The distribution of prose in Julius Caesar and Hamlet is obviously not confined to Brutus and Hamlet, but in giving this title to the present chapter I want to suggest not only that the most significant prose is theirs but also that these two early mature tragedies are set apart from those following by the mere fact that the tragic hero, ‘being in his right wits, and his good judgements’, is given prose at all. With the connotations of inferior dignity and limited emotional resources which apply to Shakespeare’s prose, it is inconceivable that Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony, or Coriolanus, could ever be given the lower medium (outside the recognized conventions for showing lower states of mind or social rank). Of course Brutus and Hamlet are given prose for special reasons, too: Brutus because Shakespeare wishes to differentiate his speech to the mob from Antony’s, Hamlet because he is feigning madness. In the first case the use of prose is quite consistent, but even so we recollect that when, in later plays, Shakespeare wishes to juxtapose victorious and ineffective speeches to a mob, he will do so within verse, by suggesting a speciousness and insincerity in the weaker speech (as at the end of Macbeth). More convincing, perhaps, is the argument that although Hamlet is feigning madness as a disguise from Claudius and his court, he nevertheless is given a considerable amount of prose in scenes where the courtiers are not present – with the Players, with the gravediggers – and although other reasons could perhaps be found for his use of prose in these scenes, I think it nevertheless worthwhile to suggest that there is something significant about the ease with which Hamlet is allowed to step down into prose; especially as for the majority of the time he is not given his madman’s riddling manner, which is reserved for intense patches of crucial moments in his encounters with Claudius and Polonius. I am arguing, then, that the use of prose for these two tragic heroes is not accidental, nor simply a result of some external influences, but a sign of a characteristic sensibility here, the flexibility and ease of adaptation in Hamlet, say, which has disappeared totally from the later tragic heroes, those immensely majestic, tortured, inflexible men. But this is only a preliminary reflection on the similarity between the two plays: it might be worth developing in the context of the tragedies as a genre, but I will not allow it to predetermine my response to the prose here.
Certainly Brutus’ speech (III, ii, 13 ff.) is the most remarkable use of prose in Julius Caesar, and a significant step in the adaptation to tragedy of resources hitherto developed for comedy. If the play is read in its correct chronological position, it either follows or is contemporaneous with As You Like It, and it needs no great skill to see that Shakespeare here applies for Brutus everything that he has learned from the tradition of comic set-speeches in rhetorically structured prose which culminated in that play in the brilliant displays of Rosalind and Touchstone. It is well known that Plutarch provided some hints for the difference between the two speeches, but in fact the few references to Brutus’ style point to a different effect: Plutarch merely says that in his epistolatory style Brutus ‘counterfeited that brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedaemonians’, and although Shakespeare may have known Cicero’s contrast of Brutus’ Stoic style with that of an earlier Marcus Antonius,1 both references would suggest a kind of Tacitean brevity and pithiness, not these expansive Ciceronian symmetries (and the other stylistic tradition, that the difference between the two speeches is that between ‘Attic’ and ‘Asiatic’ eloquence would point to the same effect). The general nature of the speech is often noted, but its rhetorical structure seems never to have been exposed, so rather than discuss it stage by stage it may be best to set it out in all its skeletal purity, with the ‘heads’ of the argument numbered:
The remarkable rhetorical symmetry, in which all the figures aiding clarity and balance (isocolon, parison, anaphora, epistrophe, and in section (3) a form of division and recollection) are used over and over again, is harnessed to an argument of some simplicity and even speciousness. The first section is an exordium that would quieten any mob by its ice-cold clarity, although it is almost a detachable opening such as many rhetoricians (Cicero and Bacon, to go no further) advised the orator to have ready prepared. In the second Brutus’ need is to placate potential enemies by assuring them of a higher duty than friendship and appealing to their sense of democracy. These two simple points are now amplified separately, section (3) developing the appropriate liberal’s reaction to Caesar, and section (4) re-stating the democratic dream. In the last section he dusts his hands of the affair, but places himself in the same position towards the mob as he had taken towards Caesar – an unconscious irony which no listener can fail to notice. The argument is simple, then, and also rests on a specious premiss, as set out in (2) and (3), where Brutus reasons that Caesar had to be killed because otherwise he would have become a tyrant and the Romans would have lived in slavery (a spurious enthymeme, Joseph, p. 179).
But of course it is not the argument that makes this speech so ineffective, although its logical flimsiness is clearly exposed. It is partly the totally emotionless attitude, as so clearly set out in section (3) with its cool equation of terms as if of comparable emotional strength: ‘tears, joy, honour, death’, and partly the self-conscious artistry of the rhetoric. This latter effect is strengthened by the fact that immediately before his oration and immediately after it Brutus speaks verse, so suggesting that this is a prepared speech, penned and learned in a vacuum, oblivous to the audience’s response to it either during or after its delivery (except for the formal appeal for support, the figure anacoenosis). The details of the speech are admirably arranged by Shakespeare to convey the impression of an abstract assessment of this dangerously real crisis. The exordium, with its repetition of the same word at the beginning and end of the clauses (‘hear … hear’, ‘Believe … believe’ – the figure epanalepsis), issuing out into a very formal piece of wordplay (‘censure … senses’ – paronomasia), seems as static a progression as the spurious repetitions and antitheses in section (2). In the third section the coolness of his ticking off on his fingers the unfelt inhuman equation of ‘weep-rejoice-honour-slew’, is strengthened by the horizontal symmetries, for within each of the four pairs of clauses there is an exact inversion of terms, resembling antimetabole but without the wit usually connected with that figure, and with a hint of carefulness which borders on tautology:
fortunate – rejoice; joy – fortune
valiant – honour; honour – valour.
The suggestion of tautology there becomes a full meaningless duplication in section (4), for the repetition in the questions ‘Who is here so base … ‘ blossoms into the duplication of the answers three times over: ‘If any, speak, for him have I offended,’ crowned by the final summing-up, ‘Then none have I offended’. The tautologies in the first sentence remind us of Shakespeare’s ignorant clowns – Dogberry, Pompey – while the specious repetition in the second recalls Falstaff’s ‘banish not him thy Harry’s company’ at just the same stage of penultimate swell. The coolness of the antitheses in the final section completes this picture of Brutus’ efficiency in word patterns and indifference to feeling. It is also significant that Shakespeare gives Brutus no imagery in prose, as if suggesting that he does not want to gain an unfair advantage from playing on men’s imagination and so addresses himself purely to the intellect. Antony has no such scruples, and nowhere else is the contrast between prose and verse and their respective resources so acute as it is here.
