These typed notes on Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet are somehow connected with Frye’s undergraduate lectures on Shakespeare: paragraph 17 roughs out three lectures on Hamlet and paragraph 34 sketches three “essaylectures” on Lear. Such a procedure was unusual for Frye, whose notes for class lectures usually consisted of a single file card listing the location of key passages in the text. The term “essay-lectures” may indicate, however, his awareness that this particular set of lectures would be recorded, transcribed, and eventually turned into Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. At any rate, these notes echo many passages of that book, and their date is therefore prior to 1986. Notes 58-5 is located in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 6.
[1] The editorial assumption that Shakespeare wrote a definitive text that included all the lines in both Q2 [the Second Quarto] and F [the Folio] that are not in each other is not by any means a certainty. Shakespeare apparently had more control over his texts than Kyd or Marlowe, but there could have been different versions of the play, as there are TS. I don’t see how an uncut Hamlet could have been acted under Elizabethan theatrical conditions, and it seems at least possible that Qi [the First Quarto] comes closer than either to the Hamlet that Elizabethan audiences got. This probability is strengthened by the German play Der Bestrafte Brudermord.1
[2] Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, and for a revenge tragedy we need a minimum of three major characters: a figure to get murdered, a murderer, and an avenger. Thus we have Julius Caesar, the Brutus group of conspirators, and avengers led by Mark Antony and Octavius in that play, and Duncan, Macbeth, and the Macduff-Malcolm group. Also Hamlet Senior, Claudius, and Hamlet Junior. (Conventions established by the Spanish Tragedy: its rough similarity to Hamlet has led to the guess that the pre-Shakespeare Hamlet was written by Kyd.)2
[3] Can’t explain any of the difficulties in Hamlet by referring to the pre-Shakespeare play: we have a pre-Shakespeare Lear, and we know it explains nothing in Shakespeare’s play.3
[4] There are three revenge tragedies in Hamlet: an inner circle where the murdered man is Polonius, the murderer Hamlet Junior and the avenger Laertes. Around that comes the main action of the play, where the three characters are Hamlet Senior, Claudius and Hamlet Junior, as above. Then, encircling the whole play, is the duel between Hamlet Senior and Fortinbras Senior, which took place at the time of Hamlet’s birth, where the killer was the former. It was a fair fight, but none the less Fortinbras Junior is out for revenge, and gets deflected by Claudius’ strategy to Poland. When he comes in at the end he comes in peace, but nevertheless he accomplishes precisely what a successful revenge would have accomplished—the crown of Denmark.
[5] The avenger usually has the sympathy of the audience, or more accurately of the dramatic convention. That’s clearly true of Hamlet: we sympathize with him even though the man who kills him is another avenger. Still, we should be careful not to make the mistake, natural in a Victorian critic like Bradley who’s reflecting a character-basis of Shakespearean tragedy:4 if Hamlet and Othello were to exchange places. True but shouldn’t lead to distortion.
[6] Hamlet, if we accept the usual textual hypothesis, is the longest play in Shakespeare, and is partly because everybody, with the possible exception of Gertrude, talks too much.5 The Ghost says “brief let me be,” yack, yack; Polonius says “I will be brief,” yack, yack. Even in the mousetrap play the queen protests too much. Claudius and Ophelia at least soliloquize as well as Hamlet; Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius weave plots and set spies: a constant sense of paranoia and claustrophobia. Just as we think we’re getting a glimpse of space, when Hamlet sees Fortinbras’ army marching toward Poland, we’re told they’re fighting for a strip of ground hardly big enough to hold them.6
[7] The question of why Hamlet delays his revenge should be taken in its context. Claudius also used delaying strategies. He deflects Fortinbras and gets him to Poland; he deflects Laertes toward Hamlet; he delays getting rid of Hamlet until he can’t any longer, and gives unconvincing excuses for doing so. Polonius blasts off with a string of wise sayings to Laertes, ending with the most resonant “this above all,” whereupon he gets a servant to act as a flatfoot to snoop and spy and question friends and report back to him.7
[8] Hamlet is a play about playing, a tragedy about tragedy. It’s not peculiar in that, but the actual process of putting on a play gets involved with the action, as in Pirandello. In the histories Shakespeare is constantly preoccupied with the theatrical side of public figures and the masks they put on.
[9] Horatio, whom Hamlet describes in almost fulsome terms, has a lucid, clear, just slightly shallow mind. Exactly the right person to convince of a ghost’s authenticity, at any rate as a ghost; but his philosophy, as even Hamlet recognizes, excludes more than it includes—“your philosophy” [1.5.167] is just a touch more than “one’s philosophy,” the normal meaning. “So I have heard and do in part believe it” [1.1.165]; “’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so” [5.1.206]. Part perhaps of his antique Roman role. But he’s clearly the right person to entrust Hamlet’s story to, and we get a strong impression that the play we’ve just been seeing is in fact Horatio’s story.
[10] The meaning of a tragedy is in its repetition, the cyclical sacrifice to a dead father that goes on through time. The feeling of a circle completing itself comes into the grave-digger’s speech about his entering into his occupation just when Hamlet was born and his father won the duel with Fortinbras senior. (There’s some clincher about this meaning-in-repetition stuff I haven’t got yet.)
