‘Born thus, I ask to be no other man,
Than that I am, and will know who I am.’
Oedipus, Sophocles, King Oedipus
‘This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.’
Polonius, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3
‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’
Hamlet, Act II, Scene 1
‘Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these is man ... he is master of ageless Earth ... he is lord of all things living ... the use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain he learnt; found out the ways of living together in cities ... there is nothing beyond his power. His subtlety meeteth all chance, all danger conquereth, for every ill he found its remedy, save only death. O wondrous subtlety of man, that draws him either to good or evil ways!’
Sophocles, Antigone
We end this third section of the book by looking at what may be regarded as the two supreme puzzle stories in world literature. The first is the Greek myth of Oedipus, as portrayed by Sophocles in the most searching trio of plays to have come down to us from the ancient world. The other is Hamlet, the most enigmatic of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In unravelling the seeming ambiguity of these tales we return again, more deeply than ever, to the heart of what our need to tell stories is about.
The first puzzle of the Oedipus myth is how it includes two separate stories which in a sense may seem to contradict each other. The first tells how a young man wandering in exile comes to the city of Thebes which is suffering under the shadow of a fearful monster. The Sphinx, literally ‘the strangler’, is half-woman, half-beast, who lives by the roadside over a precipice near the city. She stops every traveller on the road to pose a riddle. ‘What moves on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three in the evening?’ No traveller can give an answer, and the Sphinx pushes each in turn over the cliff. Finally Oedipus arrives and solves her riddle. The answer of course is ‘a man’ (who as a baby crawls on all fours and in the evening of his life uses a stick). The enraged Sphinx throws herself off the cliff, and the people of Thebes choose Oedipus by acclamation to be their king, as the great hero who has freed their city from its curse.
Obviously the Sphinx’s question stands for something much deeper than just a childhood riddle. The real question she seems to be asking is ‘what is a man?’, which Oedipus has answered in a way which clearly marks him out as quite exceptional. The fact that he has overcome the ‘dark feminine’ in this spectacular fashion implies that, like Perseus in slaying Medusa, he has shown himself to be a true man. Indeed, having married Jocasta, widow of its former king, he goes on to rule over Thebes as the greatest king the city ever had. But then begins the more famous part of Oedipus’s story, which shows that he has not really become a whole, fully self-aware man at all. Indeed he becomes defined precisely by how much about himself he does not know.
The opening of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos introduces us to the familiar image of a kingdom which has fallen mortally sick. King Oedipus has brought his people fifteen years of peace and prosperity. But now a terrible curse has come upon ‘the City of Light’. Crops fail, animals die in the fields, pestilence rages. When the people plead with their king to help them, he promises he will do all in his power to get this shadow lifted. Indeed he has already sent Creon, brother of his wife Jocasta, to ask the Delphic oracle what he should do. Creon returns to report the oracle’s pronouncement that the cause of the curse is the presence in Thebes of an ‘unclean thing, born and nursed on our soil and now polluting it’. Fifteen years earlier, just before Oedipus arrived in the city, their previous king Laius, on a journey, had been murdered. Only if the murderer can be found and banished can the city be saved. Oedipus promises that all will be ‘brought into the light’. He will stop at nothing to track down whoever has been guilty of this unspeakable crime.
Then, at Oedipus’s bidding, there arrives the wise old man Teiresias, who is blind. Having lost his outward eyes, he has gained that inward vision which can show him things hidden from normal sight. Three times Teiresias proclaims, to the king’s mounting fury, that he, Oedipus, is the ‘accursed polluter of this land’; that the killer he is seeking is himself; ‘your enemy is yourself’. He ends by prophesying that Laius’s killer will one day be driven blind out of the city, having been found to have killed his own father and married his mother. All this strikes Oedipus as no more than the ravings of a foolish old man and, having expressed contempt for Teiresias, he then explodes in fury at Creon, whom he accuses of having set up Teiresias to make these absurd charges as part of a plot to replace him on the throne. But when Jocasta tries to calm him down, we see Oedipus embarking on the three stages through which he pursues his determination to track down the truth of who is to blame for his city’s mortal sickness.
First, Jocasta reassures him that he could not possibly have been responsible for her late husband’s death, because another oracle had foretold that Laius would die at the hands of his own child. They had only had one child and, when it was three days old, it had been abandoned to die on a mountainside. Anyway, Laius had been killed by a whole gang of robbers, at a place where three roads meet. But this mention of ‘three roads’ only provokes in Oedipus, for the first time, a terrible doubt. Fiercely he quizzes Jocasta for further details. The more he hears about where this happened and what Laius looked like, the more his fears multiply. Eventually he can hold back no longer. He pours out the story of his life: how, when a young man living in Corinth, he himself had been told by the oracle that he would one day kill his father Polybus and marry his mother; that he had run away from home to ensure that no such horror would ever come to pass; and that when he had come to a place where three roads met, he had encountered a distinguished gentleman in a carriage. This man’s servants had pushed him roughly out of the way, their master had viciously lashed out at him as they passed, and, in a fit of rage, Oedipus had killed them all. If it was true that this man was Laius, he cries, ‘there is no mortal more wretched than I’.1
By this point Oedipus has come to suspect that he himself might have been Laius’s killer, but has no idea yet that Laius was his father. But then comes the second stage, when Oedipus recalls Jocasta saying her husband had been killed by a whole gang of robbers, and that there had been a witness, a shepherd, who escaped. Confirming this, Jocasta brightens. ‘A fig for this divination’, she cries, and sends for the man to repeat his story. First, however, a messenger arrives from Corinth, to announce that Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus is ecstatic. No longer need he worry about the oracle’s prediction that he would kill his father. However, the messenger, only trying to reassure him further, then gives Oedipus the shattering news that Polybus had not been his father anyway. He, the messenger, knew this, because it was he himself who had handed over Oedipus to Polybus as a baby. He had been given the child by one of Laius’s servants, the very shepherd now on his way to the court. At this Jocasta finally realises the truth and screams in horror that Oedipus must abandon his search. But saying ‘I must pursue this trail to the end’, he brutally waves her aside. ‘Oh lost and damned’ she cries, leaving the stage. ‘This is my last and only word to you forever!’
By this point Jocasta can see the whole truth of what has happened, but Oedipus is still blind to his true parentage. Thus begins the third stage, when the shepherd arrives to provide the clinching evidence. He had been ordered to kill the baby, he reveals, because an oracle had foretold that King Laius would be killed by his son. The baby was Laius’s own, and he had not had the heart to leave it to die, so he had passed it to this man from Corinth. The icy fear that has been creeping up on Oedipus finally closes round his heart. ‘Oh light’ he cries, ‘never may I look on you again’.
With this third revelation the whole truth is out, and we then hear it reported what this has led to offstage. Oedipus has rushed distracted into the palace to confront Jocasta, only to find her swinging from the rope with which she has killed herself. He has snatched down one of the gold brooches on her dress and driven its point repeatedly into his eyeballs until his face streams with blood. None of this, of course, has been shown directly, but we then see the state to which it has reduced Oedipus. He stumbles blindly back out into the sunlight, expressing total horror at how he has been guilty of ‘all human filthiness in one crime compounded’. He wishes for nothing but death, to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
At this point Creon enters, to take charge. He makes clear he has not come to reprove Oedipus for his misdeeds. He rejects Oedipus’s plea that he should be instantly banished. He has already called for Oedipus’s two young daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and Oedipus pleads with Creon to look after them, since with so cursed a father, no one will ever want to marry them. As Oedipus turns back towards the palace, his arms round the girls, Creon orders that they must stay behind. Oedipus protests, but Creon insists: ‘command no more. Obey. Your rule is ended.’ The chorus points the moral by observing how ‘this was Oedipus, the greatest of men; he held the key to the deepest mysteries and was envied by all men for his great prosperity’. But ‘no one can be called happy until that day when he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace’.