Over and above the detail of the dubious logic and the factitious rhetoric is the feeling that the words are being arranged into neat symmetries in the service of a de-humanized argument, and one which is ignorant of the dangerous context in which it is being delivered. The firm-looking vertical and horizontal symmetries of the speech are rather like a precise and highly-polished metal grille lying on the surface of a swamp: when any pressure is applied to it, as Antony is about to do, it will sink. Antony is the better rhetorician, although not so artful (his repetitions are simpler but charged with emotion) for he understands people and their reactions. Sister Joseph has done an excellent analysis of how Antony combines logos, pathos and ethos in his manipulation of the crowd’s feeling, and she concludes: ‘Brutus failed to understand that assent to the truth of an argument is no guarantee of action’ (pp. 283–6). But more than this, Brutus has developed a specious argument with great artifice, but has forgotten the prime rule in rhetoric ever since Aristotle, that a speech must be adapted to the nature of the audience. The best comment on the effect of the speech is the mob’s reaction to Antony’s, but the best comment on the reasons for that effect comes, appropriately enough, from the greatest of rhetoricians, Quintilian, discussing just this point, the relation between rhetorical figures and the speaker’s apparent sincerity:
It is of the first importance that we should know what are the requirements of time, place and character on each occasion of speaking. For the majority of these figures aim at delighting the hearer. But when terror, hatred and pity are the weapons called for in the fray, who will endure the orator who expresses his anger, his sorrow or his entreaties in neat antitheses, balanced cadences and exact correspondences? Too much care for our words under such circumstances weakens the impression of emotional sincerity, and wherever the orator displays his art unveiled, the hearer says, ‘The truth is not in him.’2
That is as perceptive a comment on Brutus’ failure as could be imagined, indeed Shakespeare might almost have written the speech to illustrate the principle, for in no other context in his plays is virtuosity in rhetoric so fatal. The confused self-deceiving rhetoric of Brutus’ first soliloquy (II, i), or the eloquent gestures of his encouragement to the conspirators later in the scene – either would have been better than this display of art revealing art. When Antony enters with Caesar’s body, Brutus’ inflexibility of style and attitude is shown in further symmetries, this time presumably more spontaneous: Antony,
though he had no hand in his death,
shall receive the benefit of his dying …
as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome,
I have the same dagger for myself,
when it shall please my country to need my death.
Both utterances are deeply ironic, of course, but Brutus could not be expected to notice that.
In the other prose scenes of Julius Caesar devices which have so far been the province of comedy are successfully integrated into the play. The opening equivocation between the citizens and the tribunes is a species of ‘warming up’, and their flippancy also makes Marullus’ outburst (‘Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?’) seem more intense. A more extensive and creative adaptation is seen in Casca’s account of Caesar’s fainting-fit (I, ii, 216– 302). The comic device of having a tale marred in the telling by repetition and digression has been seen before in characters like Mistress Quickly, Dogberry, and Juliet’s Nurse, and will later be associated with those like Pompey and Pandarus. But now it is well applied in terms of situation and character, for Casca’s repetitions are not those of garrulousness but of contempt: ‘Why there was a crown offered him; and being offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand thus’ … ‘Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again … And then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by.’ His answers show that apathy and indifference which let the other speaker do the work: ‘Why for that too’ – ‘Why for that too.’ His digressions are also not those of ignorance and senility but reveal his cynical contempt as he constantly interrupts the story to express his own disgust: ‘ I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown – yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets,’ and he several times mocks the mob. Casca’s curt style at least advances the story, but working against it is his vanity in digression, and Shakespeare puts the two discordant tendencies to excellent dramatic effect, for in addition to the mounting tension which his arrogance produces, he is made to mention the most important detail in passing, rushing on to mention his own feelings and contempt:
and still as he refused it, the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it. And for my own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips, and receiving the bad air.
He has to be stopped and asked again, and his clipped style produces a greater shock by retelling the events in three bare parallel clauses:
He fell down in the market place,
and foamed at the mouth,
and was speechless.
A final significant detail within the conventions of Shakespeare’s use of prose is that Casca is one of those unco-operative people who refuse to accept an image: thus when Cassius seizes his chance and translates Caesar’s ‘falling-sickness’ into a disease metaphorically afflicting all Romans, Casca ostentatiously refuses to see it: ‘I know not what you mean by that, but I am sure Caesar fell down.’ The rest of his account is an equally effective mixture of contemptuous repetition, personal digression, and off-hand information.
Repartee of a sort appears in the ghastly scene where the mob murders the poet Cinna because his name is the same as the statesman’s (III, iii). This is a brief but very effective display – indeed the economy of the prose scenes in this play is remarkable (in their directness and non-explicitness they prefigure the technique of Büchner’s Wozzeck). The horror of this is increased by its juxtaposition, for Nevill Coghill has shown3 that Shakespeare boldly altered his source material to place the incident side by side with the allocation of life and death by the generals, which is equally ruthless – and therefore one wonders, on the evidence of this scene, perhaps equally arbitrary. Four citizens corner him, and their sinister unity is expressed in the parallel form taken both by their questions: ‘What is your name? Whither are you going? Where do you dwell? Are you a married man or a bachelor?’, and by their injunctions on how to answer them – as if this is a routine they often perform: ‘Answer every man directly, Ay, and briefly. Ay, and wisely. Ay, and truly, you were best.’ He repeats all their questions and injunctions and takes up one of each in a light-hearted playful mood: ‘wisely I say, I am a bachelor’, only for one of the citizens to use the familiar repartee device of twisting it to an unintended abusive meaning: ‘That’s as much as to say, they are fools that marry. You’ll bear me a bang for that I fear.’ After this ominous beginning he manages to answer the next two parts of his catechism satisfactorily, and the ritual symmetry of the sequence is stressed by the citizens ending each of their succeeding questions with one of the injunctions which he takes up obediently at the beginning of the next sentence: ‘For your dwelling – briefly.’ – ‘Briefly, I dwell by the Capitol.’ But the feeling of reassurance given by the frame of this mock-catechism disappears when he comes to answer their first question, which he has placed last: ‘Truly, my name is Cinna.’ – ‘Tear him to pieces, he’s a conspirator.’ Thus the collapse from order to chaos in the action is married to that in style, and the contrast is the more shocking after the apparently witty mood of the opening. As they pounce on him the distorting wit of repartee takes a still more grisly form: ‘I am Cinna the poet’: ‘Tear him for his bad verses’; ‘his name’s Cinna, pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going’. The ironic effect from the second meaning underlying those jests conveys perfectly the mob’s cat-and-mouse malice, while it shows again Shakespeare’s ability to turn what has been for him a comic device into one not only at home in tragedy but contributing largely to the dramatic effect.
