David Shields on Hamlet, Hamlet on everything else

One piece from David Shields’s Reality Hunger that I wasn’t able to find a place to address in Wednesday's post was this take on Hamlet:

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Hamlet, dying, says, "If I had the time, I would tell you all." The entire play is the Hamlet show, functioning as a vehicle for Hamlet to give his opinion on everything and anything, as Nietzsche does in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The play could easily be broken up into little sections like "Hamlet on Friendship," "Hamlet on Sexual Fidelity," "Hamlet on Suicide," "Hamlet on Grave Diggers," "Hamlet on the Afterlife." Hamlet is, more than anything else, Hamlet taking on a multitude of different topics. (Melville's marginal comment on one of the soliloquies in the play: "Here is forcibly shown the great Montaigneism of Hamlet.") I find myself wanting to ditch the tired old plot altogether and just harness the voice, which is a processing machine, taking input and spitting out perspective--a lens, a distortion effect. Hamlet's very nearly final words: "Had I but the time . . . O, I could tell you." He would keep riffing forever if it weren't for the fact that the plot needs to kill him.

This seems like a perfect demonstration of what Shields doesn't seem to get about fiction: he’s right about what would happen if you were to take the plot out of Hamlet—but he doesn’t realize that the result would be terrible. A Hamlet who riffs forever? Could anyone really want that?

The reason we care to listen to Hamlet isn’t because he’s so brilliant. It’s that his manic flow of thought can’t obscure—in fact, reveals—the pain and confusion he’s grappling with and trying to drown in words. Without the plot, Hamlet would be nothing but an adolescent blowhard. Without the ghost of his father looming over him, he would be merely another, more articulate version of that guy you knew in high school who discovered Nietzsche and Ayn Rand and couldn’t stop raving about them.

It’s the anguish of his loss and his dilemma—reflected in the anguish of Gertrude and Ophelia as they watch him disintegrate—that make us care enough to listen to Hamlet in the first place. It’s because we have such aching sympathy for him that we are interested in what he has to say; only our sympathy allows us to put up with him, and that sympathy is rooted in the events Shields derides.

In a sense, Shields is right about one thing: the plot does need to kill Hamlet. But he's ignoring the fact that here plot--as it so often is--is actually character, and vice versa. The plot needs to kill Hamlet not as a mere device or as a way to shock or surprise; it needs to kill him because that is where the very mania that Shields celebrates is inexorably tending. The plot needs to kill Hamlet because you can’t go on that way—life simply can’t be lived at that pitch and be sustainable. Disaster will come, and we know it in our bones as we watch. That’s why it’s a tragedy, and why it is more powerful and affecting than any “Hamlet on . . . ” could ever hope to be.

"He speaks all his Words distinctly, half as loud again as the others."

{David Garrick as Hamlet}

In the weeks leading up to Hallowe'en, when I was writing daily about ghosts and spirits, I spent a few days on Shakespearean ghosts, including that of Hamlet's father. If only I'd read Tom Jones a couple of months earlier, I could have adduced a scene from it as evidence of just how scary Hamlet's father's ghost can be--for said ghost makes a memorable appearance in one of Tom Jones's most entertaining digressions, a trip to the theatre by Tom and his well-meaning buffoon of a servant, Partridge; that the scene also gives us a glimpse of David Garrick--whom Partridge refers to as "that little Man "--in action as Hamlet is an extra bonus:

As soon as the Play, which was Hamlet Prince of Denmark, began, Partridge was all Attention, nor did he break Silence till the Entrance of the Ghost; upon which he asked Jones, "What man that was in the strange Dress; something," said he," like what I have seen in a Picture. Sure it is not Armour, is it?" Jones answered, "That is the Ghost." To which Partridge replied, "Persuade me to that, Sir, if you can. Though I can't say I ever actually saw a Ghost in my life, yet I am certain I should know one, if I saw him, better than that comes to. No, no, Sir, Ghosts don't appear in such Dresses as that, neither."

Enter Garrick, and Partridge's doubts take wing, replaced by assailing fears that lead to knocking knees and trembling limbs:

"O la! Sir," said he, "I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not afraid of any Thing; for I know it is but a Play. And if it was really a Ghost, it could do one no Harm at such Distance, and in so much Company; any yet if I was frightened, I am not the only Person." "Why, who," cries Jones, "dost thou take to be such a Coward here besides thyself?" "Nay, you may call me Coward if you will; but if that little Man there upon the Stage is not frightned, I never saw any Man frightned in my Life. Ay, ay; go along with you!

Later, Partridge graces us with a close--if naive--analysis of Garrick's technique:

[D]id you not yourself observe afterwards, when he found out it was his own Father's Spirit, and how he was murdered in the Garden, how his Fear forsook him by Degrees, and he was struck dumb with Sorrow, as it were, just as I should have been, had it been my own Case.

