Part 36
Now it is just this that he himself fears. In the midst of the first tremendous outburst, he checks himself suddenly with the exclamation 'O, fie!' (cf. the precisely similar use of this interjection, II. ii. 617). He must not let himself feel: he has to live. He must not let his heart break in pieces ('hold' means 'hold together'), his muscles turn into those of a trembling old man, his brain dissolve--as they threaten in an instant to do. For, if they do, how can he--_remember_? He goes on reiterating this 'remember' (the 'word' of the Ghost). He is, literally, afraid that he will _forget_--that his mind will lose the message entrusted to it. Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he _is_ to remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already contains; and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his joy in thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in his memory. All that is done with for ever: nothing is to remain for him on the 'table' but the command, 'remember me.' He swears it; 'yes, by heaven!' That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most characteristically, he thinks _first_ of his mother; then of his uncle, the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling on him and calling him 'son.' And in bitter desperate irony he snatches his tables from his breast (they are suggested to him by the phrases he has just used, 'table of my memory,' 'book and volume'). After all, he _will_ use them once again; and, perhaps with a wild laugh, he writes with trembling fingers his last observation: 'One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.'
But that, I believe, is not merely a desperate jest. It springs from that _fear of forgetting_. A time will come, he feels, when all this appalling experience of the last half-hour will be incredible to him, will seem a mere nightmare, will even, conceivably, quite vanish from his mind. Let him have something in black and white that will bring it back and _force_ him to remember and believe. What is there so unnatural in this, if you substitute a note-book or diary for the 'tables'?[258]
But why should he write that particular note, and not rather his 'word,' 'Adieu, adieu! remember me'? I should answer, first, that a grotesque jest at such a moment is thoroughly characteristic of Hamlet (see p. 151), and that the jocose 'So, uncle, there you are!' shows his state of mind; and, secondly, that loathing of his uncle is vehement in his thought at this moment. Possibly, too, he might remember that 'tables' are stealable, and that if the appearance of the Ghost should be reported, a mere observation on the smiling of villains could not betray anything of his communication with the Ghost. What follows shows that the instinct of secrecy is strong in him.
It seems likely, I may add, that Shakespeare here was influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by recollection of a place in _Titus Andronicus_ (IV. i.). In that horrible play Chiron and Demetrius, after outraging Lavinia, cut out her tongue and cut off her hands, in order that she may be unable to reveal the outrage. She reveals it, however, by taking a staff in her mouth, guiding it with her arms, and writing in the sand, 'Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius.' Titus soon afterwards says:
I will go get a leaf of brass, And with a gad of steel will write these words, And lay it by. The angry northern wind Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad, And where's your lesson then?
Perhaps in the old _Hamlet_, which may have been a play something like _Titus Andronicus_, Hamlet at this point did write something of the Ghost's message in his tables. In any case Shakespeare, whether he wrote _Titus Andronicus_ or only revised an older play on the subject, might well recall this incident, as he frequently reproduces other things in that drama.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 258: The reader will observe that this suggestion of a _further_ reason for his making the note may be rejected without the rest of the interpretation being affected.]
NOTE E.
THE GHOST IN THE CELLARAGE.
It has been thought that the whole of the last part of I. v., from the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus, follows the old play closely, and that Shakespeare is condescending to the groundlings.
Here again, whether or no he took a suggestion from the old play, I see no reason to think that he wrote down to his public. So far as Hamlet's state of mind is concerned, there is not a trace of this. Anyone who has a difficulty in understanding it should read Coleridge's note. What appears grotesque is the part taken by the Ghost, and Hamlet's consequent removal from one part of the stage to another. But, as to the former, should we feel anything grotesque in the four injunctions 'Swear!' if it were not that they come from under the stage--a fact which to an Elizabethan audience, perfectly indifferent to what is absurdly called stage illusion, was probably not in the least grotesque? And as to the latter, if we knew the Ghost-lore of the time better than we do, perhaps we should see nothing odd in Hamlet's insisting on moving away and proposing the oath afresh when the Ghost intervenes.