[11] We see Hamlet in so many roles: curious that the one role we never see him in, the military one, is the one mentioned by Fortinbras. Of Fortinbras we know only that he will fight for anything, so Denmark’s future will not be peaceful.8 Maybe he’ll be more popular: strong impression that the people don’t trust Claudius for all his smoothness and ability, and would turn even to Laertes.
[12] Wittenberg is not Luther’s university in Hamlet: the hero of Dekker’s Shoemakers Holiday is a Wittenberg student too: just a well-known place.9 But note (a) the chop-logic conversation of Hamlet with R [Rosencranz] and G [Guildenstern] is the way educated young men talked (b) the once-upon-a-time mixing of Dark-Age Denmark with a university founded in (I think) 1500 and a Renaissance Paris. The Greek and Roman names don’t matter, except to the ear.
[13] Hamlet’s melancholy is immensely aggravated by the Ghost’s demand for revenge: Hamlet is a student who wants to talk and reflect: he’s neurotic, but if confronted with a psychiatrist he’d want to continue with his neurosis in comfort, not be cured of it. Demanding revenge is a violent interruption of his habits: the first thing he does, we note, is haul out his notebook and make a note.10 And something in his [mind] doesn’t really accept the revenge ethic: he can’t stick a sword in the back of an unsuspecting man. None of the traditional interpretations of Hamlet’s delay are wholly wrong. Neither is the Jones one11 that Claudius frustrates the development of Hamlet’s imaginative life away from the Oedipus complex by killing his father and screwing his mamma. (It’s easy to reduce this to the crudest caricature: don’t do it.) It’s unusual for a man en route to see his mother to stop and remind himself to be careful not to murder her.12
[14] The obsessive nature of Hamlet’s feelings about his mother, in short, are in the play, they’re not over-reading. The Ghost says taint not thy mind and don’t contrive against thy mother; we’ve already heard Hamlet’s first soliloquy, revealing that his mind is already tainted and that he’s obsessed by his mother’s “guilt.”
[15] Polonius, I’ve said, shows so many of the disadvantages of a literary education, with his Courtly Love explanation of Hamlet’s madness. In his way a rival producer, like Lucio in MM: anticipatory nature of his one dramatic role, of Caesar killed by Brutus. (One of two or three echoes, like the opening-scene one, showing that JC probably just preceded H.) Hamlet’s play transmutes revenge into the idea of revenge. The claustrophobia of the “Denmark’s a prison” accentuates by the hall-of-mirrors imagery: mirrors are held up to Gertrude, to Laertes, to nature.
[16] The “intractable earlier Hamlet” theory won’t work; but Hamlet himself does have an intractable earlier Hamlet, the ghost of his father.
[17] First lecture: Hamlet is about the gap between acting and thinking about acting growing into an effort to surround experience by consciousness—the Cartesian programme 30 years earlier. Second: a tragedy without a catharsis,13 where Hamlet is revenging himself on himself, pouring out all his gifts as a useless sacrifice to a dead father. Third: Claudius is blocked by what he’s done; Hamlet by what he is.
[18] The surrounding of existence by consciousness in Hamlet is what makes the To Be or Not To Be soliloquy, however hackneyed, the centre of the drama.14 It also plays its part in the claustrophobic feeling of the play.
[19] This last is rounded off by the hideous religious assumptions, that God is a stupid bureaucrat who automatically sends Claudius to hell if he dies drunk, and to purgatory (maybe) if he dies praying. It’s not reassuring to find that horrible priest in the fifth act, who gets more spite and malice into half a dozen lines than anyone else in Shakespeare, the only representative “man of God.” Religious considerations about the existence of purgatory don’t bother Hamlet: what bothers him is the question, why does a ghost come from what is supposed to be a place of purification breathing slaughter and revenge? Purgatory is certainly described as though it were hell. But the divine computer says Hamlet Senior had a lot of sin to work off. Compare Hamlet on R [Rosenkranz] and G [Guildenstern]: “no [not] shriving-time allowed,” [Hamlet, 5.2.47] and “take thy fortune” to Polonius [3.4.32].15
[20] Anyway, it seems clear that death is not a release for anyone in the play: there’s no sense of “Duncan … sleeps well” [Macbeth, 3.2.23]. Suicide is therefore no solution for Hamlet because it’s not just that God has forbidden it, but that he’s arranged things so maliciously that you’ll be worse off than ever. Interesting that the Ghost, of all people, says of Gertrude “leave her to heaven” [Hamlet, 1.5.86]. It’s pretty clear that she knew nothing of the murder (in Qi [the First Quarto] she says so)16 and had no sexual relations with Claudius before her husband’s death.
[21] Consciousness in a world which without consciousness is only a mechanism: damn uncomfortable situation.
[22] Hamlet would be recognized as melancholy by an Elizabethan audience, hence the black clothes, the preoccupation with death, the nauseated vision of life, the predisposition to suicide. How far can one go mad without losing control?
