A Raid on the Articulate: G. Wilson Knight and the Battle of Elsinore

It is respectfully submitted that, as revealing and influential as Knight’s argument is, it is so qualified and conditioned as to border on incoherence. While interpretation is shown to be the only respectable route to the mysterious middle of the wheel of fire which is the Shakespearean text, Knight confesses that he cannot always take that route “in practice,” and there may be good reasons to remain at the level of shallow or tangential exegesis. And when we turn to the first case, we are astonished to find that instead of approaching Hamlet via interpretation, Wilson Knight unleashes a barrage of criticism of the very variety he condemned in his opening chapter. In particular, though he rejects at the outset an “unduly ethical criticism,” we will see that this is exactly what he gives us in his exposition of Shakespeare’s most renowned play. (Knight 8) In the notorious The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet, Knight offers a sustained ad hominem assault on the character of its protagonist.

He begins with this young man’s condition before encountering the Ghost of Hamlet, Sr. He is the picture of frantic misery, and busies himself with self-destructive ideation.  

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self slaughter! O God! O God!
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 merely.
(I, ii,  129-137)

Knight’s explanation?  

He suffers from misery at his father’s death and agony at his mother’s quick forgetfulness: Such callousness is infidelity, and so impurity, and, since Claudius is the brother of the dead king, incest. It is reasonable to suppose that Hamlet’s state of mind, if not wholly caused by these events, is at least definitely related to them. Of his two loved parents, one has been taken for ever by death, the other dishonoured for ever by her act of marriage. To Hamlet the world is now an ‘unweeded garden’. (Knight, 18-19)

Though this issue was treated extensively in Hamlet Made Simple, let’s have one more look.

Is there a single scrap of evidence in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, that its protagonist and the late King enjoyed a close emotional bond? Not a single anecdote or recollection from any source connects the Prince with his supposed father by anything more than their names. The life expectancy in those days was what?  — forty or fifty years? And so the old man dies. Must his brilliant son now exhibit self-destruction urges? Recall that: “Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead; excessive grief the enemy of the living.” (All’s Well that Ends Well, I, i, 52) There is nothing in the text to suggest that Hamlet was this way before. He wooed and courted Ophelia, studied philosophy and enjoyed the life of an accomplished courtier. What has happened?  His father has expired of apparently natural or accidental causes, lamentable to be sure, but, as Claudius would observe, no cause for hysteria.    

What about Gertrude? True, she loses no time in wedding and bedding Claudius, but in those days it was customary for the man to propose marriage to the lady, an honorable gesture. It implies, “You were Denmark’s magnificent Queen. Now, I am its new monarch, and as I love you, you shall be my wife and continue as our esteemed Queen.” Gertrude presumably does nothing more than accept the King’s proposal (though many, including the present writer, see her as a passive accomplice in regicide). One might think it tacky not to wait a longer interval, but Claudius, as the new sovereign, is in a celebratory mood and wants to enjoy his good fortune to the hilt, so to speak. You might not like it, but there it is. Now what’s all this about misery and suicide? What indeed.

Let’s back up.

Hamlet has no siblings. All his life has been spent as heir apparent to the Danish throne. This is his destiny and his identity. While at school in Wittenberg he receives word his father has passed away, and hastens back to Elsinore, fully expecting to receive the crown, only to be jolted by the discovery that his uncle reigns already. Claudius, not Prince Hamlet, is King. Then he is forced to sit through the smarmy wedding ceremony. Could it possibly be that Prince Hamlet is a bit put off to learn that Uncle Claudius has made a peremptory strike and stolen his birthright as Denmark’s rightful successor and king? It is, to say the least, embarrassing that so few make any connection between Hamlet’s loss of a kingdom and his unquiet mood. Since when are kingdoms pushpins? Recall how upset was Prince Edward when he found himself disinherited by his timorous father, King Henry VI: “Father, you cannot disinherit me. If you be king, why should not I succeed?” (King Henry VI, Part Three, I, I, 227-228) Such actions lead to war. That such a personal catastrophe should not even be mentioned by those seeking to account for the Prince’s malaise is shocking. When Rosenkrantz questions him about his melancholia, Hamlet gives the straightforward answer: “Sir, I lack advancement.” (III, ii, 327) That is, when my father died, I wasn’t promoted. Hamlet tells us point blank the cause of his distemper. (III, ii, 324-327) Even if that were not in itself sufficient, it should at least be mentioned.