Thus ends the mighty drama which Coleridge described as ‘one of the three most perfect plots ever planned’ and which Aristotle, in the Poetics, mentions more often than any other play as the model of what Tragedy should be. But we may note three points about it.
Firstly, regardless for the moment of the specific nature of what Oedipus has learned about himself, what in general gives the play its unique power is simply that we have seen a man, confronted with a shocking crime, having to go through the acutely painful process of realising that he himself had been responsible. It is the supreme story in the world of a man having to face up to his own guilt, on a cosmic scale. It is no good saying that it was not his fault because he did not know what he was doing, or that he was just the unwitting victim of a malevolent fate. He has offended against one of the most fundamental laws of nature. Indeed, the more he learns about his guilt, the more he discovers that he has been responsible for even worse crimes. It was bad enough that he had killed his father, although there had been mitigating circumstances. Even if he over-reacted, he had only been acting in self-defence, and of course he had not known that Laius was his father. What makes it far worse for Oedipus, as the penny finally drops, is the realisation that he has also then married his own mother and had four children by her, who are not only his sons and daughters but also his brothers and sisters, and on whom he he has thus brought a lifelong curse. Finally, to seal the Tragedy, he has caused the death of his beloved wife and mother. His offence against the laws of nature and of heaven could not be more complete.2
When we do then focus on the specific nature of Oedipus’s crime, however, what may strike us is how strangely it echoes that basic psychological pattern we analysed in Chapter Twenty which characterises almost every hero of Tragedy. In story after story we saw how the fundamental problem of the tragic hero is that he is frozen into too close a tie with ‘Mother’ and is therefore locked in opposition to the values of ‘Father’.3 He cannot become fully a man because he cannot ‘see whole’. As we saw in Chapter Sixteen, on the ‘unrealised value’, the hero’s opposition to the ‘Dark Father-figure’ in stories always reflects his own need to develop into the light version of the father: in other words, to become a fully conscious, whole man. And often he achieves this precisely in the act of slaying the Dark Father-figure, symbolising the final elimination of the ‘dark masculine’ in himself, to replace it with the balanced figure, outwardly strong, inwardly feminine, which he himself has now become.
Certainly King Laius has been a ‘dark father-figure’ to Oedipus at their only meeting: an arrogant tyrant, behaving in a one-sidedly masculine way as he sweeps the lowly traveller off the road and beats him over the head. But Oedipus has also remained locked into his own incomplete state. He does not know he has killed his father, any more than he is aware that he has married his mother. Precisely because there is so much he does not know, he cannot yet begin to ‘see whole’. And this is why we see him so often acting impulsively, disproportionately and in a way which shows him helplessly at the mercy of his own ego: as when, before the play begins, he has lashed out so wildly on the road, killing Laius and his entire party. This is why, even after he has been a revered king for 15 years, he so easily loses his temper when under pressure: again by the Rule of Three, firstly with Teiresias, then with Creon, then with Jocasta. He himself has been carried away by a terrible hubris. He has become a proud, blind, immature Tyrant – until he is finally brought up against the most almighty nemesis any man could ever have to face.
Only when Oedipus realises that he himself has unwittingly been responsible for all his misfortunes is his armour-plated ego at last utterly crushed. But what do we see then? One of the most striking features of the story is what happens to Oedipus at the end. Although this is a tragedy, he does not die. His wife may have committed suicide. His children may be cursed. He himself may have become an object of revulsion to all mankind. But, unlike other tragic heroes, Oedipus is still alive. The most obvious thing which has happened to him is that he has become blind – just like Teiresias. Oedipus can longer see the outward world because his sight has turned inwards. He can now see those things which were hidden. He had earlier uttered no more hubristic line in the entire story than his contemptuous dismissal of Teiresias, after losing his temper with the old man for speaking what was in fact nothing less than the truth. ‘Living in perpetual night’ said Oedipus witheringly, ‘you cannot harm me, nor any man else that sees the light’. The Tyrant had thought he himself could see the light, just when he was most blind. But now that he too is living in the same perpetual night, he can see. Now his blinding ego has been removed from the equation, he is at last on the way to mature understanding.
When Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannos in his late sixties, he intended the play to stand alone in its own right. But 20 years later, when approaching the end of his long life, he produced its sequel. In its austere intensity and sense of eternity, Oedipus at Colonus is a typical ‘late work’ of a great artist, like the late paintings of Titian and Rembrandt or the final quartets of Beethoven.
We now see Oedipus as an old man. For a long time after the catastrophe, Creon had allowed him to continue living in Thebes. But eventually he agreed to the people’s demand that he should be banished, and this was supported by Oedipus’s two sons, Eteocles and Polynices. They have grown up into proud, arrogant young men, and eventually become locked in deadly rivalry to succeed to their father’s former throne, still occupied as regent by the ageing Creon. His loving daughters, Antigone and Ismene, are the very opposite. While Ismene remains in Thebes to keep a watching brief, Antigone has insisted on accompanying her blind father into exile as his faithful guide and companion; and as the play opens we see them arriving at Colonus, a sacred spot outside the city of Athens, where there is a deep cleft in the living rock, shaded by trees (Colonus was where Sophocles himself had been born).
At once the image of the old man and his loving daughter strikes an archetypal chord, as in the sight of Prospero accompanied by Miranda. The people of Colonus discover them and explain that they cannot stay in this holy place. When they learn the identity of this ragged old man, they are horrified. But after Antigone and Oedipus have implored them to have pity on a poor, helpless outcast, they agree that their king, the great Theseus, should be called to pronounce on Oedipus’s fate.
At this point the other daughter Ismene arrives and, after all three have expressed joy at being lovingly reunited, she reports how all is far from well in Thebes. Polynices has been driven out of the city by his brother and is even now gathering an army to return to seize the throne. But, what makes it worse, an oracle has pronounced that the future safety of Thebes depends on Oedipus returning to live, die and be buried just outside the city. The brothers know this. Each will therefore be striving to win control of Oedipus, to demonstrate to the people that he alone possesses the talisman which can guarantee the city’s prosperity. Thus does it seem that, in his old age, Oedipus is about to become a pawn to the ruthless egotism of his sons. The ‘dark masculine’ is again very much in the ascendant. Opposed to it but powerless is the ‘light feminine’, represented by the daughters. In the middle stands the battered, aged hero Oedipus, How will he measure up?
First Theseus enters, with his royal retinue, showing himself at once to be the very model of a ‘Good King’. Noble in bearing, strong in authority, he is also entirely sympathetic to Oedipus’s plight:
‘I do not forget my own upbringing in exile,
Like yours, and how many times I battled, alone,
With dangers to my life in foreign lands.
I could not turn from any fellow-man,
Coming as you come, or deny him help.
I know that I am man; in the day to come
My portion will be as yours, no more, no less.’
When Oedipus explains his situation, Theseus at first cannot understand why he would not wish to return home to Thebes. But Oedipus makes it clear that the only thing he wants is to be allowed to stay right here, in this holy place, ‘white Colonus’. He is fearful that his sons will seek him out to abduct him. The compassionate Theseus allows him to remain and promises him complete protection. Armoured with this sense of security, the time has come for Oedipus to be put to the test.
