Hamlet's Clashing Ideals

HAMLET’S CLASHING IDEALS HAMLET’S CLASHING IDEALS David Bishop 4145-BISH Copyright © 2000 by David Bishop. Library of Congress Number: 00-193086 ISBN #: Hardcover 0-7388-5115-9 Softcover 0-7388-5116-7 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. This book was printed in the United States of America. To order additional copies of this book, contact: Xlibris Corporation 1-888-7-XLIBRIS www.Xlibris.com [email protected] CONTENTS PREFACE .......................................... 9 1 WHO’S THERE? ............................ 11 2 THE YOUTH OF PRIMY NATURE ..................... 30 3 THE SON ................................... 119 4 THE FATHER .............................. 144 5 THE HOLY SPIRIT ....................... 192 6 THE DOUBTER............................ 232 7 SOVEREIGN REASON ................... 296 8 WITH MOST MIRACULOUS ORGAN ................. 370 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................. 399 4145-BISH For Theodore Baird 4145-BISH PREFACE This introduction to Hamlet, for the general reader, comes, as far as I can help it, with no modern literary-critical jargon. Some will say it also comes with no modern literary-critical knowledge, but I hope that’s not quite true. If it looks, on the surface, something like old-fashioned “character criticism”, I will, with a few qualifications, wear that badge proudly. If this play is the imitation of an action, it’s the imitation of an action by human characters. To understand the play, you have to know something about human nature, as well as the nature of plays. Both of those forms of knowledge, in my view, have recently been unjustly neglected inside the academy. They still, and always will, offer a fertile territory for exploration and discovery. For the text of the play I mainly use the magnificent Arden edition, edited by Harold Jenkins. Though it may need a few changes—like “too too solid [not sullied] flesh”—some of which I’ve silently made, it remains my touchstone: perhaps the greatest single edition of a Shakespeare play ever produced. The references given briefly in the text refer to the bibliography at the end. I use a slightly unusual convention for quotes, putting punctua- tion outside the quotation marks unless it was part of the original quote. For valuable comments and criticism I’m grateful to Annmarie Clarke and Judith Craig. Contact [email protected]. 4145-BISH 1 WHO’S THERE? 1. Stand and unfold yourself More than any other play of Shakespeare, more than any other play that I know of, Hamlet unfolds all its huge and beautiful complexity out of its first, simple line: “Who’s there?” The characteris- tic action of Hamlet, repeated over and over again, is an investigation. This play is full of people investigating each other—and in Hamlet’s case investigating himself—trying to figure out who’s really there, under the confusing or misleading surface. Investiga- tions proliferate like kudzu in Hamlet, they overlap and intertwine, and sometimes they even come to an end, in the discovery of a definite truth. The opening investigation, for example, comes to a quick and comforting conclusion: Barnardo. Who’s there? Francisco. Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. Barnardo. Long live the king! Francisco. Barnardo? Barnardo. He. I. i. 1-5 Here, maybe for the only time in the play, the question “Who’s there?” can be given an answer that’s both simple and true. Francisco’s 4145-BISH 12 DAVID BISHOP next line confirms that what’s happening here is what’s supposed to happen: “You come most carefully upon your hour.” Two reassur- ing notes have been struck: a clear identity has been established, of a man who has arrived on time, with no tardiness, no delay. But other, unspoken questions have been raised, which make this com- fort seem insecure, and fleeting. If Barnardo has “come most carefully upon your hour”, then who did Francisco think was coming? And who did Barnardo think was waiting for him? Their edgy nervousness undermines the surface discovery that all appears to be well. They go on talking as if all really might be well, except for one line: Bar. ’Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco. Fran. For this relief much thanks. ’Tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart. Bar. Have you had quiet guard? Fran. Not a mouse stirring. Bar. Well, good night. I. i. 7-12 In the winter it can be bitter cold even if all is well, inside around the fire; but in a play the words “bitter cold” sound foreboding, a promise fulfilled in the rest of the line: “And I am sick at heart.” Without that sickness, quiet guard could be just quiet, though cold, guard. With it, the quietness contrasts with something else, something feared. We feel a primal fear of the bitter cold and dark, and Shakespeare builds on that fear with the sentries’ added fear, of something else unknown. Other strange things happen so fast you hardly notice them. The challenging question, “Who’s there?”, comes from Barnardo, who is not yet on duty. He challenges the sentry, instead of the other way around. Then the sentry throws the question back at him: “Nay, answer me.” It’s his job, not Barnardo’s, to ask this question. He turns it into a command, and repeats it, showing he knows how to do his job: “Stand and unfold yourself.” In this case HAMLET’S CLASHING IDEALS 13 everything works out. The question gets answered to both men’s satisfaction. But for a moment, wasn’t there something a little strange about that second challenge? What does it mean to “Stand and unfold yourself”? Because Barnardo successfully does it, identify- ing himself with “Long live the King!”, we don’t have to worry about that question. It just somehow lodges in the mind, like a little, clinging barnacle of uncertainty. Is “yourself” something you can “Stand and unfold”? The fact that Shakespeare uses that phrase might mean noth- ing. It might be something a million sentries have said. We don’t have to unfold every odd metaphor in our speech to understand what we’re saying. What makes this phrase mysterious comes partly from its immediate surroundings: the dark, the cold, the sickness, the nervous investigation. And then, beyond that, it comes from the rest of the play. As all the investigations, and investigators, go searching for the truth about each other, the way they describe the truth they’re look- ing for builds up a picture of human beings as collections of parts, parts which can sometimes conflict with each other. When Barnardo comes on duty the first people he has to identify are Horatio and Marcellus. Peering into the dark, Barnardo says, “is Horatio there?”, and Horatio answers, “A piece of him.” When he says this no one in the audience knows what he means—at least if they don’t already know the play. As it turns out, he means he doesn’t believe in the ghost. If he said, “Yes, it’s me”, it might sound like he was enthusi- astically supporting this investigation. Instead he says, “A piece of him”, to show that he has doubts. He’s been dragged up here against his better judgment. He’s left his rational self back in his room. When Francisco says, “Stand and unfold yourself”, the odd- ness of the phrase doesn’t stand out because you know exactly what he means at the moment he says it. With Horatio’s “A piece of him” you don’t know; you’re puzzled; and then the explanation comes, first in Horatio’s skeptical tone as he asks, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”, and then when Marcellus explains, “Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy”. Even after you understand what 4145-BISH 14 DAVID BISHOP it meant, “A piece of him” still sounds like an odd reply to the question, “is Horatio there?” It’s funny—it shows Horatio’s wit. And together with “Stand and unfold yourself”, it begins to create a sense of human complexity, and mystery, that the rest of the play will vastly unfold. The complexity of the human self can be suggested, among other ways, by talking about people’s actions as the actions of their possessions. Grammatically, this is a perfectly respectable, and un- derstandable, way of talking. You have your eyes, your ears and your beliefs. If you wouldn’t believe something if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes, you can say, like Horatio, “I might not this believe/ Without the sensible and true avouch/Of mine own eyes.” He means the same thing, but his way of putting it makes his eyes active: they “avouch” his belief. When characters talk this way all the time, or as much as they do in Hamlet, it starts to sound, at least sublimi- nally, a little strange. Horatio “will not let belief take hold of him”. Here the belief isn’t even his yet. It’s a separate, free-floating entity, that can grab a man like an arresting officer. Marcellus hopes that if the ghost appears again, Horatio “may approve our eyes and speak to it.” Then Barnardo tells the skeptical Horatio to “let us once again assail your ears,/That are so fortified against our story”.

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