A True Historical Approach Vs. The

A TRUE HISTORICAL APPROACH Vs.

THE MARXIST HISTORICAL APPROACH TO ‘HAMLET’

ALUR JANAKI RAM
Lecturer in English, University of Rajasthan; Jaipur

I

Like ‘a dome of many coloured glass staining the white radiance of eternity’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been made to shed different colours by different critics most of whom have been interpreting it in their own divergent ways. No other work of literature has stimulated so many different critical approaches and interpretations as this masterpiece of Shakespeare, and this in itself is, perhaps, a testimony to its amazing vitality as a work of art. It is amazing that this play (The “Mona-Lisa of literature” as T. S. Eliot described it once) should have been subjected recently to a Marxist historical analysis by Arnold Kettle (the author of An Introduction to the English Novel) whose study “From Hamlet to Lear” appears in a collection of writings most of which can be termed as critical exercises in the Marxist historical method. It is proposed to examine here whether Shakespeare’s masterpiece can bear out a Marxist historical analysis and what a true historical approach should seek to reveal.

II

Like some of his fellow contributors in the volume in which his study appears and which is edited by himself, Arnold Kettle claims to make a historical approach to Shakespeare. It is true that Hamlet has been studied for too long rather unhistorically; it has often been discussed as, a study in character and even the celebrated critics right from Coleridge down to Prof. L. C. Knights have concerned themselves only with defining Hamlet’s problem purely in psychological and metaphysical terms. It is thus difficult to disagree with Arnold Kettle when he states that Hamlet’s problem cannot be described in purely “Psychological terms” and that “it involves not only Hamlet but the world he lives in.” Even the statements that Hamlet looks at the world as “an advanced humanist” of his time, and that there is “an undercurrent of social criticism in the “solid and detailed presentation of the Danish court”, are hardly controvertible. A knowledgeable student of Renaissance literature and history would easily discover the analogies in the play between Hamlet’s world and Shakespeare’s contemporary England, the analogy in particular between the Danish court of Claudius and the intrigue-ridden Renaissance court of Shakespeare’s England. The historical approach hardly provokes much criticism if it confines itself only to a discovery of the analogies just referred to; disagreement with the approach arises only when the assumptions underlying the analogy between the Danish world and Shakespeare’s England are overstressed and overstated.

The Marxist approach of Arnold Kettle, in spite of its claim to be historical, is far from being so. One would normally expect a critic adopting a historical perspective to view historically the problem of revenge which forms the epi-centre of the play; on the other hand, what is offered in the way of criticism is an interest in the humanist-hero of the play who, it is claimed, is acutely conscious of “not belonging” to the contemporary ruling class and whose dilemma is not so much a dilemma about the code of revenge or even about the wider problem of action as a dilemma about the class-divided society of Shakespeare’s time and the values that society stood for.

Hamlet’s new view of the world he lives in is, essentially, the view of the world of the most advanced humanists of his time. It rejects as intolerable the ways of behaviour which formed the accepted standards of the contemporary ruling class...The revolutionary nature of Hamlet’s view of the world is that he sees tyranny and murder and inhumanity not as unfortunate abuses but as the norm and essence of the Court of Denmark not as blots on a society he can accept but as integral parts of a way of life he now finds intolerable.

The foregoing passage makes it clear that the Marxist historical criticism reads too many of its own preconceived notions into Shakespeare’s play rather than discover afresh what is there already in the work. What is questionable is whether there is so much rejection on Hamlet’s part of “the accepted standards of the contemporary ruling class” and whether Hamlet’s “new view of the world” is really so “revolutionary” as is being claimed. Arnold Kettle does not specify what “the accepted standards of the contemporary ruling class” were and only describes in very general terms the Danish Prince’s dissatisfaction with those values.