Again shaped by the Rule of Three, the rest of the play shows Oedipus having to go through three ordeals. The first begins with the unexpected arrival from Thebes of King Creon. He makes a long moving speech, declaring how profoundly sorry he is for all that has happened and how, for the sake both of Thebes and Oedipus himself, he must now implore Oedipus to return home with him. It all sounds persuasive, as if Creon is acting only from the highest motives. But the old man is not fooled for a minute. When Creon has finished, Oedipus immediately explodes at him: ‘Devil, there is no specious argument you cannot twist to your cunning purposes!’ He can see how Creon has only been putting on an act, to trick him into returning to Thebes for Creon’s own dark purposes. Sure enough, no sooner has Oedipus called his bluff than Creon reveals the darkness behind his ‘light’ persona by ordering his followers to seize, first Ismene, then her sister and finally Oedipus himself, with the intention of dragging all three back to Thebes by force. In the nick of time, Theseus and his men intervene, Oedipus and his daughters are reunited and Creon is summarily ordered back from where he had come.
The second test immediately follows when Theseus announces that a mysterious young stranger has arrived, begging for a chance to speak to Oedipus. Oedipus at once guesses correctly it is Polynices, his estranged and exiled son, and at first refuses to speak to him. But when Antigone pleads that he should be heard, Polynices also makes a moving speech, expressing deepest sympathy for his father’s plight, which he now understands because he is an exile himself. But, he continues, there can now be a happy ending to both their stories. He has summoned an army of allies, led by seven heroic warriors including himself, with which he plans to take Thebes and to restore Oedipus to his home and former glory. Again Oedipus is not fooled. ‘Listen scoundrel’ he begins, reminding his son that it was he, Polynices, who took the lead in condemning his father to beggary and exile. If Polynices leads his army against Thebes, Oedipus grimly warns, this can only have one outcome: the two brothers will end up killing each other. He dismisses his son with a curse. Antigone explains more gently to her brother that, if he is wise and really has the interests of Thebes at heart, he should stand down his army and return quietly to his new home. Polynices is dumbstruck at seeing his devious plan fall apart. Once an army has been sent home, he explains, it cannot be gathered together again. Despite his father’s prophecy, he must now continue his armed advance on Thebes. He must take leave of his sisters forever.
This leads straight into Oedipus’s third, very different ordeal, which is heralded by increasingly loud peals of thunder from the heavens. ‘God is sending his voice across the sky to summon me to death’ says Oedipus, asking for Theseus to be called urgently. When Theseus arrives, Oedipus takes him aside to explain privately that he has a very important secret to impart, which must not be passed on to anyone except Theseus’s successors as rulers of Athens. He is about to die in a mysterious way. Only Theseus will see it, and the place and manner of his passing must never be disclosed. So long as this pact is kept, it will guarantee the safety of Athens forever, just as his removal to Thebes would have guaranteed the safety of that city. ‘Now’ says Oedipus, ‘it is time to go: the hand of God directs me’. Calling his daughters to join them, he turns and ‘leads the way with slow but sure steps, as one inspired with inward vision’. We only hear at second hand what happens next, as the four of them descend into the sacred cleft in the ground. First Antigone and Ismene wash their father, and dress him in new clothes. He pronounces on them his solemn blessing and says:
‘This is the end of all that was I, and the end of your long task of caring for me. I know how hard it was. Yet it was made lighter by one word: love. I loved you as no one else has ever done.’
As a terrifying voice sounds from heaven, calling out ‘Oedipus, Oedipus, it is time’, he asks Theseus to protect the girls, before asking his daughters to leave, so he can be left alone with Theseus. Then, in a way which cannot be described but which leaves Theseus looking stunned, Oedipus passes from mortal sight:
‘Maybe a guiding spirit from the gods took him, or the earth’s foundations gently opened and received him with no pain. Certain it is that he was taken without a pang, without grief or agony: a passing more wonderful than that of any other man.’
So, on this sublime note of reconciliation, ends the story of the once-tragic hero Oedipus; leaving his daughters to grieve but to be assured by Theseus that their father is now received by the gods and at peace. ‘This is the end of tears’ says the Chorus, ‘no more lament. Through all the years, immutable stands this event.’
This remarkable episode may remind us how rare it is for the hero of any story to be shown dying peacefully in old age. There are other instances, such as the passing of the great hero King Arthur which in some ways is not unlike that of Oedipus, and to this we shall return. But what makes the death of Oedipus so particularly remarkable is that it should come at the end of the life of someone who has also been the hero of one of the world’s greatest tragedies. The natural ending of Tragedy is that its central figure has become so blinded by egotism, so split off from the Self, that he or she must come to a violent death, because this is the only way in which the wider state of wholeness can be restored. We have seen Oedipus at the time in his life where he was blinded by hubris in this way, and certainly this led to catastrophic consequences. But in the final scenes of that tragedy Oedipus himself did not come to a violent end. What happened was that his ego was crushed and his inward eyes were opened, in very much the way we expect to find in a story shaped by the plot of Rebirth.
This is precisely what we see having taken place by the time of Oedipus at Colonus, so that the sight of the deposed king wandering the earth with his daughter becomes, like Lear and Cordelia, an image of the Wise Old Man and the Anima. Certainly by the end of the story the physically frail Oedipus is, like Lear, recovering his old kingly authority, but in a wholly new, spiritual way. We are left in no doubt from the supernatural accompaniments to his death that he is fulfilling some extraordinary higher destiny. And when he is at last ‘taken by the gods’, in a way so miraculous it cannot even be described, this provides one of the most indelible images in literature of a man finally finding his inmost identity as he merges into and becomes one with the universe.
What we also see in Oedipus at Colonus, in a way which contrasts it completely with Oedipus Tyrannos, is the central opposition throughout the play between the ‘dark masculine’ and the ‘light feminine’. In the earlier play the ‘light feminine’ value had been conspicuous by its almost complete absence. No one through most of that story had represented love and selfless feeling. No one sees whole until it is too late. Even the increasingly apprehensive Jocasta is presented only really in terms of her own self-interest, wrapped up with the self-interest of her husband. But in the later play, the whole of the action centres round this dramatic contrast. The ‘dark masculine’ world of the ego is represented by Creon and Polynices, obsessively caught up in the ruthless power struggle raging over who should control Thebes. The ‘light feminine’ is represented by Antigone and Ismene, acting like twin anima-figures to give such powerful emphasis to the feminine through the play. And in between them stands Oedipus, now totally aligned with the ‘light feminine’, and supported by Theseus, the wise ‘Good King’ who represents a perfect balance between masculine strength and feminine compassion.
When Oedipus gives way to anger in the earlier play, as he does in turn with Teiresias, Creon and Jocasta, it is always he, blinded by his egotism, who is in the wrong. When he explodes in fury in the later play, as he does with Creon and Polynices, he is expressing righteous anger at the mask of hypocrisy behind which they are each trying to win over his support for their own egocentric ends. The force of Oedipus’s rage is shown to be fully justified by the ruthless way in which Creon then abducts the girls. Polynices reveals his obsessional desire to impose his will on Thebes, which, as the wise Oedipus can now see so clearly, can only end in destroying both his sons.
It is precisely this polarity between the ‘dark masculine’ and the ‘light feminine’ which so memorably dominates the third play Sophocles wrote on the story of this family. Antigone brings the tragic cycle to its conclusion: even though Sophocles wrote it nearly four decades before he was to come to the wonderful point of resolution which he achieved in the story of Oedipus’s death and transfiguration, just before his own death.
Ten years before writing Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles had already been inspired to write the tragedy which shows how the rest of Oedipus’s family ended up. Although this was the first of the three plays to be written, the seeds of its theme are contained in the closing lines of Oedipus at Colonus, where Antigone and Ismene are given Theseus’s promise of a safe journey back to Thebes, to see whether there is anything they can do to ‘stem the tide of blood that dooms our brothers’.
By the time Antigone opens, it is too late. Polynices has led his allies, ‘seven against Thebes’, to storm the seven gates of the city. Their assault has been beaten off but, in the last encounter of a bloody battle, the two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, had killed each other, exactly as their father foretold. The grim and aged Creon, now the undisputed ruler of the city, orders that the body of Eteocles, as its brave defender, should be given all honourable rites of burial. That of Polynices, as the traitrous invader, must be left unburied on the plain outside the gates, to be picked at by dogs and carrion birds. Anyone who dares disobey this order shall be put to death.