The prose in Hamlet is expressly associated with the Prince’s decision to assume ‘an antic disposition’ and to an Elizabethan audience the significance of this stylistic disguise would be constantly apparent, and would therefore give more force to the soliloquies in which he returns to the norm of dignity and intensity in verse. But as I suggested earlier, prose is not only a sign of dissimulation in Hamlet, although once the disguise is donned he always addresses Claudius and his tools (Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric) in prose, speaking verse to Claudius only when the King is praying, unaware of his presence, and to Gertrude when he is alone with her in the closet-scene. However, Hamlet uses prose to other people and on other occasions, and it is noticeable that when he is given prose in this context the dominant reason is not dissimulation so much as relaxation – prose is a holiday, a temporary escape from the responsibilities of his situation as a revenger, and whenever he is made to recall this burden of action he is given verse.4 To verse therefore, are confined his more intense feelings and those criticisms of the corrupt court of Denmark which are both serious and direct: in prose he is given criticisms which are mocking and indirect. Thus the nature of the prose in the play is determined by larger dramatic functions. Hamlet is the centre of the play’s action, and – to simplify the structure but to preserve its essential balance – he is a good man in a bad society: with the exception of Horatio, and lesser characters such as Fortinbras, the Players and Gravediggers, everyone in this court has been corrupted by Claudius, giving way either out of loyalty (Ophelia) or profit (Guildencrantz). The audience shares Hamlet’s knowledge of the Ghost’s revelations, and also knows why he pretends to be mad; Hamlet cannot accuse Claudius and his tools directly until he has complete evidence, so in his prose scenes he is allowed to release some of his antagonism in a madman’s wit. Therefore the prose is the negative vision again, and it is significant that we find in the prose hardly any of the two main images that dominate the action, both emanating from Claudius: that of disease, and – less well appreciated – that of the trap set for Hamlet (as these trap images are in the verse I will not follow them up, but it is important to realize that Shakespeare is here too adapting a comic device to tragedy). Thus the prose of wit, and particularly abusive imagery and repartee, is the only opportunity for Hamlet to vent his hostility directly against a black world. And as the audience can also see Claudius and his tools forming their plots, we can best appreciate just how accurate and intelligent Hamlet is in mocking them. The development and variation of Hamlet’s moods are clearly important (no other Shakespeare character is given so much variety of emotional and intellectual experience) so it will be best to follow the play chronologically.
In his first appearance in the new guise (II, ii) he meets Polonius, and we see at once Shakespeare’s invention of a deliberately obscure manner which allows Hamlet to utter threats and insults which will be understood by the audience but not by his enemies. So his first deflating image for Polonius: ‘you are a fishmonger’ carries an ironic force for us whether or not we accept some critics’ theories that Hamlet has overheard Polonius, for we have seen the ‘old fool’ slandering his son and offering to ‘loose’ his daughter (and of course ‘fishmonger’ carries a bawdy meaning appropriate to the madman). As the encounter develops Shakespeare uses some of the established techniques of repartee, chiefly that of taking the sense of words in a way different to that intended, either by proposing an abusive word and then insisting on an innocent meaning of it:
HAMLET.… you are a fishmonger.
POLONIUS. Not I my lord.
HAMLET. Then I would you were so honest a man.
POLONIUS. Honest, my lord?
HAMLET. Ay sir; to be honest as this world goes is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
or by accepting an innocent word and then taking a ridiculous meaning of it, as Hamlet does twice here:
POLONIUS. What do you read my lord?
HAMLET. Words, words, words.
POLONIUS. What is the matter my lord?
HAMLET. Between who?
POLONIUS. I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Having fended him off for so long, Hamlet now attacks with strong, disgusting images: ‘Slanders sir, for the satirical rogue says that old men have grey beards, … their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum.’ Throughout the scenes with the enemy there is an increased tension for us as we know that he has to outwit them, and so his replies must always be seen as brilliant improvizations, sometimes so dazzling that they are obscure: this is a point which the critic sometimes overlooks, surrounded as he is by glossaries, dictionaries, and editions all designed to elucidate the text and to remove any obscurity. Thus Hamlet’s conclusion to this speech must seem at first hearing and ever afterwards, riddling: ‘for yourself sir shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.’ There is sense to be found here, as elsewhere, but we must not drag it so near the surface that it obscures the nonsense.
Another familiar device within Shakespeare’s use of repartee which here is put to organic use in terms of situation and character is the external comment made by one character on the other’s wit, as in real life:
POLONIUS. Will you walk out of the air my lord?
HAMLET. Into my grave?
POLONIUS. Indeed that’s out o’th’air.
(Aside) How pregnant sometimes his replies are; a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.
The irony is that we know that Hamlet has ‘reason and sanity’ enough, and that Polonius has wrongly interpreted each stage in this wit-combat as a sign of madness (Aside: ‘How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter’). From this observation a further point emerges concerning Hamlet’s role in these bouts of repartee. Polonius humours Hamlet out of respect, both for his madness and for his superior rank, so Hamlet is given the superiority in the contest before it begins, and indeed he enjoys this superiority in every contest: as he is made to say after a particularly passive piece of humouring from Polonius, ‘They fool me to the top of my bent.’ The courtiers Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Osric have to be deferential because of his rank (and possibly also because of the madness, although this is not explicitly stated); Ophelia is prevented by these reasons too, but on the more important grounds of her sex, her innocent nature, and her love for him; Claudius is prevented from attacking on equal terms not because of Hamlet’s imbalance (he is the only one shrewd enough to see through it) but because he is keeping up a false façade of kindness, and wants unity at any price. Thus Hamlet is guaranteed success by the very nature of his opponents’ relationship with him. However his triumphs are not empty and obvious ones, for this is just the sort of one-sided situation in which (as with Rosalind to Orlando) Shakespeare’s imagination can be given full play, with the result that Hamlet’s wit is always brilliant, and as we are already on his side given the disposition of forces within the play, then his victories are (or should be) keenly appreciated by us. Hamlet’s wit is as evasive as Falstaff’s where need be, and as sharp as Beatrice’s when it attacks. But so as not to make the other characters mere puppets, Shakespeare now brings on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and shows their wit to be much less inhibited than it is later.