But, further, it is to be observed that he does not merely propose the oath afresh. He first makes Horatio and Marcellus swear never to make known what they have _seen_. Then, on shifting his ground, he makes them swear never to speak of what they have _heard_. Then, moving again, he makes them swear that, if he should think fit to play the antic, they will give no sign of knowing aught of him. The oath is now complete; and, when the Ghost commands them to swear the last time, Hamlet suddenly becomes perfectly serious and bids it rest. [In Fletcher's _Woman's Prize_, V. iii., a passage pointed out to me by Mr. C.J. Wilkinson, a man taking an oath shifts his ground.]
NOTE F.
THE PLAYER'S SPEECH IN _HAMLET_.
There are two extreme views about this speech. According to one, Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for the occasion, simply and solely in order to ridicule, through it, the bombastic style of dramatists contemporary with himself or slightly older; just as he ridicules in _2 Henry IV._ Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as epic narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is 'too poetical--the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama'; but this is due to the fact that Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from that of his own dramatic dialogue.
In essentials I think that what Coleridge says[259] is true. He goes too far, it seems to me, when he describes the language of the speech as merely 'too poetical'; for with much that is fine there is intermingled a good deal that, in epic as in drama, must be called bombast. But I do not believe Shakespeare meant it for bombast.
I will briefly put the arguments which point to this conclusion. Warburton long ago stated some of them fully and cogently, but he misinterpreted here and there, and some arguments have to be added to his.
1. If the speech was meant to be ridiculous, it follows either that Hamlet in praising it spoke ironically, or that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet praise it sincerely, himself wrote ironically. And both these consequences are almost incredible.
Let us see what Hamlet says. He asks the player to recite 'a passionate speech'; and, being requested to choose one, he refers to a speech he once heard the player declaim. This speech, he says, was never 'acted' or was acted only once; for the play pleased not the million. But he, and others whose opinion was of more importance than his, thought it an excellent play, well constructed, and composed with equal skill and temperance. One of these other judges commended it because it contained neither piquant indecencies nor affectations of phrase, but showed 'an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine.'[260] In this play Hamlet 'chiefly loved' one speech; and he asks for a part of it.
Let the reader now refer to the passage I have just summarised; let him consider its tone and manner; and let him ask himself if Hamlet can possibly be speaking ironically. I am sure he will answer No. And then let him observe what follows. The speech is declaimed. Polonius interrupting it with an objection to its length, Hamlet snubs him, bids the player proceed, and adds, 'He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry: or he sleeps.' 'He,' that is, 'shares the taste of the million for sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, and is wearied by an honest method.'[261] Polonius later interrupts again, for he thinks the emotion of the player too absurd; but Hamlet respects it; and afterwards, when he is alone (and therefore can hardly be ironical), in contrasting this emotion with his own insensibility, he betrays no consciousness that there was anything unfitting in the speech that caused it.
So far I have chiefly followed Warburton, but there is an important point which seems not to have been observed. All Hamlet's praise of the speech is in the closest agreement with his conduct and words elsewhere. His later advice to the player (III. ii.) is on precisely the same lines. He is to play to the judicious, not to the crowd, whose opinion is worthless. He is to observe, like the author of Aeneas' speech, the 'modesty' of nature. He must not tear a 'passion' to tatters, to split the ears of the incompetent, but in the very tempest of passion is to keep a temperance and smoothness. The million, we gather from the first passage, cares nothing for construction; and so, we learn in the second passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at the clown instead of attending to some necessary question of the play. Hamlet's hatred of exaggeration is marked in both passages. And so (as already pointed out, p. 133) in the play-scene, when his own lines are going to be delivered, he impatiently calls out to the actor to leave his damnable faces and begin; and at the grave of Ophelia he is furious with what he thinks the exaggeration of Laertes, burlesques his language, and breaks off with the words,
Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou.