The play begins with Antigone telling her sister Ismene that she intends to defy Creon’s order by giving their brother a proper burial. Ismene protests that this would be madness: ‘we are women, it is not for us to fight against men’. Antigone says that then she must be left alone with her madness: ‘There is no punishment can rob me of my honourable death.’
We then see King Creon telling his council that his highest duty must now be to keep Thebes united . They have seen too much evidence of what disaster can befall the city when it is divided. This is why his will must now be considered as law, and why his first edict has been to prohibit the burial of the traitor Polynices. He has made himself a complete dictator, and while he is thus exemplifying the ‘one-sided masculine’ belief that, for the sake of the common good, power and order must come above all else, a sentry enters to report that Polynices’ corpse has been covered with earth. Creon explodes with rage, and immediately suspects that someone must have been bribed to do this: ‘Money’s the curse of man, none greater. That’s what wrecks cities.’ He cannot believe that anyone would have done this for higher reasons. He tells the sentry that unless he can track down the criminal who has defied his edict, the sentry will pay with his life.
Not long afterwards, the sentry returns triumphant. Having removed the earth from the body, and then kept careful watch to see who might cover it up again, he has caught a woman in the act. It is Antigone. The sentry knows she will die, but he will be rewarded with money and, anyway, if he had not caught the culprit, he himself would have been put to death. Creon asks Antigone whether she was aware of his edict. Of course, she replies, but ‘that order did not come from God’, and ‘I did not think your edicts strong enough to overrule the unwritten, unalterable laws of God and heaven, you being only a man’. She knows she will have to die as a result, and Creon had better just get on with killing her. She insists there could be no shame in honouring her brother by giving him proper burial. Creon insists that, on the contrary, to honour a traitor is to dishonour the brother who died to save his country; and that to give ‘equal honour to good and bad’ is to insult the good. Antigone replies ‘my way is to share my love, not share my hate’. ‘Go then’ says Creon, ‘and share your love among the dead. We’ll have no woman’s law here, while I live.’ It is one of several lines in the play where he makes clear that he stands for the stern values of ‘man’ against those of ‘woman’.
Antigone’s cause then finds, in succession, three allies. Firstly, Ismene enters, to be addressed by Creon as ‘you crawling viper’. He assumes she must have been a partner to her sister’s crime. Ismene pleads guilty. ‘Yes, if she will let me say so, I am as much to blame as she is’. Antigone hotly protests: ‘you would not lend a hand ... you shall not die with me’. Ismene says ‘how can I bear to live, if you must die?’ Creon’s response is to order that Ismene should be arrested too.
Secondly, a more powerful voice is raised on Antigone’s behalf. She is engaged to marry Haemon, Creon’s own son. When he enters he begins by saying to his father: ‘by your wise decisions my life is ruled, and them I shall I always obey. I cannot value any marriage-tie above your own good guidance.’ Creon is delighted. ‘Rightly said, your father’s will should have your heart’s first place.’ At length he extols the virtues of obedience. All fathers, he says, pray for sons who are obedient and loyal. ‘Do not be fooled, my son, by lust and the wiles of a woman.’ The important thing for a man is to be ‘the righteous master of his house’.
‘There is no more deadly peril than disobedience;
States are devoured by it, homes laid in ruins,
Armies defeated, victory turned to rout.
While simple obedience saves the lives of hundreds
Of honest folk. Therefore I hold to the law
And never will betray it – least of all for a woman.’
But then Haemon cleverly suggests how valuable it can sometimes be to listen to what other people are saying. Of course no one will have questioned his father’s judgement to his face: ‘your frown is a sufficient silencer of any word that is not for your ears’. But he thinks Creon should know that, behind his back, ‘on every side I hear voices of pity for this poor girl, doomed to the cruellest death’, and that ‘the secret talk about the town’ is that, for an action so honourable as burying her brother she would have better deserved ‘a crown of gold’. Creon spits out his contempt for the people of Thebes. ‘Since when do I take my orders from the people of Thebes?’ ‘Isn’t that rather a childish thing to say?’, his son bravely enquires. ‘No, I am king and responsible only to myself’ says Creon. ‘A one-man state? What sort of state is that?’ asks Haemon. ‘Why’ says Creon, ‘does not every state belong to its ruler?’‘You’d be an excellent king’ says Haemon, ‘on a desert island.’
So incensed does Creon become at his son’s questioning of his judgement that he finally loses patience and orders that Antigone should immediately be taken to a desert place, to be walled up in a cave. She should be left with enough food to acquit him of any ‘blood-guilt’ in her death. We then see her brought out under guard, to take her ‘last leave of the light of day, going to my rest, where death shall take me alive across the silent river’.
When she has been led away, Creon is confronted by his third challenger: the old sage Teiresias, who tells him that, although ‘all men fall into sin’, no one is forever lost who does not set his face against repentance. ‘Only a fool is governed by self-will.’ Creon reveals how completely he is now driven by his own ego, when he accuses Teiresias of only uttering these pious sentiments to make money. Like any real egotist he cannot imagine that others may be motivated by anything higher than their own self-interest. Eventually Teiresias is goaded into delivering his real message: a prophecy that Creon will very soon have to pay the price for his crimes by losing his own son. He departs, leaving Creon so stunned by this prophecy that he immediately orders that Polynices should be given proper burial and Antigone freed from her prison.
But the wise Teiresias never prophesies in vain. We then hear how, after Creon’s men have buried Polynices and gone to the cave, they hear the voice of Haemon already inside. They summon Creon, who when the cave is opened sees Antigone swinging from a rope, where she has hanged herself, and Haemon weeping for his lost love. Haemon spits in his father’s face, lunges at him with a sword, then plunges it into himself, before dying with his arms round his dead beloved. As this is being reported on stage, Creon’s wife Euryidice hears it and leaves without a word. We then hear that, within the palace, she has followed her son’s example by driving a sword into her heart. When Creon receives the news he cries ‘There is no man can bear this guilt but I ... I am nothing. Lead me away ... I know not where to turn, where look for help.’
What gives Antigone its particular force is the absolute starkness of its contrast between the values represented by Creon and those represented by Antigone. Creon adopts all the masculine language of order, the law, obedience, loyalty, the need to preserve the unity of the state and to punish traitors. But behind it, as his son so subtly teases out, is really nothing but Creon’s own remorseless will. He is one of the supreme examples in literature of the Tyrant, the flint-hearted senex-figure piously pretending to uphold the good of the community when in fact he has confused this entirely with the demands of his own egotism. In contrast, Antigone represents precisely the value which this one-sided masculinity lacks: she is the ‘light feminine’ who can feel for the humanity of her dead brother and who can ‘see whole’ above the petty distinctions of worldly loyalties. Certainly in this respect she is feminine. But she also combines this with steely inner strength and resolve. When she talks of burying her brother, she invariably refers to this as giving him ‘honourable’ burial. She wishes to observe all due honour and propriety. These are masculine values, but made life-giving because they are rooted in a loving heart, which cannot see any distinction between traitor and patriot because both are now equal in death and both are her brothers. So inspiringly does Antigone represent the values of the Self in this play that she draws after her Ismene, Haemon, the people of Thebes, even Creon’s own wife: everyone except the ever-more isolated figure of the Tyrant himself. They may all by the end have been sucked down into the black hole of his insatiable egotism. But there is no question which figure and whose values shine out at the end of the story as having been its victor. Because that is what storytelling is about. The story could not seem properly resolved or strike such a deep chord of recognition in the human unconscious if it ended any other way.