The nature of Hamlet’s dissatisfaction with the world around him needs to be clearly understood in the context of the dramatic situation as described in the early part of the play. If Denmark appears as a ‘prison’ to him and the whole universe an “unweeded garden grown to seed”, it is not so much because of his intolerance of “the ways of behaviour” of the “contemporary ruling class” as because of some of the rude shocks his moral sensibility has suffered. His mother’s hasty marriage with his uncle, a ‘satyr’, so soon after the death of his father, a ‘Hyperion’ is, as is evident from his first long soliloquy (“O that this too too solid flesh...” I, ii, 1.129-159) the root cause of his early melancholy and grief. Even after Hamlet’s suspicions about his uncle are confirmed by the ghostly revelation, his sense of revulsion and disillusionment, it must be noted, does not remain confined only to the immediate world of the Danish court around him, but goes beyond that and envelopes the larger and wider universe. Hamlet’s confession to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his first meeting with them is certainly not that of a man with a mask but can be taken as a genuine expression of a real state of his mind:

“I have of late–but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours...” (II, 2, 1. 306-312).  

Whatever the causes of Hamlet’s disillusioned view of the world, its nature is certainly not “revolutionary” in the Marxist sense; the disillusionment arises not just out of Hamlet’s dissatisfaction with “the accepted standards of the contemporary ruling class” but goes deeper than that. What is being suggested is that Shakespeare’s hero is not just a Marxist radical contemplating only the evils in his contemporary society, but a representative of the “human condition” contemplating the eternal problem of evil–evil as represented in the microcosmic world of Claudius’s court. The struggle as depicted in the plot of the play is one between the two “mighty opposites”, Hamlet on the one hand and Claudius and his associates on the other, and not a struggle between a radical humanist of the sixteenth century and the contemporary ruling class.

To the Marxist historical critics, then, Hamlet seems to have interest only as a play of the realistic type with a radical humanist as its hero “who, in the year 1600, could no longer look at society from the point of view of the ruling class.” The play has interest only as a document in social criticism and not as a supreme tragic art form.

Neither Hamlet nor Shakespeare, in the year 1600, could resolve in action, even tragically, the dilemma of a youngman from whose eyes the veils which shrouded so many truths about the class-divided society had been torn. Shakespeare could do nothing about Hamlet’s dilemma except express it with profound realism.

The Marxist interpretation of Hamlet as the realistic expression of a dilemma about a class-divided society is just another kind of oversimplification like the other critical interpretations which have considered the play as a psychological study in character. The American critic Francis Ferguson has quite discerningly taken note of the analogies in Hamlet: besides the analogous father-son relationships and analogous stories in the play itself, there are, according to him, stretching beyond the play in all directions, analogies between Denmark and England; Denmark and Rome under the mightiest Julius; Hamlet’s stage and Shakespeare’s stage; the theatre and life; and finally Denmark and the traditional cosmos. Every critic who has approached this play has been tempted to dwell exclusively on one of these analogies or one of the facets of this many-sided play to the exclusion of its other engaging and no less irrelevant aspects. Arnold Kettle’s Marxist approach also suffers from this concern to extract meaning out of the play by overstating the analogy between Shakespeare’s England and Hamlet’s corrupt state of Denmark; it ignores the other analogies in Hamlet–particularly the one between the world of Denmark and cosmos, and by doing so, misses altogether its bewildering richness and other levels of significance.

