ofHamlet: ‘What is it you would see; / If aught of woe, or wonder, cease your
search.’ Shakespeare does not exemplify Aristotle’s admired singleness of focus or
unity of action:Hamlet is exceedingly complex, and, in Gloucester and his sons,King
Lear has a secondary plot.
Hamlet
Whatever ideas he had of tragedy, Shakespeare learned the genre from the tragedies
he saw when he came to London, such as the revenge plays of Thomas Kyd. These
were influenced by the example of the ‘closet drama’ of the Roman Seneca, written
to be read, not performed. Thomas Nashe wrote in 1589 that ‘English Seneca read
by candlelight yields many good sentences as “Blood is a beggar”, and so forth: an if
you intreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should
say handfuls of tragical speeches.’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet is such a handful, and it
relies on familiarity with a previous play about Hamlet, probably by Kyd and now
lost. Horatio’s final summary gives the recipe that made tragedy popular:
you shall hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th’inventors’ heads.The world of Seneca and of most Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is morally
corrupt, their incident and language sensationalistic: malignant plotting, cunning
death, madness.Hamlet has all this, and its complex plot is conducted with the usual
dexter ity, though it also shows unusual variety. Yet Hamletand the major tragedies
have the values of a Christian humanist idealism, values more interesting than the
stoicism of the Senecan tragedy of blood. It is an entirely new kind of play, for in his
long soliloquies we are given unprecedented access to the thoughts and feelings of
Hamlet, an initially admirable hero in a horrible world. The Prince is ‘the expectancy
and rose of the fair state’, the ideal Renaissance prince lamented by Ophelia. The late
king’s son knows of the humanist ideal of human nature: ‘What a piece of work is a
man!’But in practice, in the prison of Denmark, ‘man delights not me’. Hamlet
ponders, tests out the king’s guilt, outwits those set to watch him, and reproaches his
mother, but does not act. His madness is feigned, but he is poisoned by the evil
around him, mistreating Ophelia, sparing the life of Claudius when he finds him
pr aying, in case Claudius should be saved from eternal punishment. (A reason for
not taking revenge ‘too horrible to be read or uttered’ – Johnson.) Revenge tragedy
is premised upon action, and action so extremely deferred increases suspense. Only
when Hamlet is sent to England to be killed can he defend himself. He is relieved
when he is challenged to a duel; once put out of his misery, he can act. The audience
share his relief. The concatenation of deaths in the last scene ofHamlet also
produces the strange aesthetic satisfaction peculiar to tragedy: if such dreadful
things must be, this is how they should happen.
Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar are based on preceding plays or types of play.
Shakespeare’s later tragedies are more original. By reason of its domestic focus,
Othello may be for modern audiences the nearest of the tragedies.Macbe this the most
intense, sudden, economical;Antony and Cleopatra the most expansive in language
and sentiment. But there is space to discuss only Shakespeare’s two starkest tragedies.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 129