘noveltie’ of the children’s troupe carries the day in attracting the ‘principall publike audience’, where ‘principall’ perhaps means the more eminent part of the audience, the gentry. The complaint is what we might expect from a travelling group of London actors, that it has been a victim of the vagaries of fashionable taste rather than that its decline in popularity is a result of its own deficiencies. The redactors of Shakespeare’s original text would seem to be adapting the complaint to their own circumstances. The folio text, though published much later, must reflect Shakespeare’s original more closely for it is much more precisely related to the theatrical situation in London in 1600 and early 1601. It clearly refers to what has come to be called the ‘war of the theatres’, in which Jonson, writing for the newly opened Blackfriars theatre, composes a series of plays poking fun at rivals in both the public theatre and the other ‘private’ theatre of Paul’s Boys. In contrast to the complaining tone of Q1, the account of theatrical warfare in the folio version is humorous, though laughter and tears are never far apart in Hamlet. Hamlet at this moment is in a particularly volatile mood and the conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildernstern is carried on in a spirit of banter. Rosencrantz’s description of the boys’ troupe as an ‘ayrie of Children, little Yases, that crye out on the top of question; and are most tyranically clap’t for’t’ refers (as Reavely Gair points out)2 to the Blackfriars theatre where the auditorium was on an upper floor. The reference to the Globe has about it the air of a private joke:
| Hamlet | Do the Boyes carry it away? |
| Rosencrantz | I that they do my Lord, Hercules and his load too. |
(F. II, ii, 375–6)3
It is usually assumed that this passage reflects Shakespeare’s concern with loss of revenue,4 for Jonson in Poetaster has his public theatre actor, Histrio, complain ‘this winter ha’s made us all poorer than so many starv’d snakes: No bodie comes at us; not a gentleman’ (III, iv, 330). Jonson in Poetaster, however, is much more concerned with scoring points than with God’s truth and there is no evidence at all that Shakespeare’s company was seriously affected financially at this time. Unlike the Elsinore troupe, they seem to have been acting regularly in the capital over the period and in contrast to the Q1 references the folio passage does not seem in general appropriate to the circumstances of the actors playing it. Rosencrantz gives as the reason for the troupe’s travels an ‘inhibition’ placed on them ‘by the late innovation’—an explanation that has greatly puzzled the commentators when they try to relate it to Shakespeare’s company. One explanation is that the ‘innovation’ (which in Shakespeare elsewhere refers to political turmoil)5 alludes to the Essex rebellion of 1601,6 but again there is no evidence that Shakespeare’s company was ‘inhibited’ at this time.7 It is much more likely that this part of the conversation between Hamlet and Rosencrantz does not refer to contemporary England at all, but to the requirements of the plot where the ‘innovation’ would be the political crisis caused by King Hamlet’s recent death. It would clearly have been the kind of prudent move one would expect from Claudius to ‘inhibit’ the city players during the crisis in order to forestall unwanted comment. This would also explain why Q2, the ‘authorized’ version of the play published in 1604, while it omits all reference to the now passé war of the theatres, keeps the earlier lines referring to the ‘innovation’ and the reasons why the troupe has to go on its travels. Clearly Shakespeare felt that this passage was germane to the plot, whereas the jokes about the ‘little eyases’ had ceased to be topical by 1604 and so had lost their point. Further evidence leads us in the same direction. Dover Wilson in the new Cambridge edition of Hamlet argues that Rosencrantz’s description of the Elsinore troupe as ‘tragedians of the city’ would be more suitable for the Admiral’s Men than for Shakespeare’s company, who had principally excelled in comedy at this date and for whom the description would be inappropriate.8 Wilson also thinks it unlikely that Shakespeare would mock his own standing when Rosencrantz asserts the players have lost popularity,9 but in this case it surely fits in with the bantering, self-mocking tone of the reference to the Globe. Shakespeare is not seriously concerned for his bread and butter here, but for his reputation as a playwright who can appeal to the ‘wiser sort’, for the Blackfriars theatre was small compared to the Globe and usually only staged plays one day in the week;10 in the event neither ‘private’ theatre turned out to be financially viable.11 It is possible, to judge from the Folio passage where we are told the boy players ‘are now in fashion’, that the gentry are being persuaded by ridicule to avoid the ‘common stages’. The reference in Q1 to the ‘principall publicke’ reflects the original emphasis. Shakespeare seems to have been concerned throughout his career to be regarded as a gentleman and it would have been a matter of concern if he thought there was a danger of the Globe becoming regarded as unfashionable or fit only for the stinkards. Certainly his response to the new situation shows a marked concern to be abreast of the latest theatrical fashions.
We don’t know exactly when Shakespeare, thumbing over an old play (perhaps by Kyd) on the subject of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, began to write his updated version. Harold Jenkins prefers a date sometime late in 1599 for its first performance, arguing that the passage on the war of the theatres is a later interpolation;12 most commentators have placed the date rather later, accepting the reference to the little eyases as part of the original script and therefore dating the first performance in the spring of 1601. Poetaster (of 1601) was Jonson’s last blast in the war of the theatres. While Hamlet is (as I shall explain) somewhat old-fashioned in its dramaturgical techniques, there are also signs of a reaction to Marston in the play, as we shall see. By 1602, in Troilus and Cressida, a play we can be certain was written after the advent of the new rivals, Shakespeare is clearly attempting to counter-attack by playing the ‘private’ theatres at their own satiric game, and we shall find that from Troilus on, Shakespeare consciously strives to keep abreast of the fashions as they are dictated by the ‘elite’ theatre of Paul’s and Blackfriars until the advent of James causes a further adjustment to a yet more exalted clientele. In all this Shakespeare shows, as far as we can see, an acute responsiveness to the demands of his particular audiences and an increasing tendency away from the demands of a purely popular audience, which however he never completely loses sight of. One of the most interesting aspects of his writing throughout his working life is his ability to respond to change and while this ability is evinced in the first half of his professional career it becomes much more obvious and more far-reaching in his response to the revolution in theatrical fashion that accompanied the opening of the ‘private’ theatres.
Hamlet, by the tokens of the new theatre, is, as I said, (for all its brilliant inventiveness) a rather old-fashioned play. It follows hard upon the heels of Julius Caesar, to which it alludes,13 and which was seen at the Globe by the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter on 21 September 1599. John Dover Wilson conjectures that Julius Caesar was the inaugurating play for the Globe.14 This plausible suggestion would imply that Shakespeare was making a bid, in returning to tragedy after a period in which he confined himself to comedy and English history, to challenge the Admiral’s Men at their own game in competing for the custom of the audience of the neighbouring Rose theatre. Hamlet could be explained as a continuation of this appeal combined with a concern (shared to some extent with Julius Caesar) to attract the fashionable from the West End. Its unmistakably more learned appeal, remarked on by Gabriel Harvey, who considered it a play with qualities to ‘please the wiser sort’,15 could it is true be accounted for as an attraction to the gentry, who might be sensitive to Jonson’s ridicule; but equally it could be a shrewd way of cashing in on the proximity of the new Globe to the better side of London across the water.
A further reason for supposing that Shakespeare had his old rivals, the Admiral’s Men, in his sights when he decided to refurbish the old play of Hamlet is that the rival company had successfully revived Kyd’s most popular play, the Spanish Tragedy, in 1597 in a revised version and so kept alive the popular interest in revenge tragedy.16 Indeed the Spanish Tragedy had proved one of Henslowe’s best investments,17 for he was still cashing in on it in 1602, when he paid one ‘bengemy Johnsone’ in June of that year ‘for new adicyons for Jeronymo’18 (Jonson continued as usual to keep a finger in all the theatrical pies). Even more popular through the 1590s was Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, which Shakespeare had successfully countered with his own play about a Jew, the Merchant of Venice c. 1597. But while Shakespeare was thus engaged in responding to his rivals’ successes he was also subtly changing the terms of the debate. Henslowe’s most successful money-spinners—Marlowe and Kyd in tragedy, Chapman in comedy19—were essentially sensational, centring above all on action and intrigue. To this Shakespeare added a concern for characters as individuals that increasingly led his plays away from sensationalism towards an affective drama, where the audience were encouraged to see the characters as if they were real people, identify with them and respond emotionally towards them. In achieving this shift Shakespeare was simply responding to his own supreme talent for creating the illusion of reality in his characters. No clearer example can be seen of this than by comparing Marlowe’s Barabas with Shakespeare’s Shylock, in whom the bugbear figure becomes so humanized that the thematic implications of the source material become ambiguous. That this ambiguity is not fully controlled and intentional is suggested by the sudden lurch from the trial scene in Act IV, in which Shylock is distressingly tricked and humiliated, to a serenely lyrical fifth act based on the emotional assumption that Shylock’s expulsion from the play eliminates the source of evil and disruption. Two dramaturgical methods are in uncomfortable juxtaposition here, the sensationalism of the Jew-baiting source material and the affective, humane presentation of the Jew as a real person. This problem continues to recur in Shakespeare’s plays at this time, as he explores his own extraordinary powers of characterization; it recurs clearly in the Henry IV sequence in the figure of Falstaff. Hamlet, however, is the supreme example, and the curious ambiguity of the play and its constant appeal for a critical ‘solution’ that is never achieved can be traced to the same source: Shakespeare’s use of sensational material for the exploration of character.