It is obvious that the Marxist approach of Arnold Kettle, like some of the earlier critical approaches of Bradley and other critics, concentrates on the delay motive in the story and tries to explain it away in terms of an external cause–Hamlet’s intolerance of “the accepted standards of the contemporary ruling class.” The tenor of Arnold Kettle’s critical thinking seems to suggest that Hamlet delays because he is a radical humanist who cannot bring himself round to conform to the old revenge code. Even the statement that Hamlet for the greater part of the play behaves as a humanist and then relapses towards the end into the role of a conventional prince has the implication that Hamlet’s earlier hesitancy in carrying out the command of his ghost-father springs from an innate revulsion towards the revenge code–a revulsion characteristic of a radical humanist–and that he later overcomes that revulsion in order to conform to the “law of honour.” While an innate revulsion towards the revenge code can be a convincing cause for Hamlet’s delay, it alone cannot account for Hamlet being a radical humanist with a “new view of the world.” It is also worth pointing out that the innate revulsion towards the demands of the code is a revulsion typical of a highly sensitive and self-conscious human being whom Hamlet was meant to represent. For all his humanist sensibility and views on man (“O what a piece of work is man...” 11,2, 1. 313-316), Hamlet, it must be noted, never rejects altogether the duty of revenge, the “imperious demand” from beyond the grave. He is never content to say like Charlemont in Athiest’s Tragedy “Patience is honest man’s revenge,” nor does he completely give up the old concept of ‘honour.’ The following passage,

This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
(II, 2, 1. 611-614)

as also the following lines from Hamlet’s last long soliloquy uttered on the eve of his departure for England,

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw 
when honour’s at the stake...
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.
(IV, 5, 1. 53-66)

make it quite clear that Hamlet, for all his deeper probing of his own heart and other issues, never for once renounces the conventional concepts of revenge and honour. Hamlet is essentially part of the milieu of his time and nowhere betrays that “revolutionary” outlook attributed to him by Arnold Kettle. What has been missed by the Marxist critic is that the questioning of the revenge code and all the other values it stood for is done not so much by the Danish Prince as by his creator. This implicit criticism of the revenge code–one of “the ways of behaviour” of the contemporary ruling class–is made by the dramatist in an imperceptible manner and has been adroitly built into the tragic pattern of the play.

To consider Hamlet as a realistic play expressing the dilemma about a class-divided society is “to consider too curiously”, to use Horatio’s words. To say this is not to deny the existence of some amount of criticism of the age in the play; no one who has read the play can miss the undercurrent of criticism of the age which is found in the ironic portrayal of Polonlus and Osric, in the topical allusions to theatres and actors, and also in the treatment of the pagan concept of revenge so popular in the day. But, the mould and tone of the whole play, it must be noted, are not those of a modern realistic play. Whatever criticism there is in the play, either implicit or explicit, has been subordinated to the tragic pattern, and in no way upsets the play’s tragic balance.

III

It is significant that a lot of interest has been evinced in recent years in the revenge theme and framework of the play. A true historical approach demands, in fact, a consideration of all the factors that had a bearing on the popularity of revenge on the Elizabethan stage, and the dramatic and artistic use that Shakespeare has made of the revenge theme in the light of the prevalent attitudes towards it. Paul S. Conklin, in his examination of the Hamlet criticism in the early seventeenth century found scattered in the various kinds of writings of the period, concludes that the seventeenth century, in its early decades in particular, viewed Hamlet primarily as “a bitterly eloquent and princely avenger”. The early seventeenth century’s reaction to Shakespeare’s “Sweet Prince” as its own significance and is a pointer to the way Shakespeare’s audience must have viewed this play as one belonging to the revenge tradition. Recent scholarly work has made a study of the various factors that had made revenge a popular theme on the Elizabethan stage; one of the principal reasons for its popularity was that it had been treated in the plays of Seneca and some Greek dramatists whole influence inspired Kyd and others to essay plays on the subject; and the other no less important reason for its popularity was a social factor rather than a literary one in that revenge was linked up with the medieval and Elizabethan conception of ‘honour’ which prompted many a nobleman to take recourse to duels for effecting private revenge despite the religious and Biblical injunctions against it. Revenge continued to sway the feelings of the Elizabethans in spite of the propaganda against it by the Ecclesiastical personnel of the day. In the light of all the prevalent attitudes towards revenge, Shakespeare’s treatment of it in a play on the subject deserves our attention. It would be helpful to know whether Shakespeare takes up his own moral stand on a convention so popular in his day or whether he uncritically conforms to the pagan concept of revenge.

