William Shakespeare Part 12

Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his _Histoires Tragiques_. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the _Hystorie of Hamblet_, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in London in 1608. Shakespeare seems to have known both de Belleforest and the _Hystorie_.

_The Fable._ Claudius, brother to the King of Denmark, conniving with Gertrude the Queen, poisons his brother, and seizes the throne. Soon afterwards he marries Gertrude. At this point the play begins.

Hamlet, son of the murdered king, sick at heart at his mother's hasty re-marriage, and troubled by his love for Ophelia, returns to Denmark. The ghost of his father reveals the manner of the murder to him, and makes him swear to be revenged. The revelation so affects him that the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring himself to kill Claudius. In a play he shows them that he knows their guilt.

While speaking with his mother, he discovers and kills a spy hidden behind the arras. The spy is Polonius, father of Laertes and of Ophelia.

Claudius causes Hamlet to sail for England, on the pretext that the killing of Polonius has brought him into danger with the populace.

He plans that Hamlet shall be killed on his arrival. Hamlet discovers the treacherous purpose and returns unhurt to Denmark.

During Hamlet's absence at sea, Laertes learns how Polonius was killed and swears to be revenged on Hamlet. Hamlet's return gives him his opportunity.

Claudius suggests that the revenge be taken at a fencing-bout.

Laertes shall fence with Hamlet, using a poisoned foil. If this fails, Hamlet shall be given poisoned wine.

In a scuffle during the fencing-bout the fencers change foils.

Gertrude, by mistake, drinks the poisoned wine and dies. Laertes, hurt by the poisoned foil, dies. Hamlet, also hurt by the poisoned foil, kills Claudius and dies too.

_Hamlet_ is the most baffling of the great plays. It is the tragedy of a man and an action continually baffled by wisdom. The man is too wise.

The dual action, pressing in both cases to complete an event, cannot get past his wisdom into the world. The action in one case is a bad one. It is simply murder. In the other, and more important case, it is, according to our scheme, also a bad one. It is revenge, or, at best, the taking of blood for blood. In the Shakespearean scheme it is not revenge, it is justice, and therefore neither good nor bad but necessary. The situation which causes the tragedy is one very common in Shakespeare's system. Life has been wrenched from her course. Wrenching is necessary to bring her back to her course or to keep her where she is. Hamlet is a man who understands too humanly to wish to wrench either this way or that, and too shrewdly to be himself wrenched by grosser instruments of Fate.

The action consists in the baffling of action. Mostly, it consists in the baffling of life's effort to get back to her course. All through the play there is the uneasiness of something trying to get done, something from outside life trying to get into life, but baffled always because the instrument chosen is, himself, a little outside life, as the wise must be. This baffling of the purpose of the dead leads to a baffling of the living, and, at last, to something like an arrest of life, a deadlock, in which each act, however violent, makes the obscuring of life's purpose greater.

The powers outside life send a poor ghost to Hamlet to prompt him to an act of justice. After baffled hours, often interrupted by c.o.c.k-crow, he gives his message. Hamlet is charged with the double task of executing judgment and showing mercy. It is a charge given to many people (generally common people) in the system of the plays. It is given to two other men in this play. It is nothing more than the fulfilling of the kingly office, so bloodily seized by Claudius before the opening of the play. At this point, it may be well to consider the society in which the kingly office is to be exercised.

The society is created with Shakespeare's fullest power. It is not an image of the world in little, like the world of the late historical plays. It is an image of the world as intellect is made to feel it. It is a society governed by the enemies of intellect, by the sensual and the worldly, by deadly sinners and the philosophers of bread and cheese.

The King is a drunken, incestuous murderer, who fears intellect. The Queen is a false woman, who cannot understand intellect. Polonius is a counsellor who suspects intellect. Ophelia is a doll without intellect.

Laertes is a boor who destroys intellect. The courtiers are parasites who flourish on the decay of intellect. Fortinbras, bright and n.o.ble, marching to the drum to win a dunghill, gives a colour to the folly. The only friends of the wise man are Horatio, the schoolfellow, and the leader of a cry of players.