We have only to compare Hamlet with revenge plays of the rival theatres of the same time to see how Shakespeare’s search for affectiveness disturbs the expectations aroused by the sensational material. We will take three such plays, two from Henslowe’s company, Lust’s Dominion by Marston, Dekker and others (1600) and the Tragedy of Hoffman by Chettle (1602), and a rare example from the ‘private’ theatres (where such sensationalism proved not to be popular), Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1600). Lust’s Dominion is an interesting play for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that its probable date of production, by the Admiral’s Men sometime in 1600, makes it possible that it was providing a rival attraction at the new Fortune theatre to the new Hamlet playing at the Globe. If we accept Professor Hoy’s very plausible conjectures that the play was a revamping of an old play whose revision was begun by Marston and then handed over for completion to Dekker with the aid of Day and Haughton,20 it illustrates (like Hamlet) that tendency in the popular theatre to bring up to date old material that had presumably proved viable on the stage earlier. Certainly Lust’s Dominion is notably derivative, being stuffed with Marlovian echoes. It also owes a considerable debt to the rival playwright’s Titus Andronicus, the play that as late as 1614 still had its appeal to some (with the Spanish Tragedy) as together ‘the best playes yet’.21 Shakespeare’s earlier plays are much closer in their dramatic methods to Dekker here than to his own dramaturgy later. Lust’s Dominion is a highly professional play, as we might expect of the product of a team of experienced professional playwrights. It is all the more convincing, therefore, as an indicator of what met the expectations of the popular audiences at this time. The conservatism of the play is not confined to its use of earlier dramatic material: its characters are unashamedly stereotyped to fit an immediately recognizable framework of dramatic reference. The central character, the revenging Moor, Eleazar, is labelled by his blackness as a manifestation of evil. As such his behaviour is only made other than totally predictable by the conventional requirement that evil involves prevarication and double dealing. Associated with this embodiment of evil (another convention involved here is that evil is primarily, as with the devil, of the male sex) is the ‘lascivious queen’ of the subtitle, Queen Eugenia, whose lustful perversity is expressed through her infatuation with the black man—a symbolism echoed from Tamora’s relation to Aaron in Titus Andronicus. The dominion of lust (meaning greed as well as its more specialized meaning) is illustrated in a series of examples of sexual infatuation and its evil consequences. The playwrights have no interest in explaining their characters’ attitudes in plausible psychological terms. Eleazar’s desire for revenge against the Spanish hierarchy is touched on fleetingly as the result of his father’s death in battle at Spanish hands; but as he has married into the Spanish nobility and has a prominent place in Spanish society (eventually becoming king) his hatred of the Spaniards is a matter of stance rather than genuine grievance. His desire to be evil far outweighs his political interests as, for instance, when he keeps his enemies alive in order to enjoy tormenting them in prison (V, ii). Vengeance is not a problem for Eleazar, but a definition of his status as the evil genius of the play. The playwrights’ use of soliloquy—as in Hamlet confined principally to the central figure—in marked contrast to Hamlet demonstrates their concern with stereotype. Such soliloquies are manifestos defining the hero’s course of action, expressing his mind as revenge villain, not revealing its inner processes. Like all the other characters, Eleazar is essentially a symbol of a state of mind; accordingly characters do not change and develop, but rebound off one another in feverish action and counteraction. His soliloquy as he rests from battle is typical. He is commenting on the dead body of one of his soldiers:
Oh for more work, more souls to send to hell;
That I might pile up Charons boat so full,
Untill it topple o’re, Oh ’twould be sport
To see them sprawl through the black slimy lake.
Ha, ha; there’s one going thither, sirrah, you,
You slave, who kill’d thee? how he grins! this breast,
Had it been tempered, and made proof like mine,
It never would have been a mark for fools
To hit afar off with their dastard bullets.
(IV, ii. 57–65)22
There is nothing crude in the language here, indeed dramatically it shows considerable sophistication in its switch of tone from the excitement of the opening lines, reflecting the exhilaration of the battle, to the sardonic meditation on the corpse, and the soliloquy ends on a note of seriousness as Eleazar promises the body a dignified burial. There is also sophistication in the way in which Eleazar’s evil nature expresses itself in a materialism that sees the difference between life and death on the battlefield in terms of the quality of one’s armour. Indeed a certain amount of individuality is imparted. Failure to supply psychological depth is not due to a lack of the appropriate medium for doing so, but to the whole concept of character as moral symbol.
The action of the play is grounded on a simple moral pattern in which evil characters like Eleazar and the Queen are in conflict with such symbols of righteousness as Prince Philip and his sister Isabella; between these opposing forces are those characters like the Cardinal Mendoza who are pulled in contradictory directions. This moral patterning (a familiar one deriving from the old morality plays) is not the subject of the play but provides the familiar ground rules by which the action of the play is governed. It is, in contrast, the absence of such clear ground rules in Hamlet that explains the curious disorientating effect the play has on its readers though (for reasons that will become clear) not so obviously on its audiences. Shakespeare is willing to subordinate both moral clarity and plot to the exploration of character, whereas Lust’s Dominion is concerned above all with action. The clarity with which the opposing forces are distinguished has the function of heightening the dramatic impact of their clash. The play is primarily about the shock that is engendered, and the very predictability of the stereotypes frees the audience from concerns with individuality that would weaken the impact. Essentially the two dramaturgical methods are in opposition. The playwrights pile horror on horror, including the ultimate Elizabethan horror of regicide, when Eleazar stabs to death the new king Ferdinand in full sight of the audience (weakening, one would have thought, arguments that Hamlet’s failure to kill Claudius is to be explained in terms of royal inaccessibility). Because the playwrights can take for granted a moral seriousness in their audience the play avoids absurdity, but it is interesting that where Marston’s hand is most noticeable (in Act V) absurdity is deliberately courted in the increasingly sardonic tone that Eleazar adopts, reflecting Marston’s characteristic association of comedy with moral chaos. It was in the ‘private’ theatres that this association was to be more fully explored, notably by Marston and, later, Middleton.
Lust’s Dominion does not seem to have been outstandingly popular and its survival and printing in 1657 by Francis Kirkman would seem to have been largely fortuitous. Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman on the other hand, for which Henslowe (seemingly) recorded a part payment of 5 shillings in December 1602, must have had a marked success on the Jacobean stage. Although it was not published until 1631, the title page of the quarto of that year records that the play was ‘divers times acted with great applause at the Phoenix in Drury Lane’; as it must have been originally written for the Admiral’s Men playing at the Fortune this implies a successful revival or series of revivals from 1617 onwards, the year that Christopher Beeston opened the Phoenix (or Cockpit) theatre in the fashionable area of Drury Lane. Like Lust’s Dominion it is a moralistic play illustrating the evil of vengefulness and like the earlier play it uses a familiar and orthodox moral patterning as the groundwork of a display of sensational events. Like Lust’s Dominion it uses character to symbolize the moral forces whose clash is the substance of the drama. The hero, Hoffman, like Eleazar, is perfunctorily motivated in his desire for revenge—we hear that his father was condemned to death for piracy—but Chettle is clearly much more interested in the consequences of the hero’s stance than in his motivation. The desire for revenge is made the excuse for a series of sensational (and mostly incredible) killings that punctuate the action at frequent intervals. It is particularly interesting that two or three years after the first presentation of Hamlet Chettle reproduces the conventional picture of the wicked revenge hero driven by the sin of vengefulness to a series of brutal acts until he is brought low in his turn by the ‘fickle dame’, Fortune.23 That he descends from a long line of vice figures is made clear (as with Eleazar) by the sardonic humour with which he expresses an inhuman delight in the misery of others and by his open defiance of God’s ordinance:
Had I Briareus’ hands, I’d strive with heaven
For executing wrath before the hour…
(lines 1519–20)
Hoffman too, like Eleazar, expresses his evil nature not merely through his violence, but in his unlicensed sexuality, as, for instance, in the plan he develops with his henchman Lorrique to rape the Duchess of Luningberg, mother of his first victim Charles, who is killed by having a burning crown placed on his head. To ensure Lorrique’s silence he murders him as soon as the plan is made (V, i). Ranged against the demonic Hoffman are a series of rather colourless characters representing the normality that is duly restored at the end. This normality includes the suggestion (by Mathias, the brother of one of Hoffman’s victims) that vengeance against Hoffman is justified and should be in a manner befitting the crimes (lines 2004–10). Hoffman is eventually killed in the manner of his first victim. The moral distinction involved here is that between private revenge (which is condemned as wicked) and the public extermination of an enemy of society—a distinction relevant to Hamlet, but characteristically left unstated and ambiguous in that play. That Mathias’s vindictiveness is endorsed by the playwright (and, we must assume, by the admiring audiences) is made clear by the explicit approval given to it by the saintly Rodorick, the hermit brother of the Duke of Saxony, whose dramatic function it is to remind us of the eternal Christian truths that the play embodies.