Two thousand years after Sophocles’s death, the greatest playwright of the modern world produced his own puzzle play. We find Hamlet infinitely more perplexing than any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Why does its clever, thoughtful, engaging hero have to die? Why does he get reduced to such a jelly of indecision over whether he should avenge his murdered father? Why do so many other people in the story get caught up in the resulting mess and also have to die?
There is no better starting point for unravelling the mystery of Hamlet than to look at the mediaeval legend from which Shakespeare derived his story. The first thing which may strike us about the plot of Amleth, included by the mediaeval historian Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, a collection of old Danish tales, is how it is a straightforward Overcoming the Monster story, about a hero who overcomes a ‘Dark Father-figure’ to become king.
Horwendil, a mighty warrior who has defeated and slain the king of Norway in a great battle, is made king of Jutland. He marries the Princess Gerutha (Shakespeare’s Gertrude), by whom he has a son, Amleth (Hamlet). But he has a much less brave but crafty brother Feng (Claudius) who, jealous of his brother’s renown, treacherously murders him and marries his widow. Prince Amleth sees clearly that Feng, his uncle, now stepfather, is unremittingly evil and fears for his own safety. He protects himself by pretending to be harmlessly mad (the word ‘amleth’ in old Danish means ‘insane’). After three demonstrations of his feigned insanity, one of Feng’s courtiers (the Polonius-figure) sets up a trap for Amleth, to test whether he is genuinely mad or not. This involves the old courtier hiding under a pile of straw, to eavesdrop on a private interview between Amleth and his mother. The idea is that, with his mother, whom he loves and trusts, Amleth will drop his guard and show his true character. But when he enters the room, Amleth at once smells a rat, He crows like a cock, jumps on the straw and plunges his sword into something hard he feels beneath it. He pulls out the body of the eavesdropping courtier, cuts it into pieces and throws them into a sewer, to be eaten by pigs. Amleth then returns to his mother and berates her at length for being the ‘harlot’ who had taken her husband’s murderer in ‘vile wedlock’.
When Feng discovers what has happened to his courtier, he fears what Amleth may do next and lays an elaborate plot to have him killed. He sends him on an embassy to the King of Britain, accompanied by two courtiers (Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), carrying a message which asks the king to put the bearer of the message to death. Amleth discovers this and changes the wording, requesting the king to hang the two bearers of the message and to give he who is accompanying them the hand of a princess in marriage.
The British king is deeply impressed when Amleth gives three demonstrations of his second-sight, and does exactly as the message requests. Amleth then returns to Jutland, invites all Feng’s noble followers to a highly alcoholic feast and, when they are lying in drunken heaps, burns down the hall with them inside. He is now free to seek out his stepfather in the royal bedchamber and slay him. Amleth then disguises himself to watch for the reaction of the people. When he sees they are all rejoicing that the Tyrant is dead, he throws off his disguise, explains why he had to pretend to be mad to avoid being murdered himself and tells the people that he has slain the Tyrant for their sake. As with Oedipus, the people then acclaim Amleth king, as the hero who has overcome the ‘monster’ and set them free.
Such is the story on which Shakespeare bases his play, although the original version continues with a new episode in which Amleth marries the Queen of Scotland, defeats the British in a great battle and is finally slain himself in yet another battle, to be buried with honour in Jutland. But the part of the story adapted by Shakespeare, culminating in the hero killing his wicked uncle and succeeding to his father’s throne, is thus an archetypal tale of a young hero whose ‘light Father’ is replaced by a ‘dark Father’, whom he eventually slays to become king. The fascinating question is why Shakespeare should so dramatically have altered this story (despite retaining many of its details) that he turns it into one totally different. Instead of showing us a young man maturing to the point where he can arrive at the familiar happy ending, the story ends with its hero being destroyed. Why should Shakespeare have wanted to use so much of the original story, only in order to turn it on its head?
The most crucial respect in which Shakespeare’s version differs from the original, in that it transforms the character of everything which follows, is how he shows Hamlet conceiving the idea that he must destroy his stepfather. In the original there is never any question that Amleth is justified in killing his stepfather. We have seen his father in life, as a heroic warrior-king and therefore a ‘light’ figure. There is no doubt he is then treacherously murdered by his weak and crafty brother, who is obviously ‘dark’, and that Feng may have deadly designs on Amleth too, as a potential rival to the throne. This is why Amleth pretends to be mad, to protect himself, and has every reason for wanting to kill Feng, to preserve his own life.
Shakespeare deliberately shrouds all this in a mysterious fog, where none of these points is anything like so clearly defined. We do not see the old king in life, so we have no direct evidence as to whether he was ‘light’ or ‘dark’. It is not even known that he had been murdered, since it was generally believed that he had died by accident, bitten by a snake. The play opens, at night, with the sentries talking in hushed tones on the battlements about having twice seen his ghost, and all the language used about this apparition makes it seem anything but a figure of light. When Horatio joins the watch, the Ghost makes a third appearance, looking grim and warlike, and disappears when a cock crow heralds the approach of daylight. Clearly this is a creature of darkness; and Horatio notes how, as light dawns, it had ‘started like a guilty thing’ and scuttled away. Marcellus recalls the old folk belief that, in the nights around Christmas, no ghosts are seen, because the time is ‘so hallowed and so gracious’ that ‘no spirit dare stir abroad’.
The first time we see the play’s hero is the following day. Prince Hamlet has been plunged into suicidal depression by the death of his father and his mother’s over-hasty remarriage. ‘O God, God’ he muses:
‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it utterly.’
When his friend Horatio breaks in on this morbid soliloquising to tell him about the spectral vision of his father, Hamlet, in his disordered state, cannot wait for the moment when darkness returns and he too may see this creature of the night.
Hamlet’s immediate response on seeing the Ghost suggests even more strongly that it is a personification of the dark power. ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us’ he cries out, before asking the ghost whether it is a ‘spirit of health or goblin damned’. Horatio is fearful that the Ghost may deprive Hamlet of ‘the sovereignty of reason’ and draw him into madness. Everything is calculated to make us see the Ghost as a deadly presence which bodes nothing but ill for Hamlet, and this is reinforced when it explains how it has come from a place where it is being fearfully punished for its ‘foul crimes’. Although the Ghost speaks of this realm of everlasting fire as if it were purgatory, it sounds more like hell. Then this infernal apparition comes out with its real message. Hamlet must not believe that his father died because he was bitten by a snake. He was treacherously and horribly poisoned by his brother, and it is now Hamlet’s duty to ‘revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’.
What is so striking is how Shakespeare has taken the original version, based on the familiar symbolism of a son having to kill a ‘dark Father’ in order to become a ‘light Father’, and put it so deliberately into the mould of Tragedy. How can it be right for Hamlet to follow the instructions of this messenger from hell? The very course so many heroes need to take in order to reach the happy ending is now presented as the first fatal step on a tragic downward spiral. And once Shakespeare has launched Hamlet on this path, we see how the rest of the play follows the archetypal five-stage tragic pattern,
The first act has been the Anticipation Stage. The Ghost has provided the Focus, and Shakespeare has presented him as a Tempter, egging Hamlet on to do something which is thoroughly dark. The play’s second act is the Dream Stage, in which Hamlet pretends to have parted company with reality, as a cover for the deadly course on which he is now set. The height of this comes when he arranges to put on the play which will confirm Claudius’s guilt. Even now Hamlet is not certain the Ghost was telling the truth. But The Mousetrap is the device in which he will ‘catch the conscience of the king’.