The task set by the dead is a simple one. All tasks are simple to the simple-minded. To the delicate and complex mind so much of life is bound up with every act that any violent act involves not only a large personal sacrifice of ideal, but a tearing-up by the roots of half the order of the world. Wisdom is founded upon justice; but justice, to the wise man, is more a scrupulous quality in the mind than the doing of expedient acts upon sinners. Hamlet is neither "weak" nor "unpractical," as so many call him. What he hesitates to do may be necessary, or even just, as the world goes, but it is a defilement of personal ideals, difficult for a wise mind to justify. It is so great a defilement, and a world so composed is so great a defilement, that death seems preferable to action and existence alike.

The play at this point presents a double image of action baffled by wisdom. Hamlet baffles the dealing of the justice of Fate, and also the death plotted for him by his uncle. His weapon, in both cases, is his justice, his precise scrupulousness of mind, the niceness of mental balance which gives to all that he says the double-edge of wisdom. It is the faculty, translated into the finer terms of thought, which the ghost seeks to make real with bloodshed. Justice, in her grosser as in her finer form, is concerned with the finding of the truth. The first half of the play, though it exposes and develops the fable, is a dual image of a search for truth, of a seeking for a certainty that would justify a violent act. The King is probing Hamlet's mind with gross human probes, to find out if he is mad. Hamlet is searching the King's mind with the finest of intellectual probes, to find out if he is guilty. The probe used by him, the fragment of a play within a play, is the work of a man with a knowledge of the impotence of intellect--

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown"--

and a faith in the omnipotence of intellect--

"Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."

To this man, five minutes after the lines have exposed the guilty man, comes a chance to kill his uncle. Hamlet "might do it pat" while he is at prayers. The knowledge that the sword will not reach the real man, since d.a.m.nation comes from within, not from without, arrests his hand.

Fate offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by, with his baffling slowness, made up of mercy and wisdom.

Fate, or the something outside life which demands the King's blood, so that life may go back to her channel, is foiled. The action cannot bring itself to be. A wise human purpose is, for the moment, stronger than the eternal purpose of Nature, the roughly just.

It is a part of this play's ironic teaching that life must not be baffled; but that, when she has been wrenched from her course, she must either be wrenched back to it or kept violently in the channel to which she has been forced.

In _Macbeth_, a not dissimilar play, the life violently altered is kept in the strange channel by a succession of violent acts. In _Hamlet_, when Hamlet's merciful wisdom has decided that the life violently altered shall not be wrenched back, his destroying wisdom decides that she shall not be kept in the strange channel. The King, just in his way, seeks to find out if Hamlet be sane. If Hamlet be sane, he must die. His death will secure the King's position. By his death life will be kept in the strange channel. Polonius, the King's agent, learns that Hamlet is sane and something more. Fate demands violence this way if she may not have it in the other. She offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his baffling swiftness, which strikes on the instant, when the Queen's honour and his own life depend on it. The first bout in this play of the baffling of action falls to Hamlet. The second bout, in which the King's purpose is again baffled, by the sending of the two courtiers to their death in England, also falls to Hamlet. The b.l.o.o.d.y purpose from outside life and the b.l.o.o.d.y purpose from within life are both baffled and kept from being by the two extremes so perfectly balanced in the wise nature.

Extremes in the Shakespearean system are tragical things. In Shakespeare, the pathway of excess leads, not as with Blake, to the palace of wisdom, but to destruction. The two extremes in Hamlet, of slowness and swiftness, set up in life the counter forces which destroy extremes, so that life, the common thing, may continue to be common. The mercy of Hamlet leaves the King free to plot his death. The swiftness of Hamlet gives to the King a hand and sword to work his will.

In other plays, the working of extremes to the punishment dealt by life to all excess is simple and direct. In this play, nothing is simple and direct. Fate's direct workings are baffled by a mind too complex to be active on the common planes. The baffling of Fate's purpose leads to a condition in life like the "slack water" between tides. Laertes, when his father is killed, raises the town and comes raving to the presence to stab the killer. He is baffled by the King's wisdom. Ophelia, "incapable of her own distress," goes mad and drowns herself. The play seems to hesitate and stand still while the energies spilled in the baffling of Fate work and simmer and grow strong, till they combine with Fate in the preparation of an end that shall not be baffled. Even so, "the end men looked for cometh not." The end comes to both actions at once in the squalor of a chance-medley. Fate has her will at last. Life, who was so long baffled, only hesitated. She destroys the man who wrenched her from her course, and the man who would neither wrench her back nor let her stay, and the women who loved these men, and the men who loved them. Revenge and chance together restore life to her course, by a destruction of the lives too beastly, and of the lives too hasty, and of the lives too foolish, and of the life too wise, to be all together on earth at the same time.