[23] Don’t assume that Hamlet is spouting Shakespeare in his address to the players. Speak the speech for God’s sake clearly and don’t mouth it as though the town crier spoke my lines—the nervous amateur is written all over that speech, someone who doesn’t know or care about what every professional would take for granted, the number of compromises that have to be made to get a play on the stage and keep it there.17
[24] At the same time we can’t identify Hamlet’s inserted speech: perhaps the play broke up before they got to it. The play illustrates Claudius’ strength of character in keeping up appearances: he sees the dumbshow (Dover Wilson is talking nonsense about this),18 wonders about its application to him, and finally (it’s a long time before he speaks) says: “is there no offence in’t?” [Hamlet, 3.2.232], a strange speech for an affable and gracious prince, which is what Claudius still is to everyone except Hamlet and Horatio. The repetition of the dumb show in the action of the play finally breaks him down, but it’s not easy.19
[25] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely serving the king whom they have every reason to suppose is the lawful king: Hamlet’s contempt for them is part of his disease. Once again, the extent to which Hamlet is involved with his assumed madness is the one real problem of the play. If he’s sane throughout, a lot of the things he says are pretty difficult to understand.
[26] The ultimate conclusion I want to come to is: all of us are defined, and our future limited, by the sum total of what we have done: that’s the accuser’s view of identity. Claudius has every capacity for being an able ruler, but is blocked by his crime and can’t move past it. But beyond the prison of what we have done is the greater prison of what we are—what is now called characterological armor by some psychologists:20 the sum total of our possibilities that gradually diminishes as we get older. It takes exceptional sensitivity to become aware of this. But I think Hamlet is the most unforgettable treatment in literature of a man imprisoned in the “nutshell” of what he is, and making the most titanic struggles to break out of it.21
[27] Social organization is natural to man: authority belongs on the upper level and tyranny on the lower. Lear’s repudiation of Kent’s plain speaking is part of his abdication of authority; Regan (or whoever) “a peasant stand up thus!”[King Lear, 3.7.80] is the voice of tyranny. Oswald even sees the hand of providence in a boor defeating him at fencing.
[28] Poor Tom is the absolute limit of lower nature; man as he would be if he were purely an animal; the equivalent of Caliban in romance and the Yahoo in satire. In tragedy he’s the end of the nauseated vision, “the thing itself,” as Lear says [3.4.106], so complete that he inspires Lear to tear off his clothes and remove the little left of civilization’s additions to his own state of nature.22
[29] There is a thin purgatorial line in Lear, even though the frantic efforts of Wilson Knight and Middleton Murry and all the others pretending that we still have Nahum Tate’s play23 in front of us are blah. But the isolated Lear prays, a very curious prayer, not addressed to any deity but to the “poor naked wretches” [King Lear, 3.4.28]. He’s lost or abandoned the humanity attached to his royalty; he’s finding it again in his suffering humanity. Note the spark of fire24 (which is Gloucester), the solstitial turn on the heath, and Lear’s sudden awareness that the Fool is cold too, without constantly saying so, like Poor Tom.
[30] But although Shakespeare leads us (if we didn’t know the story) to dislike Lear and Gloucester and almost sympathize with Goneril and Regan and Edmund, by the end of the play we have a lineup of white and black pieces very rare in Shakespeare, melodrama in reverse. Also the most shattering tragic actions take place after all the black pieces have been removed from the board. Who is the black king?25 What other pieces does he have, if the supernatural isn’t there?
[31] The purgatorial profession would not really be impressive or convincing if it stood alone. Lear’s later mad speeches about hypocrisy, the power of sexuality and the sexuality of power, the vitality of the “unkind,” would be unreasonable philosophically, but they’re in tragedy, where they fit.
[32] Lear has to go mad to see into the heart of tragedy, just as Bottom has to be a clown with a crazy dream to see into the heart of comedy.26
[33] All the decent people in the play are called fools in one context or another: fool in the sense of the person to whom things happen is what Lear calls himself (natural fool of fortune).
[34] First essay-lecture: nature, nothing, fool.27 The two levels; the fact the characters don’t get it all clear: the extent to which it can be clarified in an archaic context. Second: the purgatorial journey, downward to the lowest point of nature in Poor Tom, upward through identification with humanity to the tragic vision, which ends in anguish contemplating nothingness. (I think the word “absurd” is largely cant.) Third I haven’t got clear: something along the Oscar Wilde line about the way arts fill up our own past experience,28 so that Lear is intelligible even though so far beyond our conscious experience.
[35] Rebellion of younger generation: best and soundest of his time; younger rises when the old ones fall. But rebellion is a dead end, making sense only in a revenge tragedy, which Lear isn’t: deliberate reversal of the traditional story, where the French invasion succeeded. Trace of avenger in Edgar vs. Edmund, but absorbed in charity; Kent and Cordelia return from banishment as guardian angels. We get at the end what I’ve already described as the heroic have been, only the human (younger in the last two lines) are left.
[36] So far as I can see, Lear never questions the supremacy of law: there’s nothing in him of Goneril’s “the laws are mine” [King Lear, 5.3.159], which probably mean she’s insane.
[37] Anguish seeing nothing is the authentic human. Law is what is called karma; Cordelia’s death as much a result of Lear’s folly as Edmund’s treachery is of Gloucester’s. The way the word “sacrifice” is used in the play needs more study, and those O.T. [Old Testament] series of linkages.