The problem grows. For if the assembled nobles pass over Prince Hamlet in their “election,” there must be a very good reason: a legal impediment. The Prince has every qualification and is beloved of the people. That points in only one direction: ineligibility. “Hamlet Junior” doesn’t inherit the kingdom from Hamlet the Dane because, as nearly everyone knows, he isn’t the King’s son.

And there we have the worm gnawing at Hamlet’s cerebrum when he arrives at Elsinore for the funeral and marriage ceremonies. His failure to accede to the throne implies his bastardy. That is the whispered insinuation which, of course, cannot be openly acknowledged. The subject of Hamlet’s personhood, his being, has been taboo all his life, and now is certainly not the moment to broadcast it. So he is just left to drift.  

It gets worse. For suppose he is a bastard. Who is his biological father? The field of paternal candidates is limited.

Now let your imaginary forces fix for one moment upon a nuptial ceremony. We are in the royal chapel. The cold stone walls are draped with faded tapestries. Standing just behind his mother is a glum Prince clad in black. A psalter is clutched in his sweaty hands. As he listens absently to the droning priest and unctuous exchange of vows, a sickening idea flickers at the margins of his mind. The celerity of this union suggests its stars may not be exactly strangers to one another. In fact, it looks as though they have been an item for some while, perhaps a long time, and that it has always been understood that if the king were, say, slain in battle, Claudius would rouse himself, assume the helm, and take Gertrude as his trophy bride. It is therefore just as likely – if not more likely – that the “Prince of Denmark” is the actual offspring of King Claudius. 

That is the reason why Hamlet is so upset by the “hasty” marriage, not because it might be viewed as untimely by a Danish Emily Post, but because, coupled with his failure to take the throne, it signals his bastardy. Yet no sooner does this specter of an idea arise than it is smothered. It remains in his mental cellarage, haunting him. This is the real ghost in the play, not the bellowing shadow of his putative “father.”

One more thing. In the closet scene we see with a noonday clarity that Prince Hamlet loathes and detests his supposed Uncle. To acknowledge that this complacent mediocrity, this bale of corpulence, could be his own father is a conclusion so repugnant that it cannot be consciously admitted. The result is catastrophic depression and possible madness. 

Return to the first soliloquy, the one which takes place before Hamlet meets “the Ghost.” Wringing his hands in despair, he cries out in anguish that his “too too solid flesh” keeps him like a prisoner in life’s unweeded garden. Better to be dead than lose the crown to such a miscreant, a varlet who turns out to be one’s own progenitor! What could be more supremely disgusting? Imagine then his feelings when he learns that this human canker, this Claudius, has slain the universally admired King Hamlet the Dane. Yet taking vengeance upon one’s own biological sire may not be as easy as it sounds. Might there not be a moment of hesitation?

It is with all of this in mind that we repair to our critic, G. Wilson Knight. Naturally he has no trouble putting his finger on the causes of Hamlet’s dysthymic mood: his “father’s” death and his mother’s insouciant “forgetfulness.” Claudius and Gertrude have much to forget, apparently. But Knight’s failure to reflect on the implicit dynamics of the play leads him badly astray. Instead of making sense of the action, Knight, along with just about everyone else, contents himself with a hero for whom paternal expiration is a howling nightmare and a widow’s impulse to drown her sorrow in the arms of a second husband is the end of the universe. And as this makes no sense, there is no alternative but to pin the blame on Hamlet. He is the “ambassador of death.” His father’s passing away and his mother’s remarriage trigger the implosion of Hamlet’s very soul, turning him from man to Hollywood vampire in the blink of an “I.” And all this transpires well before he even hears of a Ghost stalking the crenelated towers of Elsinore. Is this a reasonable rendering of the play?   

