Shakespeare’s Double Play - New English Review

by David P. Gontar (October 2014)

In which we hoist a dram of eale with Messrs. Frank Kermode and Ted Hughes, and Prof. J.E.G. Dixon joins in.

This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So, oft it chances in particular men
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them –
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners – that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,
His virtues else be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance over-daub
To his own scandal.
(Q2, I.4 (I. 18. I))

I. Hamlet’s Secret Identity

[Hamlet] may be thought to have himself in mind, not as a drunkard, of course, but perhaps as a melancholic. He is saying something obliquely about himself in the context of a generalization about human character . . . (Kermode, 107, emphases added)

What is this play into which we march so boldly but a hall of mirrors, a respiring dream with which we so merge with the protagonist that we become afflicted by his complexes and limitations? After all, you can’t have it both ways. Fail to identify with the protagonist and it’s impossible to appreciate and understand him. But just to the extent I do identify with him, his symptoms become mine, and the objectivity necessary to know him dispassionately or scientifically evaporates. We are stunned. We cannot perceive his blindness because we ourselves have a blind spot as voracious as any black hole in space. In attending to this play, then, we do not read “about” Hamlet, but enter body and soul into his dream of life with him. There is thus no way to make our entrance into Hamlet’s cosmos without becoming entranced. Can we awaken in the midst of his reverie without bursting its seams?

The proof of our utter somnolence and oneiric delusion is the astounding fact that, although all the information we require is in plain sight, after 400 toilsome years, what lies at the root of Hamlet’s psyche remains clouded. So tainted are we by Hamlet’s pathology that we cannot connect the dots.

Take Frank Kermode as an example. What’s on his radar?

The dram of eale speech is Hamlet’s personal confession. (Kermode, 107)
It is about Hamlet himself. (Kermode, 107)
The dram of eale is a fundamental defect, the moral correlative of “birth.” (line 9)
It so undermines the virtues of its host that it causes a “scandal.” (line 22)
The drinking analogy is suggestive of a seminal substance taken within the body so as to cause corruption. (line 19)
It is “obvious” that at work in the language of Hamlet are the topics of adultery and incest.(Kermode, 101)
These ideas are related to questions of personal or dual identity. (Kermode, 101)
When we are introduced to Prince Hamlet, his mood is strongly dysthymic. Particularly disturbing to him is the habit of Claudius of referring to him as “my cousin . . . and my son.” (Kermode, 103)
The first words Hamlet speaks, “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” are a bitter retort to Claudius’s reference to Hamlet as “my son.” (Kermode, 103)
Hamlet refers to Claudius as “my uncle-father.” (Kermode, 112)
Hamlet is revolted and disgusted with incest. (Kermode, 112)
As everyone knows, Gertrude and Claudius marry soon after the coronation.
Hamlet is passed over for the Danish throne.
Prince Hamlet seems to have a great fear of women because of the risk of being cuckolded by them. (Kermode, 115-116)

Can these jig saw fragments be assembled in such a way that we begin to discern at least in outline what Hamlet’s problem is? Can we detect the elephant which is not only in the room but treading on our toes?

Let’s see.

Hasty marriage implies prior acquaintance. We have no way of knowing how long Gertrude and Claudius have known one another, and there is certainly a dramatic insinuation that King Hamlet has been cuckolded. As the dram of eale is potable, it connotes sexual deliquescence. Exchanging and internalizing of bodily fluids would have been involved in any such amatory enterprise and could easily have led to pregnancy and birth. These were the days before birth control and abortion. Any child born of such an extramarital affair would be the product of adultery and incest. Under those circumstances the reference of Claudius to Hamlet as “my son” would gain in sense, as would Hamlet’s reference to Claudius as my “uncle-father.” Conceiving of Hamlet as an incestuous bastard would entail an “unkindness” on his parents’ parts. Were he the son of Claudius, Hamlet would be the object of a great scandal, explaining why his actual identity is never vouchsafed to him by his mother or anyone else. In practical terms, Hamlet would be left with a dual identity, at once the son of King Hamlet the Dane and simultaneously the son of Claudius! There would then be excellent reason for him to be disgusted with his mother, not, weakly, on account of free-floating misogyny, but directly, because her infidelity brought him into this condition of low repute. And Hamlet’s genealogical corruption would render him ineligible to succeed King Hamlet the Dane, hence explaining why he is passed over for the Danish throne at the outset of the play. These interlocking implications achieve an extraordinarily high degree of coherence and explanatory value. It is that coherence and heuristic potency which have yet to be addressed by conventionally minded readers.

No doubt all of this can be discussed and even challenged, but the fact that these implications are never confronted so as to bring the issue up for examination strongly suggests that the brains of generations of readers have been short-circuited. Myopic literary criticism recapitulates the neurotic rationalizations and prevarications of the lead character. As good exegetes, we would certainly need to rule out the possibility that Hamlet is an incestuous bastard. But unless those terms were included in a differential diagnosis they could not be rationally set aside. The condition precedent to insight is raising the right question. To do so we must emerge from our mental fog. What we are constrained to acknowledge at last, therefore, is the existence of a mass parapraxis whose astonishing longevity implies that this play has never been read objectively but always in a state akin to hypnotic trance. Like his predecessors, Frank Kermode had in his possession every scrap of data needed to grasp the crux of Prince Hamlet’s malaise. He knows quite well that Hamlet’s emotional breakdown commences prior to the encounter with the ghost. Yet this crucial fact is glossed as complacently as if we were all high school sophomores.

We . . . hear Hamlet’s first soliloquy well before Hamlet has understood that he is to be forced into the role of avenger, although he already hates his life because of his mother’s too hasty marriage to a man he despises, his false father. (Kermode, 104)

Really?

Hence with his return to Elsinore, Hamlet’s existence becomes a prison. (II, ii, 246) It is a nightmare, a condition too awful to be true. It is a “bad dream.” (II, ii, 256-267) And it is that bad dream into which we are flung, like the discombobulated visitors to Prospero’s magic isle.