[38] Hamlet seemed the play of Shakespeare to the 19th century, because it dramatized the gap between acting and thinking about acting, for a century that was discovering that all real knowledge is unconscious and conscious knowledge means the process of acquiring knowledge, not the having of it.29
[39] King Lear seems the play of Shakespeare for the 20th century, because it’s about existential anguish, absurdity, and nothingness. It is not, like Hamlet, a theoretical play about tragedy, rather a practical example of tragedy, meeting all its ethical and other problems (e.g., malice in the divine nature) head on.30
[40] The ancient tale of Lear, coming through Geoffrey of Monmouth into British “history,” is very close to myth: Hamlet is slightly less so. The mixing up of time and space (Latin names like Gloucester and Saxon ones like Edgar and Edmund) more deliberate. Yet some systematic effort to keep an archaic and pre-Christian setting.
[41] One result is that such things as the two levels of nature is [are] something the audience knows about and the characters in the play are not sure about. They make guesses, some wild and some accurate; but the moral of Troilus (in Chaucer) about “payens corsed olde rites”31 lurks in background. Doesn’t follow that the audience is “right,” only that they’re blinded like all human beings. The perspective is what’s important.
[42] Two tragedies in counterpoint: Gloucester’s, which is moral and explicable, and Lear’s, which isn’t. The major link between the two tragedies is Edgar, and Edgar’s moralizing itch doesn’t ring true in the Lear context.
[43] Two levels of nature.32 Upper one, in Christian context, the unfallen world: the Lear characters don’t have this context. But they know that authority and a social contract is needed to hold human society together; otherwise there’s [there’d] be no difference between men and animals. The great nightmare is reduction to animals, like Caliban being turned to an ape. But of course Lear is right in calling gratitude “natural” on this level of nature.
[44] Similarly, Edmund is right in appealing to the goddess Nature on his level of nature, where nature is a competitive “Machiavellian” order with no morals and the weak get weeded out. Only he doesn’t know it’s a lower nature.
[45] In Hamlet Shakespeare almost loads the dice in favor of Claudius and against Hamlet. In Lear this technique is greatly expanded. Lear and Gloucester are portrayed at the outset as almost unbelievably asinine fools, and the behavior of Edmund, Goneril and Regan seems not merely inevitable but justified. Not once does Lear express any love for Goneril or Regan: maybe it would be uphill work trying to love those creatures, but all he talks about is how much he’s done for them and how grateful they ought to feel. Nobody with Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature would expect them to be grateful.33 Edgar is something of an ass too. Then there’s the Kent-Oswald scene: one can see why Kent would despise Oswald, but still he does seem to be asking for something, even acting as an agent provocateur.
[46] Goneril and Regan, in the first two acts, are harsh and unattractive women, but what they say has a hard common sense about it: a hundred knights would make quite a dent in anyone’s budget. Dramatically they win every round because they never lose their cool, and Regan’s “this house is little” [King Lear, 2.4.288] almost has the ring of truth if we forget that she and Cornwall have taken over Gloucester’s house.34 Lear continually dramatizes the truth of “old fools are babes again” [1.3.19].
[47] The basis for this is Lear’s bargaining game: I’ll love you if you love me, and if you love me you’ll get a nice fat piece of England. (Note in passing the horror with [sic] which producing a map of Britain and proceeding to divide it up would inspire in the audience: cf. Henry IV.) When later in the play Cordelia says “no cause” [King Lear, 4.7.74] it’s one of the supreme moments in all drama, but still she’s saying precisely what she said at the beginning: she will not play these silly conditional games.35
[48] Conditional love focusses on a token anxiety symbol, hence the to-do about the knights and the horrible bargaining scene: “thy fifty yet doth double twice her twenty” [King Lear, 2.4.259].
[49] In Hamlet we start with a ghost whose objective existence apart from Hamlet’s melancholy imagination is established at once. In King Lear, though in many ways it’s the spookiest of all the great tragedies, nothing really supernatural happens at all. Edgar churns up devils, first as Poor Tom to Lear and later to Gloucester, but we don’t believe in his devils.36
[50] One of the central postulates in Lear is: their gods don’t exist. Thou swearest thy gods in vain, Kent says to Lear [King Lear, 1.1.161], and Lear retorts with “miscreant,” [1.1.161] unbeliever. Lear feels the order of nature must be in sympathy with him because authority in society is natural; but he’s deserted his post of authority and has fallen into the wrong order of nature, so all the storm does is get him wet. Albany, like Edgar, keeps trying feebly to find signs of providence in what happens: He’s a good man but a weak one. Gloucester’s flies to wanton boys speech [4.1.36-7] is just projection: the sources of Gloucester’s misery are tangible enough: his own folly, Edmund’s treachery, and Cornwall’s brutality. Everything that happens is explicable in human terms.
[51] The Fool is a “natural,” a vestigial survival of the older upper order of nature, because he can’t help telling the truth. His loyalty is another aspect of his “natural” quality: Goneril doesn’t believe he’s a fool because she doesn’t know this upper nature exists. Albany is a “moral fool,” handicapped by scruples in a world they don’t belong in. She’s right in a way: the part of Albany is a damn hard [one] to act, because a man of principle in Goneril’s world can only splutter and say how awful.37
[52] “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” [King Lear, 5.3.325] is a most extraordinary line to be coming at that point. As a vindication of Cordelia’s or Kent’s plain speaking it comes pretty late;38 it’s probably Edgar rather than Albany, though it fits the moralizing styles of both. What it seems to mean is: a true statement, such as “Cordelia loves her father,” is not true if it’s said on the wrong occasion for the wrong motive. (Conversely, I suppose, the statement “Albany is a fool” (moral or otherwise) is untrue, but true in that context.)