It should be mentioned in all candor that Knight’s essay is notorious in academic circles, and at least one critic (David Auerbach) has gone so far as to suggest that Knight was well aware of its hyperbolical manner and outrageous claims, e.g., that Hamlet is a rogue on a par with Iago. (Knight, 29) Perhaps, as Auerbach proposes, he was merely being provocative. But the deeper problem is theoretical. Having advanced the distinction between (1) criticism which seizes on and magnifies dramatic flaws (bad) and (2) interpretation which sets dramatic action in the context of an underlying metaphor (good), to then immediately trash that important polarity and excoriate the leading character in western literature as a menace to society risks being perceived as a reader grossly confused or (rather like Hamlet) conflicted. On page 3 of The Wheel of Fire, for example, we learn that Hamlet, like the other “final plays” of Shakespeare’s career, is best conceived as based on a “death theme” which lends it “atmosphere.” (Knight, 3) It is that pervasive “atmosphere” which allows us to digest the turbulent conduct and many faceted moods of its tormented Prince. But by the time we reach page 47, we learn that Hamlet “has no dominating atmosphere, no clear purposive technique to focus our vision.” (Knight, 47, emphasis added) Well, is there or is there not a dramatic atmosphere in Hamlet? If there is, all may be well. If not, what alternative will we have but to set Hamlet down as malicious and perverse? Sadly, the latter end of Knight’s argument forgets its beginning, and he opts to contradict himself and deny atmosphere in Hamlet. He thus condemns our finest example of early modern literature as the celebration of an inexplicable rogue and psychopath. In so doing he follows in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, who, as mentioned above, contributed the Introduction to Knight’s book. Eliot’s 1919 screed Hamlet and His Problems, composed under the baleful influence of logical positivism, contended that, as there was no “objective correlative” to warrant Hamlet’s shameful treatment of his mother in the closet scene, this character’s entire story is little better than nonsense. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Eliot famously concluded, is an “artistic failure.” Wielding his profound distinction between criticism and interpretation in the first chapter of The Wheel of Fire, Wilson Knight might have responded so as to rescue the Prince and his play from such sophomoric criticism. Knight was in an ideal position to show the significance of the play’s atmosphere and perhaps even read it closely enough to exhume Hamlet’s real problem discussed above: illegitimacy. Alas, such was not to be. Instead of correcting Eliot, Knight evidently sought to outdo him in derogation, engaging in one of literature’s most flagrant hatchet jobs. So egregious was Knight’s performance that he later sought to modify or retract it, enlisting the intellectual services of Friedrich Nietzsche (Knight, 338-366), all to no avail.  

Failing to read closely, neither Eliot nor Knight comes to terms with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Neither had the perspicacity to return to the text with fresh eyes and consider that its patent aporia entail that critical premises could and should be revised. Wilson Knight praises Claudius and condemns Prince Hamlet, never noticing their similarities, similarities thoroughly discussed in Hamlet Made Simple. Neither of these eminent critics takes the measure of Hamlet’s psyche prior to the advent of the ghost, nor do they ever stop to consider the impact that Hamlet’s loss of the crown has on him. It is inexcusable. Generations of readers have paid a high price for the myopia of such blundering scholars. They could have done so much better. Eliot deserted the wisdom of the Bradley brothers (F.H. and A.C.) for the siren call of logical positivism and thus disqualified himself as an interpreter of Shakespeare, as did Wilson Knight by throwing in his lot with William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience is used as a club to cudgel Prince Hamlet into deformity as “the sick soul.” (Knight, 20, 31)

Very well, but exactly how does Knight hate Hamlet? Let us count the ways.

1.  The sickness of Hamlet’s soul “only further infects the state – his disintegration spreads out, disintegrating.” (Knight, 21)

         2.  Hamlet suffers from “the abnormality of extreme melancholia and cynicism.” (Knight, 23)              

         3.  He “dwells on the thought of foulness as the basis of life.” (Knight, 24)

4.  “Hamlet’s soul is sick. The symptoms are, horror at the fact of death and equal detestation of life, a sense of uncleanness and evil in the things of nature; a disgust at the physical body of man; bitterness, cynicism, hate. It tends to insanity. All these elements are insistent in Hamlet.” (Knight, 24)

