Hamlet1

Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary prob-
lem, and Hamlet the character only secondary.2† And Hamlet the character
has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the
critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which
through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism
instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their
own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a
Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and
probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that
his first business was to study a work of art.3 The kind of criticism that
Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most mis-
leading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical
insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the
substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative
gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his atten-
tion on this play.
Two writers of our time, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the
University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for
moving in the other direction.4† Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to
our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries,5* observing that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but
they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on the
importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of
the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to
the secret of dramatic art in general.6
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing
to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison
to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presenta-
tion of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know.
Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their
“interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that

122 ]
 hamlet [ 123

Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,

each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet
of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the
whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his
Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even
in the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordi-
nary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author
of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham;7
and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish
Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must
have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s
lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the ear-
lier, not from the later, play.8 From these three sources it is clear that in the
earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or
delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassi-
nating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet
was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play
of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more impor-
tant than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay
in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and
the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspi-
cion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing.
Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to
leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of
Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes – the Polonius-Laertes and
the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes – for which there is little excuse; these scenes
are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of
Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play
of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare
touched the play.9 And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that
the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts
of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we
believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is
Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her
son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully
upon the “intractable” material of the old play.10
124 ] 1919

Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s

masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the
play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it
is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most
pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which
even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines
like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,11
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act V. Sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep . . .
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf ’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;12
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
position. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other pro-
foundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing versifica-
tion, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic
successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as “inter-
esting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most
assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a
work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting
because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr.
Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion
of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of
his mother’s degradation. . . . The guilt of a mother is an almost intoler-
able motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to
supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.13
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt
of a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion
 hamlet [ 125

of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The sub-

ject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible,
self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff
that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.
And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very dif-
ficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you
examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare,
but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of
the Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, Act V. Sc. i.14 We find Shakespeare’s Hamlet
not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in
an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such
that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experi-
ence, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.15 If you examine any
of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equiva-
lence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her
sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined
sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death
strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically
released by the last event in the series.16 The artistic “inevitability” lies in
this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely
what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion
which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And
the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point:
that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feel-
ings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his
artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occa-
sioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for
it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot
understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life
and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and noth-
ing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And
it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem pre-
cludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of
Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different
emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and
126 ] 1919

insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable
of representing.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a
simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned.
The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a
deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the char-
acter Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in
action;17 in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he can-
not express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object
or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has
known; it is doubtless a subject of study for pathologists.18† It often occurs
in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims
down his feelings to fit the business world; the artist keeps them alive by his
ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is
an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explana-
tion and excuse.19 We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a
problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an
insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to
express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great
many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and
when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read
Montaigne, II. xii, Apologie de Raimond Sebond.20 We should have, finally,
to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to
be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We
should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand
himself.21†

