Literary criticism and theory - II

Unit I: New Criticism

T. S. Eliot: Hamlet and His Problems
Whimsatt and Beardsley: The Intentional and Affective Fallacy

Unit II: Structuralism and post-structuralism

Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author

Unit III: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

Stephen Greenblatt: Selections from Renaissance Self-Fashioning

Unit IV: Eco-criticism

HAMLET AND HIS PROBLEMS
T.S ELIOT

Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and
Hamlet the character only secondary. 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. The kind of
criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most
misleading 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 attention on this
play.

Two recent writers, 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. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the
labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 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.

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 presentation 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 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 extraordinary
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; 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 earlier, not from the
later, play. 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 assassinating 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 important 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 suspicion. 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. 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.
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,
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;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other
profoundly interesting play of "intractable" material and astonishing
versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the
tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as
"interesting" 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 intolerable motive for
drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological
solution, or rather a hint of one.
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 of
Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might
conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, selfcomplete,
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 difficult 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. 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 experience, are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more
successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; 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.
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 feelings 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
occasioned 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 nothing 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 precludes 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 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 character Hamlet it is the
buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it
is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot 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 study
to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these
feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist
keeps it 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
explanation and excuse. 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. 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.