Mousetrap: Structure and Meaning in Hamlet 9781442656246

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Mousetrap Structure and meaning in Hamlet

There is scarcely an element of Hamlet that has not received attention many times, yet both general reader and sophisticated critic would gen­ erally agree that the character of Hamlet and the full meanings of the play remain mysteries. No less a puzzle is the art of Hamlet, for, while the form of the art is elusive, the feeling of essential meaning is strong. Professor Aldus hopes to enlarge our understanding of Hamlet and our appreciation of Shakespeare as a conscious artist of great subtlety by studying the play's dramatic structure in the light of Aristotle's Poetics and its meaning as literary myth in the light of Plato's Phaedrus. This is a study of Hamlet as literary myth, a figurative mode of art in which structure is basic; yet primal myth, myth in the larger, non-literary sense, becomes part of it too, because the substance of Hamlet seems to be of this kind. Professor Aldus's reading of Hamlet is both radically new and de­ cidedly provocative. A great deal of very careful inquiry has gone into the unearthing of connections which at first sight often seem improbable and tenuous, but which, one comes to find, have an illuminating total unity. Future commentators may not accept all that Professor Aldus has to say about, for example, Ophelia's crown of flowers, but they will hardly be able to ignore it. holds degrees from the University of Detroit, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. He has taught in several colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. He now lives in Lower Waasis, New Brunswick, where he divides his time be­ tween restoring an old farmhouse and pursuing further critical inquiries.

P.J. ALDUS

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P.J. ALDUS

Mousetrap

Structure and meaning in Hamlet

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto and Buffalo

© University of Toronto Press 1977 Toronto and Buffalo Printed in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Aldus, P J 1908Mousetrap: structure and meaning in Hamlet. Bibliography: p. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet. I. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet. 1976. II. Title. PR2807.A86 822.3'3 76-42263 ISBN 0-8020-5 3 29-7 The drawing on the front cover is by Virgil Burnett.

This book has been published during the Sesquicentennial year of the University of Toronto.

To S.W.G. the only true begetter of this book

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CONTENTS

Preface ix Bibliographical note xiii PART ONE Tools 3

1 Myth 5 2 Literary myth 21 Plato: Invention 21 Aristotle: Form in tragic literary myth 27 PART TWO Exhumation 35

3 Tellers 37 4 Killers 52 Soldiers 53 Hunters 59 Spies 68 5 Players 85 Audiences 86 Critics 88 Emotional ends 90 Playwrights 91

Actors 94 Directors 95 Prologues 101 Dumb shows 105 Choruses 111 6 Dream travellers 122

7 Mousetrap 148 8 Myths 176

9 Rituals 202

10 Madnesses 209 PART THREE Inhumation 221 Notes 225

PREFACE

Any new study of Hamlet intimates a Falstaffian temerity. No one can be indifferent to the vast accretion of commentary that marks the present state of inquiry. So weighty, indeed, are the Hamlet shelves in the world's libraries that one can acknowledge only general indebtedness for parts of opinion and judgment that have lodged in the mind, inextricably fused with whatever may possibly be individual and fresh. There is scarcely any element in Hamlet that has not had attention many times, in one context of thought or another, not only in the exhaustive work of such critics as John Dover Wilson and Harley Granville-Barker, but also in the great flood of less ambitious commentaries. Yet it is generally acknowledged that the character of Hamlet and the full meanings of the play remain mysteries. No less a puzzle is the art of Hamlet, for while the form of the art is elusive, the feeling of essential meaning is strong, a sort of intuitive awareness of a pervasive unity in seeming disparity. Mystery in meaning and art is still the spur. What perhaps contributes to the continuing, even increasing, belief in a Hamlet enigma is general acceptance of the play as a literal action within its fiction, an image in a fictional mirror which reflects life directly. This view assumes that Shakespeare is presenting human actions measurable by the outward norm of such actions in a situation measurable by the usual conditions of such a situation. Hamlet is Prince of Denmark; his actions and reactions are measured by what circumstances might actually be in a court of Denmark (or of England to those who see 'English facts' in the 'Danish facts'). The inclination is to accept as facts what the words say directly: Horatio is Hamlet's fellow-scholar; the Ghost is that of Hamlet's father; Ophelia is the daughter of a courtier; Claudius is the King of Denmark; Claudius is grossly sexual; the Mousetrap is designed to catch Claudius and the Ghost. Where detail does not seem to fit situation so measured, it is said to be irrelevant, as, for example, the

x Preface

advice to the players, or contradictory, as the age of Gertrude against Hamlet's thirty years (which latter also leads to a literal fifty or sixty years for Horatio). Perhaps it is this literal measurement of 'facts' as much as the play itself that enforces the feeling of enigma. Commentaries on tragedy which proceed from the same postulates tend to agree as to the meanings of facts, but those which work from differing premises are unlikely to do so, excepting as there may be partial identity or overlapping of governing assumptions. However much a commentary may begin with acceptance of circumstances, scene, and action as literal, a given fact may mean quite different things as part of Bradley's Hegelian postulate, or as part of theatrical contrast, often the basis for Granville-Barker's discussions. Yet Bradley's Hegelian fact may provide no essential contradiction to both Coleridge's Platonism and Theodore Spencer's Renaissance cosmology. None of these is likely to correlate with Stoll's premise as to primitive, naive art in Shakespeare, so that he who reads Hamlet may run. But in every instance conclusions for parts and whole are predetermined by the initial premise, and there is no argument without a premise, overt or implied. The Hamlet problem may then be a question of appropriate governing postulates in a critical inquiry. There may be value in using as an hypothesis some set of principles not yet used, or not fully applied, or used in some uncongenial and indeterminate mixture, such as may come about from consideration of parts separated from the whole, especially when such parts seem contradictory, or even irrelevant, a charge to which Hamlet has frequently been subjected. Granting that literal reference (the 'real' act, the image, the Objective correlative') is generally requisite for an understanding of what art means, it is no less true that music, the furthest extreme in art from definable fact, is a universally meaningful if not understood experience, and that between these extremes are various intermixtures possible in art forms that have logos as means. May seeming contradiction, mystery, enigma not be likely when the non-literal in a work of art is underestimated? May Hamlet not be testimonial for Pater's remark that 'all art constantly aspires to the condition of music'? If this be so, perhaps mystery may partly give way if a view more than usually hospitable to the figurative in meaning and form be held to. The essence, in matter and form, of literary poetic myth is therefore the chosen postulate for the following discourse on Hamlet. There are here three assumptions: first, that if tragedy is essentially literary myth, the basic requirement in a search for meaning is an understanding of tragic-mythic form as this is explored in Aristotle's

xi Preface

Poetics-, second, that the most exact and comprehensive comment on the genesis of literary myth is Plato's Phaedrus-, third, that Shakespeare was a conscious artist to an extreme and subtle degree. The first two considerations are extant in critical dialectics and need only brief summaries. The third remains a matter of dispute the final value of which is rather nebulous, in that whether Shakespeare was an inspired, possessed genius or a skilled conscious artist is quite academic - he was likely both beyond even extraordinary comprehension. The essential fact is the play, however its meaning and art may have conjoined to excite, trouble, and mystify men. Whatever is written here will be an attempt to be faithful to the structure and language of the play in its whole and parts. Essential corollaries to this are two conditions: Shakespeare must be read at any point with a comprehensively active memory of all that has preceded in the action; the plays must be read more than once. Gilbert Murray, in Hamlet and Orestes, writes about his efforts to get at the concept of myth underlying tragedy: 'As for my own tentative answer to the problem, I will only mention that it has received in private two criticisms ... that every one knew it before;... that most learned men, sooner or later, go a little mad on some subject or other...' He notes that, in respect to Hamlet as mythical in substance, he has been preceded by Gollancz, Zinzow, Rydberg, and Elton. Now there can be added the important contributions of Jones, Mack, Frye, Weisinger, and others. Murray's remark is then doubly applicable here; too, the sophisticated reader may be restless about patent simplicities in the first chapter. However the complexities that inevitably come in considerations oí Hamlet should compensate for brief discomforts in rereading what is well known, and too, the play's demands provide imperative need for all the precision possible at all points, and especially at the outset. Moreover, because mature thought about Hamlet has always been caviary to the general, something may perhaps be said in support of a deliberately simple approach for those not fully aware of the Hamlet experience. One basic question is how much Hamlet incorporates primitive matter within the complex invention of an extraordinarily sophisticated artist. Consequently this study may lend itself to the misconception that it uses the mythic approach to Hamlet, with the usual earthmothers, sacrificial kings, fertility rites, et cetera. This is not at all its method. It is Aristotelian criticism of dramatic structure. It also uses Platonic concepts of metaphoric form in literary myth. Myth in the larger non-literary sense is in it only because the substance of Hamlet seems to be of this kind. Structure is basic to it because Hamlet is clearly a literary myth, a constructed figurative mode of art. Only when