As evidence for what is really now happening to Hamlet, we may recall how consistently in Tragedy, as the hero becomes increasingly possessed by darkness, his downward course is symbolised by the deaths of certain key figures who represent aspects of the hero himself. These are the Innocent Young Girl, the Good Old Man and the Light Alter-Ego. The first person to suffer from Hamlet’s drift into his dark obsession is the Innocent Young Girl, the ‘fair Ophelia’, to whom he has lately made ‘many tenders’ of his affection. Ophelia represents Hamlet’s anima, his heart and soul. Nothing more chillingly reveals the ‘dark inversion’ now taking him over than the way he turns so heartlessly against her, mocking her love and innocence with his coarse, stinging jibes.
The ‘good old man’ (as Claudius explicitly calls him) is Polonius, and he too Hamlet now savagely ridicules. But we are now moving into the Frustration Stage, where what has up to now been no more than cruel mockery and play-acting is about to turn irretrievably nasty. Hamlet’s mood of frustration is signalled by the ‘to be or not to be’ speech, in which he shows his state of extreme inner turmoil. Faced with the kind of outrage he has been subjected to, should he just weakly accept it with Christian forebearance, or should he act resolutely, like a man, and ‘take arms’ to end it? So intolerable is the choice that it might seem the only way out is to commit suicide. But who knows what hellish punishments this might lead to in an after-life?
‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’
Reduced to impotence at not knowing which way to turn, Hamlet is temporarily saved from this tortured dithering by the fact that he has already set his ‘mousetrap’. His trick with the play succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. As Claudius, sitting in the darkness, sees his hideous secret exposed, he can take no more, leaping up from his chair to shout for light. This reinvigorates Hamlet, who has again just treated Ophelia with such callous contempt; and having been invited by his anguished mother to talk privately about the offence he has given his stepfather, he is now summoning up all his resolve to commit the ultimate act of darkness:
‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out,
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.’
What tragic hero in Shakespeare gives more explicit voice to the darkness that has taken over his soul? Yet when Hamlet has the chance to kill Claudius at prayer, he cannot bring himself to do it. He tells himself that this is because, if he kills his stepfather when he is on his knees, Claudius might avoid the ultimate punishment in hell he deserves. However, this seems like rationalisation. Is not the truth that, given the perfect opportunity to do what his darker self is urging, Hamlet is too weak, not manly enough to do it? It is a wonderfully ambiguous moment, exposing just what a ‘divided self’ Hamlet has become. At this same moment we also see that, for all his show of devotion, Claudius himself knows it is totally empty: ‘my words fly up, my thoughts remain below’; and furthermore he has already set in train with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the plot whereby they will escort Hamlet to England to be murdered. Locked on a collision course, he and Hamlet are now almost equally black in their purposes, except that Hamlet is not man enough to have the full courage of his own dark convictions.
The general mood of frustration deepens when Hamlet, on a sudden violent impulse, stabs the eavesdropping Polonius hidden behind the arras. His only response is frustration at finding his victim is not Claudius, which would have solved his problem. Even when he discovers he has, by mistake, killed the ‘good old man’, he shows again just how genuinely dark he has become by significantly showing not a flicker of remorse. Instead he lets fly at his mother for her shameless treachery and infidelity (this is where the Freudians, not without justification, see Hamlet reaching the ‘Oedipal’ impasse, where a weak, unmanly son is fixated on his mother and appalled that she should ‘betray’ him by her love for the ‘father’). All this is taken from the original Amleth story, but given a spin entirely Shakespeare’s own. The Ghost, as Tempter, makes one more effort to egg Hamlet on into killing his stepfather; and then, in the most heartlessly comic lines of the play, Hamlet tells Claudius that his ‘good old man’ is ‘at supper’: ‘not where he eats but where he is eaten. A certain politic convocation of worms are e’en at him’ (this closely echoes Amleth feeding the courtier’s body into a sewer to be eaten by pigs).
The tragedy is now firmly into its Nightmare Stage, during most of which we do not even see the hero, because he is in England. The image which most chillingly conveys this sense of nightmare, simultaneously betraying what is really going on in Hamlet’s inner kingdom, is the heart-rending spectacle of the deranged Ophelia, driven mad by her father’s casual murder at the hands of the man she had once loved and hoped to marry. She then drowns as she sings, her flower-strewn body carried away on the stream. Hamlet has lost his soul. Two of the three aspects of his psyche are dead. The only one left is his ‘Alter-Ego’.
Laertes is now Hamlet’s mirror. Both are young men returned from studying abroad. Both are sons whose fathers have been murdered. Both have lost the feminine other half they loved: except that only one of them has been guilty of her death. And Shakespeare highlights the way in which Laertes has now become Hamlet’s ‘light rival’ in a strange little episode, the significance of which can easily be overlooked. Between Ophelia’s ‘mad scene’ and the news of her death, Claudius and Gertrude are left alone when a messenger bursts in to announce that something akin to a revolution has broken out. Laertes is outside, at the head of an angry mob proclaiming him as king: ‘Laertes shall be king’. Laertes himself then bursts in, with some of his followers, to address Claudius as ‘O thou vile King’.
What makes this particularly significant is that, in the original story, there is no Laertes-figure. The character whom the people acclaim as king is Amleth himself, after he has slain his stepfather. Shakespeare has thus deliberately split the hero into two, with Laertes as Hamlet’s ‘light alter ego’. Only now does Claudius tempt Laertes into his own web of darkness, by offering him the chance to avenge his own father, and this makes the equivalence between Hamlet and Laertes complete.
As Act Five begins, with Hamlet returned from England, the two rivals fight in Ophelia’s open grave, grimly foreshadowing how the drama is about to end. Having overcome his conscience and yet realised that he is not going to achieve his purpose, Hamlet is now resigned to his fate. Never has he been more wittily mocking than in the scene where he sends up the hapless Osric, the courtier sent by Claudius to convey the challenge to the fencing match which is to be his downfall. But by now Hamlet and Laertes, who has been in training with ‘Lamord’ (‘La mort’), the finest fencing teacher in Europe, have been wholly transformed into each other’s ‘dark Alter-Ego’. So far is the distorting power of darkness now in the ascendant, so unable is anyone now to ‘see whole’, that everything goes as wrong as it possibly could. First Hamlet and Laertes swap their foils, so that both are fatally wounded by the poison intended only for Hamlet. Then Gertrude drinks the poison intended for Hamlet and dies, prompting Hamlet at last to kill his treacherous stepfather. Laertes dies, already repenting of his part in this villainy (as soon as Claudius dies, he begins to move back towards the light). Finally Hamlet follows. The son-hero Prince has killed his ‘Dark Father’. But in working towards this he has killed off all those aspects of himself which, if he could have remained at one with them, might have enabled him, had he been ‘put on’ as king, to have ‘proved most royal’.
What we are thus left with is a spectacle unique in storytelling. We have seen a hero setting out to do something which, for so many other heroes, is a natural precondition to their arriving at a happy, light ending. But here this involves him in becoming so possessed by the state of darkness that it destroys him. The intelligent, funny, tortured Hamlet is portrayed so engagingly that we may overlook just how far Shakespeare has shown him turning into a ruthless monster; so that half way through the story, in the scene where Claudius is on his knees, we have the equally rare spectacle of two protagonists, Claudius and Hamlet, who in reality have become as dark as each other: except that Hamlet is not even manly enough to carry out his dark purposes, unless he is acting on impulse. And to understand just why Shakespeare has wanted to place his characters in this extraordinary situation we must step back from the personal drama of the play, to see how he intends this to be only the central focus for a much more general picture of human nature.
A common misunderstanding about Hamlet is reflected in that familiar cliché that something is like ‘playing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’, implying that, without Hamlet, there would be nothing left of the play. It may be the longest stage part in English literature. But not the least fascinating aspect of this story is the extent to which it is not just about the personal problems of its central figure.