We are blinded by hubris. Paul de Man points out that each critic is afflicted by his own blind spot. The greater our insight, the more we inevitably overlook. It seems too that there is something infectious about this blindness, because there is an “aspect of literary language [which] causes blindness in those who come into close contact with it.” (de Man, 106)

The insight exists only for a reader in the privileged position of being able to observe blindness as a phenomenon in its own right – the question of his own blindness being one which he is by definition incompetent to ask . . . . He has to undo the explicit results of a vision that is able to move toward the light only because, being already blind, it does not have to fear the power of this light. But the vision is unable to report correctly what it has perceived in the course of its journey. To write critically about critics thus becomes a way to reflect on the paradoxical effectiveness of a blinded vision that has to be rectified my means of insights that it unwittingly provides. (de Man, 106) [Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, by Paul de Man, University of Minnesota Press, 2d ed., 1983]

Reading and criticism have been dim for the past four centuries as a consequence of Hamlet’s own inability to see himself. As he fears unconsciously to see himself as a possible son of his supposed uncle, and remains in flight therefrom, so it falls out that everyone who follows his footsteps, entering into his language and spirit, embraces to an indeterminate extent the prince’s neurosis. Everything is taken at face value. Hamlet is Hamlet. Who would quibble over that? But if, as Harold Bloom contends, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is actually an extended poem, that is, a constellation of shifting metaphors afloat on the tides of language, it can never be explicated in literal terms. The son of the late King Hamlet the Dane casts a long shadow as the son of the King’s brother. Modern criticism, for all its vaunted sophistication, misses that shadow.

But while we can acknowledge esoterically that Hamlet is none other than the son of Claudius (thus neatly accounting for why he cannot rush to his revenge), at the same time we cannot just dismiss the exoteric reading which, with some warrant, treats Hamlet as the son of King Hamlet the Dane. (Gontar, 406) Hamlet is the literary character par excellence, pointing like the Cheshire cat in opposed directions. He will not be reduced to a monocular apparition, a one-dimensional man.

This pregnant line of inquiry is extended and reinforced if we recall Hans Holbein the Younger’s renowned 1533 English portrait The Ambassadors fashioned during the later reign of King Henry VIII. The reader will recall this painting, featuring an anamorphic skull visible only at an awkward angle. Though it’s hard to imagine how a country bumpkin such as William of Stratford might ever have seen such a masterpiece, Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, Great Lord Chamberlain, and most likely a grandson of Henry VIII through Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, would have long been familiar with this remarkable tour-de-force depicting George de Selve, Bishop of Lauvar, (1508-1541) and the esteemed French envoy Jean de Dinteville (1504-1555). The hypothesis that Shakespeare’s Cornelius and Voltemand are patterned after Holbein’s Dinteville and Selve should not be peremptorily dismissed. For it may well be that Holbein’s ghostly skull is the forebear of Hamlet’s spectral self and graveyard skull. The analogy is plain: as Holbein situates the spectral skull between the pillar-like figures of two French nobles, so Shakespeare gives us a divided Prince Hamlet suggestive of being simultaneously the son of Hamlet, Sr. on the one hand and Prince Claudius on the other. Lodged between these two father figures is the ghostly Prince Hamlet, exhibiting Janus-faced features which may not be resolved. Just as we cannot see Holbein’s anamorphic skull unless we view the painting at an odd angle, so we cannot see Hamlet’s ghost-like second self unless we step back from the action and observe the play from a different perspective, one in which we refrain from taking the narrative as it appears in plot summaries. When we begin to interrogate the play as it interrogates itself, Hamlet’s second self suddenly materializes before us. Negative capability is all.

What role does the dram of eale play in all this? It is nothing less than a symptom of a “mind diseased.” (Macbeth, V, iv, 42) The dram of eale soliloquy dramatically demonstrates that, prior to visiting his supposed father’s spirit and learning of the murder, Hamlet is not only suffering depression but has reflected on his dysthymic mood, and located its source in a kind of physical and metaphysical poison which taints him at the heart’s core. Though his severe father complex prevents him from a clear idea of his origins, like a good shaman Prince Hamlet uses figurative language whose particular terms, when extracted and set in order, point unmistakably in the direction of his mother’s extramarital affair and pregnancy at the hands of Claudius. Hamlet is thus despoiled ab ovum. He has two fathers. He knows and knows not. That is his tragedy and his glory.

We turn now to Shakespeare’s use of language to see how that reinforces Hamlet’s dual identity.

II. Shakespeare’s Double Play

Frank Kermode

Looking back once more at the dram of eale speech, we notice it features a number of conjunctive locutions. “East and west,” “pith and marrow of our attribute,” “pales and forts of reason,” and “nature’s livery or fortune’s star,” constitute a set of paired phrases typical of Shakespeare’s style, especially, claims Kermode, in Hamlet. This recourse to phrasal coupling has been taken up by Ted Hughes in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992), and more recently by Frank Kermode in Shakespeare’s Language (2000). Both focus on the way in which conjunctive language is related to and expressive of theme and action in the plays and poems. As we began with Kermode’s analysis of the text, we will continue with that, and then have a look at Ted Hughes.

Early on, Kermode is struck by the prominence of duality in the play’s verbiage.

our loves, fitting our duty.” (Kermode, 100, emphases in original)

The language of Hamlet continually varies in this and similar ways. It is dominated to an extent without parallel in the canon by one particular rhetorical device: it is obsessed with doubles of all kinds, and notably by its use of the figure known as hendiadys [hen.d?.?.d?s]. This means, literally, one-through-two, and can be illustrated by some common expressions such as “law and order” or “house and home.” (Kermode, 100-101, emphasis and pronunciation added)

The play has many doublings, but those which exhibit hendiadys are marked by identifiable tension or strain, as if the parts were related in some not perfectly evident way. (Kermode, 101, emphasis added)

The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language puts the meaning of ‘hendiadys’ this way: “A figure of speech in which two words connected by a conjunction are used to express a single notion that would normally be expressed by an adjective and a substantive, such as grace and favor instead of gracious favor.” (American Heritage, 819)

Kermode continues as follows.

It would be perhaps too much to claim that a study of this device can take us to the heart of the play . . . My purpose in drawing attention to hendiadys is largely to show that in the rhetoric of Hamlet there may be a strain, virtually unnoticed, of a kind of compulsion that reflects the great and obvious topics, adultery and incest, deep preoccupations given external representation. These preoccupations seem to be related to a concern with questions of identity, sameness, and the union of separate selves – joined opposites . . . as in marriage and, in a pathologised form, incest. (Kermode, 101, emphasis added)