xii Preface

structural analysis had been carefully completed was it necessary to assess primal mythic content and form to resolve lacunae. For knowledge of primary myth, only minimally my own, I have drawn on Frazer, Rose, Hamilton, Grimai, Weston, and others. Finally there is no optimism here that a full understanding of the play has been achieved. It will be enough if the germinal thought of the far past applied to Hamlet may make more profound the mystery by making it less. I wish to express my appreciation to University of Toronto Press, whose Publications Fund provided a subvention to support publication of this book, and to all those at the Press who contributed to this work. I am especially indebted to Jean C. Jamieson for her generous, friendly help and counsel, and to Joan Bulger for guiding me through a maze of technical details. P.J. ALDUS Lower Waasis, NB 1976

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The text of the play used is Hamlet, ed G.L. Kittredge and I. Ribner (Waltham, Mass 1967). Except for substantive needs, references to passages are not included. References in the text to critical comments by Kittredge or Ribner are to their notes in this edition of Hamlet. Several books and articles drawn on frequently or substantially follow. Page references to them are included in the text; occasional notes seem advisable. Aristotle. Poetics, trans I. Bywater, in R. McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle. New York 1947 Furness, H.H. The Variorum Hamlet, 4th ed. 2 vols. Philadelphia 1877 Granville-Barker, H. Preface to Hamlet. New York 1957 Greg, W.W. Camlet's Hallucination/ MLR, 13 (October 1917) Grimai, P. 'Preface' to Larousse World Mythology. London 1965 Hamilton, E. Mythology. New York 1942 Lyte, H. A New Herbal, or Historie of Plants, etc, 2nd ed. London 1586 Mack, M. 'The World of Hamlet/ in Cleanth Brooks, ed, Tragic Themes in Western Literature. New Haven 1955 Murray, G. 'Hamlet and Orestes,7 in Proceedings of the British Academy (London 1913-14) Partridge, E. Shakespeare's Bawdy. London 1947 Plato. Phaedrus and sections from Ion and the Republic, in The Works of Plato, ed I. Edman. New York 1928 Rose, H.J. Gods and Heroes of the Greeks. New York 1958 Weisinger, H. The Agony and the Triumph. East Lansing 1964 Weston, J. From Ritual to Romance. New York 1957 Wilson, J.D. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge 1935

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KING What do you call the play? HAMLET 'The Mousetrap.'

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PART ONE

Tools

CLOWN A pickaxe and a spade, a spade.

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1 Myth

SOCRATES As in our definition of love, which ... certainly gave clearness and consistency to the discourse, the speaker should define his several notions and so make his meaning clear.

Before literary myth can be considered as a specific form of fiction, 'myth/ a most loosely used word, needs precise definition. Along with 'fiction' and 'hypothesis' it has popularly been made synonymous with 'untruth/ Inaccuracy of this kind may be casual and innocuous; on the other hand, the accusation of lies led to Sidney's defence of fiction as poetical truth and was no small part of persistent Puritan attack on the theatre. The problem seems to lie not in the distinction between truly literal comparisons (as, for example, England is like Denmark) and those which are figurative, a clear difference in kind, but in the fact that figurative modes may be directed to chiefly literal ends. By 'literal ends' here is meant intentions to make rationally understandable the nature of objective phenomena, or of abstractions treated as though they are objective, that is, extant, perceptible, palpable. Distinctions lie then in opposite absolutes of literal and figurative meaning and intermixtures between these that constitute actual writings. But the term 'literal' for what is actual, objective, the thing itself, is of course self-contradictory. It means 'according to the word,' and both literal and figurative expressions in their immediate forms are according to the word. Much language has become literal only through familiarity that dims or cancels contemplative-imaginative wonder as to the real behind the actual, truth behind appearance, mystery behind fact. It is in this complex of relations between what is or may be to what is said or written that myth and literary myth must be discriminated, and their interrelationships shown.

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An approach to the problem from the figurative extreme assumes a substance of pure subjective meaning, the reality of inner experience apart from any expression of it. If there is any true expression of it, not in a one-to-one ratio addressed to rational comprehension but in complete merging with inter-essential states, expression and meaning must be the same, and expression must be figurative. If there were an ideal reader he would be the poet's alter-ego: myth, poet, poem, reader - all would be one. This is what Pater means in 'all art constantly aspires to the condition of music/ and what MacLeish means in 'a poem should not mean but be. ' Pure subjective meaning, the reality of inner experience apart from the expression of it (or in complete poetic expression of it, if that were possible), is the essence of myth; this is the challenge to poets that may result in literary myth. Ultimately the essences of pure fact and pure subjective meaning, however much at opposite extremes, are no different in that both are beyond definitive literal statement. In any full sense these extremes come together in fusion: what appears to be a dividing line is a circle. Scientist and poet are one - both deal in myth. Grimai writes: 'Myth and the provisional truths of science are only different approximations to Truth, that enigma of enigmas, which even after so many achievements and discoveries, still remains closed to us' (9). Even in the theatre of the absurd the absurd requires a point of imagined reference for its internal correlative, which, however, is as mysterious as is its universal counterpart. Ionesco has remarked: 'I try to project on the stage my inner conflict (incomprehensible to myself) telling myself always that, the microcosm being the image of the macrocosm, it can be that this interior world, broken, disarticulated, is in some way the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions/1 The difficulty of response to the theatre of the absurd seems to lie in its simple and radical identity with incomprehensible inner states and equally incomprehensible universal mystery. What T.S. Eliot calls 'the objective correlative' is left out. It is precisely on this point that Eliot condemns Hamlet. Shakespeare, he says, sought to deal with meanings beyond such necessary poetic demonstration, and therefore the play fails.2 Poetry, in actual written forms, seems to need factual, objective matter as vicarious means to convey understanding of pure inner states: the mystery of being; of being felt to exist in the centre of a complex of phenomena; of identity of ego in a universe of extra-ego; finally of fusion of ego and extra-ego, the micro-macrocosmic parallel collapsed. In these considerations the most abstruse poem is that which uses the minimum of objective statement; it aspires to be myth in a palpable form, to be pure meaning in figurative form. It seeks to obliterate the line between literary form and substance.

7 Myth

In the linear conception matter, factual at one end and mythic at the other, lies beyond the extremes of verbal expression; yet at each extreme there is language that seeks identity with substance, if generally accepted without question as true or exact only on the literal side. But the line bent into a circle is more illuminating. In it all meaning is mythic. What seems to be rationally expressible becomes identical with what is rationally inexpressible. The point of identity is paradox. As objective correlatives for this abstract pattern one may consider the definitions of Concave' and 'convex,' then draw the one figure possible. What lies between the separate concepts is something quite indefinable, the paradox of essential identity in essential antithesis. All that which assumes a demonstrable view - this world, this society, this love, this true objective in war - is a view which does not consider ultimate meanings. It is non-philosophic, or pragmatically philosophic. Any view which assumes qualities in the universe and in men, and seeks not merely to reconcile these but to identify them as one, is a view that pursues ultimate meanings. The two inevitably come together. Ultimate man is referable only to immediate man in all his agonizing complexities. The mystery of truth lies in the mystery of fact. In a literary myth which achieves the form of myth per se (if it ever does) the mystery of final objective correlatives is identical with the mystery of myth. The poem is its own objective correlative. Classical critics have not overlooked, indeed have emphasized, what has been noted thus far. Plato calls rational equivalents for mythic tales crude philosophy. Or again, all men, he says, use topics or commonplaces, but only the inspired speaker has originality or invention - he invents elaborate figures to deal with 'inconceivable and portentous natures.' Aristotle in his discussion of poetic diction shows his awareness of the power of words to delineate mystery: 'the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars' (657). He no less shows his rational predilection for the verity of fact: 'a whole statement... will be ... a riddle, if made up of metaphor ... The very nature indeed of a riddle is this, to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words (which cannot be done with the real names for things, but can be with their metaphorical substitutes)...' (657). All of these considerations have the ring of relevance to any mind full of Hamlet. But it is not enough to seek the place of myth in a pattern of metaphors of line and circle. If in a sense the substance of poetry is a special language, yet that language seeks to identify a special substance not language, the substance of myth. The matter of myth, the extreme beyond final poetic statement, must be discriminated as precisely as

