Halsey Davidson - "Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns"

Oliver Goldsmith - "An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex"

Tito Vignoli - "Myth and Science"

Edward Godfrey - "Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design"

Books of The Times: In War and Floods, a Family’s Leitmotif of Love, Memories and Secrets
Amid a relentless string of layoffs and pay-freeze announcements, book publishers are clamping down on some of the business’s most glittery and cozy traditions.

Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing
Charlie Huston has written a smoking-hot new crime novel.

Books of The Times: They Vacuum Maggots, Don’t They? Novel Delves Into the Trauma Cleaning Trade
This city, known for its shrines and blazing autumn hills, is celebrating the millennial anniversary of an ancient book about love and loss among the imperial set.

A. C. Bradley - Shakespearean Tragedy

A >> A. C. Bradley >> Shakespearean Tragedy




Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her,
the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass
of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she
dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she
has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not
last, and so at the end of the interview (III. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a
warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.[80] It
is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off
her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse;
and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a
false account of Polonius's death, and is silent about the appearance of
the Ghost. She becomes miserable;

To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.

She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If
she had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the
King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered
torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.

The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.
She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and
she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of
sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.
These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even
more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death
because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his
success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out
that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her
energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:

No, no, the drink, the drink,--O my dear Hamlet,--
The drink, the drink! I am poison'd. [_Dies._

Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as
Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic
with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?

* * * * *

King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But
he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the
one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is
courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties
efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He
nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way
into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and
address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and
there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means
to the crown.[81] His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being
dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize
of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii.
35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.

On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance--a mildewed ear,
a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of
force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open
stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in
his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and
morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive
predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first
murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet
executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first
thought was always for himself.

I like him not, nor stands it safe with _us_
To let his madness range,

--these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His
first comment on the death of Polonius is,

It had been so with _us_ had we been there;

and his second is,

Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
It will be laid to _us_.

He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won
the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of
her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to
have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on
the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a
villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's
desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to
him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even
annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had
evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness
to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his
objects,--that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he
imagined he could trick something more than men.

This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to
his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has
fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father
to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and
more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:

till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.

Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:

Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],

he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
shaped the King's no less.

For--to return in conclusion to the action of the play--in all that
happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
_must_ fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach
the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which
seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is
apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no
other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in _Macbeth_, is this aspect so
impressive.[83]

I mention _Macbeth_ for a further reason. In _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ not
only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but
it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense,
religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too
definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it
is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a
divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally
interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare
uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in _Othello_
or _King Lear_. The horror in Macbeth's soul is more than once
represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost';
the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as
_Hamlet_ nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened
in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot
in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to
Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident
has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,[84] but it
appears probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination
as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly
does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a
second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage
Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in
the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are
not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed
resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen
in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and
whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished,
because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy
are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.

Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance
between _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, the appearance in each play of a
Ghost,--a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would
seem utterly out of place in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. Much might be
said of the Ghost in _Hamlet_, but I confine myself to the matter which
we are now considering. What is the effect of the appearance of the
Ghost? And, in particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so
_majestical_ a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance,
and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all
expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of
pity for his father? Whatever the intention may have been, the result is
that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a
dead king who desires the accomplishment of _his_ purposes, but also as
the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of
divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared
impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the
connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster
life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the beginning
of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the
received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end,
conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its
rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that
the apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth
concerning him.

If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be
agreed that, while _Hamlet_ certainly cannot be called in the specific
sense a 'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use
of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always
imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and
good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And
this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this
play, just as _Macbeth_, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly
approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: In the First Act (I. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father
has been dead not quite two months. In the Third Act (III. ii. 135)
Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead 'twice two months.' The events of
the Third Act are separated from those of the Second by one night (II.
ii. 565).]

[Footnote 55: The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be'
soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by
'the Everlasting.' Even this, however, seems to have been present in the
original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a
line about our being 'borne before an everlasting Judge.']

[Footnote 56: The present position of the 'To be or not to be'
soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due
to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they
precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and
consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable
instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a
poet's first conceptions.]

[Footnote 57: Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong
strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion'
with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' (V. i.
306).]

[Footnote 58:

O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:

Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This
passage is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (III. iv. 28):

A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of
complicity in the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told
him she was innocent of that.]

[Footnote 59: I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put
after 'revenged' in a late Quarto is right.]

[Footnote 60: III. iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at this
time, though I have not seen it noticed by critics, seems to me
puzzling. It is quite clear from III. ii. 310 ff., from the passage just
cited, and from IV. vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that everyone sees in the
play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King. Yet no one shows any
sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of murder. Surely that is
strange. Are we perhaps meant to understand that they do perceive this,
but out of subservience choose to ignore the fact? If that were
Shakespeare's meaning, the actors could easily indicate it by their
looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we may feel for Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern in their fate would be much diminished. But the mere text
does not suffice to decide either this question or the question whether
the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the commission they bore
to England.]