Now if Hamlet's praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too: and who will maintain that? And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as Shakespeare's by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare's opinion: and who will maintain that? And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are both serious--and nothing else is credible--then, to Hamlet and Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave are rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant. Is it not evident that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of 'passion,' in a style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and despised the million for not approving,--a speech to be delivered with temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither? Is he not aiming here to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the audience
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
to 'stately' themes which beget 'high astounding terms'? And is it strange that, like Marlowe in _Tamburlaine_, he adopted a style marred in places by that which _we_ think bombast, but which the author meant to be more 'handsome than fine'?
2. If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was
Baked and impasted with the parching streets, That lend a tyrannous and damned light To their lord's murder;
and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture, with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines are _merely_ absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.
But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?
3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare _must_ have been conscious of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it? And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.' But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears 'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect, there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of Aeneas; and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same degree, occurs.
Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:
Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
Are Pyrrhus's 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers 'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,' and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in _Macbeth_, had occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told that they were meant for burlesque. I open _Troilus and Cressida_ (because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. 6 f.):
Thou, trumpet, there's thy purse. Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe: Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon: Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood; Thou blow'st for Hector.
'Splendid!' one cries. Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic, can you deny it? I read again (V. v. 7):
bastard Margarelon Hath Doreus prisoner, And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam, Upon the pashed corses of the kings.
Or, to turn to earlier but still undoubted works, Shakespeare wrote in _Romeo and Juliet_,
here will I remain With worms that are thy chamber-maids;
and in _King John_,
And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath Out of the bloody finger-ends of John;
and in _Lucrece_,
And, bubbling from her breast, it doth divide In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood Circles her body in on every side, Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood. Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd, And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.
Is it so very unlikely that the poet who wrote thus might, aiming at a peculiarly heightened and passionate style, write the speech of Aeneas?
4. But, pursuing this line of argument, we must go further. There is really scarcely one idea, and there is but little phraseology, in the speech that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare's own works. He merely exaggerates a little here what he has done elsewhere. I will conclude this Note by showing that this is so as regards almost all the passages most objected to, as well as some others. (1) 'The Hyrcanian beast' is Macbeth's 'Hyrcan tiger' (III. iv. 101), who also occurs in _3 Hen. VI._ I. iv. 155. (2) With 'total gules' Steevens compared _Timon_ IV. iii. 59 (an undoubtedly Shakespearean passage),
With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.
(3) With 'baked and impasted' cf. _John_ III. iii. 42, 'If that surly spirit melancholy Had baked thy blood.' In the questionable _Tit. And._ V. ii. 201 we have, 'in that paste let their vile heads be baked' (a paste made of blood and bones, _ib._ 188), and in the undoubted _Richard II._ III. ii. 154 (quoted by Caldecott) Richard refers to the ground
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
(4) 'O'er-sized with coagulate gore' finds an exact parallel in the 'blood-siz'd field' of the _Two Noble Kinsmen_, I. i. 99, a scene which, whether written by Shakespeare (as I fully believe) or by another poet, was certainly written in all seriousness. (5) 'With eyes like carbuncles' has been much ridiculed, but Milton (_P.L._ ix. 500) gives 'carbuncle eyes' to Satan turned into a serpent (Steevens), and why are they more outrageous than ruby lips and cheeks (_J.C._ III. i. 260, _Macb._ III. iv. 115, _Cym._ II. ii. 17)? (6) Priam falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus's sword is paralleled, not only in _Dido Queen of Carthage_, but in _Tr. and Cr._ V. iii. 40 (Warburton). (7) With Pyrrhus standing like a painted tyrant cf. _Macb._ V. viii. 25 (Delius). (8) The forging of Mars's armour occurs again in _Tr. and Cr._ IV. v. 255, where Hector swears by the forge that stithied Mars his helm, just as Hamlet himself alludes to Vulcan's stithy (III. ii. 89). (9) The idea of 'strumpet Fortune' is common: _e.g._ _Macb._ I. ii. 15, 'Fortune ... show'd like a rebel's whore.' (10) With the 'rant' about her wheel Warburton compares _Ant. and Cl._ IV. xv. 43, where Cleopatra would
rail so high That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel.
