T.S.
Eliot from The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) “Hamlet
and His Problems” Few critics have even admitted
that Hamlet the play is the primary
problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character
has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the
critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which
through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism
instead. These minds often find in Hamlet
a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had
Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had
Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men
in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a
work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in
writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both
possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical
aberrations the more plausible by the substitution – of their own Hamlet for
Shakespeare's – which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that
Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play. Two recent writers, Mr. J. M.
Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued
small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll
performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [Note: I have never, by the way,
seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer's
objections to Othello], observing
that they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but
they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art; and as they insisted on the
importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the
leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the
secret of dramatic art in general. Qua work of
art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we
can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of
art; and for "interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of
relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr.
Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their
"interpretation" of Hamlet
by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a
series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors.
The Hamlet of Shakespeare will
appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the
play as due to Shakespeare's design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists
even in the final form. We know that there was an older
play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who
was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham;
and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from The Spanish Tragedy itself, from the
tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's Hamlet must have been based, and from
a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's lifetime which bears strong
evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play.
From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was
a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in The Spanish Tragedy, solely by the
difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the
"madness" of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and
successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a
motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly
"blunts" the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds
of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the "madness" is not
to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion. The alteration is not complete
enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so
close to The Spanish Tragedy as to
leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of
Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes – the Polonius-Laertes and the
Polonius-Reynaldo scenes – for which there is little excuse; these scenes are
not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of
Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play
of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched
the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the
original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of
five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson's examination is, we believe,
irrefragable: that Shakespeare's Hamlet,
so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a
mother's guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this
motive successfully upon the "intractable" material of the old
play. Of the intractability there can be
no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most
certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and
disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and
is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has
left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision
should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like Look,
the morn, in russet mantle clad, are of the Shakespeare of Romeo
and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii., Sir,
in my heart there was a kind of fighting are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in
an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with
that other profoundly interesting play of "intractable" material
and astonishing versification, Measure
for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic
successes which culminate in Coriolanus.
Coriolanus may be not as
"interesting" as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic
success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because
they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a
work of art. It is the "Mona Lisa" of literature. The grounds of Hamlet's failure
are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in
concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son
towards a guilty mother: [Hamlet's] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures
on the score of his mother's degradation. The guilt of a mother is an almost
intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to
supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one. This, however, is by no means the
whole story. It is not merely the "guilt
of a mother" that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion
of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The
subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these,
intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer
could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we
search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to
localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the
two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a
content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy
d' Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet not in the action, not in any
quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is
unmistakably not in the earlier play. The only way of expressing emotion
in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in
other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be
the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,
which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you
will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of
Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful
accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing
of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these
words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The
artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the
external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated
by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as
they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is germane
to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective
equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator
in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that
his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an
adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus
a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it
therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible
actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can
express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the donnes of the
problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of
Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different
emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and
insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable
of representing. The "madness" of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand; in the earlier play a simple
ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience.
For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of
Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan
of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it
is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the
dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art.
The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its
object, is something which every person of
sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often
occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or
trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive
by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is
not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here
Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted
it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he
attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need
a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and
when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read
Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something
which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience
which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to
understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T.S.
Eliot: The Sacred Wood – Essays on
Poetry and Criticism (Methune, London, 1920; republished by Dover Publications,
Mineola, NY, USA, 1997) |