Yet for all this, at the end of the play, when asked for his favorite player, Partridge forsakes Garrick, choosing instead the actor who had played Claudius, for which he is reproached by one of his companions:

"Indeed, Mr. Partridge," says Mrs. Miller, "you are not of the same Opinion with the Town, for they are all agreed, that Hamlet is acted by the best player who ever was on the Stage." "He the best Player!" cries Partridge, with a contemptuous Sneer. "Why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a Ghost, I should have looked in the very same Manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that Scene, as you called it, between him and his Mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me, any Man, that is, any good Man, that had such a Mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but indeed, Madam, though I was never at a Play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the Country; and the King for my Money; he speaks all his Words distinctly, half as loud again as the others.--Any Body may see he is an actor."

Gulled by Garrick's naturalism, the yokel prefers the overwrought. Though Partridge doesn't know that he is expected to prefer Garrick, the scene nevertheless reminds me distantly of Marcel's disappointment at first seeing La Berma on stage in In Search of Lost Time: expecting the spectacular, he fails to notice nuance.

If Samuel Johnson's account of Garrick's acting is accurate, Partridge would probably not have been the only novice theatre-goer to have been fuddled by Garrick's technique. In The Life of Johnson James Boswell reports Johnson saying:

Garrick . . . was no declaimer; there was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken To be, or not to be, better than he did; yet he was the only actor I ever saw whom I could call a master both in tragedy and comedy; though I liked him best in comedy. A true conception of character, and natural expression of it, were his distinguishing excellencies.

{Garrick as Richard III}

But there are limits to naturalism for Johnson, even in the case of Garrick:

Johnson, indeed, had thought more upon the subject of acting than might be generally supposed. Talking of it one day to Mr. Kemble, he said, "Are you, sir, one of those enthusiasts who believe yourself transformed into the very character you represent?" Upon Mr. Kemble's asnwering that he had never felt so strong a persuasion himself; "To be sure not, Sir, (said Johnson;) the thing is impossible. And if Garrick really believed himself to be that monster, Richard the Third, he deserved to be hanged every time he performed it.

With which sentiments I believe Dr. Johnson would have found Partridge in strong agreement.

"It harrows me with fear and wonder."

{The ghost of Hamlet's father, as played at the Booth Theatre, London, 1870. Sketch by Thomas Glessing.}

In a comment to yesterday's post, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading corrected my half-assertion that Jacob Marley is literature's most famous ghost. That crown, she rightly notes, rests with the ghost of Hamlet's father, who should also, I think, get extra credit for appearing to so many more people than your usual ghost charged with a mission. He first manifests in front of two or three of the men of the guard:

MARCELLUS
Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Horatio, however, is having none of it:

Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.

But once the ghost does appear, there's no denying its presence, nor that it is

In the same figure, like the king that's dead.

Horatio, harrowed, hails Hamlet.

Watching the ghost of Hamlet's father, it's easy to see where Hamlet gets his flair for the dramatic. After all, need he appear in the chill of the ramparts at midnight? Wouldn't the quiet coziness of Hamlet's bedchamber have served as well? Ah, but then he'd eschew the hair-raising buildup he knows the guards will give him before he appears to his son, let alone Horatio's ascription to him of the powers of a Will-o-the-Wisp:

HORATIO
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.

And then there's the ghost's whole, "Oh, the stories I could tell of the horrors of the afterlife!" bit:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine,

Only, well, it turns out he's not allowed to:

But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

While Hamlet's father's technique is quite effective--as he surely knew it would be, if he possessed any understanding of the character of his son--I prefer the more straightforward approach of, as Perry White would say, great Caesar's ghost, when he appears to Brutus in his tent:

BRUTUS
Ha! who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.

GHOST
Thy evil spirit, Brutus.

BRUTUS
Why comest thou?

GHOST
To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Well; then I shall see thee again?

GHOST
Ay, at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

[Exit Ghost]

I suppose you could ask why Caesar bothered to appear to Brutus at all--couldn't he have just shown up at Philippi? But I appreciate his straightforwardness; it seems appropriate to a great general. And after all, shouldn't a ghost be confident that his very presence will supply sufficient drama to make whatever point he's charged with putting across?



In that regard, no one tops Banquo, who doesn't even speak--or appear to anyone but Macbeth. A model of ghostly restraint, he merely sits quietly on Macbeth's stool and shakes his gory locks a bit:

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

LADY MACBETH
What, quite unmann'd in folly?

MACBETH
If I stand here, I saw him.

LADY MACBETH
Fie, for shame!

MACBETH
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

And his encore is even better:

MACBETH
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

Now that's supernatural efficiency.