8 TOOLS

possible. It has had no lack of attention, from dictionary definitions through encyclopaedia essays to extended movements or schools of criticism. Relevant inquiry leads to identity for myth somewhere in a complex of legend, history, religion, the forces of fertility and sex particularly, racial memory, and the poet as a special man possessing and responding to deep natural forces, and being responded to through his powers of invention in language. Various positive formulations of the substance of myth are quite clear in a constant regression into prehistory (i.e., unrecorded history) and, more deeply, into elusive human experience not amenable to factual record even in historical times. Here the metaphor of line is again illuminating. If we move from factual true history to legend, we find that the latter is ambiguous, astride the line, its nub of historical truth on the factual side, the preponderant remainder on the fictional side. If we approach the line from the mythic side, the term closest to 'legend' is 'fabulous history.' These two terms then are essentially synonymous. From the mythic extreme we move with the anthropologists from psychological emotions per se, through psychology of belief, to responses to natural phenomena; from purely subjective states to admixtures of subjective and objective substance. Representative terms are, in approximate order: primitive impulses; racial memory; natural sentiment; archetype of belief; reality ... behind ... bewildering natural phenomena. These terms cannot be precisely dividing; the nearest thing to category is, first, inner psychological-emotional states, independent of the phenomena of non-man; and second, awareness of and response to outward phenomena. The latter category again may be subdivided into responses of sentiment and evaluation by intellect, at which point the factual - science and history - takes over. There are statements that suggest the indivisible, organic nature of the whole process: 'deep perspective of time and culture'; 'the reality ... behind ... bewildering [natural] phenomena'; 'the object of myth, as of science, [is] to explain the world, to make its phenomena intelligible.' The subtle complexities of this mythic substance have long been thought of as a key to sophisticated tragedy. Murray, for example, writes: ... in the greatest ages of literature there seems to be ... a power of preserving due proportion between ... the expression of boundless primitive emotion and the subtle and delicate representation of life. In plays like Hamlet or the Agamemnon or the Electra we have certainly ... a full command of the technical instruments of the poet and the dramatist; but we have also, I suspect, a

9 Myth strange unanalysed vibration below the surface, an undercurrent of desires and fears and passions, long slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years lain near the root of our most intimate emotions and been wrought into the fabric of our most magical dreams. How far into past ages this stream may reach back, I dare not even surmise; but it sometimes seems as if the power of stirring it or moving with it were one of the last secrets of genius. (411-12)

If, to gain a more specific notion of the substance of myth, we consider the response of primitive emotion, or impulse, or sentiment, and later memory, to nature, we invariably come to states identified as 'belief,' whether in magic or deities or the two together - in short, primitive religion. Whatever else mythic substance may be, it is belief in forces beyond definition however verifiable in immediate experience. These are commonplaces in the history of ideas, as is the basis of such magic, superstitition, or religion in the phenomena of nature. But equally basic is the identity of primitive impulse and emotion in nature. From the beginning, apparently, man has been intensely aware of his identity in nature and has harboured fears of powers beyond him that, mysteriously potent, operate on him, and, not less mysteriously, on him from within himself. As has been fully set forth from Hesiod to Frazer and Rose and others, forces in both nature and man-in-nature become, in mythic belief, gods, always in some familial pattern. Murray, in seeking to trace Hamlet back to ultimate sources, finds them in the specific mythic substance of Ouranos-Gaea, Kronos-Rhea, and Zeus-Hera, and then in the legendary accounts of Laios-Jocasta-Oedipus and AgamemnonClytemnestra-Orestes. These familial patterns are always unstable, usually violently so. Sons kill fathers; Orestes his mother; brothers kill brothers and marry sisters; sons marry sisters or mothers. These killings are done knowingly in rage and/or vengeance, or unknowingly in blindness. The rites coeval with the words of myth in appeasement of gods are bloody successions and celebrations of fertility. The violence of dying and the violence of sex become one.3 The underlying unity then in mythic substance is not that of family, but rather of forces that disrupt its conventions, however much these forces, the primeval urges of sex, are the condition on which rational social order has been imposed, often under the aegis of formal religion. The beginnings of myth seem to lie in severe disorder in human affairs because of the overwhelmingly fixed order of the procreative urge in nature: its non-literary expression takes the form of rituals of death and resurrection.

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Typically commentary on this basic substance of myth takes the view that these rites celebrated the phenomena of the seasons. Murray writes of that prehistoric and world-wide ritual battle of Summer and Winter, of Life and Death, which has played so vast a part in the mental development of the human race... (408-9)

But that the mysterious forces so celebrated were intensely subjective is attested in the same comment; the ritual experience is a directly acted surrogate: The things that thrill and amaze us in Hamlet or the Agamemnon are not any historical particulars about mediaeval Elsinore or prehistoric Mycenae, but things belonging to the old stories and the old magic rites, which stirred and thrilled our forefathers five and six thousand years ago ; set them dancing all night on the hills, tearing beasts and men in pieces, and joyously giving up their own bodies to the most ghastly death, to keep the green world from dying and to be the saviours of their own people. (410)

The substances of myth, the imagined-invented gods, the urgent procreative forces in nature and in man-in-nature, all ultimately come to one point: the line where man and nature, seemingly separate, meet in the final shadowy mystery of ecstasy, violence, and silence. It is this moment of awareness, the essential substance of myth, that is celebrated in metaphorical ritual act. Yet language seems to have been from the beginning or near it (one conjectures) organic part of such ceremony. From a Greek writer Murray quotes a definition of myth as 'things said over a ritual act/ Here myth is already strongly implied to be language, not the act itself; yet the act seems logically to be prior, the essential substance. The likelihood is that act and language together are the whole mythic substance, language becoming preponderant, action less so - perhaps limited to symbolic representative acts leading to and prefiguring an intense climactic act. As such, language is surrogate for action, and is necessarily metaphor; it does not define or describe; it is a substitute form of the action. These seem to be the distant origins of myth in the poet who shaped a vision of a guessed truth beyond disciplined rational powers. As to order, myth has always been a search for it in the multiform complexities of nature, beyond, and especially in man. The initial stage is obvious - the regular cycle of seasons, the orderly movements of sun and moon, and other easily seen, wonder-creating recurrences in nature.

11 Myth

But probably from these initiatory elements and felt identity with them, especially the analogies of birth, life, and death, came imposition of orders on nature from within - sensuous, emotional, psychological patterns of force not at all understood, if omnipresent and urgent. Mystery projected itself into analagous mystery in the search for meaningful form. Thus the hierarchies of deities and lesser deities in recurring family patterns are a god race ordered like the human race. Yet the orders in nature and in man suffer disruptions beyond calculation: storms, eclipses, Contagious fogs; which falling in the land Have every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents: The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer, The chiding autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. (MSND II.i.90 ff)

In all this ritual act is a form of order; words spoken over it in music and metre are order; the primitive poet is the embodiment of order as he is that of myth, for myth is order. There is, of course, no precise moment when primitive myth relinquished its vital dominance to become the substance of art form. But there is a point of achieved literary myth: the point where accumulated primitive myth (already gradually qualified by literary imagination and invention) is a rich and complex body of substance; where mastered literary principles allow sophisticated form and expression; where such substances and such controlled structures come together in distinct art forms. To have Shakespeare's own commentary on the imaginative force that can produce such order in myth is of great importance. It is expressed in the definition of the poet in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. The lovers have told of their night of confusions, darkness, and dream, without any knowledge as to how fairies and mechanicals have been subtly woven into the total vision of the first four acts. This report leads Hippolyta and Theseus to comments on the power of poetic imagination.