Although Hoffman is a cruder play than Lust’s Dominion, its popularity must be accounted for by the purposeful and single minded way in which sensationalism is pursued, reinforced by a gothic setting in German forests and castles which generates a wild and lawless feeling very different from the over-ripe decadence of the Italy of the Jacobean stage and perhaps owing something here to Hamlet. Its popularity needs to be remembered if we are to understand the theatrical context of Hamlet. It certainly helps to explain what Marston was about in his unaided adventure into revenge tragedy, Antonio’s Revenge, another revenge play almost exactly contemporaneous with Hamlet, to which it bears some striking similarities. Indeed G.K.Hunter, in his edition of Marston’s play, remarks that these resemblances ‘are greater than those between either play and any other surviving Elizabethan drama’.24 Both plays exhibit a rather different revenge pattern from that of the two plays we have been considering. In Lust’s Dominion and Hoffman the revenger is the embodiment of evil and the plays plot the destructive effects of this evil until, at the end, the forces of virtue triumph, the revenger is killed and the evil is extirpated. The origin of this revenge pattern would seem to owe more to the old morality play, via Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, than to Seneca. In Antonio’s Revenge and Hamlet on the other hand, the revenger is presented as essentially a good man whose virtue is tempted by the need to avenge a palpable wrong. Hamlet, however, as we shall see, is fraught with ambiguities that complicate the picture. Shakespeare had already adopted the pattern of the sympathetic revenge hero in Titus Andronicus and it is found earlier in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy; its origins are in Seneca and Renaissance imitations of Seneca. It has been frequently pointed out that Hamlet exhibits a pattern of revenge remarkably close in many ways to that of Kyd’s play.25 One explanation of the relationship between Hamlet and Antonio’s Revenge, put forward by (among others) Reavely Gair in his edition of Marston’s play, suggests that both plays were directly influenced by the Kydian so-called ur-Hamlet, a lost play which it is assumed adopted a plot patterning similar to that of Spanish Tragedy.26 Antonio’s Revenge dates from 1600 (its first performance seems to have been at the end of 1600) and the lack of clearly recognizable verbal echoes in plays that are otherwise so closely allied may imply that they were being written at the same time from a common source. Jenkins, on the other hand, argues that there are clear verbal echoes of Shakespeare in Marston’s play, but the few convincing examples he cites could as readily be explained by a common source as by the borrowing of one from the other. At least as important as the marked similarity in the plots of the two plays is the very different treatment of these plots, showing not only the completely different dramaturgical principles upon which the two playwrights were writing, but also demonstrating the wide gap between what the public theatre audiences would support at the Globe compared to the new select audience of Paul’s. Marston’s plays were highly innovatory in their sophisticated use of ‘alienating’ techniques; yet in other ways Marston’s dramaturgical technique is the more conservative of the two, for he shares with the two popular revenge dramas we have already discussed the delight in the sensational and he relates that sensationalism to a clear and explicit moral framework. We have seen that there is good evidence that he had a hand in fashioning one of these plays. At this period Shakespeare had developed, out of a theatre of characters, a theatre of personalities. His remarkable emphasis on particularity, on the phenomenal, in a religious age that cultivated the noumenal, is made explicit in the play by Hamlet’s definition of theatre as ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ (II, ii, 520). Few, if any, Elizabethan or Jacobean plays fit this definition, but in Hamlet Denmark is firmly established as a space in Elizabethan time, while Marston’s Venice is another name for Middle-earth, and its inhabitants as likely to have allegorical as personal names. In Hamlet Shakespeare takes his innovatory affectiveness further than in any of his other plays in presenting his dramatis personae with great realism and Hamlet in particular with great psychological subtlety, not so much analytically as to encourage an intense identification between audience and character. We even watch Hamlet’s mind changing and developing under the pressure of events, an extremely difficult feat to achieve in a three hour play. There is no doubt that Shakespeare is the innovator here, even allowing for the potential for psychological realism in the old morality play’s focus on the spiritual development (or decline) of the everyman hero; but Shakespeare had evolved his techniques over the years pragmatically for an audience that responded by demanding more. If the Queen’s reputed reaction was typical,27 audiences could not have enough of Falstaff and it may have been for the sake of his own artistic conscience that Shakespeare finally decided to kill him off so publicly in Henry V.
The theatrical revolution initiated by Marston and quickly followed by Jonson was to some extent a return to older ways of looking at character as part of the religious and moral patterning, rather than something to be cultivated for itself. Marston differs from his sensationalist contemporaries on the popular stage in making the sensationalism self-conscious to the point of parody in order to give priority to the moral theme. In Antonio’s Revenge sensationalism is a function of the morality, with Chettle it is the other way round. It is for this reason that the moral patterning of Antonio’s Revenge is so much clearer than it is in Hamlet where Shakespeare sacrifices moral clarity for psychological subtlety. The future turned out to be with Shakespeare—acceleratingly so, as the modern world increasingly saw as a main function of literature the exploration of personality in a secular world.
Antonio’s Revenge is certainly a strange play. Like Hamlet it presents the story of a son whose father is poisoned, as in Hamlet the ghost of the father visits the son to demand revenge on his killer, as in Hamlet the poisoner seduces the dead man’s wife and persuades her to become his bride, like Hamlet, the hero (Antonio) affects madness as part of the stratagem leading up to the revenge killing, in both plays the hero’s preoccupation with revenge involves him in the death of the woman he loves, in both plays the political significance of what is happening is touched on from time to time, but remains of secondary importance. The contrast in the treatment of these remarkably similar plots, however, could hardly be greater. Whereas Shakespeare does everything he can to encourage us to identify with the revenge hero, including an extensive use of soliloquy to reveal the inner thoughts of the character quite unprecedented both in its extent and in its appeal for audience sympathy, Marston uses dramatic techniques—including the soliloquy—to exclude audience feeling. The purpose of this exclusion is not unlike that of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, to keep the intellectual sight-lines clear of emotional clutter. For Marston’s is a sophisticated dramatic technique designed to remind the audience constantly that they are in a theatre watching a group of actors on a stage, not participating vicariously in exotic adventures. Harold Jenkins, in his discussion of the two plays, complains that Marston arbitrarily drags in from Hamlet’s response to the players a comparison that Pandulpho makes between his grief and that of a stage player (I, v, 76–80).28 Antonio’s Revenge, however, is full of explicit allusions to the theatre and to the theatrical, all with the purpose of reminding the audience of the illusory nature of the theatrical experience and, by analogy, with the experience of life itself. This is particularly appropriate in the case of Pandulpho, who represents the stoical position that man should be master of his passion, a philosophical stance that is itself exposed as illusory when Pandulpho fails to overcome his grief on being presented with his son’s corpse and throws in his lot with the active avengers. The most extreme example of Marston’s deflationary techniques is when the play’s fool, Balurdo, is made to come on stage with ‘a beard half off’ (II, i, 20, s.d.) and gives the explanation ‘the tiring man hath not glued on my beard half fast enough’ (II, i, 31). The dislocatory nature of this device becomes all the clearer when we remember that this play was written for boy actors. A particularly macabre use of the acting metaphor is when Strotzo is persuaded by Piero to pantomime his own death in a kind of dress rehearsal of the ‘real’ event later (II, v, 19–36). This is the most complex of Marston’s uses of the metaphor of life as a theatre as Strotzo ‘rehearses’ for a death that is itself a ‘rehearsal’ of the reality of final judgement. The episode tremors with ironic reverberation, showing man’s absurd vulnerability in life and death. Strotzo’s evil credulity is rewarded by Piero’s brutality, but the ultimate irony is that we, the audience, are watching a paradigm of the vanity of human hopefulness.
The central theme of the play is the Christian notion that life on earth is itself illusory—that we see life through a glass darkly—and the theatrical metaphors are thus given philosophical import. Because this life is illusory it is also essentially absurd, incoherent and meaningless without reference to a supernatural authority. Marston’s grim and uncompromising view of life is made clear in the Prologue to the play where he proclaims his intention of showing the bitter reality of ‘what men were, and are/…what men must be’. The very setting of this Kydian play in decadent Italy, in contrast to Hamlet’s romantic setting, promises that the play will be an exposition of human wickedness. The use of theatrical metaphors is only one way in which Marston represents his philosophy in his dramatic technique. The fragmentary nature of experience is also represented by the constant resort to literary allusion. This works in a number of ways. At its simplest it is represented in the sudden intrusion of long passages of Latin, usually derived from Senecan material. In earlier Senecan plays like Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus quotations from Seneca were primarily devices of authentication; here they act as disruptive elements, shattering the consistency of the linguistic medium. There is a good example of this in the scene in church where Maria finds Antonio just after he has been visited by his father’s ghost (III, ii). When she asks him why he is not in bed he breaks into a long (and relevant) quotation from Thyestes in Latin, to which his mother responds ‘Alas my son’s distraught’. Comic dislocation here becomes a symbol of human isolation. Marston uses variations in style to similar effect throughout the play. Sometimes indeed words begin to take on a macabre life of their own divorced from meaning, as when Balurdo takes up the more exotic utterances of others to relish them without knowing what they mean.29 Two of the examples I have cited of the uses of theatrical allusion (Pandulpho’s stoical refusal to lament and Balurdo’s accusation against the tiring man) have literary echoes, for both (as Gair notes) refer us back to moments in the Spanish Tragedy. The inadequate beard for instance, reminds us of the preparation of the masque in Act IV of Spanish Tragedy when Hieronimo asks Balthazar to prepare himself for his performance by getting his beard fixed on (IV, iii, 18–19): in Kyd the device is entirely contained within the realistic conventions, in Marston it has the opposite effect, its arbitrary introduction breaks through the ‘realism’ and exposes it as convention. It seems reasonable to assume that the ur-Hamlet text was also made use of in this way and this might explain why Marston’s play is so concerned with the Hamlet material. Other recurring devices for shattering realistic illusion include the frequent use of song—sometimes at inappropriate moments—and the use of mime at the beginning of scenes.
