From the Elephant's Back (10 page)

Ideas about Literature

The Prince and Hamlet

A Diagnosis

1937

Englishmen have always, in spite of the national anthem, been slaves.

—from a letter to Henry Miller
[1]

THE CRITICS, FOR INSTANCE.
[2]
One cannot help thinking as one reads them, that criticism is a trade which deals with inessentials: with artifice and not art. For the joy of art is in its privacy, in its exclusiveness. In this Museum the artist is the only one who is really at home; we, as privileged guests, are allowed to wander round it provided we do not touch. And criticism loves to touch, to handle, to analyse, to assess.

The artist retires into his private pandemonium and emerges suddenly with a few scraps—a notebook jotted in a kind of gnomic shorthand: a description of what the critics are forced to call the “life beyond life.”
[3]
His work is a battle to superimpose this private reality on the common reality of men. His battle, in fact, is really to destroy literature pure—the organism on which the critic fattens. When he does fuse the two realities he creates a work of art. He describes his interior world and through his medium, makes it overlap with the world of common or garden reality. Hence the disgust. Because you cannot criticise a world of which the artist is the sole inhabitant. You can only analyse the external reality which you share with him. The internal one is always beyond you.

In our time the critics have almost persuaded us that in order to be sensible to art one must understand it rationally. Whereas it must be obvious to at least twelve or thirteen people that art—the real core of a work of art—does not need to be understood. It is a pure experience, and only needs faith in the prophetic sense. Who can understand, for example, Lawrence's world, or Gauguin's?
[4]
But it is there as an experience to be partaken of by the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker: anyone with the faith to give himself to a new reality without question.

This is important to realise when one reads
Hamlet
. The interior battle which rages suffocatingly as an undercurrent the whole time. It is from the remote battle-front of the self that the artist sends us back his messages, gnomic scribbles, fragments,
which we can never understand
, but which thrill us, pierce us, and remain with us for centuries as a sort of tribal experience. Let us, for once, dispense with its critical literature, not only on the purely agricultural side (Dover Wilson, Harrison,
[5]
etc.), but also on the side of pure criticism.

Hamlet is a representation of the inner struggle written in terms of the outer one. It is the union of the “dream” and the reality, that Breton
[6]
mentions. All the critical mouse-traps set to catch the king fail,
[7]
because up to now, everyone has tried to relate the outer reality (the murder, Ophelia, etc.), to the interior reality. Fail completely, because the inner and outer move along separate planes, and seldom meet. There are two co-existing Hamlets. Or, to be deadly accurate: there is the Prince, and there is Hamlet.

It is this dual growth which has made the moods so incomprehensible; the interplay between the social and the psychic pressure which creates the unique Hamlet: the creature living in a new chronology, the new universe, which we call insanity. Was he mad or did he only pretend he was mad? A century of theorising has not answered. Hundreds of genial idiots have sifted every line of the play, to no effect. Hamlet was no madder than Shakespeare. In fact it was the new
sanity
which was killing him, and which drove Shakespeare away to his farm in silence, leaving all his work in chaos, unedited, unhonoured, and unsung.

The Age of The Prince was the Elizabethan Age. An Age that poisoned its young men with the humanities and then showed them none. The Prince was society. But the pressure that closed on the personal, the gentle, the malleable
Hamlet
, was the pressure of all circumstance common to all ages. Hamlet is the psyche for ever trying to fight its way out of the armour of the Prince; through the chinks we catch glimpses of this ephemera, in revolt against its social function, resentful, but dying—all the time very quietly and vividly dying. But the real death, the internal quietus was never delivered by Laertes but by Hamlet himself. The real play, in fact, is Hamlet and nothing but Hamlet. The King, the Queen, Horatio, Ophelia—they were all nothing but conventional voices calling him to conventional action—rut, revelry, or sentiment. Most terrifying of all to the dying Elizabethan was the ghost: that representative of the other world who became nothing but a social gramophone, calling for a conventional revenge. “The world is out of joint, O, cursed spite, that ever I was born to put it right!”
[8]

The inner Hamlet, when it sees that the ghost,
even the ghost
, is just another social mouthpiece, begins its death, its personal declension. Here you have a loneliness which is only emphasised by the mouthing of the chorus, by the external action—murder, love, revenge. There is your tragedy. For the rest, the insane machinery of the plot, the heroics of Laertes, the sweet stupidity of Ophelia—these are just different flavours of irony which leave nothing but a bitterness in the mouth. Hamlet is dead—Long live the Prince!