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HIP "Fis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. THE More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. HIP But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.1-27)

The universals in this passage incorporate every element of myth in a pattern that, emphasizing the shaping power of the poet, sacrifices no part of the full complexity of myth. The matter of myth, its genesis, and its form are here interwoven in an incremental repetition that begins and ends in testimonial to the wonder-producing powers of the story, 'something ... strange and admirable.' What is strange and admirable is as much a part of mythic matter as it is of effect. This story, a fable, has in it 'more than cool reason comprehends/ 'things unknown/ 'airy nothing[s]/ The locus of this matter intimates the line of myth once more: the poet's eye searches 'from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven/ Although the line of vision is vertical here, there is on it necessarily a point where heaven and earth meet, where myth takes form. It is the poet who can see and 'body forth the forms' of these, the 'things unknown/ His power of vision is a kind of madness; he is a seer: his eye glances 'in a fine frenzy rolling' ; like lover and lunatic, his seething brain discovers through his imagination 'forms of things unknown' and 'turns them to shapes' in language.4 But, most important, throughout^ Midsummer-Night's Dream it is always emphasized that the poet's pen can give shapes to things unknown only if his imagination be blended with judgment -

13 Myth

a power quite different from reason, a power akin to what Plato calls 'invention.' In the Theseus-Hippolyta statement all the elements of poetic myth are always interfused: poet, poem, matter, effect are all one. Nature is the form of myth; the poet is the form of myth; the poem as a whole and in its language is the form of myth; the response to it, if it be full and free, is myth - living myth. Equally applicable to A Midsummer-Night's Dream and Hamlet is Coleridge's remark: The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one; and what is organization but the connexion of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means?'5 In a statement about Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein that might well be about Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Hamlet, H. Weisinger expresses the whole of this: ... the source of power ... is in each instance a vision, a way of looking at the phenomena of existence, a controlling and unifying metaphor on the grandest scale so vivid, so dramatic, so immediately convincing, both emotionally and intellectually, that we cannot help being caught up by this new sudden awareness, this startlingly fresh insight into the meaning of existence, this astounding bringing together of the disparate and lifeless fragments of experience into a pattern of order and meaning, and giving it all our most fundamental assent. And I would go on to suggest that the source of power behind the new vision is in each instance again the force of that ancient myth and ritual pattern of birth, death, and rebirth ... (121-2)

In this elusive complex of myth and literary myth what is the place of Hamlet"? Or more precisely, as a point of departure for a new inquiry, where has it been placed? It is said to be a literal statement about normally definable people in a normally identifiable situation, as though the play were an imagined history: a prince of Denmark is caught up in a complex series of personal and political conflicts. It is said to be a story once literal but now verging into the region of myth (but here 'myth' is used in quite a different sense from its primitive and literary meanings); it is said to be true myth, but one imperfectly understood, a mystery, a continuing enigma. The literalists' view of Hamlet is preponderantly accepted, fully or in large part. Even in those comments which move to some final high abstraction, as in the Hegelianism of Bradley, the play and its characters are thought to have a definable local habitation and a

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name/ Another way of putting this is that what Eliot calls the 'objective correlative' becomes primary; it is accepted as the reality of the play. Insistence on verisimilitude as a condition of art is another formulation, a symptom of the attitude that finds truth in verifiable fact. We are once more on the rational, scientific, historical side of the line of myth. Art is measured as though it were a kind of history, a surrogate for history, not an effort to express universal subjective meaning in figurative statement. Yet such views of Hamlet almost always acknowledge mystery, often insoluble mystery. For a representative statement of this whole position we may go to an essay by Francis Fergusson.6 Quite aware of the mythic substance in Hamlet as shown by Gollancz and Murray, Fergusson writes: 'Hamlet has nothing in common with Saxo's primitive savage/ As to Murray's study of Hamlet-Orestes, Fergusson suggests that Shakespeare probably had no notion 'of the ancient sources of the story.' Instead in Saxo 'he seems to have found ... the classic theme which is also very modern ... [the] theme of the illness of the state ... [which] is clearly the basis of the play as a whole.' Fergusson goes on to argue (as though Hamlet is a history play) that 'in the History plays the central theme is always the welfare of the English monarchy torn by ... civil wars' and that Shakespeare makes clear 'at the very beginning that [Hamlet] is to be about Denmark's illness and its cure ... Claudius's shadow over Denmark [is] ... an objective fact.' In sum, we read: As soon as one realizes that the play is about Denmark and its hidden malady, all of the varied characters, the interwoven stories, and the contrasting effects of comedy, terror, and pathos which compose Hamlet fall naturally [sic] into place.

The large structure of Hamlet is predicated on a like postulate: the play is 'planned on the same principles as the other tragedies'; the structure is no less literal than theme or characters. In a quantitative division traceable to Bradley - 'the first three acts,' 'the Fourth Act,' and 'the Fifth Act' - there are, in an incomplete, fragmentary, narrative resume, 'the treacherous struggle between Claudius... and Hamlet'; a victory for Hamlet in the play within the play; the destruction of Polonius's family when Hamlet accidentally kills him. The fourth act 'shows the sufferings in Denmark'; the fifth act is reserved by Shakespeare 'as usual ... [for] the final word of fate.' Fergusson concludes: 'The general course of the great story is clear.' As to response to the play, it is no less literal: '[Hamlet] must have looked perfectly contemporary to the "super-subtle Elizabethans" ...

15 Myth

He still looks modern to us, in our time of troubles. And the other characters are also part of the familiar "modern" picture. Who has not met a good old boring Polonius, for instance ...? There are enough topical allusions in the play ... to suggest that Shakespeare expected the audience to take "Denmark" as a mirror of England and the times ...' But Fergusson, as all others, senses something beyond the literal: 'Hamlet's little play is itself far subtler than it looks at first... It suggests murder in such a way as to catch any murderer in the audience ...' Again: 'Even among great tragedies, Hamlet is one of the most mysterious of plays.' Finally, closer to myth, or deep in it: 'Some of the problems are insoluble, being rooted in the deepest mysteries of human fate.' From the literalist position we move to an apparently confusing pair of opposite views: Hamlet is at one and the same time becoming a myth and losing its essential quality as myth. But the contradiction is one in terms: 'myth' is used in quite different senses. In the first it seems to mean that a literal story or character begins to assume a universal significance so as to become a point of allusion: the literal becomes figurative through some power in the literal matter or statement. In the second sense, a precise use in the history of thought, the essential meaning of the work is mythic, but it moves in men's responses towards the literal. Even in this opposition one finds conscious or unconscious refinements in relationships that suggest the final unity of myth in its primitive, subjective sense. Maynard Mack, for example, writes of 'this play's peculiar hold on everyone's imagination, its almost mythic status, one might say, as a paradigm of the life of man' (32). Harley Granville-Barker finds the difficulty in an irresolvable ambivalence that comes about when an essentially mythic hero is placed in a literal dramatic action in which all the other characters are literal, conditions of 'a different dramatic nature': Shakespeare does marvels with this Hamlet who is neither mad nor sane ...; the victim ... of the world's 'sane' view of his 'insane' perplexities; the man ... at war within himself; and a traveler, with that passport, into strange twilight regions of the soul. But [Shakespeare] cannot, for all his skill, so assimilate character and story that no incongruities appear. For the two are of a different dramatic nature. To do this he would have had to recast the play's whole scheme. He will not let his Hamlet suffer [dramatically, of course] ; but the other characters and their share in the action inevitably must.7 (32-3)

Patently Granville-Barker does not entertain the possibility that the whole action and all in it may be other than the actual world.