A consideration of Hamlet as a revenge tragedy in no way distracts our attention from its other great qualities as a tragedy of high order. Nevertheless, it is necessary to consider the play historically against the ground of the revenge tradition to which it unmistakably belongs. Such an approach will not miss how Shakespeare has invested his play with many levels of significance by coalescing the simple problem of taking revenge into the wider and more universal problem of confrontation with evil. The ghost’s injunction in its first meeting with Hamlet,

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest, (I, 5, 1. 82-83)

and also Hamlet’s almost desperate cry,

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!                    (I, 5, 1. 189-191)

make it quite clear that Hamlet’s task is not just one of taking down-right revenge. Even Hamlet’s words to Horatio justifying the course of action he has at last decided to take against his villainous uncle:

Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon–
He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popp’d in between the election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage–is’t net perfect conscience,
To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damned,
To let this canker of our nature come...
In further evil?                                       (V, 2, 1.64-71)

bring out the relevance of the foregoing statement that the problem of revenge is made to appear, for the protagonist at least, as one of surmounting evil–“to have the engineer hoist with his own Petar.” A consideration of Hamlet, then, as a play of the revenge kind enhances our appreciation of the great art that has gone into the making of it by helping us to perceive how it passes from the realm of melodrama into that of high tragedy.

John Lawlor’s perceptive comparative study of Hamlet with Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and Tourneur’s Atheist’s tragedy–plays that were Hamlet’s successors in the revenge tradition–has revealed how Shakespeare’s genius has avoided the kind of artistic errors that both Chapman and Tourneur, the lesser artists, have fallen into in their treatment of the revenge matter. Both Chapman’s and Tourneur’s avenging heroes, in the plays considered for comparative study, voice their scruples openly about the ethic of revenge. By making the conflict about the ethic of revenge explicit, these dramatists have forgone the possibility of universalising their themes, for we are localised only to the single dilemma of revenge or justice. Shakespeare’s triumph consists in making Hamlet question everything else under the sun except the duty of revenge.

Dealing with the new and dangerous material of a scrupulous avenger, Shakespeare triumphs: avoiding the peril of making his hero voice his scruples, Shakespeare makes him fail to understand himself. In so doing, he is free to let Hamlet call in question all things under the sun, including, most poignantly, the nature of man, without once bringing to light the cause of his own aversion...The vital consideration is not that Hamlet nowhere questions his duty to avenge. It is that he never penetrates his inability to be an avenger.

By thus making his hero question all things and understand nothing, least of all his own nature, Shakespeare has universalised Hamlet’s predicament and has thereby widened the scope of his play’s appeal.

While John Lawlor’s study has the merit of defining the nature of the tragic conflict in Hamlet and Shakespeare’s incomparable contribution to revenge tragedy, it has not brought out clearly whether Shakespeare has taken any stand on the issue of the ethic of revenge. It was, of course, out of an artistic and dramatic necessity that Shakespeare refrained from making his hero raise explicit questions about the revenge code, but, it is inconceivable that a dramatist like Shakespeare whose last plays unmistakably extol the Christian virtue of forgiveness and reconcilement and whose philosopher-hero (Prospero) of The Tempest proclaims, “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance” (V, 1, 1, 27-28), should have uncritically accepted the pagan concept of revenge in a play like Hamlet. Critical opinion in recent years has been sharply divided over the question of whether Hamlet is an indictment of revenge or not. Some critics have tended to regard the play as a study of revenge in the abstract, while a critic like Bertram Joseph quotes impressive historical evidence from the writings of the period in support of his view that “Hamlet is set in the Renaissance tradition of honourable and noble behaviour” and that in Shakespeare’s time “the law of honour,” which was the law of revenge, “was still regarded as akin to the law of nature.” The same critic has opserved:

In Shakespeare’s work in general we cannot find an overwhelming condemnation of revenge or the normal attitude to nobility and honour: there is nothing to suggest such strong opposition to the prevailing code as to make of Hamlet an attack upon the morality of revenge...Nowhere can we find an overt statement that revenge is unworthy of a noble nature, and least of all in the mouth of Hamlet, whether in soliloquy or dialogue. His ideals are traditionally those of the nobleman.