It is difficult to praise the poetry of _Hamlet_. Nearly all the play is as familiar by often quotation as the New Testament. The great, wise, and wonderful beauty of the play is a part of the English mind for ever.

It is difficult to live for a day anywhere in England (except in a theatre) without hearing or reading a part of _Hamlet_. Lines that are little quoted are the lines to quote here--

"this fell sergeant, death, Is strict in his arrest."

"O proud death!

What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, That thou so many princes, at a shot, So bloodily hast struck?"

The last speech, great as the speech at the end of Timon, and n.o.ble, like that, with a music beyond the art of voices, is constructed on a similar metrical basis.

"Let four captains Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally: and, for his pa.s.sage, The soldier's music and the rites of war Speak loudly for him.

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot."

_Troilus and Cressida._

_Written._ (?)

_Produced._ After publication.

_Published._ 1609.

_Source of the Plot._ Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of _Troilus and Creseide_. John Lydgate's _Troy Boke_. William Caxton's translation of the French book of the _Recuyels of Troy_. George Chapman's translation of Homer's _Iliad_.

Among many other possible sources may be mentioned a now lost play of _Troilus and Cressida_ (produced in 1599) by the poets Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle.

_The Fable._ The scene is Troy. Cressida is a Trojan woman, whose father, Calchas, has gone over to the Greeks. She is beloved by the youth Troilus. Her uncle, Pandarus, seeks to bring her to accept Troilus. Hector, brother to Troilus, challenges a Greek champion to single combat.

In the Greek camp there is much disaffection. Achilles, the chief Greek champion, conceiving himself wronged, makes a mock of the other leaders. To teach him his place the leaders plan that Ajax shall be chosen in his stead to take up Hector's challenge.

Pandarus succeeds in bringing Cressida to love Troilus.

Calchas, in the Greek camp, sends to Troy for Cressida. She is delivered over to the Greeks. Forgetting Troilus, she entangles one of the Greeks with her wiles.

Ajax takes up Hector's challenge. They fight a friendly bout and then go to feast, where the moody Achilles insults Hector.

The next day, Hector and Troilus come to the field, the one to avenge Achilles' insults, the other to kill the man who has won Cressida. Hector is cruelly and cowardly killed by Achilles.

Troilus is left unhurt, cursing.

_Troilus and Cressida_ is the dialogue scenario of a play that was never finished. It seems to have been written before 1603, then laid aside, incomplete, until the mood that inspired it had died. Conflicting evidence makes it doubtful whether it was acted during Shakespeare's life. It was published, under mysterious circ.u.mstances, a year or two before he retired to Stratford.

Two or three scenes are finished. The rest is indicated in the crudest dialogue, written so hastily that it is often undramatic and nearly always without wit or beauty. The finished scenes are among the grandest ever conceived by Shakespeare, but the grandeur is that of thought, not of action. They make it plain to us why the play was never completed.

The subject is this: a light woman throwing over a boy. The setting, the Trojan war: a light woman overthrowing a city, is so much bigger than the subject that it overshadows it. Another subject arises in the circ.u.mstance of the Trojan war. Achilles, the man of action, without honour or imagination, sulks. The wise man, Ulysses, suggests that he be brought from his sulks by mockery. The result of this wise counsel is that Hector, the one bright and n.o.ble soul in the play, is killed cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus mocked.

The two subjects and the setting are not and cannot be brought into unity. Shakespeare's mind wandered from his real subject to brood upon the obsession of Helen that betrayed Troy to the fire, and upon the tragical working of wisdom that brought about an end so foul. Other, and bigger, subjects for plays tempted him from the work. He put it aside before it was half alive. As it stands, it has neither life nor meaning.

It oppresses the mind into making gloomy interpretation. Tragedy in its imperfect form cannot but be gloomy. It is nothing but the record of a fatal event. But Shakespearean tragedy is tragedy in its perfect form.

It is an exultation of the soul over the husks of life and the winds that blow them. This play, had it ever been finished, would have been like the other tragedies of the great years. That it is not finished is our misfortune.