Two chronologies: two lives: two separate sanities: two planes of action moving disjointedly along together: and two protagonists who are one. Hamlet and the Prince.

Now this may sound nonsense, but it is not. In order to illustrate it, let anyone turn to the first quarto version of the play.
[9]
He will find the whole idea laid bare for him with an accuracy the more astonishing because it was unconscious. The long Folio version of
Hamlet
, as we know it, was much too long for presentation on the Elizabethan stage. According to custom it was cut, and in this cut and partly altered version we find the real clue to Hamlet, given to us probably by Shakespeare himself.
[10]

His problem was this. To present Hamlet to the public in a
comprehensible
form. But to the public the inner struggle has always been incomprehensible, always will be. But the outer struggle—the material, the social, the ancestral problem—that is another question.

In this Quarto we find a play that the public must have understood and enjoyed with comparative ease. It is a play without any Hamlet. Unerringly the whole of the inner struggle, which clogs the action of the Folio, has been cut away. There is only the Prince. And the Prince is subject to fits of madness in a beautifully comprehensible way.
Everything is explainable without any reference to the phenomenon of genius.

Now in the long version, the Folio, the whole cast revolves around the central figure of Hamlet. Everything in the play is significant only in its immediate relation to him. The cumulative voices of King, Courtier, Lover, Liar, cajole him to relinquish his inner psyche in favour of a material role on the social stage.
Even the ghost
, that ancestral voice, joins its platitudes to those of Polonius, and cuts him off from supernatural aid. This is the final horror. He cannot call on God, since it is the representative of God who has set him this maniac jig-saw to solve, and added his voice to the voices of society. He is so caught up in the machinery that there is no hope of escape. His death begins at the first appearance of the ghost and ends in the ravings over Ophelia's grave.
[11]
It is death by what the oceanographers would call “implosion.” He is crushed inwards, on to himself.

Then, on the other hand, you have the Quarto, in which any signs of the inner feud are cleverly related to external things, to love, to revenge, to madness. The very structure of the play is altered to diffuse the emphasis which lies on the protagonist. The Queen, for instance. What a superb simplification it was to follow the source-story—to make her unconscious of the murder. How human and sentimental the ghost's request:

Speake to her, Hamlet, for her sex is weake.

Comfort thy mother, Hamlet, thinke on me.
[12]

And how delicately the same sentiment is made oblique in the Folio—less immediately emotional. Compare the two scenes. In the Quarto we have suddenly a queen who is a bad man's dupe. But a “good” woman. We have a little development on Horatio as the faithful heart-of-oak dumb-bell. The king becomes rapidly more important as the villain of the piece, and the whole play moves nearer to the accustomed forms of drama: hero, hero's mother, villain, friend of hero, etc. It is a slick piece of work that even the critics would enjoy. But in the Folio? The whole scene is pointed like a pistol at the head of the protagonist. It is all part of the mouse-trap.

There it is, then. We have in the Folio a double existence: the Prince, who takes his place among the other characters—any jack in any pack of cards: and Hamlet, the creature of the void, poisoned in the bud and dying the Bastard Death,
[13]
with a loneliness and irony never before seen in literature.

Looked at from this point of view, how many iron-cold shades of irony we have to suffer in Hamlet? The real grin of the genius is carved in it. The importunities of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finally answered by that superb whip crack: “I lack advancement.”
[14]
The desperate attempts at self-revelation before Ophelia. For, after all, her betrayal was the biggest one he had to face. In the Ophelia bits we will find the inner struggle most in evidence, because he was counting on her as an ally. But her stupidity—her persistent belief that it was the outward things which were causing his disease—finally alienated him. She became part of the outer struggle herself, and as such he turned against her. The pity of it was that she died, not for Hamlet, who was worth dying for, but for the Prince.

In the mad scene we have another simplification in the Quarto version. It is made quite clear that it is Polonius's death which has caused her madness by the little verse: “His beard was white as snow!”
[15]
etc. But in the Folio she does not produce this definite indication of her thoughts until
after
Laertes appears. After her brother
reminds
her, in fact, of her father. Before that she has confused the two deaths:
And seems to be talking about Hamlet.
In the Folio, therefore, even this scene points ambiguously back at Hamlet. In the Quarto it is plain sailing. The poor girl is sent mad with grief at her father's death. It is only too clear.