[53] I still think that “nothing” in Shakespeare means primarily a loss of identity that need not be accompanied by a loss of existence. A king who abdicates in Lear’s circumstances becomes nothing: Edgar I nothing am [King Lear, 2.3.21] means his identity is now Poor Tom though the continuity with Edgar remains:39 the king is a thing of nothing (Hamlet [4.2.28, 30]; taken perhaps from the earlier play) means Claudius has no identity as a king though he’s on the throne.
[54] Hence, as I’ve said, what Goneril and Regan are doing really is “worse than murder”: they’re annihilating Lear’s identity, symbolized by his damn knights, and letting him go on living. Even so they don’t seem obviously evil until the end of Act Two, when it’s clear they’re willing and anxious to push him out on the heath. (Incidentally, the storm is clearly not just a storm but the dissolving of nature into chaos—no actual storm was anything like that.)40
[55] Gloucester screwed a whore in a whorehouse and the result was Edmund: served him damn well right, says the moralist: it’s wrong to go screwing dames in whorehouses. If there’s one character in (well, not in) King Lear I feel sorry for it’s Edmund’s mother, who gets a hell of a bad press. Edgar can sometimes be a sickening prig. However, Lear begot Goneril and Regan off his own wife, Cordelia’s mother, so where’s the moral?41 For both Lear and Gloucester, the Job situation recurs: what happens by way of recoil is out of proportion to the action, so we can’t invoke a moral principle in things or write it off as the protagonist’s folly.
[56] Edgar is the most mysterious character in drama. That soliloquy beginning “When we our betters see bearing their woes” [King Lear, 3.6.102] or something: nothing more nauseating anywhere. And above I’ve mentioned the “dark and vicious place” [5.3.173] nonsense.42 Why does he act the role of a vestigial shaman, which is what Poor Tom is, as we can see if we look at the ballad about the horse of air?43 Why does he create devils for Gloucester as well? Why does he assume so many disguises, including the clown who kills Oswald? Why does he come like the catastrophe of the old comedy and appear on the third sound of the trumpet? He’s not overtly ridiculous like poor old Albany. Why does he put on the Poor Tom act for Lear anyway? I’m not satisfied with my answer to that.
[57] We’ve derived the words hypocrite and person from the metaphor of the masked actor. Hypocrisy is a vice requiring so much self discipline and control and awareness that it’s practically a virtue. Person has no moral overtones, but it does emphasize the dramatic aspect of human behavior. The importance of the soliloquies in Hamlet is that they show how illusory the notion is that there’s a “real me” underneath the mask. There’s never anything underneath a mask except another mask, and when Hamlet (or Claudius) soliloquizes he’s dramatizing himself to himself.44
[58] Claudius: he does a great deal of spying, of course, but in Hamlet, as in Lear, Shakespeare almost loads the dice against our own sympathies. We feel it’s tedious of Claudius to be the villain when he’s otherwise so capable and attractive, and even more tedious of Hamlet to be the hero when he’s so much of a self-indulgent neurotic. It isn’t every murdering villain that would take to prayer when his villainy was discovered: also we can’t question the genuineness of his affection for Gertrude. Perhaps he even has some for Hamlet.45
[59] The two women in the play meet tragic ends but are not tragic characters. There’s no Antigone in Hamlet, or even a Cordelia, no female of heroic stature. Gertrude is a soft, comfortable, easy-going, sentimental woman who expects the dominant male on her horizon to look after her, and according to Hamlet his father very solicitously kept her out of drafts [1.2.140-3]. But once he’d gone, who’d take care of her then. She went along with Claudius without ever dreaming that there was anything wrong with her doing so: it’s her unconsciousness of wrong-doing that infuriates Hamlet more than anything else. She collapses at once under Hamlet’s accusations, but if she hadn’t been as soft as butter there’d have been a very different scene. (Of course, there was also the shock of Polonius’ death.)46
[60] The “incestuous” nature of her marriage to [her] deceased husband’s brother was the issue over which the Reformation came to England,47 but even so it seems really just makeweight, another stick to beat Claudius with for Hamlet, but not deeply felt by anybody. Denmark in the Dark Ages would have been pretty close to mother-right anyway.
[61] Ophelia: once more, don’t think of her as an older woman than she is: she’s another of Shakespeare’s teen-aged heroines. Polonius’ mulish obstinacy about Hamlet’s lack of seriousness seems curious: it’s nonsense to say Hamlet couldn’t marry her, as it seems clear that Claudius would have approved of the match and that Gertrude at least expected it.48 Eventually we realize that Polonius is just one more grabby father, that Ophelia, like Hermia and Juliet, has to choose between father and lover but unlike them chooses her father and loses both. So when in the mad scene everybody nods wisely and says “conceit upon her father” [Hamlet, 4.5.45] they overlook the larger pathos of the situation.
[62] Of course Hamlet’s having to assume madness puts the lid on her, but then there was his inspection of her, clearly meaning: will you stick with me in a crisis? and she “chooses” her father when she allows herself to be used as a decoy. Considering the brutality [with] which Hamlet talks to her and the abominably priggish speech of Laertes at the beginning, all the affection lavished on her dead body comes pretty late. But these are elements making for the pathos rather than tragedy.