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Another commentary which expresses belief in a mythic Hamlet developed subsequent to the play also suggests a universal subjective mystery as its matter, projected into it by a special kind of readers 'puzzled self-contemplators': [Hamlet] has become a figure of myth ... the myth-character of the doubting, self-contemplating Intellectual... The haziness is inherent in the myth and in the manner by which the myth has been made, for Hamlet, the puzzled selfcontemplator, has been created through the self-projections of a long line of puzzled self-contemplators. Everything about him has for a long time been hazy ...8

Here myth is a specialized concept, not at all the primitive or the invented literary myth, however much 'puzzled self-contemplators' may finally be close to primitive contemplators of nature and self-in-nature, that is, men sufficiently poetic to formulate things said over a ritual act. The opposite position is expressed by J.W. Krutch, who writes that 'the great Greek or Elizabethan tragedies ... are still halfway between the work of art and the document/ 9 that is, they may come to be assessed rationally as much as or more than they are experienced in subjective response. Those who are more inclined to believe that Hamlet is first of all a myth consistently emphasize matter and response. The latter stands as a common denominator in well-nigh all commentaries - the play continues to convey a feeling of irresolvable mystery. There is also a longstanding and variously expressed conviction that the mystery lies essentially in Shakespeare. Finally there are commentaries that find 'ritual pattern' in the tragedies, this usually acknowledged to be both somewhat conjectural and quite largely general. Among those who discover mythic matter from Scandinavian, Roman, and Greek sources, Murray recognizes conditionally the literalists' views: 'if history is there, there is certainly myth mixed up with it' (404). But his (and others') demonstration of mythic matter, convincing though it is, is in itself, without reference to dramatic structure, not an answer to what the play does to those who experience it. As to efforts to capture the play's meaning from the nature of Shakespeare himself, two notable statements taking opposite positions provide sufficient commentary, Ernest Jones's introductory essay to the play and Eliot's 'Hamlet and His Problems.' Jones's essay, substantial and persuasive in its analysis of the mythic Oedipus conflict, is very close to dramatic structure and meaning. But Jones's basic postulate is part of systematic psychology which demands

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real psyches as subjects. This leads him not only to deal with Hamlet as though he were clinically alive and not a literary metaphor, but also to posit Shakespeare's psychological state as illuminating, indeed essential for, an understanding oí Hamlet. He writes: ... to isolate [the work of art] from its creator is to impose artificial limits to our understanding of it. A work of art is too often regarded as ... something almost independent of the creator's personality ... Informed criticism, however, shews that a correlated study of [the] two sheds light... on the inner nature of the composition and on the mentality of its author.

Presently Shakespeare's part is said to be 'the deeper, unconscious mind, which is doubtless the actual source of [poetic] ideas/ However Jones provides only two very conjectural and possibly dubious references to Shakespeare. Hamlet is said to have 'a strikingly tender feminine side.' Jones continues: 'That the same trait was a prominent one of Shakespeare's himself is well known, a fact which the appellation of "Gentle Will" sufficiently recalls ...' The second reference is to a footnote in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: ' [Freud] mentions ... the probability that the play was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's own father.' This is not much about Shakespeare's 'deeper, unconscious mind,' and one is not too surprised that finally the poet is not testimonial for the meaning of the play, but the play for Shakespeare's character, as though the objective were to understand Shakespeare and not the play: '[Hamlet] probably expresses the core of Shakespeare's psychical personality and outlook on life as no other work of his does. It may be expected, therefore, that anything which will give us the key to the inner meaning of the play will necessarily provide a clue to much of the deeper workings of Shakespeare's mind.'10 Jones's apparent ambivalence as to what he is trying to discover is not really important. That he actually deals with the play not by way of the poet but by considering the structure of the Oedipus conflict is important. That we cannot begin with Shakespeare is made most clear by Eliot. In his well-known statement Eliot identifies poet, dramatic action, and tragic hero, but insists on the impossibility of gaining answers by way of Shakespeare: 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

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emotion is immediately evoked ... artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet... is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem ... The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists ... We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography ...u

As is clear in different ways from Jones and Eliot, efforts to get at Hamlet through Shakespeare are not notably significant; Shakespeare remains more a mystery than does Hamlet, which is, after all, extant and available in every detail. If then we acknowledge that our response to Hamlet cannot come from its matter in itself, nor from knowledge of the psyche of the poet, the power must lie in the poem as it exists, although matter and poet are not indifferent to, indeed must have been inevitably interfused in, the making of the poem. What remains is the total form of the tragedy and, within this, language in its immediate forms. As T.E. Hulme puts it, the writer is dealing with 'an absolutely unstateable thing ... the only language [he] can use ... is that of analogy ... certain metaphors ... a combination of [which], while it cannot state the essentially unstateable intuition, can yet give ... a sufficient analogy' to create a similar quality of experience in the reader.12 It seems clear that primitive myth is the discovery and celebration of form, and that the line where nature and man-in-nature become one is identifiable only as a 'combination of metaphors.' How much of primitive form and matter there is in Hamlet, and how much more there is of the complex invention of an extraordinarily sophisticated artist - these are the truly critical questions. Awarenesses of metaphoric unity are frequently attested in such terms as 'incarnation,' 'world,' and 'realm,' intimations of an extant but vague form. Granville-Barker refers to the Players as ' [the] incarnation of the unreal'; he remarks that for Hamlet 'the unreal world [is] always more satisfying than the real...' (78; 88). Wilson writes: 'There may be contradiction here; but we are not moving in the realm of logic' (219).

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There are very many instances of the word Vision' to indicate both the imagination of the poet and the fact of myth. Akin to this, Wilson remarks that Hamlet 'speaks as in a dream. But the dream is a nightmare ...' (41). A nightmare is marked by a frighteningly disordered order. Something closely similar appears in a comment by Mack: 'Hamlet seems to lie closer to the illogical logic of life than Shakespeare's other tragedies' (33). However much the substance of Hamlet may suggest disorder - 'The time is out of joint. O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right' - there is constant awareness in readers that the play is not disorderly, that the disorder represented in it can be conveyed only in an order different from that of logic or history. It has been argued that more direct affinities exist between the form of primitive myth and Shakespeare's work. Weisinger especially seeks to show Shakespearean tragedy to be a literary counterpart of myth. The configuration of Shakespeare's thought was for the most part sympathetic to the shape of the myth and ritual pattern.' 'Hamlet is a particularly fascinating example of the relationship between the myth and ritual pattern and tragedy because it shows within the action of the play itself the development of Shakespeare's awareness of tragedy as a heightened and secularized version of the pattern' (116; 104). But Weisinger writes: 'no myth and ritual pattern as such exists or ever existed in any real sense ...' (211). Yet a reconstruction by him of the basic 'ritual form' is a provocative echo of much of the movement in Hamlet: Essentially, the pattern contains these basic elements: 1) the indispensable role of the divine king; 2) the combat between the God and an opposing power; 3) the suffering of the God; 4) the death of the God; 5) the resurrection of the God; 6) the symbolic recreation of the myth of creation; 7) the sacred marriage; 8) the triumphal procession; and 9) the settling of destinies. (97)

All of this, Weisinger continues, is 'but one illustration ... of the greater cycle of birth, death, and rebirth' (97). Northrop Frye comments on the pattern: 'the features of [sacrificial] ritual [are] the king's son, the mimic death, the executioner, the substituted victim ...'r3 These statements of what may have been patterns in primitive rituals and 'things said over' them give one intimations of the quality of the Hamlet experience; it is not unlikely that some variety of this experience is what leads to uneasy responses as to the heart of Hamlet's mystery. But to believe that Shakespeare recorded Hamlet only and directly as a primitive poet, indeed as a poetic articulator absolutely in

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nature, would deny the literary sophistications evident in great measure throughout the poem. If at this point one were to hazard an hypothesis as to where the line of mythic meaning may lie in Hamlet, it could be between life and the bourn from which no traveller returns, the bourn which no traveller in a literary mythic action ever leaves, and to which he is endlessly compelled to return by asserting, not that he is there, but that it is forever in him; that there is no past but always a present, no present but always a past, either/both an agonizing mystery, shaped by enigmatic forces dimly gone yet searingly alive. If this be so, what we must look for is a Hamlet which is, and which is the result of, 'a vision, a way of looking at the phenomena of existence, a controlling and unifying metaphor on the grandest scale' that embodies a heritage of literary myths. We must seek to understand the form of what is probably the most sophisticated of all literary myths, and, as our guides, appeal to Plato and Aristotle.

2 Literary myth

Plato: Invention SOCRATES ... these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them ...