(11.) Pyrrhus minces with his sword Priam's limbs, and Timon (IV. iii. 122) bids Alcibiades 'mince' the babe without remorse.'[263]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 259: It is impossible to tell whether Coleridge formed his view independently, or adopted it from Schlegel. For there is no record of his having expressed his opinion prior to the time of his reading Schlegel's _Lectures_; and, whatever he said to the contrary, his borrowings from Schlegel are demonstrable.]
[Footnote 260: Clark and Wright well compare Polonius' antithesis of 'rich, not gaudy': though I doubt if 'handsome' implies richness.]
[Footnote 261: Is it not possible that 'mobled queen,' to which Hamlet seems to object, and which Polonius praises, is meant for an example of the second fault of affected phraseology, from which the play was said to be free, and an instance of which therefore surprises Hamlet?]
[Footnote 262: The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the _absurdity_ of the second can hardly be so.]
[Footnote 263: Steevens observes that Heywood uses the phrase 'guled with slaughter,' and I find in his _Iron Age_ various passages indicating that he knew the speech of Aeneas (cf. p. 140 for another sign that he knew _Hamlet_). The two parts of the _Iron Age_ were published in 1632, but are said, in the preface to the Second, to have 'been long since writ.' I refer to the pages of vol. 3 of Pearson's _Heywood_ (1874). (1) p. 329, Troilus 'lyeth imbak'd In his cold blood.' (2) p. 341, of Achilles' armour:
_Vulcan_ that wrought it out of gadds of Steele With his _Ciclopian_ hammers, never made Such noise upon his Anvile forging it, Than these my arm'd fists in _Ulisses_ wracke.
(3) p. 357, 'till _Hecub's_ reverent lockes Be gul'd in slaughter.' (4) p. 357, '_Scamander_ plaines Ore-spread with intrailes bak'd in blood and dust.' (5) p. 378, 'We'll rost them at the scorching flames of _Troy_.' (6) p. 379, 'tragicke slaughter, clad in gules and sables' (cf.'sable arms' in the speech in _Hamlet_). (7) p. 384, 'these lockes, now knotted all, As bak't in blood.' Of these, all but (1) and (2) are in Part II. Part I. has many passages which recall _Troilus and Cressida_. Mr. Fleay's speculation as to its date will be found in his _Chronicle History of the English Drama_, i. p. 285.
For the same writer's ingenious theory (which is of course incapable of proof) regarding the relation of the player's speech in _Hamlet_ to Marlowe and Nash's _Dido_, see Furness's Variorum _Hamlet_.]
NOTE G.
HAMLET'S APOLOGY TO LAERTES.
Johnson, in commenting on the passage (V. ii. 237-255), says: 'I wish Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood.' And Seymour (according to Furness) thought the falsehood so ignoble that he rejected lines 239-250 as an interpolation!
I wish first to remark that we are mistaken when we suppose that Hamlet is here apologising specially for his behaviour to Laertes at Ophelia's grave. We naturally suppose this because he has told Horatio that he is sorry he 'forgot himself' on that occasion, and that he will court Laertes' favours (V. ii. 75 ff.). But what he says in that very passage shows that he is thinking chiefly of the greater wrong he has done Laertes by depriving him of his father:
For, by the image of my cause, I see The portraiture of his.
And it is also evident in the last words of the apology itself that he is referring in it to the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia:
Sir, in this audience, Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil Free me so far in your most generous thoughts, _That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house, And hurt my brother._
But now, as to the falsehood. The charge is not to be set aside lightly; and, for my part, I confess that, while rejecting of course Johnson's notion that Shakespeare wanted to paint 'a good man,' I have momentarily shared Johnson's wish that Hamlet had made 'some other defence' than that of madness. But I think the wish proceeds from failure to imagine the situation.