Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of Gulliver’s Travels One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn Hamlet Solitude The Age of Innocence The Handmaid’s Tale Persuasion Alice’s Adventures in Heart of Darkness Portnoy’s Complaint Wonderland The House on Mango Pride and Prejudice All Quiet on the Street Ragtime Western Front I Know Why the The Red Badge of Animal Farm Caged Bird Sings Courage The Ballad of the Sad The Iliad Romeo and Juliet Café Invisible Man The Rubáiyát of Omar Beloved Jane Eyre Khayyám Beowulf The Joy Luck Club The Scarlet Letter Black Boy Julius Caesar A Separate Peace The Bluest Eye The Jungle Silas Marner The Canterbury Tales Long Day’s Journey Slaughterhouse-Five Cat on a Hot Tin Roof into Night Song of Solomon Catch-22 Lord of the Flies The Sound and the The Catcher in the Rye The Lord of the Fury The Chronicles of Rings The Stranger Narnia Love in the Time of A Streetcar Named The Color Purple Cholera Desire Crime and Punishment The Man Without The Crucible Qualities Sula Darkness at Noon The Metamorphosis The Tale of Genji Death of a Salesman Miss Lonelyhearts A Tale of Two Cities The Death of Artemio Moby-Dick “The Tell-Tale Heart” Cruz My Ántonia and Other Stories Don Quixote Native Son Their Eyes Were Emerson’s Essays Night Watching God Emma 1984 Things Fall Apart Fahrenheit 451 The Odyssey To Kill a Mockingbird A Farewell to Arms Oedipus Rex Ulysses Frankenstein The Old Man and the Waiting for Godot The Glass Menagerie Sea The Waste Land The Grapes of Wrath On the Road Wuthering Heights Great Expectations One Flew over the Young Goodman The Great Gatsby Cuckoo’s Nest Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations William Shakespeare’s Hamlet New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Shakespeare’s Hamlet / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. —New ed. p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-632-6 (acid-free paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Hamlet. 2. Hamlet (Legendary character) I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Hamlet. PR2807.W456 2009 822.3’3—dc22 2009018234 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Alicia Post Printed in the United States of America MP BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Hamlet’s Northern Lineage: Masculinity, Climate, and the Mechanician in Early Modern Britain 11 Daryl W. Palmer Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet ’s Theory of Performance 33 Carolyn Sale Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science 55 Amy Cook Cognition and Recognition: Hamlet’s Power of Knowledge 73 Lingui Yang The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s 85 Paul Menzer T. S. Eliot’s Impudence: Hamlet, Objective Correlative, and Formulation 109 Bradley Greenburg vi Contents Translating Hamlet / Botching up Ophelia’s Half Sense 135 Maria Del Sapio Garbero Quoting Hamlet in the Early Seventeenth Century 151 Sayre N. Greenfield Gertrude’s Elusive Libido and Shakespeare’s Unreliable Narrators 173 Richard Levin Chronology 193 Contributors 195 Bibliography 197 Acknowledgments 201 Index 203 Editor’s Note y introduction suggests “family romances,” catastrophe-creation, and transferenceM as three paradigms for studying Hamlet. Daryl W. Palmer begins with a discussion of Hamlet’s origins. Carolyn Sale rightly sees Hamlet as embodying a theory of performance, while Amy Cook and Lingui Yang apply cognitive science to interpreting the play. The “City of London,” commercial core of the capital, may have housed performances of Hamlet, if the argument of Paul Menzer proves correct. T. S. Eliot’s absurd declaration that Hamlet is an “aesthetic failure” is fully contextualized by Bradley Greenburg. Ophelia’s madness and suicide are clarified by Maria Del Sapio Gar- bero, after which Sayre N. Greenfield catalogs the copious quotations from Hamlet in the early seventeenth century. Richard Levin concludes this volume with a wryly wise account of poor Gertrude’s permanent bad press, vilified as she may have been by the Ghost and Hamlet, two males with one common grudge against her. vii H arold B loom Introduction william shakespeare’s HAMLET I The last we see of Hamlet at the court in Act IV is his exit for England: HAMLET: For England? CLAUDIUS: Ay, Hamlet. HAMLET: Good. CLAUDIUS: So is it, if thou knew’st our purposes. HAMLET: I see a cherub that sees them. But come, for England! Farewell, dear mother. CLAUDIUS: Thy loving father, Hamlet. HAMLET: My mother: father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh—so my mother. Come, for England! Exit It is a critical commonplace to assert that the Hamlet of Act V is a changed man: mature rather than youthful, certainly quieter, if not quietistic, and some-how more attuned to divinity. Perhaps the truth is that he is at last himself, no longer afflicted by mourning and melancholia, by murderous jealousy and incessant rage. Certainly he is no longer haunted by his father’s ghost. It may be that the desire for revenge is fading in him. In all of Act V he does not speak once of his dead father directly. There is a single reference to “my father’s signet” which serves to seal up the doom of those poor schoolfellows, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and there is the curious 1 2 Harold Bloom phrasing of “my king” rather than “my father” in the halfhearted rhetorical question the prince addresses to Horatio: Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon— He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother, Popp’d in between th’election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life And with such coz’nage—is’t not perfect conscience To quit him with this arm? When Horatio responds that Claudius will hear shortly from England, presumably that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been executed, Hamlet rather ambiguously makes what might be read as a final vow of revenge: It will be short. The interim is mine. And a man’s life’s no more than to say “one.” However this is to be interpreted, Hamlet forms no plot, and is content with a wise passivity, knowing that Claudius must act. Except for the scheme of Claudius and Laertes, we and the prince might be confronted by a kind of endless standoff. What seems clear is that the urgency of the earlier Hamlet has gone. Instead, a mysterious and beautiful disinterestedness dominates this truer Hamlet, who compels a universal love precisely because he is beyond it, except for its exemplification by Horatio. What we overhear is an ethos so original that we still cannot assimilate it: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay Worse than the routines in the bilboes. Rashly— And prais’d be rashness for it: let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will— Weakly read, that divinity is Jehovah, but more strongly “ends” here are not our intentions but rather our fates, and the contrast is between a force that can shape stone, and our wills that only hew roughly against implacable substance. Nor would a strong reading find Calvin in the echoes of the Gospel of Matthew as Hamlet sets aside his own: “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart.” In his heart, there is again a kind of fighting, but the readiness, rather than the ripeness, is now all: Introduction 3 Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. The apparent nihilism more than negates the text cited from Matthew, yet the epistemological despair does not present itself as despair, but as an achieved serenity. Above all else, these are not the accents of an avenger, or even of someone who still mourns, or who continues to suffer the selfish virtues of the natural heart.