None of these stylistic and dramaturgical devices is entirely new to the sensationalist tradition of Senecal tragedy, Marston simply presses the logic of sensationalism towards absurd conclusions and does so deliberately to further his dramatic ends. The same is true with his characterization. We have already seen how character in popular revenge plays is subordinated to the search for sensation and this is as true of the tradition of more learned Senecanism with which Marston associates himself in this play. Some semblance of psychological realism is, however, usually maintained. Again Marston strains the conventions almost to breaking point. Piero, the play’s villain, is typical of the sensationalist tradition in being arbitrarily devoted to evil ways, for his wickedness is largely unmotivated. His reason for killing Andrugio, Antonio’s father, is merely that they were once rivals for the love of Andrugio’s wife, Maria. Other acts are even less plausibly motivated; he kills Pandulpho’s son, Feliche, simply to ‘hale on mischief’ and (seemingly) to enable him to perpetrate the macabre joke of having Feliche’s body propped up at the window where Maria and her son, Antonio, expect to find Antonio’s loved-one, Mellida. Nothing could be more theatrical and less likely than the opening of the curtain to reveal the body as Antonio eulogizes the vision of his bride-to-be (I, iii, 128–9). Piero accuses his own daughter of unchastity as an excuse for having her imprisoned. Piero’s reaction to his daughter’s death illustrates the arbitrariness of his responses:
And so she died! I do not use to weep;
But by thy [Maria’s] love (out of whose fertile sweet
I hope for as fair fruit) I am deep sad.
I will not stay my marriage for all this!
Castilio, Forobosco, all
Strain all your wits, wind up invention
Unto his highest bent; to sweet this night,
Make us drink Lethe by your quaint conceits,
That for two days oblivion smother grief;
But when my daughter’s exequies approach,
Let’s all turn sighers.
(IV, iii, 187–97)
Emotion here is treated as a form of acting, there is no expectation that it will correspond to anything in the mind of the character. Piero is only unusual here in the extreme to which he takes such attitudes, but the inner motivation of the other characters is equally obscure. We are shown Maria accepting Piero’s offer of marriage in dumb show at the beginning of Act III and though she expresses regrets over the death of her former husband it does not prevent her acquiescing in the marriage arrangements. Even the ghost, in contrast to King Hamlet’s frenzy, merely remarks ‘Thy sex is weak’. Antonio, the revenge hero, is also a stereotype taken to the point of caricature. We must assume that the ur-Hamlet had its revenge hero pass through a period of simulated madness, for both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Antonio adopt an antic disposition. In Hamlet (characteristically) the motive for this is not clear, for Shakespeare is interested much less in the logic of the plot than in the opportunity it gives him for a fascinating exploration of the borderline between sanity and madness in Hamlet’s behaviour. The motivation for Antonio’s antic disposition, however, is clear; it enables him to take on the disguise of a Fool, a disguise which Piero fails to penetrate. This allows Antonio to plot his revenge without fear of retaliation. Marston is careful to comply with the logic of his plot, but he also uses Antonio’s disguise as an opportunity to distance him from the audience’s sympathies. Antonio is made to appear blowing bubbles and Marston actually draws the audience’s attention to this absurdity by having other characters point to its inappropriateness, when, for instance, Alberto remarks: ‘Fie, ’tis unsuiting to your elate spirit’ (IV, i, 2). Marston has Antonio specifically repudiate all decorum of character at this point:
(IV, i, 25, 29–33)
Here Antonio is appealing to those eternal truths which we can only perceive fleetingly in a world in which we are all fools. He goes on to praise the fortunate lot of those born fools whose folly protects them from the more absurd idiocies of the wise:
Whilst studious contemplation sucks the juice
From wizards’ cheeks, who, making curious search
For nature’s secrets, the first innating cause
Laughs them to scorn as man doth busy apes
When they will zany men.
(IV, i, 44–8)
The whole of this important speech, indeed, could be read as a commentary on Hamlet’s vanity in puzzling over the nature of divine wisdom, for Antonio’s picture of the foolish wise (in which he is reluctantly forced to include himself) has a remarkable likeness to Shakespeare’s hero:
Had heaven been kind,
Creating me an honest, senseless dolt,
A good, poor fool, I should want sense to feel
The stings of anguish shoot through every vein;
I should not know what ’twere to lose a father;
I should be dead of sense to view defame
Blur my bright love; I could not thus run mad
As one confounded in a maze of mischief
Staggered, stark felled with bruising stroke of chance;
I should not shoot mine eyes into the earth,
Poring for mischief that might counterpoise
Mischief…
(IV, i, 48–59)
Being one of the foolish wise, dazzled by earthly wisdom, and being fully aware of his wrongs, Antonio is forced (like Hamlet) to take up arms against a sea of troubles, hence his acceptance of his role of revenger, by which he becomes an instrument of God’s justice.
It is interesting (at the risk of breaking the strict sequence of my argument) to contrast Marston’s central preoccupation with the theme of vanitas in Antonio’s Revenge, with Shakespeare’s use of the theme in Hamlet, for it shows both the opposed dramaturgy of the two playwrights and the reasons underlying that opposition. The Gravedigger’s scene at the beginning of the fifth act of Hamlet gives the hero, newly arrived from his escape from death in England, the opportunity to meditate on the perennial Christian theme. Here Hamlet is in a place of skulls, that chief emblem on which such meditation centred in Elizabethan churches and in gentlemen’s studies. But for Hamlet the emphasis is not on the ‘putrefacted slime’ (as Antonio is later to call it) of man’s ephemerality—the traditional focus of such meditation—but on the sadness of the lost world of life and enjoyment that these relics conjure up. Whereas Antonio’s meditations, and indeed the thrust of Marston’s play as a whole, is to reject the things of this world as corrupt and vicious, Hamlet’s assumptions are the very opposite. Hamlet is the humanitarian whose delight in the world’s richness and strangeness makes the knowledge of death the occasion of infinite sadness. It is this feeling, not the metaphysical implications, that dominates the scene. The meditation upon the skulls, far from prompting Hamlet to a rejection of the world (as Eleanor Prosser, following Marz, would have it)30 stimulates his imagination to recreate the delights of the past. It is a daring departure in its secularism from habitual meditations on the skull:
| Hamlet | That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave [the gravedigger] jowls it to th’ ground, as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder. This might be the pate of a politician which this ass now o’er-offices, one that would circumvent God, might it not? |
| Horatio | It might, my lord. |
| Hamlet | Or of a courtier, which could say, ‘Good morrow, sweet lord. How dost thou, sweet lord?’ This might be my Lord Such-a-one, that praised my Lord Such-a-one’s horse when a meant to beg it, might it not? |
| Horatio | Ay, my lord. |
| Hamlet | Why, e’en so, and now my Lady Worm’s, chopless, and knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade. Here’s fine revolution and we had the trick to see’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with’em? Mine ache to think on’t. |
(V, i, 74–91)
There is, of course a macabre side to this re-creation of the past, but Hamlet’s rich imagination, his sensitivity to the complexities of man’s nature—‘infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable’ (II, ii, 304–5)—leads him to create a picture of this living complexity, from singing lady to insensitive gravedigger in the present (no wish here for Antonio’s praise of the insensitive-foolish), the Machiavellian politician, the flattering courtier, the confidence man and men of business and later too a long disquisition on lawyers. Cain is evoked, not to remind us of man’s ineradicable wickedness (as in orthodox meditation) but to add to the variety of examples of human potential, for ill as well as good. Moreover the focus of all this imaginative meditation is on Hamlet’s feeling—the sadness is in Hamlet’s sense of the world he’s lost and he characteristically brings the meditation down to a feeling in himself: ‘mine [bones] ache to think on’t’. The usual purpose of Elizabethan religious meditation is the opposite of this, to lift the thoughts above the narrow confines of the self towards the eternal.31 But Shakespeare’s drama is a drama of particular experience which would ‘jump the life to come’, if only man could free himself from the aching thoughts of his own destiny. Nowhere is it clearer how much Shakespeare centres his drama, at this moment in his career as dramatist, on personality, and on his extraordinary gift for conveying a character’s feeling to an audience. It is this intense concentration on feeling that pushes the moral significance of the events to the margins of the audience’s interest and so creates that sense of confused immediacy that is a characteristic of living in the real world.
Marston’s characterization does the opposite of this. It is not in the least concerned with the feelings of particular individuals, but in the general significance that particularity can be forced to yield. Marston’s tragic methods consequently often court laughter in their search for emotional detachment. This is well illustrated by the scene that is the philosophical climax of Antonio’s Revenge, the scene where Antonio laments the death of his beloved Mellida (IV, iv). Antonio’s soliloquy at the beginning of the scene, far from being used (like Hamlet’s) to express the intense feelings of the hero at this new calamity, is made the opportunity for Antonio to express the central philosophical theme of the play: the need to submit one’s self to God’s will:
Ay, Heaven, thou mayst; thou mayst, Omnipotence.
What vermin bred of putrefacted slime
Shall dare to expostulate with thy decrees?
O heaven, thou mayst indeed: she was all thine,
All heavenly, I did but humbly beg
To borrow her of thee a little time.
(IV, iv, 1–6)
In place of Hamlet’s delight in differentiation, in particularity, we have here a reductive language in which the whole of humanity is characterized (as so frequently in Christian meditation at this time) as ‘vermin’, ‘putrefacted slime’. Antonio is of course expressing deeply felt emotion at this point, but the emotion is merely part of that illustration of human frailty that can only be overcome in death. At the end of the soliloquy Antonio envisages the death of his affections through his sufferings: ‘My breast is Golgotha, grave for the dead.’ Individual suffering is to be dedicated to the service of God by a single-minded determination to extirpate the tyrant Piero. That Marston is concerned not to allow this scene to arouse audience sympathy for his hero is clear from the progress of the action. At the end of the soliloquy Pandulpho and others enter carrying the dead body of Pandulpho’s son Feliche. Antonio has lain down on his back during the course of his soliloquy and Pandulpho places his son’s corpse to rest on Antonio’s breast. This emblematic gesture is then explained at length by Pandulpho as a mark of their unity in suffering, he for his dead son, Antonio for his dead beloved. In this curious and totally unrealistic and ludicrous situation a philosophical conversation now ensues between Pandulpho and Antonio which turns on the distinction between the stoic (Pandulpho) who maintains that suffering can be transcended and the orthodox Christian view (of Antonio and the play) that mankind in its frailty is bound to suffer in this life as part of our imperfection. That Pandulpho’s position is to be repudiated becomes clear in one of the extraordinary reversals that Marston delights in and which illustrate the dislocations in our understanding of reality, when Pandulpho’s stoical resolve suddenly breaks down and he admits to the same weakness as Antonio:
Man will break out, despite philosophy.