[63] There are a lot of puzzles in Hamlet: some of them are Lady Macbeth’s-children ones with no answers needed (how come Horatio was in Denmark so long without looking up Hamlet), except that there are so many of these, like a buzzing* cloud of gnats, that even they seem to make a point. A real puzzle is: was Ophelia mad when she drowned, and if so could she be called a suicide? The grave-diggers don’t give her the benefit of the doubt; the priest still less. We almost get the impression that Gertrude’s account of her death is phony. And what about Hamlet? Hamlet can’t understand why Laertes hates him; then it occurs to him that maybe it would be only civil to apologize for having exterminated his family, and when he does he blames it on his own madness and says that and not he is to blame. But when Hamlet murdered Polonius was in the scene with his mother when he swears up and down that he’s not mad.49
[64] Hamlet is a play about the surrounding of experience by consciousness, the deriving of existence from awareness of existence that thirty years later moves into the centre of thought with Descartes.
[65] Miniature version of the Henry VI tetralogy: what happens when feuding nobles get out of hand. Opening stage direction has servants armed with swords and bucklers on the street. The moral is that if you allow servants to go about armed they’ll get into fights. In view of Tudor policy and Elizabeth’s personal dislike of brawling, this play would have no trouble with the censor.50
[66] Opening scene: note the dramatizing of hierarchy: first servants, then Benvolio and Tybalt, then old Montague and Capulet, then the Prince as keystone of the arch. Points to a very symmetrical arrangement of characters: Mercutio consorts with Montagues, Paris wants to marry a Capulet, both are kinsmen of the Prince. Then the two leads and the go-betweens, the Nurse and the Friar.51
[67] Servants carry broadswords, not rapiers, and go in for haymakers or “swashing blow(s),” not fencing. Macho jokes associating swords and sexuality: good way of quieting an audience who most want to hear “off-color” jokes, but for a modern audience an excellent way of introducing the theme of Eros-Thanatos, violent love and violent death; also, of course, of weapons and fighting generally as closely associated with sex. Imagery shifts later to gunpowder.
[68] Scene becomes farcical as old Montague and old Capulet dash for their swords to prove to themselves that they’re just as good men as they ever were: their wives, who know better, keep pulling at them and trying to keep them out of trouble. But by entering the brawl, they, as heads of the two houses, have sanctioned it, and hence are directly responsible for the tragedy. This is connected with the gold-statues business at the end.52
[69] Otherwise, nobody seems to care about the feud except Tybalt, and it’s perhaps worth noticing that he’s not a Capulet by blood, but a kinsman of Lady Capulet. Old Capulet, in the next scene, seems quite relieved to be bound over to keep the peace. But once the brawl starts, everyone gets involved in it.
[70] Prince’s speech is timed accurately to the last syllable: two and half lines before they’ll stop whacking each other to listen. If it took longer, he’d seem impotent to control the situation; if it took less long, we’d underestimate the seriousness of the social danger threatening his city.53
[71] RJ the second tragedy, unless we count, say R3. TA a tragedy that goes all out for melodrama and sensationalism (examples of the cut-off hands of Titus and Lavinia).54 Yet only a year or so later, Shakespeare is writing a tragedy more full of wit and tenderness than anything the rest of drama can show. It’s not a comedy gone wrong: we know from the prologue on that the resolution will be tragic: tragedy seldom deceives an audience about the outcome. But the scheme of Friar Lawrence, if it had been successful (as a very similar scheme in MAN is successful, because that’s a comedy), would have brought about a New Comedy plot: young people marry in the teeth of parental opposition and get away with it. So to some degree it is a comedy, not gone wrong, but reversed in direction.55
[72] (Let’s skip the Romeo-Benvolio dialogue, noting only that lady Montague’s two lines are practically all she says in the play—it would have overloaded the action to build up the Montagues like the Capulets—but they’re enough to show that the sun rises and sets on her Romeo, so her reported death easier to accept.)56
[73] In the third scene Lady Capulet wants to confer with her daughter about her prospective marriage: being a rather prissy young woman, she dismissed the Nurse, but then recalls her as she remembers that noble families don’t do that to old and trusted servants. (Or perhaps she realizes that the Nurse is closer to Juliet than she is.) Anyway, she regrets her concession, because the Nurse goes into action with an interminable speech.
[74] Three things about this speech important. First, it develops the character of the Nurse (a garrulous and reminiscent Nurse is already present in the main source, Brooke’s poem).57 But Shakespeare is not a Victorian novelist for whom characterization might be an end in itself. Nowhere in Shakespeare (except for the William scene in his potboiler MWW) is a scene dragged in: whatever seems to be a detour in the action is actually advancing that action on another level.
[75] Second, the Nurse’s husband who isn’t in the play at all, has died long before it begins, but everything we ever want to know about him is right there, in the two lines of his joke. As usual with the Nurse’s type of raconteur, we get the punch line four times.
