CHAPTER VI SHAKESPEARE'S LATER TRAGEDIES IN the interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies it is important to bear three things in mind: (1) that between 1595 or 1596, the probable date of the production of Romeo and Juliet, and 1600, the earliest date that can be assigned for the production of Hamlet, the poet composed no pure tragedies, and that after 1600 he produced no pure comedy; (2) that his later tragedies combine the Machiavellian principle of tragic action found in his early tragedies, with the principle of philosophic reflection so strongly developed in As You Like It, King Henry IV., and King Henry V.; (3) that through these late works runs a vein of passionate thought and emotion, which seems to indicate that the poet's choice of dramatic materials had been affected by some profound change in his whole view of life. The tragedies fall naturally into two classes: those that are constructed on the base of some well-known story or historic legend -Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear, which are essentially tragedies of incident and action; and those that derive their fable from Greek and Roman history-Timon, Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, which are, in the main, tragedies of character. The first of the mature series of tragedies was Hamlet, which, judging from internal evidence, must have been first played soon after 1600. On the moral significance VOL. IV L of this tragedy volumes have been-not unnaturally— written; but its leading motive has never been better described than in a sentence of Goethe: "To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it." What there is in Hamlet beyond this may be more safely inferred from a few suggestive facts than from pages of a priori reasoning, however ingenious. And in the first place, it is of the greatest importance to observe that there was evidently a play called Hamlet older than Shakespeare's. References to it are made as early as 1589 by Nash in his Preface to Greene's Menaphon;1 by Henslowe in his diary of June 9, 1594, where he mentions the profit he himself derived from the play;2 and by Lodge in his Wits Miserie, published in 1596.3 Some scholars have inferred that the play so referred to is Shakespeare's Hamlet (which, in that case, would have been one of his earliest works); that the quarto published in 1603 shows the form in which the tragedy was originally produced; and that the text of the quarto published in 1604, which is substantially identical with that of the folio of 1623, is a recast of the first draft of the tragedy. But against this it must be urged, first, that the wretched and imperfect text of the quarto of 1603 could never have come under the revising eye of Shakespeare, being plainly only a version of the play taken down by some shorthand reporter from the lips of the actors; secondly, that, if Shakespeare's Hamlet had been in existence in 1598, it would certainly have been mentioned by Meres; and 1 See vol. ii. p. 423. 29 of June 1594 at hamlet . . viii.s/.” 3 In this book a fiend is described as "a foul lubber, and looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost who cried so miserably at the theatre, 'Hamlet, Revenge!'" Gabriel Harvey makes an entry respecting Shakespeare's Hamlet in a copy of Speght's edition of Chaucer dated 1598 :-"The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort." Stevens thought this entry was made as early as 1598, but Malone, who saw the book, considers that it was probably inserted after 1600. thirdly, that no one who accepts the account of Shakespeare's dramatic development given in the foregoing pages can suppose that in 1589 he would have been likely to conceive the tragedy, even as it appears in the quarto of 1603. The play referred to by Nash, Henslowe, and Lodge was in all probability the work of Kyd, and would have been constructed on the Machiavellian lines laid down by Marlowe and developed in The Spanish Tragedy; in other words, we may fairly presume that it represented a resolute action of revenge, worked out according to the incidents of the story of Hamlet related by Belleforest. The ghost referred to by Lodge was doubtless only one of those prologising spectres imitated from the Thyestes of Seneca, such as we find in The Misfortunes of Arthur and The Spanish Tragedy; Hamlet himself would have appeared in the play as a resolute prince determined to revenge the death of his father, just as old Jeronymo revenges the death of his son. The duty Shakespeare used the same materials as the earlier playwright, but conceived the situation in an entirely different spirit. His Hamlet is a dramatic example not of resolution but of irresolution; he is the exact opposite of Barabas and Jeronymo, and also of Henry V. of resolute action was imposed on the Prince of Denmark, as it was imposed on Henry of Monmouth by the revolt of the Percies; the latter acted with energy when the time called for action; Hamlet only recognises, from the example of Fortinbras, that he ought to act :— How all occasions do inform against me, Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom, Why yet I live to say "This thing's to do"; Sith I have cause and will and strength and means Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, When honour's at the stake. How stand I then, Why, then, did Hamlet pause? Not, I think, altogether for the reasons supposed by Goethe: the cause was rather a constitutional defect of character. Possessed of the double nature which appears also in Henry V., the contemplative element in the Prince of Denmark so strongly overbalances the active, that his passions and conscience fail to afford an adequate stimulus to his will. Under the pressure of circumstances he can behave with energy, as when he confronts his mother and compels her to recognise that he is not really mad, or when he alters the King's letters so as to ensure the destruction of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But, his resolution being fitful and capricious, he is unable to persevere in a steady course of revenge: his arbitrary assumption of the character of madman causes him first to murder Polonius by mistake, and then to overthrow the reason of Ophelia, whom he loves; the postponement of his vengeance brings about the death, not only of the guilty king, but of his own mother, of Laertes, of himself. Many intellectual 1 Hamlet, Act iv. Sc. 4. influences combine to restrain him from the execution of the purpose to which his intellect directs him. First of all, his sense of irony: he is-as Prince Henry also was to some extent-" in love with vanity": his sceptical analysis is constantly suggesting to him the unreality of things: HAMLET. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole? HORATIO. 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. HAM. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel ? Imperious Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away : O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, This is a line of thought which we have seen manifesting itself in many of the earlier plays. It is the philosophical view of Theseus in Theseus in A Midsummer-Night's Dream: The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination but amend them ; and of Jaques in As You Like It : All the world's a stage, And all the men and women me rely players ;— it is Prospero's moral in The Tempest : We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Again, Hamlet is restrained from action of any kind, even from suicide, by his vivid imagination, his fear of the He reasons, up to a certain point, like the writer unseen. of Sonnet lxvi. :— 1 Hamlet, Act v. Sc. I. |