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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 10. August 9, 1951

What Shakespeare Really Meant — A Forerunner of Marx?

What Shakespeare Really Meant

A Forerunner of Marx?

We might have thought that the Problem of Hamlet was now settled and closed for all time; Olivier's interpretation seemed to have set the seal on Shakespeare's intention of drawing "the struggle between the goal and the will of an individual" (as Goethe put it); or, in Freudian terms, schizophrenia, a chronic inability to make a decision,—streaked with a little of that spicy complex named after Oedipus.

It seemed to satisfy most of us. But then, just as we were feeling that there was no need ever to worry about the question again,—John Bamborough gave a talk over the B.B.C., (published in the English "Listener" for July 14, 1949), under the title of "The Missing Speech in Hamlet." His theme is that mere indecision is no answer to the "Hamlet problem." There must be a cause of the indecision. Now this is a basic question, and affects more problems than just Hamlet's. It strikes at the roots of Aldous Huxley's theory in Ends and Means, for instance, that the cause of war is basically "psychological." For the attitude implied in Bamborough's talk, looks for an objective mind as secondary, reflections of some external stress. It ultimately attacks the whole idea of the mind and human nature as absolutes. It blames the collective for what is wrong with the psyche of the individual.

Bamborough would include another soliloquy into the play—he isn't sure where. In it he would insert the real reason for Hamlet's indecision,—notably that his whole philosophy revolted against the act that his obligation to vengeance implied: the murder of one who was both his blood relation and his King.

Now this is, I suggest, the true motive for the Dane's becoming, like John o' Dreams, unpregnant of his cause. But I further suggest that there is no need to add anything to Shakespeare. There is no need to demand another speech giving expression to these motives. We can easily and justly infer them to have been true from the whole plot of the play and the character of the hero.

Much is said about Shakespeare's "universality," of how the human passions and situations to which he gives expression, transcend time and place. But Shakespeare himself was only too conscious of his limitations in this direction: Hamlet, speaking of the players, remarks, "They are the abstract and brief chronicle of the time" (II,2), and again, that the aim of drama "both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, score her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and the pressure." (111:2).

His greatest tragedies, it seems to me, are great for the very reason that they deal more dramatically and completely with the great conflicts of the age in which they were written, than any contemporary from the fact that the conflicts of that age have since proved to be of vital importance to the world.

The Age

The Elizabethan Age we all know, was a turning-point in the history of England. The Tudors had more absolute power than any sovereigns before or since. It was Henry VII who, on Bosworth field, finally quailed the robber barons who formed the feudal elite, and it was Charles I with whose blue blood was written the charter giving power to the great middle class. The tudor monarchy can be said to have held the reins in a hiatus.

But beneath the apparently smooth surface of Bess's England, lay the conflict. Bess herself was part of it. Why did she have to quell the Northern Earls at the beginning of her reign, and arrest Peter Wentworth for sedition at the end of it? Because all her life was a delicate tightrope act, an attempt to hasten the death of a dying power, and kill a rising one in the womb at the same time. The Renaissance was the natural process of the freeing of the individual, spiritually and materially, from feudalism and its world-outlook. It was a conflict of a traditional, stagnant philosophy, with absolute standards in all matters physical and metaphysical, and a nascent, immature and rampant individualism which seemed to have no moral principles.

Shakespeare, holding the mirror faithfully up to nature, recorded it all. Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, although in terms of a different time, all have aspects of this conflict as their basic themes. Macbeth is actuated purely by ambition, with the aid of the forces of hell, in committing the acts that make the plot and lead to his downfall. In this play, as Professor Stoll has inferred we see the supernatural aligning itself on either side of the conflict—the ghost of Ban-quo representing the "nemesis," the wronged powers of good, and the Witches as the devil's agents, spurring on the devilishness that is in all flesh. Both these unseen powers are straight from medieval theology, and they symbolise the plot on a higher plane.

In Lear, the title figure is an old, idealistic fuedal monarch with his faithful pillars in the persons of Gloucester and Kent. Opposed to them is the anarchistic, selfish, pragmatic philosophy of the two elder (laughters and Edmund. The latter, even more than Macbeth, or any of the cruder products of Marlowe or any other dramatist, is the symbol of the "Machiavellian," the evil individualist who acknowledges none of the restraints of the "scholastic" attitude, but only his own base material interests. His speech that:

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars," (1,2), asserts the self-sufficiency of the individual, and denies that "there is a divinity that shapes our ends," Hamlet's credo. Edmund revolts against the whole theory of "degree", the core of scholasticism, which Shakespeare has expressed elsewhere:

"The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Institute, course, proportion, season, form,
Office in all line of order."