With their appearance his mockery takes a lighter course (he does not as yet suspect them though he obviously realizes that Polonius must be aiding the king), and like a comedy heroine he catches up the courtier’s affected image: ‘On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button,’ and takes it to the other extreme of the body with equally ludicrous concreteness: ‘Nor the soles of her shoe?’; this denied, he takes the mean: ‘Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?’ and as Guildenstern seems to accept the bawdy image – ‘Faith, her privates we’, Hamlet can twist it to their discomfort: ‘In the secret parts of Fortune? O most true, she is a strumpet.’ The repartee continues in imagery, as he now leads the dance and comes much nearer to his own situation by proposing the image of Denmark as a prison, which they refuse to accept: ‘We think not so my lord,’ and he deflates the answer with a ploy which could be applied to any such phrase: ‘Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ They urge that his motive must be ambition, which makes Denmark ‘too narrow’ for his mind, and he reduces the idea to a ludicrous image, denies it, and again hints at his own unhappy situation: ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ They seize on the one word ‘dreams’, and urge their case by equating it with ambition, developing the ‘shadow/substance’ commonplace: ‘Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitions is merely the shadow of a dream.’ Hamlet seems on the defensive, and tries to equate the two terms in one side of their formula; ‘A dream itself is but a shadow’ – they agree, and victory seems in sight as they enlarge the point with a still wittier equation: ‘Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow’s shadow.’ But now Hamlet destroys the argument by inserting examples for their terms: ‘Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows.’ This is a dazzling involute inversion of their own categories, and it may be yet another reference to his own situation, if we consider that ‘monarchs’ may refer to Claudius and ‘outstretched heroes’ to old Hamlet. At all events there follows the mock-modest dismissal: ‘Shall we to th’ Court for by my fay I cannot reason?’
This success for Hamlet serves partly to establish his superior wit, as ever in such exchanges, and partly for him to attempt to convey his unhappy personal situation as a test of their sympathy. Having noticed that little is forthcoming he begins to suspect them, and the sharpness of his intuition is another sign of his intelligence. He questions them with an ironic use of rather affected images, as if parodying their style: ‘But in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore?’ – ‘To visit you my lord’ … – ‘Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks, but I thank you; and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear a halfpenny.’But this gushing, mannered tone seems also to be designed to lull them into complacency, and in sharp contrast Hamlet’s real intent strikes out without metaphor: ‘Were you not sent for? Is it your own inclining?’, and the force of his relaxed mock eloquence alternating with these nervous direct questions finally collapses them into admitting it. With another abusive image for these tame birds – ‘I will tell you why; so shall … your secrecy to the King and Queen moult no feather.’ – Hamlet at last explains the unhappiness of his personal situation which he has been hinting at for so long: that is to say, he tells them what is wrong with him – a form of melancholy – but not what has caused it. This speech, Hamlet’s Soliloquy on Man, as it might be called (for it is directed more towards the audience than to the two courtiers, who would in any case be incapable of transmitting it accurately to Claudius), conveys his absolute disillusionment, with considerable eloquence. But if it is eloquence, it is used on a negative topic, and I would stress that it is designed to show his disillusionment, for it is the most misread speech in Shakespeare (second perhaps to Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida which is conventionally taken as a copy-book demonstration of Elizabethan ideas on degree, but which in its dramatic context and in its portentously diffuse style should, I think, be taken rather as a specious politic manipulation of those ideas). This speech by Hamlet is too often regarded as a straightforward piece of praise (even Sister Joseph describes it as a positive encomium, p. 123) and is usually connected with Renaissance orations on the dignity of man – but Robert Burton would be a better gloss than Pico della Mirandola. The speech may use ennobling images – ‘this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’, ‘how like an angel’, but it evokes them only to contrast them with Hamlet’s disillusioned vision: to him the first is ‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’, the second ‘this quintessence of dust’. Although this juxtaposition may not totally destroy the golden vision, the speech was not written to glorify anything, but to show that for Hamlet, here and now, gold is dust.
Throughout the speech the patterns of rhetoric are a crucial reinforcement to the images and to the argument, and having established his personal emotional state Shakespeare uses them to convey Hamlet’s disgust at the discrepancy between the potential and the actual by developing the potentially glorious vision – of the cosmos, of man – in expanding symmetrical clauses, and then following it with a brutally plain statement of the actual (as he sees it – hence the repeated ‘to me’). The first two sections – the earth, the air – are given the same structure, and the increasing length of the clauses within this overall correspondence highlights Hamlet’s increasing disgust, as we can best see if the two parts are set out in parallel (the a] clauses are to be read before the b]):
I have of late, but wherefore I know not,
| lost all my mirth, | |
| forgone all custom of exercises; | |
| and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that | |
| a] | this goodly frame the earth, |
| b] | this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, |
| this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, | |
| a] | seems to me a |
| b] | why it appeareth no other thing to me than a |
| a] | sterile |
| b] | foul and pestilent |
| a] | promontory, |
| b] | congregation of vapours. |
By placing them side by side we see the increasing force given to the second section, and the structure also determines the tone of voice with which the speech must be read, for Shakespeare achieves a rising note in this section (‘this most excellent canopy’) by using anaphora on ‘this’ to anchor the left-hand side, while the remainder of the clauses rise (increasing both in size and weight and in the density of the images) to an ecstatic height on ‘golden fire’ before collapsing as a more powerful echo to the first section a]. By means of this structure Shakespeare creates a change of pitch, for it is impossible to speak these words without the voice making a parabola of disillusionment.
The same process of build-up and let-down is seen in the third section, on man, but at a still higher level because of the shorter, more frequently returning clauses, and the repetition (in the Folio punctuation5) of ‘how’ and ‘in’ creating a subtle cross-rhythm which constantly pushes the movement along:
By now the note is very high indeed, with a springy rhythm and an exclamatory top-of-the-voice wonder, almost an above-actual evaluation, so that the final below-actual estimate can completely prick the bubble and return us to what Hamlet feels:
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me–
no nor woman neither.
That enormous crash could only have been achieved by the symmetries of rhetoric building up the tone along with the meaning to a heavenly height, and the demolition is reinforced by the choice of the final words: the hissing sibilants and explosive consonants of ‘this quintessence of dust’ (‘quintessence’ may, for the first fraction of a second, be thought to be a positive term, and if so then the let-down is postponed still more climactically). Again the rhetorical parallelism between the three sections has been maintained to stress the essentially subjective nature of Hamlet’s feeling (the repeated ‘to me’, which I have italicized, acts as a point de repère), and to suggest the pressure behind it, for the constantly expanding movement suggests a still unexhausted level of emotion. Here an elaborate rhetorical structure is used to a completely different purpose to that for Brutus’ ineffectual oratory, and as we concede the flexibility of the device in Shakespeare’s hands, we must also admire its expressive power as he translates it into human emotions: the symmetries of Gorgias have been essential to construct this curve of hope and despair.