Why, all this while I ha’ but played a part,
Like to some boy that acts a tragedy…
…I spake more than a god,
Yet am less than a man.
(IV, v, 46–8, 51–2)
Again the acting metaphor (reminding the audience characteristically of the boy player) illustrates the illusory nature of man’s search for certainty in this world. The emblematic nature of this scene, its total and uncompromising rejection of realism, is then further illustrated when ‘They strike the stage with their daggers and the grave openeth’ (there is none of Hamlet’s realistic digging here) and by the formal dirge that Pandulpho speaks over the dead body as he now admits (in orthodox Christian fashion) ‘there’s no music in the breast of man’ (IV, v, 70). The dramaturgy throughout this scene has been deliberately sensational. Realism and emotional involvement have been kept at arm’s length so that the full intellectual significance of the action can be made clear.
In spite of this, many commentators have felt the ending of Antonio’s Revenge to be ambiguous. Pandulpho and Antonio devise a gruesome end for Piero whereby he is first deprived of his tongue and then fed with the chopped body of his son, before being ritually murdered. This deliberately recalls the ending of Seneca’s Thyestes, and its function is again to alienate us from any sympathy with the characters on stage. Antonio’s murder of Piero’s innocent son, Julio (III, iii) is perhaps the most sensational horror of the play, more especially because the scene in which it happens shows that Antonio and Julio have been particular friends (Julio is Mellida’s brother). The murder is made particularly shocking and surprising to the audience because at one point in the scene we are led to believe the plan to murder the boy has been given up. The ghost of Andrugio appears, however, to whet Antonio’s ‘almost blunted purpose’ and the murder is carried out in full view of the audience. The inevitable alienation of the audience from the hero that results is the main purpose of the killing and the intervention of the ghost is to make it clear that we are meant to see the event as part of God’s mysterious purpose. Again there is no ambiguity here as there is in Hamlet. Marston follows the conventions of Italian Senecanism where the ghosts function as divine messengers,32 in spite of the ghost’s sounding on one occasion in Antonio’s Revenge beneath the stage. Piero’s brutal and tormented death is the one appropriate to so evil a ruler—as Antonio points out when (like Hamlet on a similar occasion) he has the opportunity of killing him (III, ii), but stays his hand so that the punishment can more adequately fit the crime: ‘blood cries for blood, and murder murder craves’ (III, iii, 71). Piero’s death is presented, as it most frequently is in the Italianate Senecan tradition that Marston is following, as the appropriate death for a tyrant. It is a death, for instance, like that of Giraldi’s villain Sulmone in Orbecche,33 which is explicitly justified in Christian terms:
Ma non é stato mal a uccider lui;
ch’a Dio non s’offre vittima più grata
d’un malvaggio tiran, com’era questo.
(‘But it was not wrong to kill him; for no more acceptable victim is offered to God than a wicked tyrant, as this man was.’) However ‘un-Christian’ this attitude appears to the twentieth century, the brutality of Christian against Christian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is far too extensively documented to need recalling in detail here. The Spanish Inquisition was only one of the many institutions that openly expressed itself duty-bound to adopt a policy of killing and maiming fellow-Christians. There is no ambiguity, then, in the ending of Antonio’s Revenge. Antonio triumphs over the vicious Piero, who is duly made to eat the seed of his own evil nature; God’s providence is asserted. Antonio’s triumph, however, is not a vindication of human nature, for we are all ‘vermin bred of putrefacted slime’ (IV, iv, 2) as theologians from St Augustine to Luther and Calvin have repeatedly reminded us. We achieve God’s purposes in spite of the evil nature we all share.
Arriving in Shakespeare’s Denmark from the lands of Lust’s Dominion, Hoffman, and—even more—Antonio’s Revenge, is at first an extraordinary experience of arriving back into the familiar world of ordinary people going about recognizably ordinary business, and this in spite of the mystery of the play’s opening and the appearance of the Ghost. Look how much of the first two acts of Hamlet Shakespeare spends recreating the experiences of the normal everyday world. Polonius, immediately established as a ‘character’ and not just a character, sends his young son Laertes, as any Elizabethan courtier might, to sow a few (but not too many) wild oats in Paris before coming back to settle down to make a living in the politics of Court life. To keep a discreet eye on his son and heir, he dispatches Reynaldo to oversee Laertes at a distance and report back. How prudent, how worldly wise, how ordinary. Claudius and Gertrude settle into their new reign in businesslike fashion. As always for a ruler there are foreign entanglements and the hot-headed Fortinbras has to be headed off from his aggressive intentions against Denmark (another aggrieved son of another father) and persuaded to plunder Poland instead. Shakespeare gives valuable stage time to a scene only tangential to the revenge plot, in which Norwegian ambassadors are received at the Danish Court to report on the success of Claudius’s diplomacy. The players arrive at Court and Hamlet, fond of theatre, joins them in a rehearsal of lines from a tragedy on the Trojan war. Of course all this air of normality has a relevance to the revenge theme, for within this world of normal comings and goings Hamlet appears as an element of disruption. Clothed in black (Eleazar’s colour) he seems to defy the logic of events and, like Hoffman, in his wildness refuses to conform to common expectations. Here we are immediately plunged into ambiguity. The Ghost protests that this too, too solid world is fraudulent, a world of seeming, while at the same time we have already become part of it, judged the pleasantly tedious Polonius for what he is, sympathized intensely with Hamlet’s intense difficulties and the dilemmas they pose for Gertrude and Ophelia, admired the efficiency of Claudius. Shakespeare has successfully asked us to enter a world which has all the reality and substance of our own world, even while that substantiality is being questioned and undermined. The play takes as one of its themes the way evil undermines this sense of reality; but this theme is presented not as statement but as experience. We are taken on a journey of disorientation with Hamlet until the actual no longer seems real.
Ambiguity is at the very heart of the play. Shakespeare’s method takes us through the experience of doubt and uncertainty in association with his hero. The usual Elizabethan and Jacobean method that we have seen in the other revenge plays is to create a thematic framework in which each character can be placed and judged as part of the total pattern of a meaning that is clear and unequivocal. In Hamlet Shakespeare inverts this process and uses the events of the play to convey the hero’s state of mind, with which the audience is asked to identify, to share his experience. This experiential focus, whether consciously intended by Shakespeare or simply the result of the furthest development of a tendency already evinced to make characterization the central concern of his drama, is not unknown elsewhere in Elizabethan art. When Milton praises the Faerie Queene for showing us Guyon in the Cave of Mammon ‘that he might see and know, and yet abstain’34 he is expressing a view of art as vicarious experience that is not uncommon at this period; yet even here Spenser’s (and Milton’s) ultimate purpose is doctrinal, to relate the experiences we share in the ordinary world to the eternal truths that the work as a whole displays. Hamlet, unusually, would make the vicarious experience itself a central truth of the play.
One way Shakespeare achieves this (whether intentionally or not) is by playing off one set of revenge expectations against another. I have just been arguing that our entry into the Hamlet world seems to be setting Hamlet up not as the revenge hero, but as the revenge villain, although overall it is clear that the play essentially follows the Kydian pattern that requires sympathy for the revenger. We are never, however, allowed to settle into any comfortable pattern of expectations in this play. In Antonio’s Revenge and in the Spanish Tragedy (and in later plays that follow a similar pattern, like Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy) we not only have no doubts which is the aggrieved party, but this certainty is reinforced by the manifest villainy of the hero’s main opponent or opponents. Shakespeare’s play, on the other hand, presents Claudius more in the manner of Prince Philip in Lust’s Dominion or the Duke of Saxony and Mathias in Hoffman’s Tragedy, the revenger’s opponents who, while to some extent implicated in the action that begins the revenge process, are presented as triumphant opponents of the revenger’s evil nature. Claudius is presented in the beginning of the play as an eminently reasonable man and as an efficient ruler. He shows considerable patience with the eccentric behaviour of his wife’s son, and his advice on the inevitability of death (I, ii, 87–106) is a passage of orthodox ‘consolation’ deliberately couched in Christian terms.35 The fact that it turns out to be spoken by the murderer of Hamlet’s father is an irony we can retrospectively savour, although the villainy of the messenger does not (as any Elizabethan audience would know) invalidate the message. There are other signs, even in this speech, that, in a sense, Shakespeare is pulling the wool over our eyes. For the ‘machiavel’ of the play Claudius is extraordinarily naïve in (apparently) not connecting Hamlet’s eccentric behaviour with a ‘prophetic’ suspicion that his father was murdered. Why, for instance, is Claudius so insistent on Hamlet’s remaining in Elsinore when the Prince is anxious to return to the University of Wittenberg (I, ii, 113)? In the eyes of a true ‘machiavel’ Hamlet would be better out of the way (as Claudius much later decides) where his popularity with the multitude (IV, iii, 4) would go for less. But Shakespeare prefers to give substance to Claudius’s protestations of love and affection for his stepson (I, ii, 107–12) by making it appear he wants Hamlet’s company. Like so many ‘facts’ in this play Hamlet’s popularity is of uncertain status, for within a short stage time we hear that it is Laertes the people want to be king (IV, v, 106). The play abounds in such uncertainties. Hamlet, for instance, complains that the King engages in the Danish vice of excessive drinking (I, iv, 8–12), though whenever we see the King he is a model of sober self-control, indeed the very language of the King exhibits a sense of control and ceremony that belies the accusations of insobriety. Hamlet’s assertion that drinking ‘is a custom/More honour’d in the breach than in the observance’ (I, iv, 15–16) does not, either, seem to square with his own invitation, (not necessarily ironic) to Horatio: ‘We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart’ (I, ii, 175). These are minor matters, but they are important in indicating Shakespeare’s preferences. Hamlet is the disaffected melancholic and a contrast is to be set up between his way of thinking and that of the Court. Yet Hamlet is no stereotype melancholic, he has a hearty appreciation of good fellowship and the normal appetites of a young man, including, to judge from his conversation with Ophelia during the play scene, a healthy, or perhaps unhealthy, preoccupation with sex (III, ii, 110–20, 240–6). Ambiguities arise because we can never establish to what extent Hamlet’s views are justified—and the more emotionally involved we become with Hamlet the more difficult this becomes. Indeed Shakespeare plays on the difficulties that these ambiguities give rise to in order to create in his audience the kind of mental uncertainties that characterize the hero. Ambiguity is made a device of the characterization whereby we are inducted into the hero’s world.
