Hamlet Comedy and Class Struggle

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Hamlet Comedy and Class Struggle ;GKL, *!hh&)--Ç).-Afl]dd][lDaeal]\*()+ ;ge]\qKlm\a]k Ngdme],FmeZ]j* *()+Afl]dd][lDl\9jla[d]&=f_dak`dYf_mY_]&\ga2)(&)+0.'[gkl&,&*&)--W) AK99;@MA Daf_fYfMfan]jkalq ËLgo`YlZYk]mk]ko]eYq j]lmjf$@gjYlagÌÇ@Yed]l$ ;ge]\qYf\;dYkkKljm__d] 9:KLJ9;L C=QOGJ<K This article analyzes the relationship between comedy and tragedy through a Hamlet rereading of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, which is full of comic quality, yet is Shakespeare inserted before the ‘climax’ of the play, by, first, discussing the relationship between comedy comedy and materialism, and, second, examining the mutuality between comedy and tragedy tragedy. It discusses how comedy links with the material, class struggle, and death materialism and castration, arguing that the comic quality of the gravedigger is inseparable from psychoanalysis his materialism, suggesting that if tragedy is about the spiritual, comedy would be about the interruption of the spiritual by the material, and these two qualities Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 10:15 25 October 2015 coincide in the grinning skull. If comedy signifies the material life from within, the tragic hero may be the person who resists this heterogeneous motion of life, which explains why Hamlet abhors Yorick’s skull. This article rethinks the interrelation between comedy and tragedy: while most scholars treat them as separate genres, they are interrelated, and the thin line that distinguishes them is class differences, which is significant, as it illustrates the material power of comedy to usurp the bour- geois society. )-- COST_4.2_Hui_155-166.indd 155 8/30/13 1:13:12 PM AkYY[@ma AFLJG<M;LAGF Criticism of spiritual things is to distinguish between the genuine and the nongenuine. This, however, is not the concern of language, or only deeply disguised: as humor. Only in humor can language be critical. The particular critical magic then appears, so that the counterfeit substance comes into contact with the light; it disintegrates. The genuine remains: it is ash. We laugh about it. The rays of anyone who beams excessively will also tackle those heavenly unmaskings we call criticism. (Benjamin 1994: 84) Humour, for Walter Benjamin, is the language of criticism. The genu- ine is the ash: the material that associates with death, and the function of criticism and humour alike is to turn the spiritual into material. It seems that comedy often has a connection with the material. Before the climax of Hamlet, William Shakespeare introduces the tragic hero to the gravedigger whose business, as my discussion is going to show, is to remind the prince of his impotence. The clown, the rustic, represents the comic anti-hero whose responsibility is to dig the base, or, to use Benjamin’s term, to ‘brush history against the grain’ (1968: 257). Through a rereading of the gravedigger scene, I am going to examine two questions in this article: (1) what is the relation- ship between comedy and the material? And (2) how can such a relation- ship tell us about the mutuality between comedy and tragedy? Based on the discussion, this article argues that the two genres are interrelated and should be understood together, for what is a tragedy for the bourgeois may just be a comedy for the proletariat. Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 10:15 25 October 2015 Figure 1: Artwork by Tony Moon. )-. COST_4.2_Hui_155-166.indd 156 8/30/13 1:13:14 PM Lgo`YlZYk]mk]ko]eYqj]lmjf$@gjYlagÀ ;GE=<Q9F<E9L=JA9DAKE In the first part of this article, I am going to argue for the close connection between comedy and materialism. In the beginning of the gravedigger scene, the first clown says, ‘Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam’s profession’ (V.i.28-29). His words come from the proverbial rhyme ‘When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?’, Harold Jenkins suggests that ‘the Clown’s speech wittily inverts this by implying that there were none but gentlemen’ (Shakespeare 1982: 378). Adam was the first man who bore ‘arms’, which can be read as the coat of arms. The rhyme was the text that John Ball preached during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. However, if we allow ourselves to consider the text in a bigger context, the idea of the Diggers revolt against hierarchy also recalls the Levellers in 1649, when a group of poor men started to dig the waste land on St George’s Hill, which is ‘a symbolic assumption of ownership of the common lands’ and ‘a symbolic rejection of conventional pieties’ (1972: 88). Christopher Hill writes that ‘The constitu- tional Levellers … were not in fundamental