Hamlet may not be an examination of revenge in the abstract, but there is no reason to believe that it can be considered as altogether devoid of even an implicit criticism of a particular convention–revenge as a duty for the murdered kinsman. It is true, as Bertram Joseph says, that “there is no overwhelming condemnation of revenge or of the normal attitude to nobility and honour” in Hamlet at least, or even in the rest of Shakespeare’s work But Bertram Joseph commits the mistake of equating Hamlet’s attitude to revenge with Shakespeare’s own; he also gives far too much of importance to the opinions about the “law of honour” which were prevalent in Shakespeare’s time and which do not seem to have influenced considerably Shakespeare’s treatment of the revenge theme in this particular play. Though we may not find “any overt statement in the play that revenge is unworthy,” we nevertheless do find an implicit and ironic criticism of the code of revenge built into the tragic structure of the play. Shakespeare has not altogether failed to refashion the materials of his story according to his own vision, and it cannot be too readily assumed that Shakespeare retained, along with some other elements of the plot, the pagan morality of revenge of his source. There is sufficient evidence in the play itself to show that Shakespeare has not altogether avoided taking a moral stance on the question of revenge. The character of Laertes is a case in point. Current Hamlet criticism regards Laertes as a typical example of the traditional avenger familiar to the Elizabethan audience, a character who will “dare damnation” and will sweep to revenge in utter disregard of all moral values in order to obey the “law of honour”. The readiness with which Laertes joins hands with Claudius in laying the treacherous “mousetrap” of the duel for Hamlet is a reminder of what the noble prince cannot stoop to under any circumstance. Laertes has all the traits required in a true revenger while Hamlet has not; Hamlet all the time aspires to be a revenger and in the end becomes one only by chance in the last duel scene; his manner of killing Claudius with the envenomed point can hardly be described as a premeditated act of an avenger and can at best be described as an act of requital for Cladius’s treachery in the duel. While the character of Laertes is thus meant to be a ‘reflector’ (to use Henry Jame’s word) to Hamlet, throwing light on the prince’s nobler and more honourable nature, it is also meant to be an ironic criticism of the unscrupulous avengers of the revenge tradition.

In another sense, Horatio’s choric comment in the last scene can also be considered as Shakespeare’s own ironic commentary on the code of revenge:

And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, 
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in the upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors’ heads; all this I can truly deliver.                        (V, 5, 1. 390.397)

The moral import of these lines is unmistakable, if not very palpable: an uncritical following of the code of revenge, however time-honoured and popular it may be, can only lead to “carnal bloody and unnatural acts,” enmeshing both the guilty who put on deaths by cunning and the avengers who cause them by “forced cause”. It is the code of revenge, with its cult of blood, that wrecks even a noble and “Sweet Prince” like Hamlet who, despite all his questionings and probings of weightier and more serious matters, never questions the duty of revenge, although his manner of achieving revenge in the duel scene amounts to hoisting the “engineer” with his own “petar”, and in that sense is not so treacherous and dishonourable as Laertes’s way of achieving revenge. But there is no mistake about what has been the chief motivating force of all the havoc–of all the “carnal” and “unnatural acts” and the “casual slaughters”–in the play: Destiny, as if to expose the flaws or a code devised by fallible human intelligence, has chosen the evil-doers and the avengers as its agents to show how the inexorable laws of divine retribution and justice operate in this universe. In the concatenation of all the seemingly random events operating as pure chance and the willed acts of the major characters in the play–a concatenation which alone can sustain the tragic sense–the code of revenge, it is obvious, also forms an inevitable link and a no less significant driving force. In short, instead of showing directly the fatal consequences of the working of the revenge code, Shakespeare has subsumed it all into the larger cosmic design of destiny and human character and, by so doing, has preserved the basic tragic structure of his play without allowing it to acquire the overtones of a morality play.