Aspects of Claudius’s role are also deliberately kept ambiguous. The justification of the revenge hero (as is made very clear in Orbecche)36 is that he (or she) is doing God’s will in extirpating a tyrant. Marston’s Piero is obviously such, for his decisions are arbitrary and cruel. Claudius, on the other hand, is not only shown to be a judicious and efficient ruler, but he also seems to be accepted as the legitimate ruler of Denmark. It is true that Hamlet progressively throws doubt on the legitimacy of Claudius’s accession, accusing him of ‘stealing’ the kingdom (III, iv, 99–101) and of interfering in some way with the succession (V, ii, 65), but this is highly partial evidence and does not seem to be supported from more dispassionate sources. As Jenkins notes, ‘the play does not question the legality of his [ Claudius’s] title’.37 Again the effect is one of considerable ambiguity; the clear-cut opposition between villain and revenger is made more a matter of personal antagonism than of political principle.
As the murderer of his brother, Claudius evokes the audience’s condemnation, but unlike the villains of other revenge plays, Claudius is presented as a man of conscience whom we see suffering for his transgression. Again Shakespeare’s predilection for humanizing his characters transforms the stereotype and he provides Claudius with a soliloquy (III, iii, 36) whose function is to reveal his character’s state of mind. Elsewhere in Elizabethan drama soliloquy provides the villain with the opportunity for displaying his villainy and defining it more precisely. Typically it announces a programme of action for the destruction of the good. Claudius’s soliloquy on the other hand has the opposite function: to demonstrate the essential humanity behind the stereotype, the essential goodness even in a murderer. It is this humanizing of the villain more than Hamlet’s curious vindictiveness in abstaining from killing Claudius while he is at prayer lest his soul go to heaven, that drastically alters and confuses the audience’s response to the scene. That the revenger is tainted by the very process of revenge he is committed to is a commonplace of revenge tragedy and it is well illustrated in Antonio’s killing of Julio. At the end of the Revenger’s Tragedy the condemnation of the revenge hero Vindice makes the point with unusual clarity, but in those instances there is no question of shifting sympathies towards the villain. In Hamlet on the other hand Hamlet’s outburst comes immediately after Claudius is presented at his most vulnerable and sympathetic. It is not really surprising that generations of critics have agreed with Dr Johnson that ‘this speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered’.38 As a result it came to be argued that Hamlet could not mean what he says and must be making this an excuse for an inability to act.39 Johnson is surely right to detect an irresolvable tension between our feeling that Hamlet is essentially a virtuous character, with whom we readily identify, and the intrinsically evil nature of his vindictiveness. Here again the play leaves us with an unsolvable dilemma: are we after all to see Hamlet as the revenge villain at this point and repudiate those feelings of sympathy Shakespeare has so successfully cultivated, or are we to revise our ethical assumptions about the appropriateness of eternal damnation for a regicide, in accordance with the traditions of neo-Senecan revenge drama and the vindictiveness of so much Renaissance Christianity? The play, characteristically, rests in its ambiguity.
Hamlet’s relationship with his mother is even more fraught with uncertainties than his relationship with Claudius. At least we know that Claudius did commit the crime of which he is accused. In Gertrude’s case we cannot be certain what her crime is or, indeed, whether she can be regarded as having committed one. Like Claudius she is presented as a sensible, if insensitive, person, fulfilling her role as consort in the Court scenes with dignity and decorum. She never speaks to us as directly as Claudius and this in itself causes uncertainty about her complicity in Claudius’s crime and about her own view of the adultery she is accused of having committed. Nevertheless she is presented as a personality in her own right whom we can relate to and sympathize with. Her response to Hamlet’s revelation of Claudius’s crime is simply to repeat Hamlet’s words ‘As kill a king’, which is only a clear manifestation of innocence if we accept the Folio’s question mark.40 More ambiguous still is her innocent-seeming response, after the accusation of adultery as her ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ (III, iv, 14)—a clear accusation if we accept the relevance of the Book of Common Prayer’s injunction (quoted by Jenkins): ‘a woman may not marry with her…husband’s brother.’ The Queen’s response ‘What have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue/In noise so rude against me?’ would seem, in the light of this, to be impudent in the extreme. But that is not, in fact, how it appears in performance; rather Gertrude seems genuinely puzzled by her son’s behaviour and seems to believe him truly mad when he purports to see the ghost that she cannot see. Again Shakespeare chooses ambiguity by having us question the ghost’s reality at this point. Both Claudius and Gertrude adopt a similar air of innocence to each other when, immediately after, they discuss Hamlet’s behaviour and Gertrude tells her husband of Hamlet’s killing of Polonius (IV, i). It is almost as if we are intended to interpret the two scenes from two different ethical standpoints simultaneously: Hamlet’s Elizabethan view that Gertrude has committed adultery and Gertrude’s apparent pagan view that she has done nothing wrong (a view that many social systems would endorse).41 In the bedroom scene Shakespeare has preferred a drama of personality, in which the Queen is presented as wife and mother, to the obscuring of her allegorical role as accomplice to the devil’s disciple. Once again the signposts point in contrary directions and we are left in a perplexity that is as disorienting as (though not identical with) Hamlet’s own.
Such enigmas abound throughout the text, so that small discrepancies, like Horatio’s both appearing to be familiar with Danish customs and ignorant of them,42 and the radical change that comes over Fortinbras’s character in the course of the play, that could be dismissed as a working dramatist’s minor aberrations elsewhere, here contribute to the disorientation that afflicts the reader whenever he attempts to take his bearings. Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia needs special mention as part of this process. Here again Hamlet’s role would seem to relate him more obviously to the revenge villain. Admittedly Hamlet’s abuse of Ophelia is a more refined abuse of womanhood than Hoffman’s attempted rape or Eleazar’s lustfulness, but its brutality is not the less striking on that account.
In What Happens in Hamlet Dover Wilson describes Hamlet’s attitude to Ophelia as ‘without doubt the greatest of all the puzzles in the play’43 and similar views have been expressed by such other distinguished Shakespeareans as Bradley44 and Geoffrey Bullough45—indeed articles have been written on the impossibility of solving the problem.46 Harold Jenkins, on the other hand, argues that there really is no Ophelia problem.47 Bullough presents a succinct account of where he feels the problems lie and we cannot do better than quote him:
Hamlet’s relations with Ophelia are left mysterious. What would almost certainly have been a scene of farewell in the ur-Hamlet is narrated in Hamlet, so that we hear only Ophelia’s side of it (II, i, 75–100). We are left wondering whether (some weeks after the Ghost’s revelation) this is a sign of his self-dedication to vengeance, or whether he sees her as inevitably bound to prove that ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’, as a potential ally of the other side, or just as a pawn in his game of pretended madness. His love-letter is that of a potential wooer, yet real pity struggles with his revulsion and disgust in the nunnery-scene, and his protest at her graveside rings true, ‘I loved Ophelia’, though mingled with the rhodomontade of pretended madness (V, i, 261–91). Since the plot did not allow the dramatist to show the two together in a happier time, we are left with an unsolved puzzle.48
Jenkins dismisses all these doubts by arguing firmly for one of these alternatives: that Hamlet had genuinely loved Ophelia, but now sees her through the eyes of his disillusionment with his mother, and indeed—following what he regards as his mother’s betrayal—with life itself. Jenkins’s argument is persuasive, but so is Dover Wilson’s totally contradictory argument in defence of a sane and rational Hamlet who suspects Ophelia’s willingness, (or at least agreement) to act as Claudius’s spy. Jenkins’s reduction of the problem simply turns it into the problem of Hamlet’s real or supposed madness—for to allow one’s disillusionment with the world at large to turn into such a ferocious assault on the woman you love must surely be neurosis of a very high order. There have been (inevitably) critics who interpret Hamlet’s disorder in such strongly pathological terms, but there are too many contradictory signs that Hamlet sees clearly a hawk from a handsaw to make this view entirely convincing, quite apart from the difficulty of explaining why Hamlet shares his sexual neurosis, apparently newly acquired, with the Ghost.49 Jenkins has invoked one mystery in trying to solve another. All I am concerned with here, however, is to illustrate yet again my theme of the treacherous uncertainty of the Hamlet landscape. Ophelia, like the hero himself, appears out of the mists of an insufficient past, a ‘real’ and highly sympathetic girl whose love is mysteriously sacrificed to unknown gods. The dramatic effectiveness of Shakespeare’s method is no more vividly illustrated than in the scene where the rejected girl sings in her madness of a sexual fulfilment that has been denied her for ever: there is no scene more full of pathos in the whole body of dramatic literature. But of course at the heart of the play’s mystery is the hero himself.