5.  “Hamlet looks inward and curses and hates himself for his lack of passion, and then again hates himself the more for his futile self-hatred.” (Knight, 25)

6.  He speaks with the “voice of cynicism.” (Knight, 26)

7.  He “denies the existence of romantic values.” (Knight, 27)

8.  He “denies the significance of humanity.” (Knight, 27)

9.  His “cynicism borders on madness.” (Knight, 28)

10.  He “tortures” Ophelia and Gertrude. (Knight, 28)

11.  He is “like Iago.” (Knight, 29)

12.  He “takes a devilish joy in cruelty.” (Knight, 29) This of course is the very pith of wickedness.

13.  He is guility of “callous cruelty.” (Knight, 29)

14.  He is “brutal” and “sarcastic.” (Knight, 30)

15.  His words are “horrible” and “disgusting.” (Knight, 30)

16.  “Hamlet’s disease is mental and spiritual death.” (Knight, 31)

17.  He speaks with “the grating voice of cynicism.” (Knight, 32)

18.  He is “morbid,” “cynical,” “disgusting,”“cruel” and “evil.” (Knight, 32)

19.  He exhibits the “cancer of cynicism in his mind.” (Knight, 33)

20.  “He is the ambassador of death walking amid life.” (Knight, 35)

21.  “ . . . the consciousness of death and consequent bitterness, cruelty, and inaction . . .  not only grows in his own mind but disintegrating it as we watch, but also spreads its effects outward among the other persons like a blighting disease, and, as the play progresses, by its very passivity and negation of purpose, insidiously undermines the health of the state, and adds victim to victim  until at the end the stage is filled with corpses. It is, as it were, a nihilistic birth in the consciousness of Hamlet that spreads its deadly venom around.” (Knight, 35)

22.  “Hamlet is inhuman.” (Knight, 37)

23.  Hamlet’s philosophy is the negation of life. (Knight, 37)

24.  He is a “danger to the state.” (Knight, 38)

25.  “Inhuman, cynical, not of flesh and blood.” (Knight, 41)

26.  “Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark.” (Knight, 42)

27.  “The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal.” (Knight, 43)

28.  “Hamlet is a living death in the midst of life.” (Knight, 45)

29.  “Pity enlists Hamlet not in the cause not of life but of death.” (Knight, 48)

30.  “We properly know Hamlet himself only when he is alone with death.” (Knight, 49)

In the midst of this bizarre defamation of one of literature’s most treasured characters, Wilson Knight turns his attention to Hamlet’s supposed “uncle” with equal errancy. Several pages are devoted to eulogizing an outright rogue, one of the “eminently likable people” who surround our hero. (Knight, 41) For you see, while Hamlet’s very breath infects the air at Elsinore, everyone else is agreeable and charming, including “considerate Claudius, the affectionate mother, Gertrude, the eminently lovable old Polonius, and the pathetic Ophelia.” (Knight, 47) Hamlet “is the only discordant element.” (Knight, 43, emphasis added) Why, even the Ghost fits right in with “the healthy bustle of the court”! (Knight, 42) When we see Claudius fall to his knees and confess to God his bloody crime of murdering his own brother and stealing his wife and crown, we must appreciate “this lovely prayer” (Knight, 39) in which any sense of grace or absolution eludes the penitent yet winsome homicide. 

What has gone wrong here? In traducing his own principle of interpretation, Wilson Knight loses his way, and falls into the tempting trap of painting Hamlet in lurid colors. There could be no more impressive illustration of the mistake of pseudo-empirical criticism than the one that Knight himself provides. A noble mind, “the glass of fashion and the mould of form,” (III, I, 156) is here o’erthrown personally by G. Wilson Knight. No consideration is given to what Hamlet was, as against what he has become, nor has this critic any way to account for this ugly transformation other than looking to his father’s death and his mother’s early remarriage.  

