Sorry, sorry, sorry - for the lack of posts recently, that is. I have been wrestling in the mud of my ignorance with the likes of Dover Wilson, Harley Granville-Barker, Wilson Knight, the Arden edition, my cast and just about anyone else you can think of who knows more about this bloody play than I do! Honestly, it's almost embarrassing the number of misconceptions I had concerning Hamlet.
Let's start with this one. I always thought that Hamlet was supposed to be hesitant and irresolute. As a very small salve to my ignorance there are still people who do, but not me, not now. Hamlet was as much of an 'action man' as Laertes, or his dear, departed Dad but, as a Renaissance 'New Man' he wasn't prepared to rely simply on gut re-action. What was the point, he asks, of possessing "that capability and godlike reason" if you didn't use it? Shakespeare's society had evolved slowly out of the Stygian gloom of the Dark Ages into the grim, superstitious barbarities of the Medieval and was now perceiving the first sunlight of the Renaissance Age in which reasoning and contemplation were beginning to be enjoyed - not least by the new and burgeoning bourgeois class of lawyers, small business-men, Protestant converts and the like who formed such an important part of the audience at the new Globe Theatre. (Our hero, of course, studied at Wittenberg, a Protestant univerity!) They were now relatively free to think and contemplate and they wanted to see plays in which the 'hero' was more than just a brave, virtuous knight in shining armour. They wanted to see and hear him struggle with the complex, contradictory concepts that puzzled them, too.
Revenge, as a motivation for murderous action has more or less slipped away today because we have eschewed it in favour of allowing the state to act on our behalf - with the utterly predictable result that the state has failed in its duty, but that's another argument for another day. The only revenge we experience is at second-hand with the so-called 'honour killings' of our Asian neighbours, a practise that would have passed unremarked in medieval England. Laertes's instant and unthinking response to the question of what he is prepared to do about Hamlet who has killed his father and driven his sister insane is to say, "Cut his throat i' the church"! That was the old way, the proper way, the traditional way, dare one say, the conservative way (small 'c', of course, the current crop of so-called Conservatives are only good for the metaphorical stabbing of a woman in the back - but I digress). However, it was not Hamlet's way - until he had definite proof. Again, the question for him was why possess the faculty of reasoning if one is supposed to re-act like an automatum, or, to use his imagery, like "a beast". The proof once gained, however, he acts, or re-acts, with medieval ferocity - and that is part of his tragedy!
Indeed, it is (it seems to me) exactly that duality, what Californian gurus would call the 'yin and yang', between the possibilities contained in "what a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form" and the brutish, animal-like re-action of "Cut his throat i' the church" , that fascinates Shakespeare in this play. It is not the most original of insights when I say that in the later plays Shakespeare became more and more interested in philosophy, or, to be precise, in subjects that were philosophical by their nature. But, if it is hard to write a tome on philosophy (and sometimes to read it!), imagine how intensely difficult it is to write a play in which you must construct a believable plot and tell it in a way that will beguile, fascinate, thrill and engage an audience. You can see that some of the difficulty emerges (but not in Hamlet) in the way Shakespeare's verse structure becomes more and more fractured in the later plays, as he struggles to express complex thoughts in strict iambic pentameters.
The important thing in Shakespeare, I am learning, is that what appears on the surface is but a fraction of what is hidden beneath. It was directing Troilus and Cressida that first opened my eyes to his partially-hidden profundities. Everyone says that it is a play about love and war, which it is, but those motifs are merely two hooks upon which Shakespeare hangs his philosophical hat whilst he explores all sorts of abstruse philosophical arguments. Hamlet is similar; on the face of it, a somewhat melodramatic revenge thriller, but beneath that theme of revenge, oh dear, what complexities lie in wait for the unwary director.
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