Hamlet functions, then, on the symbolic level of a tragic art-form and not on the level of a realistic satire, as the Marxist historical approach tends to make it out. Instead of choosing a realistic medium to mount an attack on popular convention, Shakespeare, in the year 1601, was content with doing what he wanted to do within the limits of the tragic pattern which had become by then the norm for the treatment of revenge matter. With his attendant spirit always guiding him properly, Shakespeare could yet subordinate the supposedly “intractable” material of the revenge story to the larger design of a tragedy and thus make his own incomparable contribution to the revenge tradition.

To understand the nature of Shakespeare’s contribution, it is necessary to perceive the exact manner in which Shakespeare’s rivals in the revenge tradition have failed to raise their plays to the higher level of a tragedy. Kyd, Shakespeare’s predecessor in the revenge tradition, relied solely on a pagan morality of revenge and on showing dramatically, by making use of the melo-dramatic elements, how his hero meets the requirements of the code; this explains why the Spanish Tragedy is only a revenge play rather than a Shakespearian tragedy. Shakespeare’s successors, Chapman and Tourneur, tried to introduce some variations into the revenge pattern by raising the question of the ethic of revenge but these variations, as JohnLawlor’s study has made it clear, resulted only in depriving their plays of a tragic conflict. Shakespeare’s triumph consists in the preservation of the tragic balance and in the introduction of a subtler kind of criticism of the revenge code. By working within the limits of a tragic art-form Shakespeare could emphasise equally the part played by human character and a mysterious ‘Destiny’ shaping the events implacably; this helps the dramatist in investing his theme with far more universality than a conventional treatment of the revenge matter would have made it possible. It should also be noticed how Shakespeare has made the best artistic use of the freedom that the form of tragedyallowed him: since most of the tragic heroes are ‘scapegoats’, in a sense, Shakespeare makes Hamlet also appear as a ‘scapegoat’, in two different ways; Hamlet is made a scapegoat by Destiny in the sense that he too is swept away in the final purgation of ‘cankerous evil’ which takes place in the state of Denmark; he is made a scapegoat by the revenge code also in so far as the necessity to carry out the injunctions of revenge enjoined on him, enmeshes him, as it were, in a chain of events which finally leads to his being an avenger himself while becoming at the same time the object of another avenger (Laertes) for having earlier killed Polonius.

An implicit criticism of the revenge code is certainly one of the many levels of significance that Shakespeare’s masterpiece on the revenge theme has to offer. Shakespeare seems to have deliberately shrouded this criticism with ambiguity and subsumed it into the larger design of a tragedy so that the play may not descend to the level of a realistic satire. This ambiguity appears to have positive virtues rather than negative virtues when we bring the right kind of historical perspective to our study of the play. As a dramatist working for the public theatre in the year 1601, Shakespeare possibly could not have attacked openly a convention which was so popular and which was also at the same time bound up with the way of life of the nobility. If Hamlet had contained an open repudiation of revenge, it would have acquired the overtones of a modern problem play like Galsworthy’s Silver Box which, for all its tragic intention and tone, suffers from having a narrow focus in so far as it is concerned only with bringing to light the inadequacies of a social set up. By showing the working of an old convention within the larger design of Destiny and character–a design characteristic of classical tragedy–Shakespeare could satisfy the demands of great art, and also of the contemporary theatre without at the same time compromising his artistic integrity by an uncritical acceptance of the revenge code of his medieval story.

The Marxist historical approach fails to take note of Shakespeare’s supreme achievement in the revenge tradition by narrowly considering Hamlet’s problem as a dilemma about a class-divided society. A true historical approach, on the other hand, would make us aware of the great qualities of intelligence and moral sensibility which a master dramatist has brought to bear on his treatment of what was by then a stock-in-trade revenge theme.