Shakespeare is continually at pains to emphasise that his real preoccupation in this play goes much wider than just what is going on in the mind of one individual. As we learn soon after the start of the story, it is not just in Hamlet’s mind that ‘the time is out of joint’. There is ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’ itself. The whole kingdom is sick. Even Elsinore stands for much more than just one little kingdom on the edge of Europe. It has infinitely less to do with the real, geographical Denmark than, say, Julius Caesar’s Rome has to with the real Rome, or the ‘history plays’ with a real England.
Elsinore just happens to be the place on which the spotlight is shining. But we are made continually aware of the rest of the world stretching away into the darkness in all directions. Norway to the north, Paris and Wittenburg to the south, England to the west, Poland to the east: all play their part in the overall story, and in no other of Shakespeare’s plays are we made so continually aware of a fever of activity going on off-stage. Right at the start we learn (in a speech inserted by Shakespeare at the last minute, and obviously intended further to underline some general point about the play as a whole) that a major ‘crisis’ has arisen between Denmark and Norway, and that the people of Denmark are preparing for war. So frenziedly is the country arming that ‘the night is made joint labourer with the day’, ‘Sunday is so no longer divided from the week’. Throughout the play, from the first act to the last, the warlike tramp of armies is continually heard off stage. The little court of Elsinore is thus simply a brightly-lit microcosm, reflecting the general state of the world.
It is against this vast, dark, restless background that Shakespeare focuses on just one human crisis in particular: on the catastrophic events we see unfolding in Elsinore. And if there is one thing above all which marks out the unhappy little group of people we see thrown together in the Danish court it is the way they are all plotting against and spying on each other.
There is scarcely any play of Shakespeare’s in which someone does not in some way attempt to trick or deceive someone else, whether it be Iago tricking Othello with the handkerchief or all those heroines in the comedies who appear in male disguise. But no play contains anything like so many plots and stratagems as Hamlet: at least nine in all. Scarcely has Polonius seen off Laertes to Paris than he is sending Reynaldo after him to spy on his moral conduct. When Hamlet’s old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turn up, they are immediately recruited by Claudius to spy on Hamlet. When the troupe of actors arrives, Hamlet himself immediately sets up the evening’s entertainment as his trick to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Polonius and Claudius set Ophelia to waylay Hamlet as he is walking in the palace, then settle behind a pillar to spy on them. Polonius eavesdrops behind the arras, to spy on Hamlet and the Queen. Claudius packs off Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, supplied with letters to ensure that Hamlet will be murdered when they get there. Claudius and Laertes finally plot to trap Hamlet with the poisoned foils. While over all this, forming the outlines of the tragedy itself, hang the two greatest plots of all: Claudius’s original plot to poison his brother in order to usurp the throne; and Hamlet’s own, conceived at the prompting of the Ghost, to murder Claudius.
The significant point, of course, is not just that every one of these schemes is egocentrically motivated but that almost all of them end up producing a result exactly opposite to that intended. As the tragedy darkens, their outcomes become more and more fatal to the plotters themselves. The eavesdropping Polonius is stabbed to death. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reach England, thanks to Hamlet’s deft footwork, it is they who are executed. It is Gertrude, not Hamlet, who drinks the poisoned cup. Laertes dies poisoned by his own sword. Everything goes exactly as wrong as it could, until finally Claudius and Hamlet are themselves destroyed by the chain of events their own plotting has set in motion. And how keen Shakespeare is to underline this for us as a central key to what the play is really about. It is no accident that we get from Hamlet that most familiar phrase about the way in which, when people set out to deceive others, their devious plans have a habit of rebounding on them: ‘the enginer hoist with his own petard’. Again and again, right up to the final curtain, we hear this point being hammered home: how Laertes admits he has been caught ‘as a woodock to mine own springe’, how ‘purposes mistook fall on their inventors’ heads’, how ‘our wills and fates so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown’.
What Shakespeare is showing us, more searchingly than in any other of his plays, is a human world in which everyone is caught up in the fog of self-deceiving egotism. Everyone is trying to trick someone else. Everyone is in some way pretending to be something other than what they really are. Everyone is hiding from the world behind a false mask, not least Hamlet himself in pretending he is mad. Almost no one in the play is really being true to his or her inmost self. As Polonius himself puts it, ‘to thine own self be true’, and ‘thou cans’t not then be false to any man’. If this could only be taken literally, and not just as one of a string of sententious clichés uttered by a pompous old fool, it embodies precisely the truth no one in Hamlet is capable of living up to. And what Shakespeare is really telling us is that this is not just a problem affecting one little group of people in Elsinore. It is a problem which is well-nigh universal. The dark side of human nature ordains that people may conceal their egotism behind such masks all their lives, until they end up, like Yorick, as no more than a skull and bones.
What Shakespeare is concerned with here is the infinite capacity of human beings to put on a false front to the world, the seemingly sociable persona behind which they conceal their unremitting egotism. And no passage in the play is more telling in this respect than the churchyard scene, where Hamlet swaps badinage with the gravedigger at the start of the final act. Surrounded with the grisly evidence of how every human being ends up, Hamlet singles out examples of the types of people who most obviously rely on the self-deceiving vanity of the persona. One skull, he suggests, may be that of a politician, someone so false and self-seeking that he ‘would circumvent God’. Another could be that of a lawyer. Where now is all that high-flown legal jargon with which he self-importantly protected himself from the human reality of the world? Where now is the courtier, with all his empty flatteries (‘Good morrow, sweet lord. How dost thou, sweet lord?’)? He is simply the property of ‘Lady Worm’. As for all those women who put on a deceiving front to the world with their masks of cosmetics, let them ‘paint an inch thick’, they will still end up as stinking dust. Even the greatest ones of the earth, in all their power and pomp, Alexander or ‘imperious Caesar’; where are they now, but ‘dead and turned to clay’.
Like Macbeth in the ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ soliloquy at exactly the same stage of his own tragedy, Hamlet now sees the human world as governed by nothing higher than egotism and futile pretence. We are no more than poor ego-driven fools: vain actors strutting and fretting our brief time on the stage of life before we come to ‘dusty death’. And this is merely how individuals lead their lives. Behind this picture of human society made up of countless deceiving, scheming little egos, all competing with each other for approval and selfish advantage, lies the wider stage of the world where the collective egos of whole nations compete in the same futile struggle.
Another thread running through Hamlet is the wasting of spirit and energy which goes into the rivalry of nations as they battle for empty supremacy over each other, At the start of the play we hear how Denmark is preparing for war against Norway. But we subsequently hear that the two countries have mended this supposedly deadly quarrel, on the payment of a large sum of money, to become allies; and that the Norwegian army under Fortinbras (‘strong in arms’) is now marching instead against distant Poland: simply to fight over ‘a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name’. As Fortinbras’s soldiers tramp through Denmark on their way to this foreign war, no one sees more clearly than Hamlet the absurdity of how human beings are prepared ‘to find quarrel in a straw when honour’s at the stake’. He foresees with horror how these ‘twenty thousand men’ may be doomed, for a ‘mere fantasy and trick of fame’ to ‘go to their graves like beds’.
Yet no sooner has he expressed his scorn for such self-deceiving madness than he goes on to resolve that, from this moment on, his own thoughts must be similarly ‘bloody, or be nothing worth’. We then cut immediately to the sight of Ophelia, now torn apart by that madness to which Hamlet himself has driven her, yet in her derangement speaking limpid truth. How can one tell someone who truly loves, she asks. By his ‘cockle hat and staff’, the outward signs of a holy pilgrim: one who has surrendered the deceits and self-deceits of the ego for a higher, self-transcending cause. Ophelia has only been driven mad because the world around her is mad. She alone has remained in touch with the world of the Self, where she alone can still see those values of heart and soul which everyone around her has lost.