One consequence of Shakespeare’s decision to centre his play on the personality of the hero and to ask his audience to share his hero’s thoughts and feelings is that it is difficult to separate critical from psychological judgements. The disagreement between Dover Wilson and Jenkins involves such a crossing of wires. Dover Wilson’s explanation of Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia appeals to literary criteria: the logic of the plot requires Ophelia to act treacherously towards Hamlet in obedience to her father, and Hamlet’s outrage towards her follows logically from his suspicion of this treachery.Jenkins, on the other hand, evolves his interpretation in terms of Hamlet’s state of mind and appeals to our experience of the way human minds work to explain how the hero comes to behave so illogically at this point. Jenkins’s response is eloquent witness to Shakespeare’s success in making Hamlet come alive, as indeed are all those attempts to psychoanalyse the Prince, culminating in Ernest Jones’s Freudian analysis in Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). But just as these psychological analyses founder on the simple fact that Hamlet is not a person but a dramatic character,50 so equally, but for a different reason, do those attempts that appeal to purely literary criteria. These fail to convince because of the text’s ambiguities. Dover Wilson’s case, for instance, rests on the doubtful assumption that Hamlet overhears Polonius and Claudius instructing Ophelia to spy on him. The text gives no warrant for that assumption and an emendation of the stage directions of both Q2 and F is needed to allow it. Eleanor Prosser, in her stimulating book, Hamlet and Revenge (2nd edn, 1971), appeals to Senecan convention to explain Hamlet’s conduct in the ‘nunnery’ scene. Hamlet is tempted into irrational rage by the Ghost’s demand for revenge, his treatment of Ophelia illustrates the well-attested Elizabethan theme that revenge is a form of madness. Again this is a persuasive argument, especially when presented with such impressive documentation as Prosser musters, but it presupposes an objective standpoint which Shakespeare steadfastly refuses to give us.
It is crucial to Prosser’s argument that the Ghost is seen as evil. Hamlet himself considers this possibility in his soliloquy at the end of Act 2:
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
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.
(II, ii, 594–9)
Hamlet’s test of the Ghost’s truthfulness, however, is usually taken to dispel that doubt, and the proof that ‘it is an honest ghost’ (I, v, 144) is usually assumed to mean both that Hamlet accepts the justice of the demand for revenge and that we too, in the audience, are expected to accept the justice of Hamlet’s cause. There is, however, as Prosser points out, no necessary connection between the Ghost’s honesty in telling the truth and the rightness of the revenge. Every member of Shakespeare’s audience would know that ‘the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose’51 and that ‘oftentimes, to win us to our harm,/The instruments of Darkness tell us truths’.52 Prosser produces a considerable amount of evidence to show that the Ghost would be considered evil by an Elizabethan audience. Its fading with the crowing of the cock, for instance, explicitly identifies it with the world of the evil and un-Christian:
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our
Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is that time.
(I, i, 163–9)
It is not only that here Marcellus clearly implies that the Ghost is evil but that Shakespeare introduces to the language of the play a rare glimpse of that benign lyricism which the action and the hero’s torment generally precludes, until it is briefly heard again at the end of the play in Horatio’s few words over the body of his friend. If the signs are so clear then, why do we resist them and agree readily enough with Bradley that ‘Hamlet… habitually assumes, without any questioning that he aught to avenge his father’?53 The reason seems to be that Shakespeare asks us to interpret the Ghost’s instructions not objectively, not as data to be measured against Hamlet’s state of mind, but through Hamlet’s eyes. For Hamlet never comes to the conclusion that the Ghost is evil, even though he scouts the possibility that it might be. The soliloquy ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ (II, ii, 544ff) seems rather to imply a connection between the Ghost’s veracity and the justice of the revenge (594–600). The signs are not clear to Hamlet; the Ghost ‘may be’ the devil, the call to revenge may come from heaven or hell, or both. Hamlet is never allowed to decide, nor is the play; a word from Horatio on the illogicality of Hamlet’s assumption would have saved much agonizing (as Prosser ruefully notes),54 but Shakespeare is careful to see that such clarification never comes. Even towards the end of the play Hamlet can consider, in conversation with his philosophical friend, that he has a moral right to avenge his father:
is’t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damn’d
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
(V, ii, 67–70)
It is interesting that the two texts (Q2 and F) differ markedly at this point, the speech in Q2 ending with the question ‘is’t not perfect conscience?’ The effect in the quarto is to suggest greater uncertainty and incoherence, as if Hamlet is trying to persuade himself, whereas the folio text, by spelling out what his conscience requires him to do, makes it seem as if Hamlet is bringing an internal debate to a conclusion. The addition perhaps shows that the experience of performance surprised Shakespeare into seeing that he had created a more sympathetic hero than he had originally intended. It is always Hamlet’s version that we are inclined to accept, with all its doubts and uncertainties, and to the scholarly Hamlet there is no certainty about the Ghost’s status, only an impulse to obey it. Shakespeare leaves the matter open so that we can share the hero’s moral confusion. The appeal to revenge convention only compounds the ambiguity, for we have seen in Antonio’s Revenge the Senecan convention of the virtuous ghost. Once again Shakespeare uses the conventional expectations to puzzle rather than to enlighten. To what extent we tend to share Hamlet’s viewpoint can be seen in Jenkins’s discussion of the revenge motif. ‘Those who maintain that the prompting is wholly diabolical and so to be resisted are confuted by the text’, he argues.55 On the contrary, the text (or rather texts), looked at closely, seem to justify Prosser’s case that the Ghost is evil: it is Hamlet who resists this and he carries us with him, for the best evidence that the Ghost is not evil, apart from the negative evidence of Horatio’s silence, stems from Hamlet’s doubts.
It is because we cannot settle in our minds the reality of Hamlet’s world that we cannot decide on the validity of his response to it. This gives rise to yet another uncertainty in the play, the question of Hamlet’s ‘madness’. Here again a literary and a psychological explanation confront each other. Senecan revenge tragedy frequently shows the hero afflicted by madness. Sometimes (as in the Spanish Tragedy) the madness is real enough, in other cases (as in Antonio’s Revenge) the madness is assumed to protect the hero and deceive his enemies. It seems likely that the ur-Hamlet presented feigned madness, for the chronicle sources of the Hamlet story, Saxo-Grammaticus’ Historiae Danicae and its French translation in Belleforest both show Amleth/Hamblet pretending to be mad. Shakespeare does something far more interesting, he blurs the distinction between reality and pretence so that we cannot decide exactly how much Hamlet is in control of his actions. We cannot, that is, make a critical judgement at all in terms of a precise character and the actor and producer are forced to create an arbitrary psychology from the text that might account for Hamlet’s actions and opinions. It is characteristic of the play that Shakespeare gives us no clear indication of why Hamlet adopts his ‘antic disposition’. In Antonio’s Revenge it is a disguise to protect Antonio and it proves successful, for Piero fails to see through it. Its purpose of protecting the hero from the villain would seem to derive from the source material. Hamlet’s feigned madness, on the other hand, simply draws attention to himself and arouses Claudius’s suspicion. Failing to find any objective reason for his behaviour we are again forced to look inwards to Hamlet’s state of mind.
Shakespeare’s principal device for turning the action of the play inwards is the soliloquy. There are few Elizabethan tragedies that do not use the soliloquy, but the soliloquies given to Hamlet are of a different order, not only from that found generally in Elizabethan drama, but from those found in other Shakespeare plays. The usual function of Shakespearean soliloquy—which it shares with those of other Elizabethan dramatists—is to identify the place of the character speaking in the dramaturgical pattern. This pattern may be predominantly moral, as when Richard III identifies himself in his opening soliloquy as the evil genius of the play, or may be more directly related to the action of the play, as it is, for instance, in Julius Caesar, when Brutus meditates on the need to assassinate Caesar (II, i, 10–34), or it may be both equally, as when Macbeth debates the likely consequence of killing Duncan (I, vii, 1–28). From Macbeth’s soliloquy we learn a lot about his state of mind, but even so, like the other examples I have cited, the primary function of the speech is to strengthen and clarify the framework of reference by which we learn to judge the nature of the action, the theme and the character. They are primarily interpretative devices. This is also true of the soliloquies of Hamlet other than those of Hamlet himself. Claudius’s confession clarifies the issue of his guilt and his role as the villain in the revenge scheme, while Ophelia’s soliloquy in the ‘nunnery’ scene is largely on Hamlet (though characteristically the information we obtain from it further confuses our response to the hero by presenting a picture of him that is difficult to reconcile with what we see of him).