The line of myth is directly relevant to three basic concepts in Plato about poetry. In the Republic, imitation is art without truth. Lacking knowledge, the imitative poet is not able to penetrate the line; he can deal only in what he sees directly - appearances.1 Possession, as in the Ion, represents a power from beyond the line that penetrates centripetally the world of actual phenomena, entering the poet, part of this world, so that he may become spokesman for truths beyond or hidden in the factual. Invention, Plato's third concept, is basic in actual (i.e., written) true poetry, or in poetic rhetoric, as for example in the Phaedrus. It interweaves divine capacity for knowing truth with sense phenomena of the actual world as the poet experiences these. Invention seeks to fuse actuality and ultimate reality in nature and man-in-nature. It makes the line meaningful by achieving a kind of understanding of the quality of the experience. It fuses nature-poet-art in the forms of poems. It is in some measure an intuitive, in some measure a conscious, act. To the extent that it uses mythic matter and ritual form intuitively, it is primitive; to the extent that it is marked by sophistication in fusing into its own form ritual pattern, language, and mythic matter, it is literary. In combining the intuitive and the literary it creates literary myth. Imitation in its unqualified form represents the poet as imprisoned through ignorance within the line-circle between immediate phenomena and mythic truth. The possessed poet in the Ion is released from the bondage of convention and fact through an indefinable force, the muse,

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that, entering him, pulls him, as though it were a magnet, through the line into a vision of reality in nature. This force is identified as invention, but is not altogether the same in kind as invention in full literary myth, for which one must go to the Phaedrus. In the Ion it is an inherent power, genius, perhaps the kind of primitive poetic power that formulated things said over a ritual act. The poet in the Ion is 'out of his senses'; his 'mind is no longer in him'; he is 'not in [his] right mind'; he is, like a Bacchic maiden, intoxicated; he is 'under the power of music and metre.' That is, he is not normal, not conventionally factual, historical, rational, scientific; he sees and lives in a context of other meanings and values and expresses himself in unconventional language necessary to his vision. To the prisoners within the circle he is mad. But that Plato is projecting an imagined muse from extant true poets is very likely, for in a precisely parallel pattern the souls of such poets draw songs out of nature as oracles for the rest of mankind; they 'bring songs from the honeyed fountains,' from 'the gardens and dells of the Muses.' This is a power to express 'priceless words,' the power of invention, the formative power in intuitive genius. But in the Phaedrus expression of truth beyond rational statement includes a conscious capacity to design and express metaphor or complexly ordered metaphors in a larger metaphorical form resembling allegory. This is Plato's final statement on invention, a power essential to literary myth. The pattern of myth points, paradoxically, in opposite directions at once to attain a single goal - a common identity in nature outside of man and nature in man. The Phaedrus probes the second of these, using outward nature as symbol for conflicts and aspirations in the soul of man. The great force of the dialogue lies in the elaborate literary myth of the soul invented by Socrates. Some additional consideration of a readjusted perspective applied to the line of myth may then be helpful before invention, as its principles are set forth and illustrated in the Phaedrus, be examined. It seems reasonable to believe that primitive man's vision was more directed outwards and into the phenomenal world of nature at the centre of which he always stood as a point, than towards himself inwardly, however much he may have unconsciously shaped the visions of what he saw from forces deep in his own psychological-emotional centre. When man's rational faculty took precedence over his emotions, he discovered in nature constant, recognizable forms and immediately identifiable, predictable, and often governable form/forces. But the essential form of man continued, and continues, to frustrate attempts at rational formulations; that is, it leads to poetic myth as the expressed form of the mystery of self.2

2 3 Literary myth

This hypothesis leads to a reconsideration of the implications in 'microcosm' and 'macrocosm.' It may be that man does not merely seek to identify with surrounding phenomena. Perhaps he is really engrossed in his own reality within the spectacle that vastly surrounds him with apparent order. So viewed, he may be the macrocosm, all outward nature the microcosmic image of his essential being. Certainly the most intense kind of struggle to discover mystifying, powerful internal identities marks Hamlet, Lear, Oedipus. To a gentler end the same kind of inquiry goes on in the Phaedrus, although the darker alternatives are intimated by Socrates: 'I want to know ... about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort...?' (266-7). There are further refinements of the concept of the mythic line. There is always, for the non-poetic man, a perimeter of space between himself and nature, enforcing the reality of what are said to be objective phenomena. But the myth-maker recognizes no such separation; for him the outward boundary enclosing what he is is not separable from the boundary of nature encircling him. There is for him only one line, and therefore his perspective must be different in kind. In either direction the physical must be penetrated for knowledge of essence. But as the perception must be different in kind, so must its instrument be. By necessity operative on physical phenomena, it must yet be the agency for vital metaphor of metaphysical reality. In apprehending images of things and actions in vision reaching outwards, and instantly metamorphosing them in a diametric inversion of direction into internal symbols of internal states, it becomes itself metaphor of the act of self-knowledge. The eye, 'the window of the soul,' in Plato's words, performs its curious, powerful function at the very periphery of man. As poets have often affirmed, they, the myth-makers, are seers ; their seeing is always a reaching for the mystery of being. It seems abundantly evident that inner-directed seeing and eloquent poetic expression of what is seen are attributes of tragic heroes as alteregos, so to speak, of the poets who invent them. Oedipus strives to discover the shadowy forces that lie deep inside him, unbelieving that Teiresias, lacking physical sight, can better see within. Richard, seeking to understand the destroying enigma of his ambivalent identity, calls for a mirror to try to see inside himself. Lear attempts to tear off his clothing to reveal the 'poor, bare, forked animal... the thing itself.' Hamlet, seeing Yorick undressed to his skull, remembers his 'infinite jest,' his 'most excellent fancy'; let his lady paint herself an inch thick, this is but a futile disguise of what is within. The audience in the theatre which watches Hamlet sees an audience on the stage which both is and sees Hamlet as action, and within this Hamlet as dumb-show; the vision goes inward as

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layer after layer is peeled off to reveal again and again the identical vision, as though one were in a hall of mirrors. There are those who would pluck out the heart of Hamlet's mystery, but he himself knows that he has 'that within which passeth show/ however much he agonizes to discover and to show. Myth may then be said to be a primal symbolic action representing internal states of man through verbal images of actions. But the myth in the Phaedrus is, despite its imagistic, symbolic means, obviously not of this kind; it is an extended, extraordinarily complex poetic construction, the invention of which is no small concern in the dialogue. It may, however, be reasonably asked how the invention of this myth - in Socrates' words 'a tolerably credible and possibly true though partly erring myth ... the composition [of which] was mostly playful ... [the] chance fancies of the hour' - can be relevant to a work which seems so utterly different in kind as Hamlet. In one sense it is the difference between comedy and tragedy: the dialogue has a happy ending. Phaedrus, potentially a 'victim of his passions ... slave of pleasure,' is persuaded to abandon gross earthly love for a godlike love of wisdom. The transformation of his character is shown through the images of the myth, as for example in the description of the growth of the wing, symbol both of phallic passion and of striving for a godlike ideal. But this difference involves another: Socrates assumes a full knowledge of both his own character and that of Phaedrus, and beyond these of the ideal form of human character. He can then consciously invent from these variant concepts a fable, a myth, the interweaving of symbolic images in an imagined action which culminates in complete resolution. The character of Hamlet is a different concept: that it is an enigma, and that its action ends in enigma, is a distinguishing characteristic of the tragedy, not only to those who see it, but to those invented figures who act it. If a full, orderly hypothesis of the essential nature of human character in inner conflict requires mythic invention to convey the quality of the experience, certainly such invention is more necessary for an attempt to show inner forces quite beyond rational discourse. One postulates ideal order; the other an apparent chaos. In each instance, although the ends be as different as the initial postulates, the essence of man's being is the matter; the poet's myth is the form.3 To the degree that each consciously incorporates a long inheritance of primitive mythic matters and forms, each is a literary myth. From these variable elements Socrates fashions a careful concept of the nature of invention, the poet's power to achieve an imitation that is not superficial - imitation of the truth of the human condition.