This exposition relating the congruent structures of Shakespeare’s dramatic language and the major themes of the play is nothing short of an epiphany. The conjunctive phrases mirror Hamlet’s divided identity, mired in incest and adultery. The “tension and strain” of hendiadys come to embody the tension and strain in Hamlet’s splintered psyche. The problem is that the oppositional elements noted by Kermode’s analysis (adultery, incest, identity, union of separate selves, et al.) only come cleanly into focus when we perceive Hamlet’s shadow self as son of Claudius. Note that the adultery and incest Kermode has in mind are exclusively functions of marriage to a deceased brother’s wife. That is ‘adultery’ in a weak sense of the term, based on the inference that, having become one flesh with her husband, mating with his surviving brother is consanguineous de jure and so proscribed. What are these two selves? Kermode isn’t very helpful on that one. But think about it. The Ghost calls his brother an “incestuous [and] adulterate beast.” (I, v, 42) As we have nothing in the text to demonstrate that Claudius engages in sexual relations with anyone other than Gertrude, the implication in accusing him of adultery is that Claudius’s affair with her began during her marriage to King Hamlet. Nothing rules that out, while cohesion with much in the play rules it in. Hamlet thus unconsciously fears that his mother had an adulterous, extra-marital liaison with Claudius, of which he, Hamlet, is the product. He is a legitimate son because he is born within the bounds of marriage, but illegitimate insofar as he is not his lawful father’s issue. As Hamlet the Dane’s child, he is putative heir to the throne of Denmark, but as the son of Claudius he cannot become king on the death of the reigning sovereign. Ironically, the “strain, virtually unnoticed,” is unnoticed by Kermode himself, that is, the tension between Hamlet’s two different progenitors and the Prince’s two selves that eventuate and square off against one another in the darkest recesses of his soul. This is Shakespeare’s double play.

A particularly illustrative linguistic doubling is observed by Kermode in the exchanges with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

Hamlet ends his interview with the spy-courtiers by mentioning that radical doublet “my uncle-father and aunt-mother,” which contains in little the whole charge of incest. Later (IV, iii, 49-52) he will call Claudius “mother,” disgusted at the idea that Claudius is of one flesh with Gertrude, as in a different sense he himself is. Here is an exquisitely horrible case of there being “division none,” [referring to The Phoenix and Turtle] now characterized not by happiness of true love but by its opposite, the disgustingness of incest. (Kermode, 112)

Consider “To be or not to be.” A fair interpretation of that most famous discourse is the acid test of any reading of Hamlet. What Kermode proffers on this score is wide of the mark. Remember that this critic begins by observing that in the dram of eale speech Hamlet isn’t talking about humanity but about himself. (Kermode, 107) But by the time we reach the soliloquy to end all soliloquies eight pages later, we learn just the opposite.

[O]ne thing is surely obvious: Hamlet is referring his own to a more general view of the human condition. . . . (Kermode, 115)

The soliloquy is “a way of considering the human condition more largely.” (Kermode, 115, emphases added). Would it not make more sense instead of creating a glaring contradiction to just admit that both speeches have general and personal meaning and application?

2. Ted Hughes

Though unmentioned by Frank Kermode, perhaps the earliest scholar to seriously explore Shakespeare’s linguistic doubling was the Poet Laureate of England (1984-98), Ted Hughes (1930-1998). His Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being performs en passant a searching analysis of this trope, its structure and meaning. Like Kermode, Hughes is a traditionalist who attempts to press the juggernaut of Shakespearean poesy into the shallow and incommensurable straits of Stratfordian biography. (See, e.g., Hughes, 127, 134) But where Kermode identifies The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark as the summa of double epithet and hendiadys, Ted Hughes offers a developmental account of these devices whose apotheosis is not Hamlet but All’s Well That Ends Well. Where Kermode helpfully explains such replications as the “external representation” of Prince Hamlet’s two divergent personae, for Ted Hughes the purpose and significance of such poetic conjunctions are far broader and more polyvalent. He approaches Shakespeare as a systematic mythographer whose poems and plays are (excepting the histories) one and all celebratory variations on the bipartite divinity standing as the fountainhead of western culture. (Gontar, 161 ff.) Of course it isn’t possible to cover Hughes’ vast and intricate metaphysics and literary theology in a few pages. In what follows we will focus attention on the functional role played by the double epithet in Shakespeare, tracing Hughes’ exposition from Titus Andronicus through the history plays (which employ the locution in question absent the mythology), to the crescendo in All’s Well, and then on to Hamlet. We will find that although neither Kermode nor Hughes ever grasped the author’s (or Hamlet’s) actual or full identity, and could not make valid textual or historical correlation with the polarities of the double epithet, both these thinkers shed light on Shakespeare’s utilization of this conceit, and, ironically, they form a brace of analysts whose work recapitulates the double epithet they took up individually.

Although he concedes that Shakespeare had some recourse to paired epithets prior to Hamlet, Frank Kermode sees that tragedy as the grand finale of doubling. (Kermode, 100) In this it is “without parallel in the canon.” (Kermode, 100) Yet no effort is made in Shakespeare’s Language to demonstrate the truth of this claim or assess the role of dual phrasing in the works which precede (or follow) Hamlet.

Ted Hughes, on the other hand, tells us that “something like [the doubling in Hamlet] “occurs from quite early on.” (Hughes, 132) He begins with a citation from the early Titus Andronicus.

TAMORA

They told me, here, at the dead time of night,

A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes,

Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins,

Would make such fearful and confused cries,

As any mortal body hearing it

Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly.

(II, iii, 99-104, emphasis added)

Though this seems innocent and straightforward enough, the conjunct in the fourth line is full of strain and tension, strain and tension presaging the scene in which Bassanius is slain and Lavinia raped and disfigured. Under Ted Hughes’ microscope a seemingly inert conjunct is revealed in startling motion.

participle ‘confused’ activates its passive sense. The line then creates a dramatic scene, in which fiends, snakes, toads and urchins are making noises so frightful that they themselves are terrified by them and so crying worse – in a howl-back amplification of their own cries, an especially diabolical idea of infinite terror in a dark wood: existence terrified by its own existence. (Hughes, 133)

Hughes might easily have gone into greater detail to expose the power of Shakespeare’s conceit here. For example, this speech of Tamora stands diametrically opposed to her seductive invitation to Aaron given moments before in which this very part of the forest is described as though it were an earthly paradise where snakes make no frightful noises in a dank pit of doom but “[lie] roll?d in the cheerful sun.” (II, iii, 13) Tamora’s contradictory characterization of this glade is therefore itself “fearful and confused.” Because of the ambiguity in this locution, it suggests in miniature the disposition of the parties, Tamora and her sons “fearful” and Lavinia “confused.” On the other hand, insofar as the two descriptive terms amount to the same thing, they reflect the villainous siblings, Chiron and Demetrius, who murder Bassanius and pillage Lavinia. When these two barbarians are in turn executed by Titus, they also utter their own fearful and confused cries.

Hughes moves now to the more mature Shakespeare of the history plays. Four illustrations are given.