The last ironic throes of Hamlet's own inner death are at the graveside. Here the complete disorganisation between the two Hamlets has never been so clear or so fearful. He is called upon, after all, to exhibit his formal sorrow for her death, when in his inner chronology Ophelia is already dead and buried and rejected. And it is this knowledge that produces the terrific outburst, the embarrassing strained shouting over the coffin. But he himself is clear enough about who is speaking from the mask: “Behold it is I, Hamlet the Dane!” This is the death-scene for him, which passes all understanding. One is struck dumb by the humour of his word-duel with Laertes. It has an irony which the Greeks could never have approached.

It has been said that Hamlet is an artistic failure.
[16]
And this is so, if one can only respect in literature the façade, the architecture, the externals. But no writer of any genius attempted artistic success. That is a myth which only the critics and the mediocrities concentrate on. I commend the Quarto to the attention of such literary grave-diggers.
[17]
It will please them hugely. The Prince can be explained, weighed, analysed, etc.

But as an epitaph there is one little omission from the Quarto which seems, to me at any rate, full of a profound significance. It is in the phrasing of the love-letter which Polonius reads to the king. It is an indication of how much Hamlet needed Ophelia to understand—to respect his inner struggle. Not that she, sweet, silly little wretch, would have been able to comprehend it—even if a modern critic had written it out for her in his own words.
[18]
After the scrap of verse in the Quarto we have, simply:

To the beautiful Ophelia: Thine ever most

unhappy Prince Hamlet!
[19]

And in the Folio something more curious, more significant of the real state of the disease. It was really an epitaph on Shakespeare himself:

O, dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers,

I have not art to reckon my groans, but

that I love thee best, O most best believe

it. Thine evermore, dear lady, WHILST

THIS MACHINE IS TO HIM HAMLET.
[20]

This is not the voice of the Prince!
[21]

Hamlet, Prince of China

1938

NO ONE WILL PRINT THEM.
I'll tell you why.
[1]
You choose a title with the word
Hamlet
, and ring an old psychic chord in the cranium. You excite the critics in your first letter by some real death-rays on the subjects, immensely profound: then you begin rough-necking and capering the theme around in your second: AND THEN SUDDENLY the whole arena shifts round and empties for a duel between you and Fraenkel.
[2]
Your last letter is magnificent. MAGNIFICENT. It's all magnificent, but why kill the book by calling it
Hamlet
? Because somehow it's so unexpected, this tissue of mirth and magnificence. It's all Henry Miller, PRINCE OF DENMARK. When I said in a previous letter that Hamlet's major problems you had solved for yourself, I was nearer the mark than I realized. You cannot write anything about Hamlet because the place it occupies in the Heraldic pattern is below you. There is only going up, not down. This peculiar English Death
[3]
which is epitomized in the play is foreign to you. I say foreign, and I mean by that—
China
. The stratosphere. It was a stratosphere that Shakespeare inhabited, but only
wrote
about by accident. Your whole propensity is set towards the recording of the flora and fauna of that stratosphere. You have penetrated it further, and at a higher level. This is not Shakespeare's fault. It was the fault of the damning literary formulae of his age. If he had faced the world as it is now, in which canon is no longer based on anything, he would have written things greater than you can IMAGINE. But poor fellow, he didn't realize for a moment that what was the important thing was the description of his inner heraldic territory. Only sometimes the malaise shook him, tied him up, and presto, out of the folds fell a genuine bit of heraldry. When I say this I am not patting you on the back for being a better writer than Shakespeare, QUA WRITER. I am saying that you have realized yourself as a man more fully:
also this important thing
…In our age we have reached a point in writing when it is possible for the writer TO BE HIMSELF on paper. It's more than possible. It's inevitable and necessary. But for the Elizabethan writing was separated from living entirely. The self you put on paper then might have a HALL MARK: that is to say, it was recognizable by a few mannerisms, a style of moral thought, etc. But it no more corresponded to the author than Hamlet corresponds to you. The virtue of the Elizabethans was this: their exuberance was so enormous, so volatile, so pest-ridden, so aching and vile and repentant and spew-struck, that here and there, by glorious mistakes, they transcended the canon. But their critical apparatus was interested only in the NARRATION. Was it good Seneca, or wasn't it?