[76] But the real reason for the speech is to sketch in a background for Juliet, whom we see but have not yet met. We suddenly get a vision of what Juliet’s childhood must have been like, wandering around a big house with nobody to talk to except the Nurse and the Nurse’s husband with his inexhaustible joke. Her father is “Sir” and her mother is “Madam”; she must have special permission to leave the house, not ordinarily granted except for visits to a priest for confession, and she waits for the day when Capulet will say to his wife “I’m sure we’ve got a daughter around here somewhere: isn’t it time we got rid of her?” Then she would marry and settle into the same mould as her mother, who was married at the same age.
[77] There’s more to be said about her childhood, probably, in view of her father’s fondness for parties and the like, but there would also be enough loneliness in it to throw her on her own resources sufficiently to develop self-reliance. So when she turns from a frightened child into a woman with more genuine courage and resolution than Lady Macbeth ever had, the change seems less prodigious if we’re listening attentively.
[78] Notice too the speech by Lady Capulet that follows the Nurse’s harangue—in couplets, usually a bad sign in Shakespeare. To the Nurse, marriage means exactly one thing, and she is never tired of telling us what it is. Lady C. would like to prepare her daughter for her approaching courtship, be a conscientious mother, and say things more appropriate to high-class aristocratic life. But she has nothing to say, and finally comes down to “Speak briefly, can you like of Paris’ love?” [Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.96]. She communicates nothing except that she clearly approves of the match, and Juliet would have been talking in the same way to her daughter fifteen years or so later.
[79] Who is responsible for a tragedy that kills so many young and attractive people? In many tragedies there’s a clearly marked villain: we can point to lago in Othello and say that if it hadn’t been for that awful man there’d have been no tragedy. But who is the villain in this play? Not the harried and conscientious Prince; not the well-meaning Friar; not the rather likeable old buffer Capulet. Tybalt seems to be the answer, and is the direct cause of the tragic turn of the action, but he is a villain only because of his position in the plot. According to his own code—admittedly a code open to criticism—he is a man of honor, and there is no reason to suppose him capable of the kind of malice or treachery we find in lago or Edmund. Perhaps he is even no more likely to engage in a fight than Mercutio.58
[80] The Nurse is called a “most wicked fiend” by Juliet because she proposed that Juliet conceal her marriage to Romeo and live in bigamy with Paris. But Juliet is overwrought. The Nurse is not a wicked fiend, but she has a very limited imagination, and she does not belong to a social class that can afford to live by codes of honour. Such upper-class words as knave, varlet, villain, boor, are drawn from the servant or peasant class because they have to wriggle through life. Besides, on her first embassy to Romeo she is teased by Mercutio and is, figure of fun as she is, genuinely offended—after all, she’s not a whore or a bawd. When she returns to Juliet and won’t come to the point in delivering the message, that’s not just Shakespeare straining for laughs: it’s the Nurse consciously or unconsciously teasing Juliet to get even. Not very logical, but who said the Nurse was logical? Similarly when she laments the death of Tybalt and Juliet thinks she’s talking about Romeo, where the teasing is more malicious and less [un]conscious. She doesn’t really much like these Montague boys or their friends, and in a crisis she’ll remember she’s a Capulet and leave Juliet to herself.
[81] At the very end of the play we come to one of those puzzling episodes in Shakespeare that we have to look at more than once to make sense of. Montague proposes to erect a gold statue of Juliet at his own expense, and Capulet promises to do the same for Romeo. Big deal: nothing like a couple of gold statues to bring two dead lovers back to life. But by that time Montague and Capulet are two, miserable defeated old men who have lost everything that meant anything in their lives, and they simply cannot look their own responsibility for what they have done straight in the face. So they propose to erect these statues as a way of persuading themselves that they are doing something. The gesture is futile, but pitiful and very human.59
[82] They are, as Eliot says of Othello’s last speech, cheering themselves up, but in a way they are cheering the audience up too. Tragedy, on this level, always conveys the sense of something exhilarating, despite the loss of attractive young lives. “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” [5.3.304] gives us a hint: the sacrificial victim has to be perfect, and there’s a moment when the victim(s) is/are identified with what they’re sacrificed to, which in a sense, for a play, is the audience.
[83] Tragedy is often moral in the sense of suggesting a villain who caused it all: this is clearly an element here, the villain being the feud. It’s often fatalistic in the sense of suggesting a hidden and malignant power: that’s here too, in Romeo’s frequent references to the “inauspicious stars” (he never blames the feud, only the stars), Friar Laurence’s undelivered letter (shades of Thomas Hardy), the fact that the Capulet servant sent out to invite guests can’t read and comes to Romeo. (Note how courteous Romeo invariably is to social inferiors, careful to call them “fellow,” then a polite term for such a context. Similarly when soothing the ruffled feathers of the Nurse). Also the fact that Capulet’s very sensible behavior in controlling Tybalt comes too late.