“A beauty-waning and distressed widow” (R3, III, vii, 184)
“Seduc’d the pitch and height of his degree” (R3, III, vii, 187)
“Be judg’d by subject and inferior breath” (R2, iv, 128)
“The tediousness and process of my travel” (R2, II, iii, 12)

(Hughes, 134)

However, we have to do here with no literary quirk. In order to help us to grasp the rich and full meaning of what is unfolding, Hughes interrupts his technical treatment of double epithet to set this locution in social and political context. It is nothing less, he says, than “a sort of regal gesture” or a “small grand moment.” (Hughes, 134) That is, as we have long suspected, the language of Shakespeare is the idealized language of the court, the monarch being always the prototypical speaker. So far, so good. But at this point Hughes descends into Stratfordian bathos, which we reproduce here for the reader’s edification.

There is little doubt that Shakespeare delighted in ‘stateliness’ – to the point of infatuation. The huge proportion of his work devoted to kings and their courts being ‘stately’ and ‘ceremonious’ was satisfying a powerful hunger. It touched those ‘strong shudders’ and ‘heavenly agues’ that stirred in the base of his spine. His addiction to the ‘grand’ was like a permanent psychological pressure. It is one aspect of his sheer sense of theatre, of what suddenly hushes the groundlings and makes the gods listen, but was no small part of the tremendous sense of ‘things high and working, full of state and woe’ for which he was able eventually to create a whole new kind of drama. These lines [e.g., 1-4 above] speak directly for that ear. (Hughes, 134)

There is nothing objectionable in placing the Shakespearean conceit in its early modern social setting. The foregoing is admirable. But Hughes’ Startfordian presuppositions make of our poet a grotesque snob, toadying up to elites whose ranks he would give his own mellifluous tongue to invade. Is Shakespeare to be viewed as Malvolio? (See, Gontar, 121 ff.) There is no evidence that the author of the plays was “addicted” to sycophancy, or given to “low-crooked curtsies and base spaniel fawning.” (Julius Caesar, III, i, 43) On the contrary. The author of these poems and plays was opposed to snobbery with every fiber of his being. Rather than portray such a genius and teacher of humanity as a hopeless lick-spittle and hypocrite, it would obviously be more congenial and economical to view the proclivity to stately and grand language not as an affectation of a bizarrely gifted groundling but as the natural self-expression of an artistic lord. Wouldn’t that be William of Ockham’s (1285-1349) view of the dispute?

At any rate, as we study Hughes’ painstaking analysis we do begin to see that the conjoined antecedent and consequent nouns and adjectives differ in connotation and linguistic origin and point of view. Usually it is the antecedent which carries the loftier tone. Thus:

threat into hovering balance with ‘height’ as a dignity – a fateful uncertainty everywhere in these plays about pathological kings. (Hughes, 135)

LEONATO

Neighbors, you are tedious.

DOGBERRY

It pleases your worship to say so, but we are
the poor Duke’s officers. But truly, for mine own part,
if I were as tedious as a king I could find it in my heart
to bestow it all on your worship.

LEONATO

All your tediousness on me, ah?
(Much Ado About Nothing, III, v, 17-22)

Hughes’ third stage of epithetical pairing is consistent with the earlier ones, but takes an additional step to reach what he dubs “translation.” This occurs when Shakespeare confronts the challenge of communicating dramatically with both the noble theatre patrons, eager for every new and recondite word or phrase, and the groundlings, who also covet such fancies, yet hardly know what to make of them (as the Dogberry incident above shows). Shakespeare’s stage gambit is to toss to the lords and educated patrons the unusual vocabulary term as the antecedent, to be followed consequently by the prosaic ‘translation’ or rough synonym for the thrill of the commons. Once more, Hughes portrays Shakespeare as a learned fool such as the Pedant in Love’s Labour’s Lost, that is, a semi-educated and pompous word addict who stumbles into literary greatness in the manner of Christopher Sly. (The Taming of the Shrew, Induction 1) “One supposes,” speculates Hughes glibly, “words simply stuck to him, like tunes to an Irish piper.” (Hughes, 138) “Supposes,” indeed. Why suppose any such thing? Just as there is no reason to “suppose” that Shakespeare was a snob obsessed with mimicking the English nobility, by the same token there is no reason to “suppose” that Shakespeare’s massive vocabulary was anything other than what large vocabularies usually are, the natural product of wide reading, excellent breeding, and good taste. Whatever else he may have been, the author of the quartos, sonnets, long poems and First Folio was a supremely educated polymath of the highest order. He was able to give the nobility the words after which they hankered not because he was an idiot savant (as Hughes ‘supposes’) but because he was a lord par excellence, a teacher’s teacher.

Hughes misses the obvious. Though it’s possible to characterize Shakespeare’s technique of doubling epithets as a pandering to the patricians and a patronizing of the poor, in the end such a description lacks concreteness. History tells a story of more illuminating and efficacious events. After the battle of Hastings in 1066 A.D., William the Bastard and his Norman compeers had a stranglehold on England, evicting the English nobility who were supplanted by Norman French aristocrats. By edict of William, the official language of Britain now became French. Old English went underground along with pagan customs, culture and religion. For many years there were then two languages in England, and the rustic simplicities of Anglo-Saxon were the object of Norman apprehension, scorn and derision. This linguistic alienation then began to slowly ebb in scope and force, as a close reading of Chaucer will show. Once again English kings took up the native tongue, though it was heavily Gallicized. The “small grand moment” mentioned by Ted Hughes was the Shakespearean heyday during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor. All looked back proudly to the English wars against the French during the reigns of Kings Henry V, VI and VIII. Meanwhile it often seemed to the French that in combating the English they were in fact seeking to destroy their cousins.

DAUPHIN

O Dieu vivant! Shall a few sprays of us
The emptying of our father’s luxury,
Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,
Spirit up so suddenly into the clouds
And over-look their grafters?

BOURBON

Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!
Mort de ma vie, if they march along
Unfought withal, but I will sell my dukedom
To buy a slobb’ry and a dirty farm,
In that nook-shotten isle of Albion.
(King Henry V, III, iii, 5-14)

Ted Hughes deserves credit for drawing our attention to a commonly overlooked detail in this vast panorama: the employment of the double epithet in Shakespeare’s plays. Across the conjunctive plain two mighty hosts confront one another and clash, as do subject and predicate via the copula. The result is a chain of metaphor strong enough to bind a nation together at the very instant of its ascendancy. Thenceforward what was to lie at the heart of the English people was poetry, a poetry capable of ratifying and sustaining heroism in a manner not seen since Homer and Vergil. Though he doesn’t quite rise to the occasion, we can detect Hughes’ awareness that more was going on in the double epithet than the elaboration of poetic technique.

