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\title{Hamlet and His Problems}

\author{T.S. Eliot (1888--1965)}  

\date{1922}

%The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.  1922.

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\maketitle

FEW critics have even admitted that \emph{Hamlet} the play is the primary
problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the
character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type
of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative
order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises
itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in \emph{Hamlet} a
vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind
had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who
made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in
writing about \emph{Hamlet} remembered that his first business was to study a
work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced,
in writing of \emph{Hamlet}, is the most misleading kind possible. For they
both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their
critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution---of their
own Hamlet for Shakespeare's---which their creative gift effects. We
should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this
play.    


  Two recent writers, Mr J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the
  University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be
  praised for moving in the other direction. Mr Stoll performs a
  service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of
  the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,\footnote{I have never, by
  the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer's
objections to Othello.} observing that  
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but
  they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art; and as they
  insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on
  the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their
  old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general. 

  Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is
  nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to
  standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for
  ``interpretation'' the chief task is the presentation of relevant
  historical facts which the reader is not assumed to
  know. Mr Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have
  failed in their ``interpretation'' of \emph{Hamlet} by ignoring what ought to
  be very obvious: that \emph{Hamlet} is a stratification, that it represents
  the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the
  work of his predecessors. The \emph{Hamlet} of Shakespeare will appear to
  us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the
  play as due to Shakespeare's design, we perceive his \emph{Hamlet} to be
  superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the
  final form. 

  We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that
  extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all
  probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the \emph{Spanish
  Tragedy} and \emph{Arden of Feversham}; and what this play was like we can
  guess from three clues: from the \emph{Spanish Tragedy} itself, from the
  tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's \emph{Hamlet} must have been based,
  and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's lifetime which
  bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not
  from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in
  the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the
  action or delay is caused, as in the \emph{Spanish Tragedy}, solely by the
  difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that
  the ``madness'' of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion,
  and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other
  hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of
  revenge, and which explicitly ``blunts'' the latter; the delay in
  revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and
  the effect of the ``madness'' is not to lull but to arouse the king's
  suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be
  convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the
  \emph{Spanish Tragedy} as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was
  merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained
  scenes---the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes---for
  which there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse
  style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of
  Shakespeare. These Mr Robertson believes to be scenes in the
  original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman,
  before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very
  strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like
  certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The
  upshot of Mr Robertson's examination is, we believe, irrefragable:
  that Shakespeare's \emph{Hamlet}, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play
  dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that
  Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the
  ``intractable'' material of the old play. 

  Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being
  Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic
  failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is
  none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is
  possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he
  has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty
  revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines
  like
  \begin{verse}
      Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,\\
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
  \end{verse}
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act
v. sc. ii.,
\begin{verse}
  Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting\\
That would not let me sleep\dots\\
Up from my cabin,\\
My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark\\
Grop'd I to find out them: had my desire;\\
Finger'd their packet;
\end{verse}
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an
unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play,
with that other profoundly interesting play of ``intractable'' material
and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of
crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in
\emph{Coriolanus}. \emph{Coriolanus} may be not as ``interesting'' as
\emph{Hamlet}, but it
is, with \emph{Antony and Cleopatra}, Shakespeare's most assured artistic
success. And probably more people have thought \emph{Hamlet} a work of art
because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting
because it is a work of art. It is the ``Mona Lisa'' of literature. 

  The grounds of \emph{Hamlet}'s failure are not immediately
  obvious. Mr Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the
  essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a
  guilty mother:
  \begin{quote}
      [Hamlet's] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the
      score of his mother's degradation\dots The guilt of a mother is
      an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be
      maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or
      rather a hint of one.
  \end{quote}
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the
``guilt of a mother'' that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the
suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of
Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy
like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. \emph{Hamlet}, like
the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to
light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for
this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to
localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you
examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of
Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps
by the author of the \emph{Revenge of Bussy d' Ambois}, Act v. sc. i. We find
Shakespeare's \emph{Hamlet} not in the action, not in any quotations that we
might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably
not in the earlier play. 

  The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding
  an ``objective correlative''; in other words, a set of objects, a
  situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
  \emph{particular} emotion; such that when the external facts, which must
  terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
  immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more
  successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will
  find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has
  been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined
  sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's
  death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words
  were automatically released by the last event in the series. The
  artistic ``inevitability'' lies in this complete adequacy of the
  external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in
  \emph{Hamlet}. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is
  inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they
  appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is
  genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of
  objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the
  bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic
  problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is
  occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate
  equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus
  a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it
  therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the
  possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do
  with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed
  that the very nature of the \emph{donn\'ees} of the problem precludes
  objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of
  Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally
  different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so
  negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling
  which she is incapable of representing. 

  The ``madness'' of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand; in the earlier
  play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a
  ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and
  more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase,
  his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a
  form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the
  buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the
  dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express
  in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object
  or exceeding its object, is something which every person of
  sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It
  often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings
  to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the
  artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his
  emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of
  Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must
  simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved
  too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle;
  under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the
  inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many
  facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and
  when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he
  read Montaigne, II. xii., \emph{Apologie de Raimond Sebond}. We should
  have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable,
  for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated,
  exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which
  Shakespeare did not understand himself. 

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