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Invention in Socrates' sense requires not only precise knowledge of extant mythic tales, but, more important, carefully discriminated attitudes towards them. He rejects two extremes. Of uncritical belief in traditional myth as true he remarks: 'The wise are doubtful...' But if scepticism leads to naturalistic explanations, the result is 'crude philosophy,' a waste of time when the urgent need is for one to know himself. This rejection of absolutes is, however, not a dismissal of myth itself, which remains as a powerful agency for representations of the complex forces in human nature. An unobtrusive but important part of Socrates' literary invention is the right place for his myth to be formulated and expressed. It is a mythic place in itself, 'sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs,' in the middle of which is a plane tree, symbol of Diana's chastity; it is thus an exact metaphor for the conflict between the sensual and rational, between passion and wisdom, which is the centre of the dialogue.4 Although the place is not indifferent in Socrates' conscious invention, he does not press the point beyond an eloquently sensuous description of the precise spot; he will invent his own myth for the occasion, as he makes unmistakably clear: Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate Hippocentaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and portentous natures. (266)

Socrates makes myths symbols of self-knowledge rather than merely forms of religious belief: 'Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use' (281). More specifically, he accounts for particular kinds of character by men's choice of gods to emulate: Every one chooses his love from the ranks of beauty according to his character, and this he makes his god, and fashions and adorns as a sort of image which he is to fall down and worship ... he who follows in the train of any ... god, while he is unspoiled and the impression lasts, honours and imitates him, as far as he is able ... (294)

Allusions to the gods are then useful to Socrates in the shaping of his own myth, in the identity-opposition of Eros and Anteros in the character of Phaedrus. The dialogue has nearly fifty mythic allusions, all of which bear precisely on Phaedrus's ambivalence in character, a remark-

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able display of imaginative felicity.5 This procedure is most important to an understanding oí Hamlet. But precise relevance of myth to theme is far more important than any quantitative measure of mythic matter. Stated simply, the form of true invention, of good poetic imitation, is the character of man; when the poet has self-knowledge and knowledge of other men's character, he at once has the primal form of the myth through which he seeks to set forth the human condition. The literary myth, however, is a far more subtle 'knot intrinsicate' than this. Its most direct agency is said to be 'god' or 'the muse' or 'genius/ Although Socrates has emphasized this in the Ion, and repeats it in a more objective fashion in the Phaedrus, his ultimate assessment does not exclude the fact and power of literary art; form is finally neither purely intuitive nor purely the result of principles in art. Phaedrus asks: 'What is our method?' In reply Socrates is evasive, but there is a statement which indicates why Socrates says he cannot give exact details of his method: The perfection which is required ... is, or rather must be, like the perfection of anything else, partly given by nature, but may also be assisted by art. If you have the natural power and add to it knowledge and practice, you will be a distinguished speaker; if you fall short in either of these, you will be to that extent defective. (316)

If the form of the myth is the form of its central character, and if the literary myth is true to the knowledge it seeks to image forth, then all in it must be part of that character. Everything in Plato's myth, including the characters of Socrates and Lysias, is part of the character, potential or realized, of Phaedrus. Everything in Hamlet is part of Hamlet, or image of the whole of Hamlet. Or, said another way, every part of Hamlet is the whole of Hamlet's character at the moment of the image, and every image is consistent with or the same as every other image. Hamlet is peculiarly marked by multiple repetitions in protean forms, by essential unity in diversity. But if Hamlet is myth, it is also tragedy, the tragic-mythic in an art form corresponding to its central character. Principles in the Phaedrus seem to fit myth with a happy ending, but their universality makes them applicable to literary myth per se. That it is a comedy stems from the concept of positive possibilities in character which Plato postulates. If Hamlet is a literary myth, these general principles should be applicable, but, in that it is a tragedy, there must be particulars within its universal form that identify it as a tragic literary myth; and these par-

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ticulars together must then determine tragic form, the image of action which is precisely correspondent to the character of Hamlet. Extended fully to the ideal form, in Plato's terms, the matter, the poet, the poem, the response of the participator are all one. All of these (although unlike Plato he does not speculate about the poet) come together in the end in Aristotle's analysis of tragic literary myth. Aristotle: Form in tragic literary myth ... and the end is everywhere the chief thing ...

Perhaps for the purpose of using as much of the Poetics as is necessary for a working hypothesis to examine Hamlet, one may take the version of a recognized Greek scholar, Ingram Bywater, and seek to understand the work in terms of its contextual demands rather than linguistic quibbles. While this may leave some margin for error, Aristotle's fidelity to precise analysis should prevent distortion of a serious kind. But before the major structural principles of tragedy in the Poetics are set forth, the place of myth in Aristotle's thought must be noted. His comments about mythic matter and form are concentrated and precise. About matter he writes: Though the poets began by accepting any tragic story that came to hand, in these days the finest tragedies are always on the story of some few houses, on that of Alcmeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, or any others that may have been involved, as either agents or sufferers, in some deed of horror. (640)

Although the criterion here seems to be 'some deed of horror/ this is surely not so, for any number of tragedies can qualify. But very few can in respect to the kinds of deeds of horror, that is, the kind of character found in the family stories indicated, all of which are legendary/mythic. It is not indifferent that in almost every instance of commendation for superiority Aristotle cites Sophocles' Oedipus, a pre-eminent example of tragic myth.6 Aristotle's separation of poetry from history is no less relevant; it accounts not only for the preferred use of legendary/mythic stories 'of some few houses,' but intimates that such matter lends itself to the poet's function, that is, to a power of invention achieving extra-historical meaning, something beyond visible and recorded actuality:

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... the poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet... consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such and such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do - which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters ... (635-6)

Next, although he must be faithful to the universal form of the story, the poet's freedom to invent is asserted: Whenever the tragic deed ... is done within the family - when murder or the like is done or meditated by brother on brother, by son on father, by mother on son, or son on mother - these are the situations the poet should seek after. The traditional stories, accordingly, must be kept as they are ... At the same time even with these there is something left to the poet himself; it is for him to devise the right way of treating them. (641)

Or again, in reference to historical names as providing the rhetorical value of the possible, Aristotle writes: Nevertheless even in Tragedy there are some plays with but one or two known names in them, the rest being inventions; and there are some without a single known name ... one must not aim at a rigid adherence to the traditional stories on which tragedies are based ... It is evident... that the poet must be more the poet of his stories or Plots than of his verses ... (636)

Invention is no less evident in this comment (relevant, although it is in the discussion of epic): Tor the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possiblity ...' (665). Narrative poetry, like tragedy, says Aristotle, should be based 'on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature. Nor should one suppose there is anything like them in ... usual histories' (657). Finally Aristotle's closeness to Plato's concept of mythic art is unmistakable: It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of these poetical forms ... But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one

29 Literary myth thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. (657)

It seems clear that for Aristotle significantly excellent tragedies are those incorporating legendary/mythic matter in invented forms especially marked by the power of figurative expression. The Poetics is an explication of the essential qualitative parts in the organic whole of such invented, imaginative art forms (and too, of less profound, even ordinary or inferior, forms based on historical actuality). What follows is a brief indication of what seems basic to the method needed to assess Hamlet. The action of tragedy is organized by internal principles peculiar to the genre; it is a dramatic, not a narrative, form of action, and therefore cannot be identical with history or with fictional narrative. It is not ordered in terms of unity dictated by the 'life' of the central figure, as in the episodic form of some narratives. A good tragedy is the imitation of one unified action, a complete whole, rather than 'an infinity of things ... some of which it is impossible to reduce to a unity.' These elements of the tragic action are set forth in the Poetics by way of a series of technical terms, which, unfortunately, often have irrelevant popular meanings that create confusions and misinterpretations. Thus probable does not mean something commensurate with real experience; character does not mean qualities we might describe in a living person; that a character must be good does not refer to moral good or evil. These terms have precise technical meanings in the discussion of action or plot (which is itself a technical term); they must be understood in the light of Aristotle's statement that 'the end is everywhere the chief thing.' What then, is the end? Aristotle writes: Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse. In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing. (632)

The whole of the tragic action then is the end: the total meaning, the total tragic impact, must come from the whole. But language is linear, a continuum. Therefore, although the whole cannot be grasped until the tragedy is seen or read to its completion, its meaning must be every-