If we glance back at Knight’s first chapter on the principles of Shakespearian interpretation we recall that setting the apparent faults of Shakespearian personae in the context of the “original poetic experience” of the play was fairly guaranteed to resolve such faults automatically. And since all Mr. Knight can behold are faults piled one on top of the other in Prince Hamlet, he knows not what to do with that theory when applied to this tragedy. There must be a “burning central core” in Hamlet where seeming abrasive elements are reduced and absorbed, but since all we can see are Hamlet’s sins (and not those of eminently likable Claudius) we seem driven to conclude that there is no atmosphere in this our greatest tragedy. Or, if there is an atmosphere, it is the death theme compounded of the hostile thoughts and conduct of this hateful protagonist.

The fundamental problem is that when second-rate minds seek to sit in judgment on Shakespeare the result will rarely be commendable. 

Coleridge, repelled by the horrors in King Lear, admitted that the author’s judgement, being so consistently faultless, was probably superior to his own: and he was right. (Knight, 2)

Wilson Knight teaches the lesson but has much trouble learning it. It is not we who sit in judgment on Hamlet, but just the other way round: Hamlet takes the measure of us, its readers, viewers . . . and critics.

Let us follow Mr. Knight when his better angel is perched on his shoulder. What is the underlying theme of Hamlet? Is it death? No, for that is merely a symptom of the deeper issue. Every other moment in Romeo and Juliet touches death, but its theme is love. The redoubtable Thane of Cawdor wades in a river of blood, but it springs from sources in his soul of which he knows nothing. What then of Prince Hamlet? What makes him tick . . . and makes him sick? Don’t we know by now? Pace Horatio, it was Ophelia who knew him best. What does she say? Her beloved prince was “Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state.” (III, i, 155) That is, Hamlet lived in the expectation of the crown, as his people expected to see him crowned – or so he thought. Equally important is that this is how early modern English audiences would have seen him, understanding Prince Hamlet as a figure cut from the same cloth as, say, Prince Hal, heir to King Henry IV. For who should succeed the father if not the son? Hamlet was denied advancement. He tells us so.  

It is therefore difficult to overestimate the magnitude of the trauma he suffers when he returns to Elsinore to discover that he has been passed over for the diadem of Denmark in favor of Claudius. That’s bad enough, but his loss is quickly compounded when he half-realizes that the reason Claudius could so easily become king is because he, the “prince,” is ineligible. And the only ineligibility there could be is bastardy. This means that Hamlet discovers (if “conscience” will permit it) at the beginning of the play that he is not what he seems to be or, more strongly, that he is not what he is (a standard theme in Shakespeare). Consider what that would be like. You spend your entire youth as a royal prince, blessed with all the graces of a splendid courtier and look forward to reigning as Denmark’s King. You are admired, envied, and celebrated, and live at the pinnacle of noble society. And yet, there is something else, some subtle “atmosphere” in the court that sends a different message. There is a kind of strange condescension in the manner of the people, as patronizing smirks rise to their lips which they haven’t the craft to conceal. What could this portend? There IS an atmosphere, but what is it?

Then one day you wake up and realize you aren’t the Prince at all, but a mere court bastard, not the son of the Hyperion King but spawned by the repulsive Claudius with the cooperation of your own mother! This is news so profoundly unsettling that it cannot be quite swallowed down. And the oscillation of this thought in the brain is the very germ of madness.

Finally, as if in a dream, you discover in conversation with a ghost that your biological father is a ghoulish murderer who, with your mother’s apparent cooperation, has destroyed the great man you thought was your father! Might not these revelations send you headlong into the abyss? Might not your consciousness be darkened, and Denmark now appear to be the prison from which you cannot escape? Suppose you kill Claudius (your own father) in “revenge.” It is useless, unless you kill yourself too, for as his son, you too are Claudius. 

It is this unappetizing scenario which is the “objective correlative” for which Eliot (and Knight) searched in vain. And it is this scenario which explains as no other reading does why Hamlet falls into the madness that consumes him. His mind is henceforth wrapped in a nueé ardente which he can neither grasp nor escape.

