FIGURATIVE DESIGN IN HAMLET THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DUMB SHOW LEE SHERIDAN COX OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS $8.00 FIGURATIVE DESIGN IN HAMLET The Significance of the Dumb Show By Lee Sheridan Cox Critics have long debated the significance of the dumb show in Hamlet. There is a wide divergence of opinion on the matter of its importance: to one critic, it is ''only a mechanical necessity"; to another, "the keystone to the arch of the drama." In mod­ ern performances of Hamlet, it is frequently omitted, a decision vigorously protested by some critics as detrimental to the play scene. But the presence of the dumb show in the play scene has given rise to questions that evoke little unanimity of response even among its proponents. Why does the mime directly anticipate the subject matter of The Murder of Gonzago? Does Shakespeare preview Gonzago to provide necessary in­ formation? If not, is the dumb show then superfluous? And if superfluous, was the de­ vice forced on Shakespeare, or was it merely a politic catering to popular taste? Is the show foisted on Hamlet by the visiting players? If not, how does it serve his larger plan and purpose? What is its effect on the stage audience? Does Claudius see the pan­ tomimic prefiguring of Gonzago? What does his silence during and immediately alter the show signify? The search for answers to such questions is usually confined to the play scene. But Professor Cox maintains that the true na­ ture and function of the show can be ap­ FIGURATIVE DESIGN IN HAMLET THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DUMB SHOW FIGURATIVE DESIGN IN HAMLET THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DUMB SHOW LEE SHERIDAN COX OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 1973 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cox, Lee Sheridan Figurative design in Hamlet Includes bibliographical references. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet. 2. Pantomime. I. Title. PR2807.C68 822.3'3 72-12916 ISBN 0-8142-0175-X FOR HELEN LOUISE CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix CHAPTER ONE 3 CHAPTER TWO 17 CHAPTER THREE 35 CHAPTER FOUR 55 CHAPTER FIVE 77 CHAPTER SIX 109 NOTES 156 INDEX 177 This book has been in process for a good many years, during which I have accumulated a variety of debt to a good many people. The study had its beginning in a paper written for a graduate seminar at Indiana University; and I recall, with gratitude, fellow students whose enthusiasm for my early ar­ gument enforced my own confidence in it. I am similarly in­ debted to friends and colleagues along the way for a stimula­ tion that comes with good conversation and encouraging sup­ port: I must name, with a particular sense of obligation, Fran and Arnold Shapiro, who were always ready to talk about Hamlet, and Robert M. Estrich and Bernard O'Kelly, whose response to an early product of my argument contributed to its progress. I wish to express special gratitude to those who took time from busy schedules to read the entire book in manuscript and to give me the benefit of their counsel: warm thanks are due to John Harold Wilson and John Gabel; to Rolf Soellner, with added appreciation for his helpful critical notes on the first draft; and to Roy W. Battenhouse, whose generous and open-minded interest in the work of his students can always be counted on and whose provocative teaching and critical advice were a constructive force in the making of this book. Details and conclusions of the germinal study mentioned above were later employed in a chapter of my graduate dissertation, writ­ ten in 1962 under the direction of the late William Riley ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Parker. Although the latter work dealt with Milton's use of imagery and the comment on Hamlet served only comparative purposes and although Mr. Parker did not see the present study in manuscript, students who had the good fortune to work under his kind and invaluable tutelage must be aware, in the course of any scholarly project they subsequently under­ take, of profit from his precepts and example: I record such debt in grateful memory. The obligation of the Hamlet critic to the published work of others defies express acknowledgment. Some of that in­ debtedness is indicated in my text and notes. However, the latter are necessarily compressed and selective, intended to direct the reader to related lines of inquiry or to findings closely similar or directly contradictory to my own, rather than to provide general bibliography. It goes without saying that if this study of the dumb show helps to effect a resolution of certain long-debated questions (as I hope it does), that re­ sult has been implemented by