[84] Somebody, I think Auden, raises the question whether Shakespeare’s audience would think that Romeo was damned for committing suicide.60 The question is tedious, and Shakespeare avoids tedium. But I think also the audience would realize that Romeo has his own religion, involved in his meetings with the Friar, but [this] makes him a saint and martyr in the calendar of Eros. The dialogue with Benvolio following the brawl is curiously long, but it outlines the convention Romeo is working with, and later Romeo replies to Benvolio in a six-line stanza that includes the words “religion” and “heretics” [1.2.88-93].61
[85] Romeo is doing what is fashionable, and his friends understand what’s happening, but he’s also a bit tedious about it. When the Friar sees him approaching and thinks “Oh, no, not Rosaline again,” he is naturally disconcerted when Romeo says, in effect, “Who’s Rosaline?”62 The Friar says he condemns Romeo’s feeling about her “for doting, not for loving” [Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.82], the only indication that he recognizes what amounts to a rival religion. Mercutio’s speech mentioning Petrarch and Laura, and, significantly, Thisbe [Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.37-45] shows that he knows all about the convention too, though he’d get bored himself with a relation that proposed sexual sublimation—Rosaline says she wants to live chaste, and as we don’t meet her we don’t know if she means it or is just playing along with Romeo’s act—if the latter, she plays just a second too long.
[86] Then the “real thing” hits Romeo, although the real thing is just as much a convention as the self-churned Rosaline affair. In the background is the central convention of Elizabethan culture: the frustration caused by rejected love, or ecstatic metaphor, drives the lover into the third stage of the poet. The Friar of course sees a good chance of ending the feud, as said earlier, but he also recognizes that two people he’s been accustomed to think of as rather nice children have suddenly turned into adults.
[87] Part of the convention was that male friendships has [had] a disinterested quality that made them morally superior to sexually-oriented love for women. Shakespeare even represents himself as loving a beautiful youth even to the point of allowing the latter to steal his mistress (it’s not homosexual, we note; neither man has any sexual interest except in women). Also in the rather farcical conclusion of TGV, another Verona play, where Valentine proposes to hand over his mistress to the friend who has actually betrayed him, apart from trying to rape the girl.63
[88] So when Mercutio is fatally wounded, discovers that Romeo through his bungling is nearly as much his murderer as Tybalt, and gets the helpless answer “I thought all for the best” [Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.104], then turns to Benvolio, turning his back contemptuously on Romeo, Romeo is suddenly possessed with the sole idea of avenging his dead friend. It’s the only moment in the play after he’s met Juliet that Juliet drops entirely out of his mind, and it’s not surprising that that should be also the peripety of the tragic action.
[89] The character who makes the most impressive entrances in the play is the sun, which dominates RJ as the moon does MND. “The day is hot, and Capulets are abroad” [Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.2]. The love is at night: Romeo sees Juliet at an evening party, hanging on the cheek of the night; the great “balcony” scene is of course at night; the final macabre death scene is at night in front of Juliet’s tomb, or at least the Capulet vault. Hence the tremendous importance of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech. The theory of dreams given in it is, to us, very Freudian and wish-fulfilling: it’s the world of Eros that forms in our emotions before we awake, and when we awake it collides with Thanatos. The macho sexual boasts of the servants at the opening are based on swords (“draw thy tool” [1.1.31]), but gunpowder is a better image for energies that “as they kiss consume” [2.6.11]. The oxymoron dominates this play, from the rather affected ones Romeo uses at the beginning (“O loving hate!” [1.1.176]) throughout.64
[90] One listens to themes as in music: Friar Laurence’s opening speech talks about the virtues of herbs (traditionally the kind of thing this kind of man would know about), and how some are poisonous; then Lady Capulet tells Juliet not to worry because she’ll get a friend in Mantua to administer poison somehow to Romeo.65
[91] RJ is one of the world’s most popular and best loved stories: mainly Shakespeare’s word-magic, but not entirely: what the stage actually got, down to about 1850, was a series of travesties: Lee (or somebody Restoration); Colley Cibber; David Garrick. One has to distinguish the actual Montague-Capulet setting, which has been traced to the misunderstanding of an allusion in Dante66 from the archetypal story, which is really the Pyramus and Thisbe story, perhaps the most popular of all Ovid’s myths in Elizabethan times. Arthur Brooke has a preface where he says the story has two morals, first not to get married without parental consent and second not to be Catholic and confess to priests. Then he settles down and shows enough respect for his story to hold Shakespeare’s attention throughout. He not only tells the main story but provides a Mercutio, a Nurse, and a Friar.67
[92] If we turned the RJ story inside out, what would we get? A world where Queen Mab’s dream night was a vast powerful and benevolent presence; a world where the feuding and brawling Thisbe story appears in the form of farce. In short, we’d get MND.68
[93] MND refers to two sombre tragedies, the Pyramus-Thisbe legend and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. Both appear as farcical interludes (see the MND notes). In RJ they’re central: Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers divided by a wall and hostile families both killing themselves for love, is the archetype. The Knight’s Tale theme, two males feuding over the same woman, appears in the duel of Romeo and Paris at the grave vault, but it’s less vestigial than that: Tybalt is really fighting for Paris’s interests, though he doesn’t know it, as Mercutio is for Romeo’s.69
[94] When Romeo says “My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne” [Romeo and Juliet, 5.1.3], he’s certainly talking about the god of Love. When he says earlier “But he that hath the steerage of my course / Direct my sail” [1.4.112], we aren’t sure whether he means Eros and [or] Christ, and neither perhaps is he. All we can say is that metaphors of a ship’s pilot are more common in the Eros connection.70
[95] In drama everything has to be done by the words—long description of the apothecary’s shop in a film could be given by a single shot of it. But then we’d miss the “woodspurge has a cup of three”71 feeling about the speech, the hallucinatory concentrating on images in a moment of despair.