Yet the fact remains that Shakespeare was inspired to create this unutterably bleak picture of the dark side of human nature by that original legend which simply describes a young man finding his manhood and destiny in the most time-honoured, archetypal fashion, by winning the hand of the Princess and succeeding his father as king. Why has he wanted to make such a shattering break with the archetypal mould?
No idea is more central to storytelling, as we have seen, than that of one generation succeeding to another, and of the need for the hero to reach true maturity so that this can be achieved in the right way. Yet the one thing that is certain about Hamlet is that he cannot make this transition. He is doomed never to grow up. As we see him trapped in his state of tortured irresolution, he cannot relate properly either to his inner feminine or to his masculinity. Like so many other tragic heroes, he thus remains in thrall to his ‘unrealised value’, trapped in a state of impotent rebellion against the ‘Father’ of which he cannot turn himself into the light version. What Shakespeare has done is put this archetypal pattern to the test on a still deeper archetypal level, by changing the basis on which it is presented in a particularly significant way.
When the hero of Jack and the Beanstalk slays the giant who has murdered his father and stolen his inheritance, we do not for a moment question his right to do so, because the giant is portrayed as nothing but a monstrous personification of human egotism. The giant is unmistakably dark, the hero is light, When Perseus slays his stepfather Polydectes, by showing him the head of the Medusa, this seems wholly justifiable, because Polydectes is a cruel, heartless tyrant. It is the same when Aladdin slays his ‘stepfather’ and ‘uncle’ the Sorcerer. It is the same when Nicholas Nickleby’s wicked Uncle Ralph, his dead father’s brother who has stolen his inheritance, is finally caught out and hangs himself. It is the same when all the countless other dispossessed sons who teem through storytelling manage to overcome the monstrous ‘Dark Father’ to claim their birthright. But, quite deliberately, Shakespeare varies this pattern. The inspiration for Hamlet’s decision to kill his usurping stepfather comes only from the Ghost, who is unrelievedly dark. The result of obeying that temptation is that Hamlet himself becomes overwhelmed by the darkness in his own nature. Clearly the course the Ghost is urging on Hamlet is one he should not follow. So what is Shakespeare trying to tell us?
The clue lies in the nature of what the ghost is urging Hamlet to do. ‘Old Hamlet’ is not lovingly asking his son to do something which might directly further ‘young Hamlet’s’ own welfare. His sole concern is vengeance for his own death. Having been guilty in life of the ‘foul crimes’ for which he is now being punished, he is still locked entirely into the world of his own ego and is now instructing his son to commit an equally heartless crime in turn. And what Shakespeare gradually develops from this original core is a picture of a human world in which almost everyone is similarly trapped by the ego, as no one is more acutely aware than Hamlet himself. ‘We are arrant knaves all,’ he says to Ophelia, ‘believe none of us.’ ‘Use every man after his deserts, and who should ’scape whipping?’ Every human being, he implies, is as much in a state of sin as everyone else. ‘What news?’ Hamlet asks Rosencrantz. ‘None, my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.’ ‘Then is doomsday near’ replies Hamlet, ‘but your news is not true’. Only two figures in the story are not tainted with this relentless, universal curse of egotism. One is the ‘faithful Horatio’, whose role is simply to be Hamlet’s loyal friend. The other, of course, is Ophelia, representing the shining, selfless ‘light feminine’, which is why she becomes shut out from a world where this is simply not understood, and why Hamlet tells her to retire to a nunnery, since if she does not she will only become a breeder of yet more sinners.
In this respect Ophelia plays much the same role as the heroine in Antigone, where the city of Thebes under the Tyrant Creon is, like Elsinore, a microcosm of a world oppressed by the harsh, loveless masculine value, with its talk of honour and vengeance. Thebes too has resounded to the tramp of armed men, with Eteocles and Polynices locked in the egocentric rivalry which was to bring both to their deaths, leaving Antigone as isolated as Ophelia in representing the life-giving feminine value which everyone else lacks (even though Antigone is ‘active’ and Ophelia ‘passive’). Antigone, like Hamlet, concludes on a stage strewn with corpses, brought about by heartless, vengeance-obsessed, ‘eye for an eye’ masculine morality. Appropriately Hamlet ends with the sound of military drum beats, as Fortinbras arrives to see the ‘dismal sight’ of the court of Elsinore reminding him of a battlefield. He orders that Hamlet should be honoured with ‘the soldier’s music and the rite of war’, and the play closes on the line ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’, followed by the noise of cannon-fire. ‘Young Hamlet’ may have failed to succeed ‘Old Hamlet’. But now the warlike ‘young Fortinbras’, who had succeeded his uncle ‘Old Fortinbras’, has, with the approval of Hamlet’s dying breath, succeeded also to the throne of Denmark. Despite this fearsome illustration of what the loveless pursuit of the one-sided masculine value must in the end lead to, no lesson has been learned. To the sounds of war and death, the vicious circle of human egotism seems destined to carry on, generation succeeding generation, to the crack of doom.
It is precisely the seeming ambiguity of Oedipus Tyrannos and Hamlet which puts them in a dimension of their own; for they tease out the central riddle at the heart of human existence with a depth and subtlety unmatched by any other stories in world literature.
Oedipus is the man who seems to have everything. He is a wise, respected king, surrounded with a loving wife and children. Yet suddenly a crisis arises in his kingdom and he discovers that he really knows nothing about himself at all, and that unwittingly he has become the worst sinner in the world. Hamlet is the prince who seems to have everything: intelligence, wit, unusual gifts, a girl who loves him and whom he loves; everything necessary for him to succeed to manhood and kingship. Yet suddenly a crisis arises in the kingdom, and in the very act of achieving that goal he finds he has irretrievably become a sinner doomed to die.
Was this all that Sophocles and Shakespeare could see in human nature? That there is ultimately nothing higher in human life than to enjoy the empty, self-deceiving exercise of egotism, followed by death? Hamlet himself may have suggested so, in that wonderful, chilling passage where he exclaims:
‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.’
Yet what in the end does all this amount to, he concludes, but a worthless ‘quintessence of dust’?
Similarly in Antigone, Sophocles’s Chorus exclaims how the greatest wonder on earth is man:
‘master of ageless Earth ... lord of all things living ... the use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain he learnt; found out the ways of living together in cities ... there is nothing beyond his power. His subtlety meeteth all chance, all danger conquereth, for every ill he found its remedy.’
Yet the one thing for which he has no remedy is death. And of all the subtleties of his nature, none is more wondrous, notes the Chorus, than how it can draw him ‘either to good or evil ways’.
As it happens, both Sophocles and Shakespeare were eventually able to show us this problem being ultimately resolved. In Sophocles’s valedictory play, Oedipus at Colonus, we see how his hero, having had his ego utterly crushed, first developed that inner vision which allowed him to see the world straight and whole, and is eventually able to be received back into a state of one-ness with the universe, like no other mortal man,
For the same sense of final resolution in Shakespeare we also have to wait for his last play, The Tempest. In crucial respects Prospero is like a light version of the Ghost in Hamlet. Like ‘Old Hamlet’, he has been treacherously dispossessed from his kingdom by a dark, usurping brother. But instead of then turning dark himself, to seek bloody vengeance, he has been through a long process of inner growth and transformation, until he is finally ready to confront his shadow, win him to repentance for his crime and then to forgive him. Thus can the play end on a trumphant note of love and reconciliation, symbolised above all by the union of the young Prince Ferdinand and his Miranda: the very union Prince Hamlet and his Ophelia were so grievously unable to achieve. All Prospero’s striving is at an end. The last vestige of his egotism is gone. He has redeemed his inner kingdom, and become whole. Like the wise old Oedipus, he has become one with the universe.
The moment has come at last to step outside this self-contained world of storytelling, and to see how the ways in which we tell stories relate to what we call ‘real life’.