Little is made of this speech dramatically, for by an abrupt change of tone Shakespeare now makes the courtiers announce the arrival of the players, and for most of the remainder of this long scene we are in the world of the London theatres at the turn of the century, with the dispute over the boy companies and the Poetomachia. This is in the nature of a topical digression, but Hamlet is at least made to connect the triumph of the boy players with Claudius’ equally rapid rise to success. The other theatrical business of the scene, Hamlet’s welcoming roll-call of the players (‘the lover shall not sigh gratis’), and his actual greeting of them, can all be defended as relevant given Shakespeare’s naturalistic presentation of Hamlet and the arrival of a whole troupe of players, an event of sufficient significance in the experience of any Elizabethan for it not to be passed off with a few words. But also a sufficient time is needed as a prelude to Hamlet’s reminiscence of ‘Aeneas’ tale to Dido’ of Priam’s slaughter, and for the Player’s Speech, which in addition to its complex relationship to Hamlet’s situation6 is one of the most inspired stylistic inventions in Shakespeare. Although the tools of Claudius are largely forgotten during this scene the presence of the actors is well used to show up Polonius’ old-fashioned pedantry with genres (‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’) and more revealing still, his embarrassment at the Player’s intensity: ‘Look whe’r he has not turned his colour, and has tears in’s eyes – prithee no more.’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dismissed with a riddling threatening image, one of the few hunt-metaphors in the prose (inasmuch as it distinguishes hunter from prey): ‘I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’, and Polonius is welcomed with a development of the inversion idea in the crab image: ‘that great baby you see there is not yet out of his swaddling-clouts’. Polonius is mocked further in repartee (II, ii, 405–39).
The use of abusive imagery and repartee to express Hamlet’s suspicion and resentment towards the King’s party is put to great dramatic effect in the scene with Ophelia (III, i), setting up in the audience a peculiarly divided response. At one level we are distressed by his brutal manner to her, but at another we are relieved that in this way he does not reveal his secrets to the snooping Claudius and Polonius: again it seems preferable not to imagine that Hamlet knows that he is being spied on, for his feeling that something is wrong – ‘Where’s your father?’ – is an index of his sensitivity.7 Repartee is again applied both to the immediate situation and to Hamlet’s own general disillusionment as he sets up an opposition between beauty and honesty to which Ophelia makes the perfectly sound objection: ‘Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?’, only for him to crush it with a more penetrating argument (‘paradox’, as he calls it, correctly within the Renaissance meaning of that word as an idea apparently ‘contrary to the opinion of all men’ which is then shown to be true), and one that also hits her present position as bait:
Ay truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd, than the force of honesty can translate beauty into its likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.
This is a generalized statement, and it is noteworthy that in the rest of the scene Hamlet’s attacks, although they undoubtedly distress Ophelia, are not directly pointed at her: it is as if Shakespeare wishes to show Hamlet in his antic mood for the benefit of the eavesdroppers, but tries to spare her any abuse. Thus he goes on to attack his own family: ‘virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock’, himself, all men, and all women, – every possible object except Ophelia. It is generalized abuse, and like the ‘What a piece of work is a man’ speech, it seems designed as much as anything to show Hamlet’s own complete disillusionment. We see his imbalance partly in the speciousness of his arguments: ‘why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners’ (premiss: all men are sinners); ‘wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them’ (premiss: all husbands are cuckolds): the loopholes left there are almost a reassurance that he is not being vicious to her directly. Now while the first argument could be defended by an ‘absolute’ reasoner, on the grounds that all men are indeed sinners in Christian terms, I do not think that anyone will want to defend the second one. Nor can the first argument be taken so seriously in its dramatic context, for Hamlet is obviously unbalanced, as we see by the force of his language and the absolute nature of his condemnation:
I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck,
than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in.
What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us.
This is as intemperate and absolute – and unfounded – a self-accusation as that of Malcolm before Macduff, but whereas that is designed to test Macduff’s human reactions and trust, here Hamlet’s violence shows the totally negative attitude towards the world which the shock of the Ghost’s revelation has produced in him. It is of course based on a flawed argument: if one man falls so, then all men may be rotten; but we do not object to that as we have seen the shock and can gauge the effect that it has had on Hamlet’s love. But now we must see that his words embrace a total negative, although it may also have ironic overtones in this situation: ‘I say we will have no more marriages.’ His final ‘attack’ on Ophelia is so generalized as to resemble a stock piece of Elizabethan satire on the vices of woman: ‘I have heard of your paintings too well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig and amble …’ – we have seen no evidence that this could possibly come home to Ophelia, and this imbalance towards sex seems to be the sort of behaviour to be expected from any madman or ‘natural’ (as with Mercutio’s description of the ‘natural’, Love, and the commonplace accounts of such people’s potency – hence perhaps Hamlet’s bawdy in the play-scene may be another semi-realistic disguise). Whatever the measure of agreement to this account of the ‘nunnery’ scene, I think it is true to say that Shakespeare has been at pains to preserve Ophelia from any direct abuse: our attention is drawn towards the ambiguities of Hamlet’s behaviour.
If the stylistic detail in this scene make its overall intention slightly problematical, the next prose scene with Hamlet is still more puzzling. The Advice to the Players (III, ii, 1–51) is so famous and is so often quoted simply for its content, that little attention has been paid to its form. However Hamlet seems to be given a style here which is quite different to anything elsewhere in the play, and our sense that we know Hamlet’s voice and the sort of sharpness, intelligence and wit to be expected of it is here strangely disappointed. To begin with he is the not unsympathetic figure of the anxious author trying to get his piece acted properly: ‘Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue’ (although one would like to know what a professional Elizabethan company thought of those amateur authors who very occasionally ventured into their world). But the speech develops so far from Hamlet’s own position and into apparent comments on contemporary acting – ‘have so strutted and bellowed’ – ‘let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them’ – that the change of tone may be explained as a device to make Hamlet step outside his part, and indeed the play, either to deliver such topical comment on Shakespeare’s behalf, or possibly in addition to satirize some superior critic of the theatre. The change is noticeable partly in the affected, rather exaggerated, and very repetitious images: the ‘torrent, tempest, and … whirlwind of your passion’, ‘tear a passion to tatters, to very rags’, ‘to split the ears of the groundlings’, ‘strutted and bellowed’; partly too in the way that images are introduced with that self-conscious preparation, that appeal for allowance to create a metaphor, which elsewhere in Shakespeare is mocked: ‘for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of your passion’; ‘the purpose of playing whose end … is to hold, as ’twere the mirror up to nature’ – and in both these cases the image that finally emerges is something of an anticlimax (in the first case because of the tautology of the synonyms for ‘whirlwind’, in the second because the image was an Elizabethan commonplace – and not only that). The exaggeration felt in the images is also felt in the critic’s horrified reactions to excess: ‘it offends me to the soul’; ‘I would have such a fellow whipped’: these terms may not be meant literally, but if not then they are the greater affectations. Equally affected are the exclamations, which are unlike Hamlet:
O it offends me to the soul.…
O there be players …
O reform it altogether …
–the tone there is that of a courtier – such as Osric, or those mocked by Lavache – but it is hard to match anywhere else in more reputable prose. The literary allusions, too, are unlike Hamlet, with their self-conscious elaboration: ‘whipped for o’er-doing Termagant; it out-Herods Herod, pray you avoid it’.