[Footnote 61: This passage in _Hamlet_ seems to have been in Heywood's
mind when, in _The Second Part of the Iron Age_ (Pearson's reprint, vol.
iii., p. 423), he makes the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to
satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to his mother's guilt. No reader could
possibly think that this Ghost was meant to be an hallucination; yet
Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I may add, goes
further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as visible,
to the privileged person.]

[Footnote 62: I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in
the way of the obvious plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him
shut up or executed. It is much safer to hurry him off to his doom in
England before he can say anything about the murder which he has somehow
discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance, and probably Hamlet's great
popularity with the people, are additional reasons. (It should be
observed that as early as III. i. 194 we hear of the idea of 'confining'
Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)]

[Footnote 63: I am inferring from IV. vii., 129, 130, and the last words
of the scene.]

[Footnote 64: III. iv. 172:

For this same lord,
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister:

_i.e._ the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense
elsewhere also in Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 65: IV. iii. 48:

_Ham._ For England!

_King._ Ay, Hamlet.

_Ham._ Good.

_King._ So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.

_Ham._ I see a cherub that sees them.]

[Footnote 66: On this passage see p. 98. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's
warning sounds, no doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And
is it not significant that, having given it, he abruptly changes the
subject?]

[Footnote 67: P. 102.]

[Footnote 68: It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's
repetitions can hardly be said to occur at moments of great emotion,
like Cordelia's 'And so I am, I am,' and 'No cause, no cause.'

Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be
found in comic persons, _e.g._ Justice Shallow in _2 Henry IV._]

[Footnote 69: Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find
something characteristic too in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor
ghost!' (I. v. 4), 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (V. i. 202).]

[Footnote 70: This letter, of course, was written before the time when
the action of the drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her
father's commands in I. iii., received no more letters (II. i. 109).]

[Footnote 71: 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the
first soliloquy. Cf. what he says of his mother's act (III. iv. 40):

Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there.]

[Footnote 72: There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible
idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother;
that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed
simple and affectionate love might really have been something very
different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some
lines in the Nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of
his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a
suspicion. I do not suggest that he _believed_ in it, and in the
Nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence
is in conflict with it.

He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable
intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that
Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long
as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress
on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius.]

[Footnote 73: Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight
to Ophelia's room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just
seen that on the contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it
is absolutely certain that a long interval separates the events of I. v.
and II. i. They think also, of course, that Hamlet's visit to Ophelia
was the first announcement of his madness. But the text flatly
contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time appeared totally
changed (II. ii. 1-10); the King is very uneasy at his 'transformation,'
and has sent for his school-fellows in order to discover its cause.
Polonius now, after Ophelia has told him of the interview, comes to
announce his discovery, not of Hamlet's madness, but of its cause (II.
ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the effect Hamlet aimed at in his
interview. I may add that Ophelia's description of his intent
examination of her face suggests doubt rather as to her 'honesty' or
sincerity than as to her strength of mind. I cannot believe that he ever
dreamed of confiding his secret to her.]

[Footnote 74: If this _is_ an allusion to his own love, the adjective
'despised' is significant. But I doubt the allusion. The other
calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that
patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all specially his own.]

[Footnote 75: It should be noticed that it was not apparently of long
standing. See the words 'of late' in I. iii. 91, 99.]

[Footnote 76: This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of
Hamlet's love.]

[Footnote 77: Polonius says so, and it _may_ be true.]

[Footnote 78: I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as
is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to
justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the
Quartos at IV. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost all modern
editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and gone,
lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.]

[Footnote 79: In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a
complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but
I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to
have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words
pathetically betray her own feeling:

Good my lord,
How does your honour _for this many a day_?

She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested
to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in
which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and
to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach.
So again do those most touching little speeches:

_Hamlet._ ... I did love you once.

_Ophelia._ Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

_Hamlet._ You should not have believed me ... I loved you not.

_Ophelia._ I was the more deceived.

Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but
that _she_ had repulsed _him_; and here, with his usual unobtrusive
subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have
accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven
Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot
repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own
heart is unchanged.

I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given
them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still
shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's
day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider
that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,'
sing an old song containing the line,

If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.]

[Footnote 80: _I.e._ the King will kill _her_ to make all sure.]

[Footnote 81: I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV.
vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in
speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy
(III. iii. 55).]

[Footnote 82: This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he
says, because if the King is killed praying he will _go to heaven_. On
Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts _never to heaven go_.]

[Footnote 83: I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.]

[Footnote 84: The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by
Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.]




LECTURE V

OTHELLO


There is practically no doubt that _Othello_ was the tragedy written
next after _Hamlet_. Such external evidence as we possess points to this
conclusion, and it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and
versification, and also by the fact that ideas and phrases of the
earlier play are echoed in the later.[85] There is, further (not to
speak of one curious point, to be considered when we come to Iago), a
certain resemblance in the subjects. The heroes of the two plays are
doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without
much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but
still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures
the shock of a terrible disillusionment. This theme is treated by
Shakespeare for the first time in _Hamlet_, for the second in _Othello_.
It recurs with modifications in _King Lear_, and it probably formed the
attraction which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer's
tragedy of _Timon_. These four dramas may so far be grouped together in
distinction from the remaining tragedies.

Copyright (c) 2007. topmasterworks.com. All rights reserved.