(Troilus and Cressida, 1,3).

Dying Order

The representatives of dying order in Lear are only too conscious of the fact that order is dying, and that the age of the Edmunds and the Machiavels is come. Gloucester exclaims:

"Love cools; friendship falls off, brothers' divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father . . . the King falls from bias of nature . . . We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us unquietly to our graves." (Lear, 1,2).

And Lear himself, in that scene where his madness symbolises his social effeteness, and the storm symbolises the same great conflict, exclaims to that storm:

"Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,
Crack nature's mould's, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man."

The "natural" order is disintegrating: the man of the old order and outlook secs it as the end of all. That is just the theme of Hamlet.

The play centres around the gradual formulation and execution of revenge by the son of a murdered man on the murder who is also the avenger's uncle. Both murdered and murderer are Kings. As wo see from Gloucester's speech, part of the "natural" order of medievalism was the sacred duty that bound subject to King, and blood relations one to another. The ghost of the late King Hamlet, who, as a "nemesis" ghost from Purgatory is definitely on the side of "natural order," condemns his own murder by his brother as "foul and most unnatural," and calls on Hamlet

"If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not!" (I.v).

Hamlet sees revenge as a sacred duty. But at the same time regicide is a crime condemned by heaven and earth. Rosencrantz remarks, apropos of Hamlet's threats to Claudius, that

"The cease of majesty.
Dies not alone, but like a gulf does draw
What's near with it . . .
. . . Never alone
Did the King sigh, but with a general groan." (III,3.)

Hamlet realises this, and is, too, conscious of his kinship to [unclear: huncle]. His [unclear: rat] remark on hearing of the murder shows that. He cries "O any prophetic soul,! my uncle!" (1,5).

Faced with the complete lack of scruple of the Machiavellian Claudius, Hamlet is faced with the fundamental contradiction of his own wornout philosophy. While demanding dutiful vengeance, It deplored the regicide which vengeance in this instance involved, for the villain has, albeit by an "unnatural" act, acquired a crown.

The fault is not in Hamlet's mind; it is in the incompetence of his philosophy to deal with the situation he meets, its effeteness in the times he lives in. As Edmund says in Lear, "Men are as the time is." Claudius is. So is Laertes, who scruples not to shed royal blood to avenge his father. So too is Fortinbras, who, by sheer determination and absence of moral hesitation, marches to victory at the close of the play when the stage is strewn with the corpes of nearly all the other characters in omitting this absolute contrast with Hamlet, Olivier cut out a very effective and integral part of the drama.

Class Conflict

Hamlet is aware that he is not dealing with individuals, but with the time. The couplet

"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right," (1.5).

is the crux of the whole tragedy. Faced with a time that is out of joint, he is too conscious of his own shortcomings to try to deal with it, and his principles are too revolted to let him try.

I realise that it lays me open to all manner of abuse to suggest that a Soviet spokesman has even said anything sensible. But in 1932, following on Akimov's famous Moscow production of Hamlet, Radek wrote in Izvestia: "Hamlet is a monument to an epoch of upheaval. He is the man of the sixteenth century, of the beginning of the Reformation. He is a person in whom old beliefs are undermined, though not completely destroyed. He is no longer capable of direct action dictated by his old outlook."

In other words, his philosophy was breaking down, he symbolised the disintegration of a class (all right, if you don't like that word, think up another one). To me, that explains his inability to make up his mind, his talk of suicide, and its automatic cancellation because

"the Everlasting . . . fix'd

His canon gainst self-slaughter" and later (1,2)

"that dread of something after death." (III,1)

World-weariness is natural when the only other choices are to fight a losing battle, or to lie down under the lotteries of fate. When at last he did

"take up arms against a sea of troubles"

he settled nothing. For when the time is out of joint it takes more than one man to set it right.

And, as history proved, the Renascence did more good for the world than harm. The Claudiuses—and the Edmunds and Macbeths and Faustuses and Barabases and Tamburlaincs—were also the pirate kings of politics and commerce and adventure on whose privateering was built the material (and untimately the cultural) prosperity of capitalist England; and the Hamlets, like the young gentlemen in Auden's poem (himself, in turn, a descendant of the pirate kings),

"owned a world that had its day."

—Despard.