The impression formed by these deviations from Hamlet’s norm is that of a rather superior, fastidious critic, the sort of aristocrat who shows his contempt for the cheaper seats: ‘the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise’: these are terms with which Hamlet contemptuously (and rightly) dismissed Polonius’ incomprehension of dramatic emotion – ‘he’s for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps’, but I wonder whether our conception of Hamlet would allow him to express such scorn for the people. As the tone of advice becomes more confident, we are conscious of an artistic selection of words for choice spruce alliteration: ‘a robustious periwig-pated fellow’ (and earlier ‘in the very torrent, tempest …’), and for abstractions which become stiff and formal images: ‘let your own discretion be your tutor’, ‘with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.’ The language throughout is pleonastic, as in most of the images, or this doublet – ‘acquire and beget’, or this especially repetitious antimetabole:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,
or most of all in the definition of the aim of acting, which is hedged about at first with meaningless qualifying formulae, and then illustrated with a self-conscious amplification of the obvious (‘virtue: scorn’ …)
the purpose of playing,
whose end both at the first, and now,
was and is,
to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature;
to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image,
and the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure.
The expansions and repetitions in the sense (we have only to compare it with the much tauter economical earlier statement to Polonius: ‘they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time’) are as ever made more obvious by the symmetries, indeed one could almost suggest that Hamlet is only given rhetorical structure when he is consciously playing some part outside himself, (the speech on Man was by announcement a set-piece, and I would argue that the satire in the nunnery-scene is similarly detached from his own voice). He is made to continue in the same rhetorical symmetries, now perhaps still more self-conscious and with quite predictable antitheses:
Now this overdone,
or come tardy off,
though it makes the unskilful laugh,
cannot but make the judicious grieve;
the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh
a whole theatre of others.
In addition to the artifice, the vocabulary sets this speech apart from Hamlet: he has been made to use words compounded with ‘over’ five times in a dozen or so lines, and the phrase ‘the which one’ is oddly contorted and rare for Shakespeare. The remainder of the speech will be found, I think, to contain further delaying qualifications, ingenious patterning, and affected sentiments suitable to ‘the judicious’ critic. The scene reads almost like a parody of the foppish critics in Restoration Comedy (or even as far ahead as Sheridan’s Puff). If is it a contemporary satire, then the significance of the style (as well as the details of the actors and companies involved) may be for ever lost to us, although one could suggest that Shakespeare is either parodying a type of critic or is detaching Hamlet from his normal persona to express his own views – at all events Hamlet’s language here is quite different to that before and after.
As the spectators arrive for the play Hamlet reverts to his normal language of witty repartee and riddlingly abusive images, being made to mock all his major opponents in turn, and so reminding us of his situation. Thus to Claudius he uses the riddling manner: ‘Excellent i’faith, of the chameleon’s dish; I eat the air, promise-crammed, you cannot feed capons so.’ Polonius’ account of his university career includes the appallingly obvious comment that Brutus killed Caesar, and Hamlet is given the much needed deflation: ‘It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there’, although this is also, as Dover Wilson notes, a timely reference to a play based on the murder of a tyrant, such as is the one about to be performed. This pattern of repartee combining both witty mockery and the serious expression of his own situation continues in his exchanges with Ophelia, which move from the bawdy talk appropriate to a madman to bitter references to his father’s recent death, his mother’s brief love, and to the poisoning – all in a manner to which the other characters cannot really object, though the audience sees his serious meaning as well as the wit: ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung …’ This plot-situation determines the nature of his prose for the remaining encounters with the enemy before he is sent away to England. After the play has caught the conscience of the King, Hamlet evades Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with repartee and with one of the few trap-images used in the prose: ‘Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?’ But his distrust of them is increasingly expressed in long-developed damaging comparisons, first in the recorder scene where he manipulates Guildenstern into a corner and then presses the analogy home: ‘You play upon me, you would seem to know my stops’. developing the image fully up to the last bitter pun on ‘fret’: ‘Call me what instument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.’ In his next scene with them (IV, ii) Hamlet is given another long aggressive image, showing Rosencrantz as Claudius’ sponge, kept as an ape does an apple in the corner of his mouth, to be squeezed dry when needed: Hamlet repeats the image to make it inescapable, and Rosencrantz tries the ploy of not seeing the image (not through stupidity – he cannot afford to admit it): ‘I understand you not my lord’, but Hamlet’s infinite ingenuity has an image for that too: ‘I am glad of it; a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.’ In this his last confrontation with Claudius and his tools he is given a marvellously apt image as epitaph for the foolish politician: ‘Not where he eats, but where ‘a is eaten; a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him,’ and he goes on to develop threateningly the idea of the King as food for worms, bringing Claudius from his first conventional comment on madness: ‘Alas, alas!’ towards a realization of the double meaning which has been apparent to us all along. Hamlet leaves Claudius with a last threatening riddle, this time an insulting syllogism: ‘Farewell dear mother’ – ‘Thy loving father, Hamlet’ – ‘My mother – father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; and so my mother’. Comic logic is now the very stuff of tragic character and relationships. But the wit and ingenuity shown here would be crestfallen if Hamlet knew of the only scene with a character speaking prose in which he does not figure, the pathetic madness of Ophelia (IV, vi), where her collapse into prose is accompanied by a disordered vision of many of the elements which have surrounded her – frustrated love, bawdy, deceit, both in the snatches of song, which are wonderfully adapted to her condition, and in the ironies of her prose comments: ‘O how the wheel becomes it! It is the false steward that stole his master’s daughter’ – ‘There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered when my father died – they say ‘a made a good end’: as Laertes is made to say, ‘This nothing’s more than matter.’ The pathos of this scene is considerable, and is increased by the fact that whereas to Hamlet speaking prose other characters adopt prose as if to humour him, here they remain in verse – she is too far gone.
The madness of Ophelia is one of the prophetic uses of prose for the later tragedies, as is the incongruous humour of the graveyard scene, and although this mixture of moods may annoy neo-classic critics, it is the most creative example yet of the adaptation of comic devices to tragedy. The scene falls into three parts, up to the entry of the funeral procession: first the two gravediggers are shown, then Hamlet and Horatio are shown separately while the clown sings as he digs the grave, and finally there is a ‘confrontation’ between the two parties, as in the comedies. The clown’s opening conversation establishes the dilemma following Ophelia’s suicide: ‘Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she wilfully seeks her own salvation?’ We may laugh at the hint of malaprop-ism there, but not as we realize that the evil of Claudius has not only used Ophelia as a tool, and driven her mad into death, but has now reduced her to the final ignominy of perhaps not being buried in consecrated ground. But as the graveyard lawyer develops his argument laughter may return:
if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches; it is to act, to do, to perform; argal she drowned herself wittingly.