Hamlet’s major soliloquies not only occupy more stage time than those of any other Shakespearean hero, they singularly fail to clarify the issues that they touch upon. Without them (as Q1 witnesses in several instances) the action of the play is not greatly affected and though they reveal, in bewildering variety, Hamlet’s rapid changes of mood and thought, they reveal little of his function as character within the dramatic framework of the play. Instead they take us into the very turmoil and confusion of his responses, which we are asked to share and re-enact to the point where (as we have seen) it is no longer possible to distinguish between the ‘facts’ of the play and Hamlet’s view of them. In the first of these soliloquies ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’ (I, ii, 129) it is true that Hamlet articulates the chief charge against his mother: her marriage to Claudius ‘within a month’ of his father’s death and the incestuous nature of her relationship to her new husband. The speech does therefore have some informative function in establishing part of the motive for revenge, but its informative function is overridden by the strength of the emotion with which it is presented. Hamlet begins the speech, not with the facts, but by expressing a desire for suicide that is only checked by his consciousness that it is forbidden by Christian law. The feeling of overwhelming despair and of disgust with life dominates over the speech’s functional purpose, as the language itself illustrates. For this is no coherent presentation of a dilemma, but the expression of the emotions created by that dilemma expressed in broken syntax, in sudden changes in direction, that suggest the mind in turmoil:
That it should come to this!
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two—
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr…
(lines 137–40)
Other playwrights were capable of this kind of dramatic immediacy—we saw a contemporary example in Eleazar’s soliloquy over the dead soldier, for Dekker had learnt more than a thing or two from Shakespeare. But in Lust’s Dominion Eleazar’s speech can be readily placed and interpreted within the thematic pattern of the play. Here, in Hamlet, this outburst of intense emotion takes place in a world where no clear pattern emerges. Even here, where some cogent reasons are given for the emotion expressed, there is (on critical contemplation) some unease at a disparity between the problem and the response (as T.S.Eliot noted of the play in general)56 and so uncontrolled an outburst is even harder to square with such later evidence as Ophelia’s description of the Prince as ‘The glass of fashion and the mould of form’ (III, i, 156). In the theatre we do not contemplate, we are caught up in the passion and made accomplices of it; it is only in retrospect that we find it difficult to explain precisely how the feeling arose.
The discrepancy between the apparent problem and the response is even more evident in the second long soliloquy: ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ (II, ii, 553ff). Here again the speech serves some functional purpose, for it spells out Hamlet’s intention of using the players to test the Ghost’s veracity. But this functional purpose is strongly overlain by the emotional intensity with which Hamlet expresses his state of mind, and in particular his disgust at his own inaction. The players provide him first with a contrasting image of detachment, through which he can emphasize the intensity of his emotional involvement; the use of the players to further the plot appears very much like an afterthought. As in the first soliloquy the viewpoint is introspective, relating the outside world to the inner landscape of Hamlet’s mind. It is hard to gauge the truth of his self-accusation that he has unreasonably delayed the revenge, an accusation that is first broached in this speech, though repeated later and urged by the Ghost, who in this, as in the sexual nausea, seems to function as Hamlet’s alter ego. The whole debate about delay and whether in fact there is any57 is yet further evidence of the uncertainty with which we account for Hamlet’s feelings in terms of the play’s action.
The third soliloquy: ‘To be or not to be’, the most famous of all the examples of this dramaturgical device, comes rapidly on the heels of the one just discussed. This speech, more than any other in the play, is almost wholly concerned with Hamlet’s mental anguish. It has no bearing at all on the action (or on the inaction come to that) and far from adding to our understanding of the hero’s role in the scheme of things is itself extremely difficult to unravel. Yet even Q1, for all its concern with speed of action, retains much of the soliloquy, if in garbled form. For in the theatre, however we interpret what Hamlet says, the speech comes across with the utmost force as an expression of the agony of soul that afflicts him. It is also clear that this agony of soul originates not merely from the circumstances in which he finds himself, but from a philosophical consideration of the nature of being in relation both to this world and the next (if there is one). The exact nature of the metaphysical problem Hamlet confronts has been much debated; clearly Shakespeare is much more concerned to create a mood than to define philosophical problems. The mood is cogently defined earlier in the play during Hamlet’s conversation with Guildernstern and Rosencrantz as one of disillusionment with the world:
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours…
(II, ii, 295–303)
This (as we saw) is very much the mood out of which Marston was creating his new plays for his City audience. But where Marston relates his theme of the vanity of the world to a traditional Christian viewpoint, Shakespeare accounts for his hero’s melancholy in terms of a psychological malaise. Characteristically Hamlet cannot explain his feelings in terms of his view of the world (‘wherefore I know not’); instead he explains his viewpoint in terms of his feelings. The gravitational pull of feeling is so strong that fact is unable to escape from its field. This same emphasis dominates the soliloquy. In ‘To be or not to be’, the metaphysical speculation is not there to interpret the mood, the mood generates the intellectual speculation. Hence the soliloquy presents a series of alternatives between which it is impossible to decide: whether man’s true identity exists in suffering or in action, whether death pre-empts this problem or transforms it, and if it transforms it, whether the transformation is for good or ill. Shakespeare is presenting Hamlet with Marston’s premises about the vanity of the world as a psychological rather than a metaphysical problem. It is Hamlet’s mood that exposes for a moment a philosophical void that converts the play’s secularism into metaphysical statement. Because such speculation is the result of Hamlet’s shifting feelings, neither the hero nor the play rest at this point. Hamlet ultimately comes to reject this vision of metaphysical uncertainty in favour of a trust in Providence, and Horatio finally accords the hero Christian consolation. Shakespeare was later to explore a metaphysic of emptiness both more objectively and more profoundly in the greatest of his plays, King Lear. In Hamlet such metaphysical speculation disturbs still further that confidence in an outer presence against which the inner world of Hamlet’s mind can be measured and judged. It is interesting, however, that Hamlet’s remark to Horatio: ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (I, v, 175) is usually taken as a stricture on Horatio’s limitations, rather than on Hamlet’s.
The fourth, and last, of the major soliloquies: ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ is rather different in tone from the other three. It is more coherent and orderly in presentation and less introspective, although it rehearses again the earlier theme of his inability to act. The effect is rather that Hamlet is now trying to objectify the problem of his inaction:
Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’event—
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.
(IV, iv, 39–46)
The puzzlement that exercises us too is still there, but some of the passion, the despair has gone out of it; compared to the frenzied, hysterical outbursts of the closet scene (III, iv) Hamlet’s language is restrained, almost calm:
How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep…
(IV, iv, 56–9)
The self-accusation is the same, but reason seems to be reclaiming the language from blood. ‘That capability and godlike reason’ Hamlet speaks of is now once again asserting itself, though it squares oddly with the thoughts of revenge to which Hamlet still feels himself wedded and the irrationality of the aims he praises in Fortinbras. The Marstonian nightmare of sin’s dominion is receding. The folio discards this speech, but it serves the very useful function of preparing us for the marked change that will appear in the Prince when he returns after his long sea voyage, a return that will no longer require soliloquy to mediate between the inner world of Hamlet’s mind and the mysterious, uncertain world with which it attempts to grapple.
When Hamlet returns to Denmark and the play at the beginning of Act V after a considerable gap in stage, as well as narrative, time, the dislocated man Hamlet has been so far now appears to be at one with himself, as Hamlet explains to Laertes:
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? His madness.
(V, ii, 230–3)
As soon as we see Hamlet again, in the graveyard scene, that same feeling of the everyday world that we had experienced intermittently in the first two acts, returns. The gap between Hamlet’s inner life and the world in which he acts disappears, there are no more soliloquies because the imagination of the audience is no longer to be stretched intolerably and painfully between inner and outer worlds that do not match. The fifth act might almost be regarded as an ‘answer’ to Marston’s Calvinism: the obsession with man’s evil nature is itelf a blight that destroys man’s trust in God’s creation. It is only when trust in God’s providence is reasserted that the sense of reality returns. Shakespeare is reasserting his habitual Christian optimism. But even at the end of the play, where a certain distancing between hero and audience is achieved, we find it impossible to review our shared experience dispassionately. We do not at the end simply see Hamlet as a young man (though even our estimate of his age introduces an uncertainty between our feelings about it and the apparent facts)58 who has come to his senses, but rather as a man with whom we have shared a profoundly disturbing journey; some sort of ‘bonding’ has taken place between audience and hero that prevents the detachment required in learning from his example. The history of Hamlet criticism illustrates over and over again the difficulty (which Dr Johnson expresses) in reconciling a virtuous Prince with the viciousness of his actions. The variety of critical responses is largely the record of the varying ability of critics to escape the bond.
In Hamlet Shakespeare had pursued the drama of personality as far as his contemporaries would allow. The new dramaturgy fostered by Marston and rapidly followed by Jonson and others, pointed in the opposite direction. We are soon to hear of Jonson’s complaints (only thinly disguising their Shakespearean targets) that the popular theatre lacks moral purpose; the framework of judgement is to be reconstructed, if in more sophisticated forms than in the past. Jacobean society could not provide the social democracy required for the flourishing of such individual liberties and it was inevitable that the Shakespearean experiment should be checked by the pervasive conformity. But Shakespeare had also, in Hamlet, run into dramaturgical problems in trying to develop the drama of personality from conventions designed for other purposes: the assertion of moral precept by sensational means. As Chapman was later to put it: ‘materiall instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to Vertue, and deflection from her contrary; [are] the soule, lims, and limits of an authenticall Tragedie’.59 After Hamlet Shakespeare notably retreats from his exploration of personality and begins a series of experiments in response to the new directions the theatre was now taking. To some extent this was for Shakespeare a return to earlier ways, for his early work had evinced a central concern for action as the expression of moral pattern. There were times when the new fashions led him too far from his natural bent, and we shall see an example of this in the next play he wrote, Troilus and Cressida. But the effect of the new stimuli was largely beneficial, producing works where his supreme genius for characterization was to be subordinated to a pattern of complex moral or aesthetic statement.