If we now revert to the question of the original poetic experience, the “burning core” at the heart of the wheel of fire, we can see that it is not death. The idea of death is a mere side effect, an escape valve that could perhaps relieve the tormented mind of a heroic young man who has been cast down from clouds to clods. He languishes in the pit of despair until the very end when he encounters the laughter of Yorick, the companion and muse of his youthful innocence. There is a theme, then, in Hamlet, one which is fully capable of resolving his enigma and explaining why it is that 99.999 percent of viewers and readers do not come to the negative conclusions of G. Wilson Knight about this character. That theme is: ALIENATION. Hamlet is not only altogether alienated, his predicament is far worse. Edmond and Don John, for example, are bastards and know it. Their knowing resentments spill over into schemes, plots and devices borne of disaffection. And Wilson Knight has no trouble likening Prince Hamlet to such villains. The difference is Hamlet cannot thrust his illegitimacy into center stage in his mind. Edmond suffers simple alienation, and so chooses the path of vengeful self-advancement. But Hamlet is cursed with a genuine nobility of spirit with roots unwittingly embedded in ordure. He cannot view himself squarely and deliberately, any more that Brutus could. Though circumstances strongly suggest that he is not who he thinks he is, he flees in the opposite direction, and his noble mind falls into delirium.   

If we look at the roster of epithets used by Wilson Knight to castigate Hamlet, we notice that some of them are drawn from the vocabulary of ethics and morality, and others are medical terms. Hamlet is “evil” and “cynical” but he is also “diseased” and “poisoned.” These two sets of predicates clash with one another, and allow us to observe the confusion in the mind of the Prince of Denmark and also in his critic. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that prior to learning that he was being rejected as heir to the Danish throne and witness to the union of Gertrude and Claudius that he suffered the harrowing self-doubts he exhibits as the curtain rises. His psyche has suffered a tremendous blow and is plainly traumatized. This is the root of his partial paralysis. But human beings are not usually condemned for the injuries they have suffered, unless they have through negligence or intentional misdeeds brought those injuries on themselves. We do not blame King Hamlet for having been poisoned by his malignant brother. How then shall we blame Lord Hamlet for the poisoning of his mind? Suppose for the sake of argument that Hamlet is the biological son of Claudius but has always been treated as the son of King Hamlet. On the basis of the impediment of illegitimacy he is suddenly rejected as a candidate for Kingship, though Claudius assures him he will accede to the throne after the death of the new king. Somewhere in the deeper regions of his mind he senses that he is not the son of the man he loved and admired but rather the offspring of the smiling villain he despises and is commanded to murder. These facts are too ugly and destructive of his identity to be consciously acknowledged. He collapses mentally, the victim of psychological trauma, and consequently loses his fiancée on whom he depended for emotional support. Will it then be appropriate to employ the language of judgment and condemn such a one as “evil,” “cruel” and “cynical”? Other than G. Wilson Knight, it is hard to think of any other serious reader of Shakespeare who treats Hamlet in this demeaning manner. His “child-like faith in the theatre” somehow deserted him when it was most needed. In fact, Knight himself was sufficiently troubled by his handling of “the embassy of death” that years later he penned another long piece in 1947 to modify his argument, assimilating Hamlet to Nietzsche, much as Jonathan Dollimore would do later. (Knight, 338-366) But he never recanted his arguments and remained firmly committed to his moral opposition to Prince Hamlet.

Conclusion

In so doing, this critic failed, and failed tragically. Having elaborated a method of literary interpretation which was available to put Hamlet’s antic disposition in proper context, Wilson Knight might have found his way out of his overreaction to Hamlet’s “unhappy consciousness” (to borrow a phrase from Hegel’s Phenomenology). He might have read the play closely enough to see that once Hamlet returns home and finds his legitimate expectations defeated, he is driven to the brink of acknowledging that it is his illegitimacy that is the impediment, and that it was Gertrude’s indiscretion which gave rise to her son’s existential dilemma. Knight betrays the very insight that could have conveyed him to the heart of the wheel of fire, where he would have encountered Hamlet’s burning soul. Instead, he stumbled, and his raid on Elsinore went down in flames. 

WORKS CITED:

F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Oxford University Press, 1893, 1930.
G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, Routledge, 1989.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, Ox Bow Press, 1979.
Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses, University of California Press, 1961.
William Shakespeare The Complete Works, 2d ed., G. Taylor and S. Wells, eds., Oxford, 2005.

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David P. Gontar’s latest book is Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays, New English Review Press, 2013.

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