That is as circular as the gravedigger’s other arguments, indeed putting it into a syllogism only makes the chaos behind the words clearer and more amusing. But it is a different type of humour to that produced by the logicians preceding and following this play – Touchstone and Feste, who are enough masters of their tools to make us respect them. Here we are back in a context familiar from early Shakespearian comedy, that of an ignorant clown trying to argue with the tools of logic and rhetoric and only creating ludicrous confusion: the words ‘ergo’ and ‘argal’ have not been used since Gobbo, and before him, Grumio, Dromio, and the rebel in 2 Henry VI. The gravedigger’s ancestry is shown again in his way of dramatizing the argument by taking a simple concrete example, such as earlier innocents have done: Launce with his ‘Nay, I’ll show you the manner of it. This shoe is my father; no this left shoe is my father’, or Gobbo with his ‘The fiend is at my elbow and tempts me, saying. … My conscience says …’ So goodman delver brushes aside the interruption and demonstrates the whole situation:
Give me leave. Here lies the water – good. Here stands the man – good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes, mark you that. But if the water come to him, and drown him, he drowns not himself; argal, he that is not guilty of his own death, shortens not his own life.
As crazy a conclusion as could be hoped for.
This sequence is amusing in itself, but one of its dramatic functions is to crystallize the Elizabethan reaction to the burying of a suicide (and the famous case of Hales v. Petit may give it extra force, as Dover Wilson has suggested). Thus it prepares us for the unpleasantly niggling official attitude of the Church, which in turn provokes Laertes’ anger and Hamlet’s demonstration of his love for Ophelia (some have complained that the final stages of the play are loosely constructed, but although the detail of the scenes may be expansive, every action provokes the one following). And although the discussion has been confused, the conclusion is sound: ‘If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out a Christian burial’, though the first clown characteristically reduces it to absurdity, for as Sister Joseph has said, ‘The argument which won leniency is the very one which they, with a touch of the grotesque, complain’ (p. 201): ‘Why there thou sayst, and the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even-Christen.’ But in addition to conducting a serious discussion in a ludicrous and naturalistically appropriate way which does illuminate the subject, this sequence has a more important dramatic function in that it establishes the clowns, and the first one especially, as habitual disputants with an appetite for games of wit. This aspect is developed further in their equivocating riddles: Adam as ‘the first that ever bore arms’, and the brilliantly specious repartee in which the second clown’s apparent winner to the riddle who builds the strongest: ‘The gallows-maker’, is again put down with the help of logic:
the gallows does well, but how does it well? It does well to those that do ill; now thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than the church; argal, the gallows may do well to thee.
– and the last clause contains a new ambiguity. The first clown’s keenness in disputing, as seen in his various impatient interjections ‘I’ll put another question to thee’ – ‘To’t again, come.’ – ‘Ay, tell me that and unyoke’ – ‘To’t’, recalls other wits hungry for fight – Fluellen’s eager wish to engage in disputations, or Touchstone’s imperious ‘Instance, briefly; come instance’ – ‘A better instance, I say; come’. Thus when Hamlet arrives the clown will probably want to try his wits on him, too.
Hamlet’s first reaction on seeing the clown is to reflect on his callousness that he ‘sings in grave-making’, but as the skulls come tumbling out of the pit his attention is caught by them, and this second part of the scene begins with him philosophizing – as he has done before but now more consciously – on the ubi sunt theme ‘Where be his quiddities now?’ His mood is established as relaxed, reflective, melancholy, showing both an interest in death and decay which is morbid in itself, but which has certainly been thrust upon him by the events of the play, and also the philosopher’s wish to catch truth despite human limitations: ‘here’s fine revolution an we had the wit to see it’. But his wit comes out again as his meditation on the skulls becomes a satire on several Renaissance butts: a politician, a courtier, a lawyer, a painted lady, and he is later given the satirist’s usual distrust of the generalized evils of ‘the age’: ‘the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe’ (there is a sense, although we must not make too much of it, in which Hamlet is two Elizabethan dramatic types, the Revenger and also the Malcontent who stands slightly outside the action and delivers satiric comment on it). But in addition to showing us yet again this aspect of Hamlet’s character, several of his butts have been features of the play: the Machiavellian imagery for the politician suggests Polonius: ‘This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o’er-reaches; one that would circumvent God’; the ‘painted lady’ recalls his earlier attack on Ophelia and the courtier might be Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, or more probably, as we shall see, Osric. This sequence pulls together in a remarkable way many of the subsidiary elements of the play. Again after his conversation with the clown his earlier reflections on the equality of King and beggar as meat for worms are recalled in his extempore rhyme on the tyrant Caesar ‘dead and turned to clay’. Similarly the wit with which he had punned on legal terms (‘to have his fine pate full of fine dirt’) is recalled later in his riddling reduction of Alexander to a bunghole (using the figure metalepsis, Joseph, p. 159): ‘Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he has converted might they not stop a beer barrel?’ To the purist this may all seem superfluous display, but I would stress that the complex union of wit and rhetoric and philosophical speculation on death both before and after his conversation with the gravedigger – that all these elements are designed to establish Hamlet’s strangely relaxed mood, his mixture of wit and melancholy showing how off-guard he is, and his interest in death being a kind of atmospheric preparation for his own end.
The clash with the gravedigger is crucial. Hamlet approaches him with a direct question: ‘Whose grave’s this sirrah?’ – ‘Mine sir’. Instead of explaining what he had meant, as a lesser wit like Polonius or Horatio might have done, Hamlet – whose skill in equivocation has been amply demonstrated – refuses to give in to this obstreperousness, taking the answer and twisting it back with ‘lie’ meaning ‘to tell an untruth’: ‘I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in’t.’ The clown seems to accept this point by agreeing to the opposite: ‘You lie out on’t sir, and therefore ’tis not yours’ but then takes ‘lie’ in the other sense and rejects it: ‘for my part I do not lie in’t, yet it is mine’. Hamlet reiterates his meaning, and adds a further logical argument ‘Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t and say it is thine. ’Tis for the dead, not for the quick; therefore thou liest.’ This seems conclusive, but the clown has another twist: ’Tis a quick lie sir, ’twill away again from me to you’. And so the contest continues, as Hamlet’s quick wit persists in playing the game the clown’s way: ‘What man dost thou dig it for?’ – ‘For no man, sir’ – ‘What woman then?’ – ‘For none neither.’ This is ludicrous, so Hamlet is at last forced to descend to the obvious: ‘Who is to be buried in’t?’ and now the equivocation behind that last riddle is revealed: ‘One that was a woman, sir, but rest her soul she’s dead.’ This witty evasion produces the familiar reaction within the conventions of Shakespeare’s use of repartee, the direct comment on a character’s wit, in Hamlet’s admiring: ‘How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.’ But again this is a stylistic device being used very differently here compared to the repartee used elsewhere in the play (Hamlet to his enemies) or in the gay comedies, or for Falstaff. To find a parallel we again have to go back many years to an earlier type of clown, the stubborn equivocator who denies the direct answer and who by his delay-tactics exasperates the questioner. Faint traces of this situation appear in recent plays, as in the opening of Julius Caesar, or the boy who quibbles with Benedick for two stubborn lines (Much Ado, II, iv), or Gobbo in his new job (Merchant, III, v) – who produces from Lorenzo a frustrated comment similar to Hamlet’s: ‘How every fool can play upon the word!’ But for the real type of stubborn equivocator we have to look back to Grumio in the Shrew (I, ii) or Dromio in Errors (IV, ii), and it is surely strange that Shakespeare should go back ten years or so in his own career to revive a cruder type of clown, with his confused logic and obstreperous equivocation, especially as he writes parts for more sophisticated clowns immediately before and after this play. But there is, I think, an artistic reason for it.