Notes
1. As printed in SE; originally “Hamlet and His Problems,” The Athenaeum, 4665 (26 Sept
1919), 940-41, composed by 14 Sept (L1 396); a review of The Problem of “Hamlet,” by J. M.
Robertson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919), pp. 90; revised under the original title in SW.
2†. In Ath: “We are very glad to find Hamlet in the hands of so learned and scrupulous a
critic as Mr. Robertson. Few critics have even admitted”; in SW: “Few critics have even
admitted”
3. TSE echoes Robertson, who suggests that, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe
refashions Hamlet in the likeness of the protagonist of his own first novel, The Sorrows of Young
Werther: “To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects
of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it.” Trans. Thomas Carlyle
 hamlet [ 127
(London: John C. Nimmo, 1903), 304. According to Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835), Coleridge identified with Hamlet’s “abstracting and generalizing
habit”: “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so” (24 June 1827).
4†. In SW: “Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll”; this paragraph
and the following quotation were not in Ath.
TSE later claimed to have been “hand-in-glove” at the time of this essay with J. M.
Robertson, best known for his “disintegrationist” theories about the composite authorship of
Shakespeare’s plays (TCC 19). Elmer Edgar Stoll (1874-1959) was the author of Hamlet: An
Historical and Comparative Study (University of Minnesota Press, 1919).
5*. TSE’s note: “I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s
objections to Othello.” In A Short View of Tragedy (1693), translator and official court
historiographer Thomas Rymer (1641-1713) criticized Othello for its improbable plot, unnatural
characters, and moral depravity: “Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye;
And, certainly, never was any Play fraught, like this of Othello, with improbabilities”; he calls it
“plainly none other than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour.” Critical Works of Thomas
Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1956), 134, 164.
6. Stoll, Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study, 64; the “critics of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries” to whom Stoll refers include Jeremy Collier, James Drake, John
Dennis, and Sir Thomas Hanmer. “The psychological Hamlet,” he concludes, was “exclusively
the discovery, or invention, of the Romantic Age” (12).
7. Of the so-called ur-Hamlet, the presumably lost play that some believe to have been
Shakespeare’s source, Robertson writes, “Most critics have long been agreed that there was a
pre-Shakespearean Hamlet . . . and that its author was Thomas Kyd” (33). TSE had assigned
both Arden of Feversham (which he assumed the work of Kyd), a domestic tragedy dealing with
a nearly contemporaneous murder, and the prototypical revenge play, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, in
his 1918 Extension course (1.754).
8. François de Belleforest (1530-83) translated and adapted the legend of Amleth in his
collection of prose tales Histoires tragiques (1580) from the thirteenth-century history of the
Danes, Gesta Danorum (1514) by Saxo Grammaticus. Of the German “version” of Hamlet, Der
Bestrafte Brudermord [Fratricide Punished], Robertson writes, “we must examine the old
German play . . . known to have been played . . . at the Court of Dresden in 1626. This, though
preserved only through a manuscript of 1710, is at bottom clearly an early form of our Hamlet”
(42).
9. In the preface to The Problem of “Hamlet” Robertson refers readers to his conclusions
about Chapman’s contributions to the Shakespeare canon in Shakespeare and Chapman (1917),
which contains “the most revolutionary of the critical inferences to which the author has thus
far been led” (7).
10. Robertson concludes: “What Shakespeare could not do, no man could have done. What
he did remains a miracle of dramatic imagination. . . . He who will may argue that Shakespeare
should not have accepted intractable material. Let him tell us whether he would rather have
been without Hamlet, and whether he cannot see that the practical compulsion to handle or
retain intractable material underlies half a dozen of the Shakespeare plays” (75).
11. Hamlet I.i.166-67 .
12. Hamlet [Link].4-5, 12-15.
128 ] 1919
13. TSE’s brackets; Robertson, 73.
14. The final act of Chapman’s tragedy features the risen shade of Bussy D’Ambois awaiting
his revenge, the unfolding of the king’s treacherous plot to murder the Duke of Guise, and the
final soliloquy and suicide of the protagonist, Clermont D’Ambois.
15. Among the many possible sources for the term “objective correlative” are Santayana’s
“correlative objects” from “The Elements and Function of Poetry” in Interpretations of Poetry
and Religion (1900); John Henry Newman’s “Objective correlative” in sermon XLI, Sermons
Preached before the University of Oxford (1884); Edmund Husserl’s “objektives Korrelat” in
Logische Untersuchungen (1900-01); and Washington Allston’s “objective correlative” in Lectures
on Art (1850), though TSE was surprised to learn of the latter; see “A Letter from Eliot,” The
New Statesman (5 Mar 1965), 361. Later TSE referred to popular critical phrases like this one as
“conceptual symbols for emotional preferences,” and he added: “The ‘objective correlative’ in
the essay on Hamlet may stand for my bias towards the more mature plays of Shakespeare”
(TCC 19).
16. Macbeth V.i (“Out, damned spot! out, I say!”) and V.v (“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and
to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”).
17. TSE echoes Arnold’s observation in the “Preface” to Poems (1853): “What then are the
situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be
derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action.”
18†. In Ath and SW: “doubtless a study to pathologists”
19. In “Hamlet, ou les suites de la piété filiale” [Hamlet, or the Results of Filial Piety], part of
his Moralités légendaires (1887), Jules Laforgue describes the dandified Hamlet as a “young
insatiable prince.” TSE first read of Laforgue’s version of Hamlet in The Symbolist Movement in
Literature; in Aug 1916 he translated “a few pages” of Laforgue’s “Hamlet” in the unrealized
hopes of producing an English version of Moralités with Ezra Pound (L1 159).
20. Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (Essais, 1580) is a skeptical critique of the
high valuation of human reason in Raymond Sebond’s Liber creaturarum, which Montaigne
had translated earlier in his career. In the second volume of the Temple Classics edition that he
owned – The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1915) – TSE dog-
eared page 71 on which the following passage appears: “Those which have compared our life
unto a dreame, have happily had more reason so to doe, then they were aware. When we dreame,
our soule liveth, worketh and exerciseth all her faculties, even, and as much, as when it waketh;
and if more softly, and obscurely; yet verily not so, as that it may admit so great a difference, as
there is between a dark night, and a cleare day: Yes as between a night and a shadow: There it
sleepeth, here it slumbreth: More or lesse, they are ever in darknesses, yea Cimmerian darknesses.
We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. In my sleep I see not so cleare; yet can I never find my
waking cleare enough, or without dimnesse” (71). He would have consulted the original French
in his edition of Essais, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Garnier frères, 1872). TSE likely discovered the
connection in Robertson’s Montaigne and Shakspere (1897), in which Robertson quotes the
identical passage from the “Apologie.”
21†. In Ath, the review concluded with the following sentences, which were deleted in SW:
“In the Storm in Lear, and in the last scene of Othello, Shakespeare triumphed in tearing art
from the impossible: Hamlet is a failure. The material proved intractable in a deeper sense than
that intended by Mr. Robertson in his admirable essay.”