A. C. Bradley - Shakespearean Tragedy

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According to the first of these typical views, Hamlet was restrained by
conscience or a moral scruple; he could not satisfy himself that it was
right to avenge his father.

This idea, like the first, can easily be made to look very plausible if
we vaguely imagine the circumstances without attending to the text. But
attention to the text is fatal to it. For, on the one hand, scarcely
anything can be produced in support of it, and, on the other hand, a
great deal can be produced in its disproof. To take the latter point
first, Hamlet, it is impossible to deny, habitually assumes, without any
questioning, that he _ought_ to avenge his father. Even when he doubts,
or thinks that he doubts, the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses no
doubt as to what his duty will be if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he
but blench I know my course.' In the two soliloquies where he reviews
his position (II. ii., 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,'
and IV. iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he
reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he
reflects on the possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among
them a moral scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he
confesses, conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has
let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead that his
conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet
his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but
does not blunt it. What natural explanation of all this can be given on
the conscience theory?

And now what can be set against this evidence? One solitary passage.[35]
Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his
voyage, he asks him (V. ii. 63):

Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon--
He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother,
Popp'd in between the election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage--is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?

Here, certainly, is a question of conscience in the usual present sense
of the word; and, it may be said, does not this show that all along
Hamlet really has been deterred by moral scruples? But I ask first how,
in that case, the facts just adduced are to be explained: for they must
be explained, not ignored. Next, let the reader observe that even if
this passage did show that _one_ hindrance to Hamlet's action was his
conscience, it by no means follows that this was the sole or the chief
hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask himself
whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here almost
repeating the words he used in vain self-reproach some time before
(IV. iv. 56):

How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep?

Is it not clear that he is speculating just as vainly now, and that this
question of conscience is but one of his many unconscious excuses for
delay? And, lastly, is it not so that Horatio takes it? He declines to
discuss that unreal question, and answers simply,

It must be shortly known to him from England
What is the issue of the business there.

In other words, 'Enough of this endless procrastination. What is wanted
is not reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more
significant?

Perhaps, however, it may be answered: 'Your explanation of this passage
may be correct, and the facts you have mentioned do seem to be fatal to
the theory of conscience in its usual form. But there is another and
subtler theory of conscience. According to it, Hamlet, so far as his
explicit consciousness went, was sure that he ought to obey the Ghost;
but in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a
moral repulsion to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his time,
which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge
his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his
time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because
this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to
recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or
passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to
Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him
that we admire and love him.'

Now I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and
more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has
more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to
Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections
to it, three which seem to be fatal. (_a_) If it answers to
Shakespeare's meaning, why in the world did he conceal that meaning
until the last Act? The facts adduced above seem to show beyond question
that, on the hypothesis, he did so. That he did so is surely next door
to incredible. In any case, it certainly requires an explanation, and
certainly has not received one. (_b_) Let us test the theory by
reference to a single important passage, that where Hamlet finds the
King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives himself for
sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him to
heaven, whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be
an unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had
been the stirrings of his deeper conscience, _that_ could have masked
itself in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not
the idea quite ludicrous? (_c_) The theory requires us to suppose that,
when the Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge the murder of his father, it is
laying on him a duty which _we_ are to understand to be no duty but the
very reverse. And is not that supposition wholly contrary to the natural
impression which we all receive in reading the play? Surely it is clear
that, whatever we in the twentieth century may think about Hamlet's
duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he _ought_ to have obeyed
the Ghost.

The conscience theory, then, in either of its forms we must reject. But
it may remind us of points worth noting. In the first place, it is
certainly true that Hamlet, in spite of some appearances to the
contrary, was, as Goethe said, of a most moral nature, and had a great
anxiety to do right. In this anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is
stronger in him than in any of the later heroes. And, secondly, it is
highly probable that in his interminable broodings the kind of paralysis
with which he was stricken masked itself in the shape of conscientious
scruples as well as in many other shapes. And, finally, in his shrinking
from the deed there was probably, together with much else, something
which may be called a moral, though not a conscientious, repulsion: I
mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly on a man who could not
defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the only plan that
Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the play that
he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man, one
must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and
honourable, we may presume that he did so.

(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ
may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course
is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most moral
nature, _without the strength of nerve which forms a hero_, sinks
beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?

How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful
traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no _hero_.

But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth--how could he
possibly have done what we _see_ Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
terrified friends with the cry:

Unhand me, gentlemen!
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;

the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and
forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been
formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.

This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to
Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it
is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were
indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are
indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out
of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.
Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to
his corpse:

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;

yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us,
for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:

This man shall set me packing:
I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia
was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly
feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still
less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of
his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely
an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is
such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses
Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to
soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this
embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a
soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business
was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul
unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of
conscious failure.[37]

(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, _Hamlet_ is the tragedy of
reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause
of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of
mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue
of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is
'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human
foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed,
cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
any positive, limited thing,--a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
resolution or executed a deed' (_Shakspere, his Mind and Art_, 4th ed.,
pp. 132, 133).

On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received
view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies--such
words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or
those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side
and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence
of those words of the King to Laertes (IV. vii. 119 f.), which,
if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what
was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:

that we would do
We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh
That hurts by easing.

And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the _description_
given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
but unconscious excuses.

Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we
feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.

Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
the theory, the _direct_ result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at _any_ time
and in _any_ circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
who at any _other_ time and in any _other_ circumstances than those
presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
abnormal and induced by special circumstances,--a state of profound
melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
in the _production_ of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
established, displayed, as one of its _symptoms_, an excessive
reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
the theory makes it, the _direct_ cause of the irresolution at all; nor
was it the _only_ indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
of it.

These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
will presently become so.

3

Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately
or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's
death. And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea
that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who
knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a
mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In
a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the
observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who
are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently
practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to
have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a
soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet _was_ a soldier. If
he was fond of acting, an aesthetic pursuit, he was equally fond of
fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
fearless,--in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
vengeance, could _ever_ have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!

If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]

Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?

(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
in the _Merchant of Venice_ a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to
Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
is quite different.

(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
himself. The world for him was _herrlich wie am ersten Tag_--'this
goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled
with wonder and swelling into ecstasy.

Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those
around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's
adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of
him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother,
though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never
entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her,--characteristic,
and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is
forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find
it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to see
something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a
'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first greeting
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace
the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His
love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most
natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure
that he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the
foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be,
answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving
the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm
belief in anything, but he is never sceptical about _them_.

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