With a mediumistic author such as Shakespeare, whose compelling theme happened to be an extreme case of the common psychic conflict, the commercial dilemma became a national opportunity. A true ‘language of the common bond’ in drama, at every level of theme, action and speech, became essential. And, in finding it, Shakespeare invented, as if incidentally and inadvertently, a new kind of drama and a new poetic vernacular. (Hughes, 140)

That, “new poetic vernacular” is, of course, the English language. What occurred in Shakespeare was indeed “the intermarriage of two different linguistic stocks,” as Hughes says. (Hughes, 149) But his characterization of those opposing partners as merely “high” and “low” is too abstract, and ignores the relations of language to nationality and culture. Hughes’ demonstration of Shakespeare’s employment of double epithet in All’s Well That Ends Well is masterful, however, and were there sufficient time and patience we might relish his illuminating exposition of “on the catastrophe and heel of pastime,” (142) and “this captious and intenible sieve,” (149).

Those pleasant tasks are left for the reader. For we must turn to Hughes’ reading of Hamlet. Curiously, while Frank Kermode discovers the most consistent usage of doubling language in Hamlet, Ted Hughes finds almost nothing of that. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune sail into the sea of troubles with hardly a bubble of concern. (Hughes, 145) Hughes’ merit in explicating Hamlet is that he recognizes the essentially problematic character of the play. He is thus keenly aware of Eliot’s critique, and takes his objections seriously.

Eliot pointed out that Hamlet, as a work of art, seems to struggle with a mass of highly pressurized, obscure material that cannot be dragged into the light, as if plot and characters were somehow inadequate to express what Hamlet, and behind Hamlet, Shakespeare, seem to be aware of and involved with. (Hughes, 235)

The Prince’s murder of Claudius becomes a replay of Claudius’s Murder of King Hamlet, but a more complicated example of the Type. In this action one catches sight of the weird perpetuum mobile that spins the whole drama into a vertiginous other dimension. When King Hamlet’s ghost rises out of Purgatory . . . Hamlet sees, as in a mirror, an image of his own mythic self. He sees himself, that is, as his mother’s consort, punished for that incestuous crime by death and now by Purgatory. In the same way he sees Claudius as another image of his own mythic self. In this case he is again his mother’s consort, not yet punished, but definitely, inevitably to be punished, and to be punished by him, Prince Hamlet. But this punishment, of himself as Claudius, by himself, will make his mythic life a reality. (Hughes, 237)

There follow three mentions by Hughes of the “something tortuously inexpressible” (238-239), the phrase first used by Eliot to identify and explain the hero’s darkness and ultimate failure as a literary character for us. We just don’t understand him. That is, we don’t understand him so long as we do not recognize that he is just as much the son of Claudius as he is of Hamlet the Dane. Hughes embraces Eliot’s thesis that the play is a failure on account of its lacking an objective correlative, that is, a rationale for Hamlet’s hyperbolic rage at his mother. But a posteriori we know the play is anything but a failure, and that the adequate emotional correlative exists. Hughes tries to get around the dilemma by suggesting that Hamlet’s hidden self is merely symbolic or mythical, but that would not be sufficient to account for the self-loathing that runs through the action like a radioactive current. The play quite obviously is not about Hamlet’s hate for Claudius but about the hate he cultivates for himself. Remember that Claudius, too, hates himself. (III, iii, 36-72) The idea that Hamlet hates himself because he can’t kill Claudius founders on the plain fact that Hamlet hates himself before he knows anything of the murder and before he swears to take revenge. In fact, Hamlet is so busy hating himself that he is incapacitated and cannot perform the deed he is sworn to do. Killing Claudius will in fact be a useless act for it will not kill off the Claudius inside of Hamlet. These tragic twins must die together.

III. Conclusion

In the dram of eale speech, in which Hamlet dwells on his own corruption, we find a veritable eruption of doubles, including “east and west,” “traduced and taxed of other nations,” “pith and marrow of our attribute,” “the pales and forts of reason,” and “nature’s livery or fortune’s star.” In light of all that has been found in this study, we should now be in a position to roughly “translate” the dram of eale speech.

There is something in our natures (especially my own nature)
which saps the pith and marrow of my achievements, (that is,
the substance of what I am). When I was born there was
already something inside me that ruined me and my
virtues, even though I did not choose to be born as this
person. This “vicious mole of nature” has destroyed my reason,
and reduces me from a free and self-determining man to
a plaything of fate. Whatever spawned me was a dab of evil that
will eventually make me an object of scandal and derision.

What distinguishes this taint from the doctrine of original sin is that the latter is a spiritual legacy of Adam’s fall, whereas what Hamlet is talking about is an errant insemination which has left him as a clone of a venal and callow rogue of the type which has always triggered his disgust and revulsion. The corruption then is not cosmetic or symbolic, but resident in the “pith and marrow” of this sad Prince’s very bones. Can there be a valid reading of this central document of western culture which ignores these factors? Consider that 99% of the time, Hamlet is mechanically trotted out as a humdrum tale of an overly sensitive youth so lost in internal debate that he cannot fulfill his promise to his father’s tormented spirit to avenge his murder at the hands of his brother. What is there about human beings that allows them to prefer blindness to insight and cleave to truism instead of truth, unless some vicious mole of nature hath all their noble substance over-daubed to their own scandal? Is being English an intellectual liability? Falstaff seems to hint at that when he observes that “it was alway[s] yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.” (King Henry IV, Part Two, I, ii, 15-17) Isn’t that what they have done to their black prince? “Ay, it is common,” we hear a ghostly voice respond. (I, ii, 74)

POSTSCRIPT

We are all grateful to Professor J.E.G. Dixon for his recent appraisal in New English Review of Hamlet Made Simple. Quite properly he recognizes that this essay is not a cavalcade of opinion, but a sustained argument calling for an alternate reading of our most famous work of literature. In the spirit of rational discourse Prof. Dixon tenders a rebuttal. That is commendable. In making counter-argument he shows respect for a colleague and evinces a willingness to roll up his sleeves and engage in the hard work of criticism.

Unfortunately, his remarks are not consistent with those intentions. Not only are the recent contributions of post-structuralism, cultural and historical materialism ignored, but so is the classical interpretive tradition going back to A.C. Bradley. So far as can be ascertained, Professor Dixon asks us to embrace Hamlet as a stately tableau of the moral life and its foibles. A noble prince learns of his royal father’s murder by his uncle, witnesses that uncle’s licentious marriage to his widowed mother, swears to his beloved father’s spirit to take swift revenge, but in view of rarified ethical considerations, loses his sanity and thus cannot destroy the guilty party. Thus he perishes. A pity. This is how the Germans looked at Shakespeare in the early 19^th century.