Shakespeare has established the wit and appetite for repartee of both Gravedigger and Hamlet, and now brings them together. Hamlet is put down for the first time in the play, and as he admits defeat and returns to the gravedigger with questions about his profession and about corpses, he is led away from his first question: ‘Whose grave’s this?’, and as his vein of reflection on death and decay establishes itself again, as we have seen it earlier, he is led still further away from the point until his riddles on Caesar and Alexander are only interrupted by the arrival of the funeral procession, and the question first asked at line 127 is now repeated at line 241:
Who is this they follow?
And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken
The corse they follow did with desperate hand
Fordo it own life. ’Twas of some estate.
Couch we awhile and mark.
And it is not until twenty lines later that Hamlet finally realizes: ‘What, the fair Ophelia!’ Thus, together with the hero’s own mixed mood, the gravedigger’s specious logic and equivocation had delayed Hamlet from learning that Ophelia is dead until he is confronted with her burial – an ironic application of characteristic styles which has been foreshadowed by the way in which Dogberry’s unchangeable manner delayed and for a time even concealed the truth about Hero’s slander. By the time that he does learn, Laertes’ passion is so high that he leaps into the grave to take his last farewell, and Hamlet is immediately impelled to rival – indeed excel – him in sincere love and protestation, the change in his manner being shown with Shakespeare’s usual stylistic consistency in that he now speaks verse to the court for the first time since his assumed madness, and shows for the first time his real passion – though ironically as we see, the Queen thinks he is still mad. It was not completely necessary in terms of plot to postpone Hamlet’s knowledge of the death of Ophelia, but it makes a considerable difference to the play in terms of atmosphere and emotional reaction: Hamlet could have been told by the grave-digger (Horatio presumably does not know), but then his reaction might have been one of remorse and self-accusation, and so emotion might have been dissipated – now he is brought to the most intense pitch at one go, and the sudden shock (and Laertes’ mouthings) provoke him to a magnificent affirmation. Thus the graveyard scene has been necessary, for in addition to re-establishing certain aspects of Hamlet’s character, pulling together certain elements of the play, and suggesting that he is somehow nearer death in his sympathies, the function of the gravedigger’s equivocation seems (although it has never been recognized as such8) to be to delay the news until it can produce the most intense dramatic reaction. Shakespeare’s elaborate and realistic method of delaying the news (as ever, the equivocation is commented on as showing the character’s actual normal behaviour) surely presupposes some such ultimate aim – if so it provides the most wonderful example yet of his adaptation of a comic device to tragic purposes.
One comic device is yet to come, and that is the character of the fop. The scene with Osric (V, ii) shows Hamlet’s wit again in a relaxed and expansive mood (and the satirist comes out in his comment that Osric ‘and many more of the same bevy, that I know the drossy age dotes on, [have] only got the tune of the time’) and it establishes once more his ingenuity in such holiday situations before his responsibilities are finally fulfilled. Osric is mocked with all the techniques so far developed: the direct comment: ‘This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head’ – ‘ ‘A did comply with his dug before ‘a sucked it’; the fulfilment of a prophecy of linguistic affectation (like Malvolio), for if we remember Hamlet’s sarcasm about the courtier ‘which could say, good morrow sweet lord, how dost thou sweet lord’, then there is irony in Osric’s first words: ‘Sweet lord, if your lordship were at leisure’; the unperceived mock, as he agrees with Hamlet in turn that it is Very hot’, ‘indifferent cold’, and ‘very sultry’ (so ‘complying’ just as Polonius had done earlier with the shapes of the clouds); the indirect mock, as with the deflating asides (‘His purse is empty already, all’s golden words are spent’); the self-ridicule through affected imagery, and, most effective, the immediate parody of this weakness (a late development, seen before in Hal on Falstaff, Celia on Rosalind). So Osric describes Laertes in grotesquely conceited language, often putting a simple word to an unnatural use (like Armado):
an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society, and great showing; indeed to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gentry, for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gentleman would see.
Hamlet’s reply is more obviously ludicrous (it has to be) but shows a great improvising wit:
Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you, though I know to divide him inventorially would dizzy th’ arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail.
And so on, with more clever wit culminating in the final bafflement of Osric as Hamlet tries to discover why Laertes should be mentioned: ‘The concernancy sir? Why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?’ – ‘Sir?’ But although Osric is a fop and soon mocked, he is in fact the instrument of Claudius’ most sinister plot, and to an audience that has seen this plot formed there is, both here and in Hamlet’s last witty prose exchange with Horatio, a deflating image which Hamlet for once does not control. Horatio seems to sense a plot, but Hamlet brushes it aside with a part-Christian part-fatalist acceptance of death: ‘Not a whit, we defy augury; there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’ And his last words in prose sum up the movement by which he seems increasingly to have come to terms with death, in rhetorical symmetries which both convey his indifference and again move outside his own situation to suggest the finality of the whole experience:
If it be now, ’tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all.
Since no man of aught he leaves knows,
what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
We may be reminded of Feeble’s consolation: ‘And let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next,’ and if we are we will see how fine the distinction is between comedy and tragedy here.
The student of the prose may stop here, but the reader of the play will go on through that painful last scene, and will perhaps look back from its intensity to judge more clearly the relaxation, the expansiveness which characterizes the prose of the play (despite its initial function of disguising Hamlet’s intentions from the enemy trying to trap him). Shakespeare seems throughout Hamlet to be experimenting with that process of tension and relaxation which is used so powerfully in the later tragedies, and if he has sometimes got the proportions wrong, or included too much topical reference (and created one or two curious changes in Hamlet’s style), then we can excuse him in that he is feeling his way towards a greater artistic interplay between the two media. But even here, for a large part of their use, the devices of prose are organically related to character, situation and mood, and in the graveyard scene we find the first signs of that application of comic prose to tragedy which is shortly to come to fruition.