A. C. Bradley - Shakespearean Tragedy

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And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps
even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of
earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to
be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the
disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust
at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his
astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything
pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.
This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his
heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with
an emphasis on 'man,'

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the
others speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to
you.' He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.
He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and
a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and
his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is
not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original
character.

Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme
intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact,
_Hamlet_ deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as
the title 'tragedy of reflection.'

(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the
Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly
this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad
alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare's other
heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his
nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at
length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a
genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself,
fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception,
great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and
fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does
not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them,
and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows
itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike
in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is
not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really
nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of
philosophies,' unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough,
exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]

His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own,
the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
_i.e._, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?

Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
dreams.

If now we ask whether any special danger lurked _here_, how shall we
answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first
place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted--the
idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought
tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life--would be found by
no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of
the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally
known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in _any_
intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a
man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual
peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more
at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a
lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
specially tends to produce _this_ is really a mere illusion.

In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
Hamlet did _not_ live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.

On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
being and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
still more. Thus the speculative habit would be _one_ indirect cause of
the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
degenerate form as one of the _symptoms_ of this morbid state.

* * * * *

Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
hear?

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him

As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.

He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
within a month--'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'--she married
again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see
in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste
to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more
desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
soliloquy, which is _wholly_ concerned with this subject, are,

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
marriage-bed.[45]

If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.

And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to
answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.

The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right,--

so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his
life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain
efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing
self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.

4

'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was
not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of
madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an
instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would
enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I
am grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was
no mere common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many
readers of the play would understand it better if they read an account
of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word
'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No
exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at
once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to
call _Hamlet_ a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.

But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in
anything like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop
into insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible
impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might
extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might
become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy
is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing from
the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic
use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly
be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a
tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers--and thousands go
about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree--is
considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is
only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is therefore, so
far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at
any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.[47] And, finally,
Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to
imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more
difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony
or Macbeth.

Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.

It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the _immediate_
cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at
life and everything in it, himself included,--a disgust which varies in
intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into
weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such
a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to _any_ kind of decided
action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response
is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And
the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a
man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a
certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would
not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and
against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and
positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of
revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an
unnatural strength because they have an ally in something far stronger
than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy
motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased
feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.' We
_see_ them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple, no
analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48] But this melancholy is
perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task
assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For
those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the
Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
consequence of attempting it--success, my death, utter misunderstanding,
mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a
defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as
this?'--all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with
such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought,
an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening
self-contempt.

Again, (_a_) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a
nature normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing
healthy impulses which work themselves out before they have time to
subside. (_b_) It accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which
some of these actions give to him. He arranges the play-scene with
lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and
partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III. ii.
286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King's
designs in sending him away (III. iv. 209), and looks back with
obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he
displayed on the voyage (V. ii. 1-55). These were not _the_
action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them
his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust. (_c_) It accounts
for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his
'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe)
in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed by 'much forcing
of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy
alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
suspicion he is forced to feel. (_d_) It accounts no less for the
painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises,
and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent
symptoms of such melancholy, and (_e_) they sometimes alternate, as they
do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite
fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the
soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes
when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as 'lapsed in _passion_,' and
it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that
inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's
slave.'[49]

Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
(IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
him here and always is god-like), but this _bestial_ oblivion or
'_dullness_,' this 'letting all _sleep_,' this allowing of heaven-sent
reason to 'fust unused':

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to _sleep_ and feed? a _beast_, no more.[50]

So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
_dull_ and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when
the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
tardy and lapsed in _time_; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
almost _blunted_, and bids him not to _forget_ (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of
love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
thinking of it at all, but for the time literally _forgets_ it. It seems
to me we are driven to think of Hamlet _chiefly_ thus during the long
time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
command, 'Do not forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not
accidents.

The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '_Why_,' he
asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
event? And does _that_ again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have _cause,
and will, and strength, and means_, to act?' A man irresolute merely
because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly
condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
it exerts at other times.

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