As the play lacks a gnomic dimension, theory has no business raising its ugly head. Though it is renowned as the Question Incarnate, purging hearts and minds, catching the audience in its evasions and lurking anxieties, Professor Dixon seems averse to the ensuing wonder. As there is for him nothing particularly special or provocative about it, attempts at searching exegesis are viewed with suspicion. His withers are unwrung. We have the sort of impression of the tragedy we might get from a review by Polonius. After all, he was an experienced thespian. (III, ii, 94-102)

Portraying Hamlet’s purposes as quaintly moral not only flies in the face of the hero’s personality, creating a wooden, one dimensional hero, an eloquent automaton, it also fails to take into account the deliverances of modern criticism. G. Wilson Knight, for example, famously devotes hundreds of pages to showing that Prince Hamlet is evil incarnate. That’s the opposite of moral. One might disagree, but given the enormous prestige and influence of Wilson Knight, before bruiting about that Hamlet is a saint one would surely want to deal with the very thorough and persuasive argument of that highly regarded Shakespeare scholar. T.S. Eliot, one of the preeminent critics of the twentieth century, contended with some warrant that Hamlet lacks dramatic ballast, and should be set down as an artistic failure. Professor Harold Bloom, one of our most distinguished critics today, suggested in his book on Hamlet that the Prince might be the son of Claudius. Thus, while we can admire Professor Dixon for his nerve in entering the lists, we search in vain for the foundation of his views. He gives no indication of being conversant with contemporary Shakespeare research and writes in a near vacuum. Where are the references to academic journals? Of his six footnotes only one is from a purely Shakespearean source. A.C. Bradley, Harold Goddard, Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt and dozens of other celebrated Shakespearean savants are completely disregarded, as though they were not germane for one advancing the idiosyncratic thesis that Hamlet is a morality play.

Failure to demonstrate acquaintance with classical Shakespeare criticism and contemporary studies inevitably calls into question one’s credentials and qualifications. Why not at least quote recognized experts for support? Shooting from the hip can hurt one’s foot. In fact, it’s embarrassing. Take the Ghost for example. Though quite an unsavory thing, Professor Dixon genuflects before “him” as a deus ex cathedra. The issue is whether it can be trusted or is more likely a deceiver. Most of the exhaustive expounding of the Ghost’s probity vel non in Hamlet Made Simple is omitted by our would-be critic, as though it had no application. Professor Dixon aims to rehabilitate the Ghost and relieve it of crimes of moral turpitude that would impugn its integrity. The task is a bootless enterprise. Casuistic subtlety is our tool of choice. If Claudius is a fiend, must his brother have been an angel? Professor Dixon thinks so.

This spectral authority tells us it is:

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.
(I, v, 10-13)

We also hear that it has been:

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled,
No reck’ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
(I, v, 76-79)

It is as clear as the nose on Bardolph’s face that this apparition is a venal entity with a rather distal relation to human values. Professor Dixon, however, playing the devil’s advocate, takes up the cudgels in its behalf. He questions whether its “foul crimes” actually belong to it. “Foul crimes,” says he, must “refer to others’ or another’s,” acts. Another’s? Are we being told that this individual (whatever “he” may be) must fry in deep fat until someone else’s “foul crimes” are burnt and purged away? This jarring contention emerges from a brand of theology Professor Dixon is keeping under his hat. At the very least, one would expect a reference to some knowledgeable person who defends such a wild contention, but all we have is Dixon’s ipse dixit. Those “foul crimes” are done in “my days of nature,” not someone else’s days. It is true that the Ghost’s misdeeds are subsequently referred to as “sin,” and “imperfections,” terms of lesser gravity. But that too is self-accusation. After all, we’re in Purgatory. Ordinarily, “crimes” could not be disposed of there, but these are crimes that can be “burnt and purged away.” At least that’s what the Ghost imparts, and who would know better than a refugee from Purgatory? One thing is beyond doubt: this particular Ghost is candidly self-accusatory, enough so that its testimony is a strike against its credibility. To rummage through the complete catalogue of its misdeeds to determine the precise measure of condign punishment to be meted out is quite unnecessary. Is it possible that in his career King Hamlet did a naughty deed to obtain the throne? Was he perhaps complicit in his spouse’s infidelity? What is there about him that would preclude the “sins” of which the Ghost proclaims him guilty?

While we are on the subject of “evidence,” a topic of some importance to Professor Dixon, what does he say to persuade us that he actually read the book in question? We see nothing but casual comment on the penultimate chapter. Does anyone do a book review on one chapter only? Recall that the review features a picture of the book cover. Doesn’t that illustration imply acquaintance with the book? Had the entire volume been perused he would have found important arguments buttressing the thesis of Chapter 18. Certainly we are all busy, and there is nothing wrong with scanning a single essay. But to launch into a critical book review for public consumption without having taken the measure of the entire volume is a departure from professional standards. For example, in Chapter 8 on Julius Caesar it was shown in painstaking detail what role was played in the psychology of Brutus in virtue of being the illegitimate son of Caesar. That filiation is nowhere stated in the extant script but is a central tenet of Plutarch, whose history Shakespeare knew and on whom he relies for nearly the entire tragedy. Brutus’s son-ship oozes out of every line though it is never expressly acknowledged. (Gontar, 139) Thus we have in Julius Caesar a play which can be read in the conventional way, as the story of a noble rebel taking extreme action in doubtful circumstances, or, more dramatically and sensibly, as a tragedy in which a bastard son rises up against his father the king. Sound familiar? This is the context in which we read Hamlet, a context of which Professor Dixon is apparently unaware. In short, either he read the whole book or he did not. If he didn’t read it, we can understand something of the cavalier and spotty manner of his review of Hamlet Made Simple, a review lacking in cogency and support. On the other hand, if he consumed the entire collection, why doesn’t he say so? Why are those relevant passages in other chapters providing information and grounds for the arguments in Chapter 18 altogether unmentioned? It’s hard to see how readers are to benefit from such circumlocution when what is needed is a rigorous explication de texte.

