HAMLET:
AN ARTISTIC FAILURE OR SUCCESS
SARAT CHANDRA PARIDA
Hamlet, the play, like ‘Mona Lisa’
is a riddle; and its hero, a mystery. Coleridge, Goethe, Hazlitt, Bradley, Wilson, Eliot–and a few dozen more names
may be added–tried to explore the mystery behind the play and its hero, and
reached, most of them, it in
different conclusions. Because Shakespeare has endowed the prince with the
reality and mystery of life, and life being multi-faceted, the critics vary. “There
are as many Hamlets as there
are actors who play him” says Mr. Dover Wilson.1
“The
intractable material”: this is how Mr. Eliot defines the subject matter of the
play. Gertrude’s sin is the genesis of Hamlet’s spiritual discord and mental
poisoning. Her “over-hasty marriage, a blasphemy against nature in nature’s
name, comes as a shock for Hamlet, the prince–a young man of intense moral sensibility.
He loses the equilibrium, the balance of his inner being. He sees a world of
shattered ideals; he dwells upon the thoughts of the hideous decay of flesh,
the impurity of sex, the deceit of beauty. A dark horror invades his mind. So
Hamlet, according to Mr. Eliot, becomes subject to “an emotion which is
inexpressible.” “Like the sonnets” he says, “Hamlet is full of some stuff that the writer could not
drag to light, contemplate or manipulate in art”.2
This
inscrutable emotion of the Prince of Denmark Shakespeare failed to express: the
playwright couldn’t find out an “objective correlative” for its dramatic
representation: so held Mr. Eliot. According
to him “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective
correlative’, in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external
facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion
is immediately evoked.” Hamlet lacks
this “complete adequacy of the external to the emotion,” this “artistic inevitability,”
without which any drama will fail to impress. The play therefore is not dynamic, ‘there is no surge and swell of passion pressing
onward through the play to us as in Lear with the mighty crash and
backwash of a tragic piece. There is not this direct rhythm in Hamlet” (Wilson
Knight). 3
“Hamlet
is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible” and even Shakespeare, the
indisputable master of dramatic art, cannot “objectify it,” as the Prince
Hamlet cannot translate it into action. Thus the play has no clear purposive
technique to focus our attention, no dominating atmosphere. Shakespeare failed
to express the “inexpressible horrible” and so Eliot regards the playas an
artistic failure. “Far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most
certainly an artistic failure” declares he in his essay on Hamlet. 4
In
spite of Mr. Eliot’s devastating remarks every dramatic device is effectively
displayed in Hamlet. Shakespeare here offers a double-plane of vision,
the one for reflection and the other for immediate apprehension.
The
haunting force of the play comes from its hero, the prince, essentially a man of
feeling-type, with intense moral sensibility, through whom
Shakespeare explored the whole problem of action and the reflective mind. The
death of Hamlet’s lovable father; the incestuous, hasty marriage of his mother;
the usurper who deprives him of the throne; the ghost’s revelation and the task
the sepulchral spirit bestowed on him–all these in their combined weight are
enough to cowdown the most heroic spirited and Hamlet
assumes the “antic disposition” because he was tottering under the onerous
burden. He discovers himself in the ruins of his dreams. His subjectivism, which
is his intellectual sin, enchains his mind. “
Ophelia’s
repelling is the last blow he gets by which he is completely overthrown to the
demon of neurotic despair. Bitterness, cynicism, hate, and deep-seated rage
fill his heart. He is alone and must walk alone in the prison of mental death.
But
there is the command of a dead father, the task he must perform. A sick heart
is called on to cleanse, to heal, to harmonize; a broken heart is to beat in
even pulse, “Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me”–words of the departing spirit echo
in his ears, and they have an awesome ring.
A
sufferer from spiritual atrophy is commanded to do a mighty task: to save
A
dark chapter of his life opens: a chapter of spiritual struggle. The hero is labouring under a mental infirmity.
The
conflict of the play, though not represented in outward events, is almost
always there in the mind of the hero and we are always aware of it. His
dialogues serve as a running commentary of his dualized
person: Hamlet the cynic; and Hamlet the lover, the friend, the son. He is at
war with himself: now good, now evil try to dominate his mind.
His
deep-seated rage, his dark jealousy, his bitter cynicism is poured forth in his
dealings with his mother, Claudius and Ophelia.