disagreement with the type of society that was being set up by the English Revolution. They accepted the sanctity of private property, and their desire to extend democracy was within the limits of a capitalist society’ (1972: 123). Even though the Levellers and the True Levellers wanted to distant themselves from being called a ‘communist’, the image of the gravedigger was again seen 200 years later in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that says ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’ (Engels and Marx 2008: 16). Marx uses the allegory of the gravedig- ger to suggest that the bourgeois would eventually create its own failure. Linking the working class with the colonized, Terry Eagleton comments: For Marxism, history moves under the very sign of irony: there is some- thing darkly comic about the fact that the bourgeoisie are their own grave-diggers, just as there is an incongruous humour about the fact that the wretched of the earth should come to power. (2009: 161) In fact, if we follow Jenkins’s comments, we can see a Marxist twist in the words of the gravedigger, for Slavoj Žižek wrote: For properly historical thought, as opposed to historicism, there is no contradiction between the claim that ‘all history hitherto is the history of class struggle’ and the claim that the ‘bourgeoisie is the first class Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 10:15 25 October 2015 in history.’ All civilized societies were class societies, but prior to capitalism, their class structure was distorted by a network of other hierarchical orders (castes, estates, and so forth) – only with capitalism, when individuals are formally free and equal, deprived of all traditional hierarchical links, does the class structure appear ‘as such.’ (2010: 196) ‘Bourgeoisie is the first class in history’ – does it not sound like an echo of the clown whose words imply that once upon a time ‘there were none but (original emphasis) gentlemen’? Summing up from the above, we can see that the gravedigger is an image that represents the destructive force from within, such an image demonstrates Marx’s insight in his reading of Shakespeare. )-/ COST_4.2_Hui_155-166.indd 157 8/30/13 1:13:14 PM AkYY[@ma In fact, the clown’s words have a close connection with class struggle, for he demonstrates the revolutionary power of jokes. Comparing with the coat of arms, a spade is more superior as it was there from the very beginning. The spade, which is ‘the insignium of “ancient gentlemen” like “Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers”’ (Jenkins 1956: 564), recalls the late medi- eval morality play Mankind, in which it was used as the representation of honest labour, the symbol against the sin of sloth. W. A. Davenport writes that ‘Mankind’s role in the play is identified as that of honest labourer by his spade, and the self-appointed task of avoiding idleness by digging and sowing’ (1982: 43). In the play, the symbolism of spade and the allusion of earth and clay are deployed to ‘remind us of Adam and of man’s burden of original sin’ (Lester 1981: xxiv). Davenport suggests that digging ‘stands for the whole idea of man’s potential labours on this earth, as well as the idea of occupying oneself with useful tasks to fend off the Devil, and to earn salva- tion through virtuous acts, as one wins fruits from the earth by toil’ (1982: 43). Apart from this traditional reading, the spade, which digs the material base of earth, can be read as a symbol of the ‘working class’, and it belongs to nature and is primary while the coat of arms belongs to the bourgeois and is cultural and secondary. The interlude relates to the use of the gallows, as the devil Titivillus tries to convince Mankind to hang himself by saying that Mercy has been hanged. The power of comedy, as seen in Titivillus, Mischief, Newguise, Nowadays and Nought, is on the side of death, only in Mankind is it oppo- site to the one who makes their living through the spade. If the moral lesson of Mankind is to warn us against the violent use of language, the sin of flesh and excess, the theme of Hamlet is more ambiguous as it is the gravedigger who holds the spade. The power of comedy and death in the latter belongs to the working class. While the clown’s words may seem to be idle chatter, comparing Mankind with Hamlet shows that the bourgeois use of language is the real abuse of language. The teaching comes from the side of death, which is the exact opposite of Mercy’s saying ‘your body is your enemy’. The body for the gravedigger is not an enemy, because the material is the only form of existence, and it is the source of comedy, living and dying.
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