It is axiomatic that the test and duty of any work of criticism is whether it matches or exceeds the quality of its object. That duty is flouted by off-the-cuff jottings. It may even be doubted whether the reviewer actually inspected the entirety of the Chapter reviewed: “Hamlet Made Simple.” Though he mocks the title, its Kierkegaardian irony is totally lost on him. The play fairly bristles with subtlety and complexity. Chapter 18 aims not at turning this tragedy into a fool’s paradise, but at resolving its several aporia through an adroit paradigm shift. Finding no aporia, Professor Dixon charges at the fluttering cape to refute the ridiculous proposition that Prince Hamlet is not the son of the late king but rather the son of Claudius. Sorry, but that is not the thesis or conclusion of either the title essay or the book. Prince Hamlet cannot have been the son of the late king or the new one for the obvious reason that Shakespeare’s play is a work of fiction, not a news story. Yes, there may be historically antecedent events, but those are lost in the mists of time, and are far from being identical with the characters and events in this early modern play. This is a work of imagination. As such, it is absurd to claim that one character must be the biological son of another, a gross category error. No one is going to submit to a DNA paternity test. The thesis of Chapter 18 is not that Prince Hamlet “is” the son of Claudius and “is not” the son of King Hamlet the Dane, but that the character of the Prince in the play is tantalizingly ambiguous and can and should be variously understood. That is the “strain and tension” we discussed above in “Shakespeare’s Double Play.” The conventional reading requires revision. But that revision should not and will not be reduced to the ludicrous metaphysical proposition that Hamlet “is” the son of Claudius. In the reviewed essay we find these words:

Do we know with apodictic certainty that Prince Hamlet “is” the son of Claudius? God forbid. Hamlet is a poem, not a Euclidean deduction. As Aristotle taught, it is the mark of an educated person to demand only that rigor of proof suitable for a given context. But once the shadow is exposed, it cannot be swept away. There is nowhere to hide. Hamlet can never be the same. In Wittgenstein’s picture, when the rabbit turns into a duck, the rabbit does not hop off, stage left, to oblivion. It comes back to haunt us. (Gontar, 406)

Again we face a grim dilemma. Either Professor Dixon read the entirety of Chapter 18 or he did not. If he didn’t read that essay in punctilious detail, and neglected to notice the paragraph above disclaiming the simplistic thesis that Hamlet is really the son of Claudius, this review violates academic protocols, recklessly giving the public the impression that Hamlet Made Simple is without merit on the basis of incomplete reading (ignorance). If he did scan the whole chapter but merely forgot this passage and others, what can we do but humbly correct the record now and recommend that in the future Professor Dixon look more closely and take better notes?

But let’s be specific.

As though he had interviewed him on Youtube, Professor Dixon denies that Hamlet wished to inherit the crown. How can we be so sure? Because he doesn’t run off to Norway to join Fortinbras and return with an army a la Coriolanus? When indication of his perfectly normal ambition is presented (Hamlet complains he ‘lacks advancement’), it is brusquely swept away with equivocation and sophistry. But Ophelia tells us directly that Prince Hamlet was “th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,” (III, i, 155) meaning that everyone, including Hamlet, expected that he would one day assume the helm of state. Ophelia confirms independently Hamlet’s own pronouncement on the subject. That expectancy of state is rudely defeated when Hamlet on return to Elsinore discovers corpulent Claudius reclining comfortably in his throne. Implicit in that usurpation is an impediment which would bar the heir apparent from his seeming birthright: he is not the issue of the king. No amount of legerdemain can make Hamlet’s frustrated political aims disappear.

Professor Dixon observes that vengefully slaughtering Claudius is not a realistic plan inasmuch as it would be seen as a coup d’état on the part of Hamlet. This was already stated in Hamlet Made Simple. But Hamlet rashly swears to assassinate the king, and then falters, lacking the will to realize his destiny. Over the course of four centuries the world has not been able to account for this paralysis. That is what allows the Freudian theory to win adherents. But for the Freudians, Claudius is a mere symbol, a father figure. Much stronger is an intuitive sense based on his inability to gain the crown that Hamlet was actually sired by Claudius, and that to murder him is ironically to destroy his own progenitor.

What drives Hamlet ‘crazy’ can certainly be conceived as the realization that the murderer of his father has married his mother. But this conventional rationale founders as Hamlet is already severely mentally imbalanced (suicidal) before he learns of any murder. That is why the fallback position becomes that Hamlet is enraged by “incest.” But the words a man mutters to himself may not show his true feelings. And when we deceive ourselves we may also mislead others.

Professor Dixon, however, is unfazed by textual inconveniences. “When Hamlet returns home from Wittenberg,” he says, “he is immediately confronted by the Ghost of his father, King Hamlet, in that eerie and memorable scene in which the Ghost reveals . . . “ etc., etc. This would, of course, be a true statement if it weren’t an utter falsehood. It is reiterated in Hamlet Made Simple, in Shakespeare’s Double Play and in many related writings that well before “Hamlet Meets Ghost” the Prince is hysterical and suicidal. He is most certainly NOT “immediately confronted by the Ghost” on his return to Elsinore. Hamlet first appears in Elsinore in Act I, scene 2, but doesn’t even see this Ghost until the fourth scene of Act I. (I, iv, 20) There are no Ghostly words to Hamlet until Act I, scene 5. “Murder is not mentioned until I, v, 25. The term “immediately” is thus given a novel twist. Does the Ghost fetch the jolly Prince at the rail depot in the family station wagon and give him bad news on the drive to Elsinore?

Professor Dixon’s message is plain: the play is translucent. It presents no serious obstacles to honest and candid efforts at comprehension. It is rather like a dime store whodunnit whose loose ends are neatly tied up at the end. But dime store mysteries don’t endure 400 years. There is something about this multifaceted gem that eludes, baffles and rouses us, that makes debates like the present one spring up year after year. It is inexhaustible. We do not sit in judgment on it, as it takes our measure. In short, The Tragedy of Hamlet is positively problematic. It is safe to say that this is the verdict of literary history and criticism. It is therefore not the claim of Hamlet Made Simple that Shakespeare’s greatest drama is a stroll in the park, or that it can be finally resolved with the revelation that the Prince is Claudius’s son. On the contrary. Hamlet Made Simple is designed to survey the extraordinary depth of a play which so many try to squeeze into the confines of a book bag. There will always be folks like that, who find all they need to know in a Broadway Playbill.

Hamlet is something like trying to decide the meaning of life; everyone has his own opinion.” Dr. Dalrymple concludes:

Hamlet the character and Hamlet the play elucidate the inevitable and insoluble paradoxes of human existence, the very heart of our mystery, which no technical sophistication will ever pluck out: a mystery that explains why puzzlement at our own situation is the permanent condition of mankind. (Dalrymple, n.p.)

It follows that those who would treat this Hydra-headed work of art as an ordinary piece of entertainment are fundamentally misguided.