In
the closet when he sees Ophelia his heart begins to swell with love and “Nymph,
in thy orisons. Be all my sins remembered” he says. But this spontaneous gentleness
is soon blighted by the demon of cynicism which has his soul in its remorseless
grip. Soon his consciousness works in terms of evil and negation and death. The
devil of neurotic despair raises its voice: “Get thee to a nunnery. Why woulds’t thou be a breeder of sinners? The poisoned
consciousness of Hamlet is exalted seeing others writhing in pain. He sees
Claudius “marvellous distempered” after the king’s
witnessing of the play-within-the-play and is filled with a frenzied ecstasy.
Hamlet takes a malicious delight in hood-winking, fooling and tripping his
great opponent. Thus the play, devised as a “mouse-trap” feeds his emotions
without advancing his cause. He wrings the heart of his mother in the
bed-chamber scene painting her adultery with a masochistic delight, and
tortures her mercilessly till at last he is sobered by his father’s ghost. And
his killing of good old politician Polonius without a shadow of regret reveals
a horrifying callousness. He becomes a thing discordant, a poison, and an ambassador
of death walking amid the jolly court life of
I
loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could
not, with all their quantity of love
Make
up my sun”,
–he says, and we are amazed at his sincerity.
Thus
we come in close contact with the Jekyll-Hyde aspects of Hamlet’s character and
upon this psychological element that the permanent vitality of the play
depends. “Characterization is the really fundamental and lasting element in the
greatness of any dramatic art,” says
Above
all, let us not forget that Hamlet is a character in a play and not of
history he is a mere puppet in the hands of Shakespeare whose first duty was to
please the world of his time: the Renaissance world of “non-theological
observation”. 6 Shakespeare’s achievement was born of a happy
cross-fertilization between the man and the moment and in Hamlet is
there not enough to make a stirring appeal to the strong nerves of the
Elizabethan audience? A ghost, whom Shakespeare made an epitome of the
ghost-lore of his age, enters the stage bringing with him the mystery of the
other world; there is the tender Ophelia who runs mad, and her most tragic
death; the graveyard scene; the fencing match and death of the King, Queen, Laertes and Hamlet himself, have enough to freeze anybody’s
blood. The principles of contrast, parallelism and the histrionic devices to
keep suspense alert and delay the catastrophe is effectively handled by the
dramatist.
According
to Mr. Dover Wilson, Shakespeare endowed the hero with a dualized
personality–frenzy followed by calm, calm followed by frenzy–simply to delay the
catastrophe, thus keeping our suspense alert and making the play artistically
effective. And indeed with breathless suspense we wait to witness the fate of
this great Renaissance prince, though at last he brings disaster to himself and
others, a disaster of his own making. Gertrude drinks poison, Laertes dies in the sword-play, Hamlet forces the king to
drink poison; and he himself too, wounded with the venomous rapier, dies. But “the
dying Hamlet leaves upon us a sense of power, of terrific force” says Mr. Dover
Wilson. And what is the aim of art? What seeks literature? De Quincey say “Literature seeks to communicate powers,” and
its function is, he adds–“to move.” The dying prince moves us terribly; the forces
lead us for reflection of heaven and hell, life and death, of the divine
possibility and human aspiration. And in Hamlet there is more for
reflection than for immediate apprehension. Art is to be “apprehended not by
the discursive reason but by intuition, imagination, aesthetic
sense.” If the play fails
finding an effective ‘objective correlative’ all the same it is enriched for
its reflective values. Bradley says:
“...Hamlet
most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul’s infinity and the sense
of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its
offspring.”
Hamlet’s
versification,
Eliot remarks, is variable. Hamlet, it must be admitted, is “throughout
overloaded with matter, which has little or no vital connection with the plot.”
W. H. Hudson also held the same opinion. Horatio’s long account of the
political relations between
Eliot’s
another charge that Hamlet contains “superfluous and incoherent scenes”
is very effectively replied by Mr. David Daiches. The
play, according to him, is an organic whole with a coherent series of events.
Scene succeeds scene, he says, with mounting dramatic interest; moments of
tension are adroitly followed by more relaxed interludes; characters create
themselves by speech and action with astonishing vividness and humanity, and
the struggle between Hamlet and his destiny is played but. Characters in Hamlet
are intimately related to action and certainly they are not a psychologist’s
case-work. Unity of action, we must remember, is the higher and controlling law
of the drama. And here it is in Hamlet. To hold Hamlet as an
artistic failure, therefore, is far from correct.
References
1
2 T. S. Eliot: The Sacred Wood, ‘Hamlet and
His Problems.’
3
4 T. S. Eliot: The
Sacred Wood ‘Hamlet and His Problems.’
5 W. H. Hudson: Introduction to the Study of
Literature.
6 David Daiches: A
Critical Study of English Literature.