the work of many scholars whose contributions may not be documented in these pages* Finally, I am indebted to the Ohio State University for a grant that freed me from routine academic duties in the winter of 1967; to my typist, Mrs. Roger Johnson, whose competence deserves kudos; and to the staff of the Ohio State University Press for courteous assistance and painstaking care in the editing and proofing of the text. FIGURATIVE DESIGN IN HAMLET THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DUMB SHOW CHAPTER ONE In modern performances of Hamlet, the dumb show is fre­ quently omitted. Many critics have protested the deletion, some of them vigorously. J. Dover Wilson says, "Remove [the dumb show], and what happens? The play scene is ruined."1 One may agree with this opinion and at the same time suspect that the custom of gauging the worth of the mime only by its contribution to the play-scene accounts, in part, for failure to establish the show as indispensable. Referring to the "common assumption" that the show is "only a me­ chanical necessity," H. D. F. Kitto says, "In a dramatist of Shakespeare's class, should we not expect the dumb-show to be .. an integral part of the whole?"2 Certainly, one might expect to find a special, even an intrinsic, significance in a dramatic convention to which Shakespeare gives unconven­ tional form. And when a playwright has his protagonist, ex­ pounding on the art of the dramatist and the actor, scorn "inexplicable dumb-shows and noise"3 although the playwright himself is employing a puzzling dumb show (through the agency of the scorner) and, repeatedly, the noise of kettle­ drum, trumpet, and cannon, one might suppose both the silent scene and the sound of ordnance to be germane to a large pur­ pose. To date, one approach to the significance of the show has not been taken: a close consideration of its nature and function in the light of figurative and structural patterns throughout FIGURATIVE DESIGN IN HAMLET Hamlet. When Shakespeare placed the mime in the second scene of the third act, he gave it a medial position in the un­ folding of the framing action. In the following study, I hope to demonstrate that he also gave it a meaning central to his basic thesis and a figurative significance that makes it inex­ pendable. Midway in the course of Hamlet a drama in progress before the assembled court of Denmark is interrupted when the Dan­ ish King, rising from his seat in the audience, cries, "Give me some light," abruptly dismisses the players, and leaves the "theater." The dramatic matter thus violently terminated is itself violent: a ruler is treacherously slain; his place of power is then assumed and his wife wooed and won by the killer. The inner-stage performance is repetitious: what the players first enact in dumb show is in the process of replay, with dia­ logue, when the theater is closed by the invoker of light. And if one action is presented in two dramatic forms to the stage audience, it is thrice-presented in as many guises to the Hamlet audience. "The matter" that the King and the Queen of Den­ mark have been entreated to "hear and see" (III.i.23) and that they first only see, the Hamlet audience has first only heard. For both pantomime and playlet iterate the gist of the tale poured into "ears of flesh and blood" (I.v.22) by the Ghost of Hamlet's father who—appearing to Hamlet, accusing King Claudius of murder, and charging Hamlet with revenge—re­ counts, in vivid detail, the peculiar circumstances of that mur­ der and its immediate aftermath: the King sleeping in the garden; the pouring of poison into the sleeper's ears; the "leperous" effect of the deadly hebenon (64); the murderer's subsequent abuse of "the whole ear of Denmark" with false report of the victim's death (36-38); his wooing of the vic­ tim's wife with "wicked wit" (44); and his success in this, as in his assault on the ears of King Hamlet and Denmark. Thus, an account of two forms of poisoning by way of the ears is first presented in affecting narration by a speaker who re­ peatedly enjoins his audience to "hear," to "list" (5, 7, 22, 34). His hearer then resorts to action on a stage as a medium for, and determinant of, action in the Danish court. Proposing to THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DUMB SHOW observe the show that Claudius presents on seeing a dramatiza­ tion of the deeds ascribed to him, Hamlet commissions the performance of The Murder of Gonzago (or The Mouse­ trap). Before the King whose "seeming" he so can "censure" (III.ii.91-92) and the court whose ear has reportedly been abused by false report, the substance of the Ghost's revelation is pantomimed in a scene that dispenses with the spectators' ears and is repeated in dramatic action with dialogue.