Professor Dixon has the audacity to contend that the finest scholars in the world are vexatious in their readings of Hamlet exclusively on account of preconceived ideas. All that is necessary to achieve perfect comprehension of this literary Minotaur is to shed our pet doctrines and ideologies and waltz into the text, where everything will be bathed in light. Would that it were so. Malheureusement, there’s naught in Hamlet that can be with a nimble galliard won. You cannot revel into insight there. (H5, I, ii, 251-253) Avoiding doctrinaire readings isn’t quite the same thing as avoiding theories and ideas necessary to make sense of the material. The risk here is anti-intellectualism, surely the wrong path when it comes to Shakespeare.

Here are some of the issues and attendant factors which make Hamlet an intractable mystery.

As we’ve repeated several times, at the outset of the play, before he meets the Ghost, Hamlet is suicidal. We see it in the first soliloquy. In the dram of eale speech, we learn that he feels infected with a sorrow he cannot explain or identify. No common sense posturing has ever resolved this enigma.
Why can’t Hamlet take his revenge and kill Claudius? The explanation that the Prince is struggling with moral convictions has hardly achieved a consensus amongst authorities. It is and will remain a bone of contention. But it may be granted that it’s a lot harder to kill the king if you feel in your bones that he’s your own dad. Hamlet shows no particular moral disposition and in fact behaves like a cad much of the time. He has a few kind words for Horatio, but threatens his friends with death early on (I, iv, 62), stabs to death an unidentified person behind a curtain, and treats just about everyone with contempt. There is precious little to show he is animated by anything we would regard as moral or ethical. He is fixated on a crude revenge he cannot accomplish. He hates himself for this. Is self-loathing moral?
Is Hamlet mad or does putting on ‘antic disposition’ mean he’s only pretending to be insane? Professor Dixon proposes that Hamlet is unhinged by the realization that his father’s murderer is now married to his mother. But Hamlet’s dementia is in full swing long before he has this information. He is in fact SUICIDAL before he meets the Ghost. (I, ii, 129 ff) The idea of Claudius being a murderer is an aggravating circumstance. And being called on to murder the murderer doesn’t make things any easier. Physicians and psychiatrists have wrangled about Hamlet’s madness, but none of them has based a diagnosis on the obvious possibility that Hamlet is sickened by the sudden discovery of Claudius as his father. Those medical disputes are of little value.
How does it happen in an English play that the only son of the King fails to inherit the throne? Primogeniture, anyone? Even if he hadn’t complained that he lacked advancement we would still be confronted with this anomaly. The most straightforward explanation is that there is an impediment in the form of illegitimacy. This should come as no surprise, as this very contention was made by Robert Falconbridge in Shakespeare’s earlier play King John concerning his right as younger brother to inherit the estate of his deceased father to the exclusion of his bastard brother. As the elder brother, Philip, is admitted by his mother, Lady Falconbridge, to be the son not of her husband, but of Richard the Lionhearted (I, i, 253), Robert correctly challenges the claim of Philip the Bastard to inherit the estate of Lord Falconbridge. Mutatis mutandis, when we observe an only son of a king in a later play by Shakespeare being passed over for the crown in favor of a brother, the first thing that should occur to us is the existence of a bar based on illegitimacy. (I, i, 50-275)
Though Professor Dixon takes his stand on Hamlet’s nobility and virtue, generations of readers and viewers have had a dim view of his truculence and self-absorption. He is the bad boy of literature, the original rebel without a cause. One wonders why, if Professor Dixon has read Wilson Knight, he doesn’t trouble to mention him. In light of his alleged heroism, the debate about Hamlet’s misbehavior reflects the problematic character of the play.
This brings us to what may be the most overriding issue of all. As readers are human beings, they grasp that the plays of Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, are not fairy tales or diversions. They are intensive reflections on life, life in all its depth, grace and occasional weirdness. Long ago Socrates taught that wisdom is the recognition of our ignorance, implying that things are just a tad murky. What does it all mean? Why are we here? What happens after death? How can we achieve goodness and at the same time behave well towards others? “’Tis a puzzlement,” sang the King of Siam. Shakespeare says so himself, and illustrates this repeatedly in his art. The inscrutability of life is thus inscribed within Shakespeare. Poetry is the vessel of life’s alluring opacities. Professor Dixon may grasp this, but based on his review one would not think so. What is Hamlet about? Is there any sense in which its subject is really you and me? Or is it just a show of puppets?

It is one of the paradoxes of philosophy that although life is universal, to comment meaningfully on it requires gifts possessed by very few. When we come to Aristotle, Lao Tse, Tolstoy, Gandhi, or Shakespeare, and write not about technical aspects of their work but about substance, we enter into their sensibility and spirit, and must therefore to a large extent partake of those qualities that made them great. That means although many feel the inclination to chatter about Shakespeare, the number who can discourse with originality and acuteness is infinitesimally small. Only those equipped with the widest learning, tact and judgment and the most thorough acquaintance with thinker or artist can make a meaningful contribution. To ignore this stern reality and plunge forward is to risk the production of graffiti. We go to the most dedicated and competent teachers for enlightenment, not to the scribblers. The problem we face in this regard is that modern journalism makes possible – even necessary – the handling of such material not by experts but by minds unseasoned, untrained and largely ill-equipped for the heavy tasks assigned to them. That is why book reviews are most rewarding when they are done by the very best among us. It is not a game of one-upsmanship, not an opportunity to display cleverness and wit. When we write about Shakespeare’s use of iambic pentameter in the comedies, for example, the skills needed to do so are different than what is wanted to ponder the broad meaning and significance of his art. This rule applies in particular to the interpretation of the most outstanding works of dramatic poetry. A cat can look at a king, and anyone can scrawl a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But to write about Einstein’s physics requires some of the scientific knowledge and qualities of Einstein. Unfortunately, the less adequate our abilities the greater tends to be our zealous presumption.

pertinent to the “Claudius” in our play?

1. Emperor Claudius was known as a flagrant womanizer and was married at least five times.

2. One of his wives was a distant cousin, Aemilia Lepida.

3. Another wife was Plautia Urgulanilla, who after their divorce, gave birth to a child declared by Claudius to be a bastard.

4. He later married Valeria Messalina, his first cousin, a notorious nymphomaniac. She gave birth to an illegitimate child, Claudia.

5. The last wife, Agrippina, persuaded Claudius to adopt her son, Nero. She then murdered Claudius by poison (54 A.D.) and had her seventeen-year-old son Nero installed as the new Roman Emperor.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

WORKS CITED:

Books

Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.
David P. Gontar, Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays, New English Review Press, 2013.
Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Farrar, Straus, Geroux, 1992.
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, Farrar, Straus, Geroux, 2000.
William Shakespeare The Complete Works, Second ed., S. Wells, G. Taylor, eds., Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 2005.

Articles

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