30 TOOLS

where present in all parts or elements of the action. This is an essential quality not evident in life, but controlled in the art form. Aristotle makes this peculiar quality clear in his term magnitude, the particular kind of unity which marks the form of tragedy. Quantities are of two kinds: a plurality, in which the position of parts makes no difference, as for example two plus five is seven, or five plus two is seven; or a magnitude, in which the position of parts makes a difference (Metaphysics v. 13-26). A magnitude in the sense of a whole is made up of continuous parts in a particular sequence; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, each of which stands in a definable relationship to each of the others. 'A well constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described'; that is, the end follows something else as 'its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it,' the beginning is that 'which is not itself necessarily after anything else/ and the middle is that 'which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it' (634). End here is both the same as and different from end as the whole action, the plot. Here it means specifically the point at which the whole action is completed, the final discovery and reversal. It is both the final point in a continuum and the epitome of the tragic meaning and emotions. As the final point in the linear action it is still subject to the principle that 'the end is everywhere the chief thing.' It is only in terms of the end in this second sense that it is possible to determine the beginning, and in the necessary concatenation of the tragic action to determine the middle. In addition to end as the whole action and end as the culminating point of the action, Aristotle also speaks of the emotional ends of the tragedy and the catharsis of such emotions. This concept, although definable in rational discourse, is, in the tragic form, indivisible from the other two concepts. All come together in the point of culmination the final reversal, the meaning of the whole action, and the emotional impacts of it. Here then is the point of departure in critical method for tragedy the fullest, most exact understanding of the whole as it comes from the epitomizing power of the end. In the most effective tragedy this end coincides with the end of the representation, that is, the play as an extant form in language, and is therefore not difficult to determine. In Aristotle's view the central fact is tragic action, and of this all other elements are parts or qualities. Character is not a man, but the internal nature or state which distinguishes an agent in a particular action; character lies in one who is better than we, worse than we, or

31 Literary myth

like us; in classical tragedy the hero or heroine is better than we, that is, like us but of more impressive stature. Character is shown in choice where choice is not indifferent, that is, only where it is significant to the whole action or end. It is that which in a given circumstance begins a course of action, and in it will inevitably choose so as to move further towards a culminating point. This does not mean, of course, a simple series of choices one after the other. Tragedy is a complex of different types of character in conflict with one another, or conflicting elements within one character, so that choice in one may compel choice in another.7 In chapter 15 Aristotle sets forth four criteria for character. First, it 'shall be good/ If we remember that 'the end is everywhere the chief thing' then good must mean good for the plot or action. This is not an ethical or moral distinction. A thoroughly evil character (e.g., lago) must be excellent in his bad qualities; he must have just those elements of character required for the action of the play. He is, dramatically, a good bad character. Second, a character must be appropriate. This appears to mean that the inward character assumed to be true for a type of person must not be violated: a woman must not be manly; a character must not be incongruous nor his acts unbefitting the nature of his type. Elsewhere in the Poetics the kind of character which is appropriate for the tragic hero is carefully delineated (625-6; 639-40). Third, the character must be like, that is, like life, in diction, appearance, dress, etc. Like is the equivalent of verisimilitude, or what is now called 'characterization' - the use of devices, techniques, stage effects, dress, mannerisms in speech, and so on, to create the feeling or conviction that a character is what we conceive him to be like in life. Finally character must be consistent; that is, it should show itself to be not contradictory in a series of situations of a similar sort, even to the extent of being consistently inconsistent. Whatever is set forth as happening in a tragic action must be related to the end in its sense as the final, epitomizing act, in terms of necessity and probability. Necessity is that in character and situation together which allows no latitude in choice. For example, Hamlet's character leads him always to give himself away in any scheme or act against Claudius. Probability is not what a given kind of character may do as in life, but what he may do in terms of statements made in the play. For example, in Antony and Cleopatra, when Enobarbus says that Cleopatra will die upon hearing of Antony's departure (i.ii), this establishes probability for her self-destruction when Antony leaves her by dying. But it is not at all probable that queens of Egypt in life kill themselves for loss of a lover. The pattern may be more complex; for example, when Hamlet

32 TOOLS

says he will catch the conscience of the king in the play within the play, this seems to come about as probable. But another probability lying in Claudius's earlier stated suspicions of Hamlet makes equally probable that he will catch Hamlet's intentions, which also comes about. Here the probable and the unexpected come together in what appears to be an ironic defeat of Hamlet's purpose. But neither of these discoveries comes about by necessity; both follow from established probabilities. Obviously there is no probability that kings and princes, or uncles and nephews, act this way in life generally. These considerations lead Aristotle to make a distinction between history and imitative art which has puzzled some readers: 'And if [the poet] should come to take a subject from actual history, he is none the less a poet for that; since some historic occurrences may very well be in the probable and possible order of things; and it is in that aspect of them that he is their poet' (636). Those who think that probable means 'likely as in life' are puzzled at the statement that actual history may provide the probable. What Aristotle is saying is that historical truth is not enough, and not the same as truth in tragedy (and certainly it would not be in mythic tragedy). The poet must establish probability in statement and language for totally non-historic, imaginary action and character, for example for fairies, witches, and ghosts. How does character make choice? It may come about from the necessity of the character itself, or it may take the form of thought. This in turn is of two kinds. One is the 'enunciating [of] some universal proposition,' or a single statement of opinion, which may take the form of proverbial wisdom or some similar type of statement. Of this kind is part of Gertrude's effort to break down Hamlet's animosity towards Claudius: 'All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.' The second is 'shown in all they say when proving or disproving a particular point,' that is, several connected statements involving proof and persuasion. Thought in this sense is amply evident in tragedies, as, for examples, Macbeth's self-examination before the murder and Lady Macbeth's persuasion that he do the act; the efforts expended unsuccessfully on Antony to dissuade him from fighting at Actium; Hamlet's agonizing self-appraisals in the soliloquies. But Aristotle stresses again that the end, the whole, is the controlling consideration: 'There is no room for Character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject' (633). Other terms are too well understood to need comment: discovery, the change from ignorance to knowledge; reversal, the change from good fortune to bad, or its opposite; confusions of the real and the apparent, which are the chief source of tragic irony; the unexpected, which is the more effective when it is also probable; and suffering.

3 3 Literary myth

All these elements in their proper place and in proper fusion in the tragic form bring about the tragic end - the emotions that come about as character like ours or better than ours moves inevitably to its final woe and wonder, through some error in judgment for whatever blind cause may lie in man's nature. It is by these principles, and especially that which governs all the rest - 'the end is everywhere the chief thing' - that the following exegesis of Hamlet is conducted.

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PART TWO

Exhumation

PROSPERO ... graves at my command Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth By my so potent art. HORATIO A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets ... HAMLET Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

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3 Tellers

HAMLET O God, Horatio, what a wounded name (Things standing thus unknown) shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. HORATIO ... give order that these bodies High on a stage be placed to the view; And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world How these things came about. FORTINBRAS

Let us haste to hear it...

HORATIO ... let this same be presently perform'd, Even while men's minds are wild ... FORTINBRAS Let four captains Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage ...

The adequacy of any structural study of tragedy, Aristotle shows, depends on an accurate sense of the whole in total response; such response can come fully only at the end of the action. To begin a study of Hamlet, then, one may consider an asseveration and a plea by Hamlet at the end: Things standing thus unknown' (echoed a few moments later by Horatio), and '... tell my story.' This is the clearest and most puzzling testimony of all that Hamlet is a mystery - that of Hamlet himself and of Horatio - at precisely the point at which the whole acting out of the story is at its close.

38 EXHUMATION

By their own testimony only Hamlet and Horatio know, or believe they know, what the story really is. Hamlet has just said: You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time ... O, I could tell you But let it be. Horatio ... ... report me and my cause aright...

Horatio is about to say: All this can I Truly deliver

immediately after having, in four brief lines, catalogued compactly various actions in the play and their qualities. It seems that if Hamlet were to be 'alive' he could tell his story; Horatio being 'alive' (these are imagined poetic figures, not living men) asserts that he can. Horatio must believe that he knows all and the innermost conditions of Hamlet's experience; the two stand then at this point each as altér-ego, or, put differently, as a single dramatic character, compounded of preponderantly rational qualities on the one hand, and passionate, irrational forces on the other. But why is there need to tell the story? Despite attested knowledge the just completed telling is yet in doubt. This seems to suggest that, although subjective experience is knowable in terms of the emotions, and presumably by the reason, its communication has not been fully possible, and that this causes the plea that the story be told again. This, in turn, leads to a mode of suggestion not at all infrequent in Shakespeare's plays, and especially provocative in Hamlet - the use of names to intimate character. 'Fortinbras' translates directly as 'strong-in-the-arm'; other characters in the play have been estimated similarly, if not fully.1 Of immediate consequence is 'Horatio,' which, its composite significances separated, is ratio or reason; orare, to speak or tell. Horatio is pre-eminently rational and immediately and in i.i the teller. But statements from Hamlet's plea to the last speech of the text of the play not only indicate Horatio's belief that he can tell the story; they make clear the manner of its telling. The story will be told 'high on a stage ...'; it will be told truly; it will include Fortinbras's 'rights of memory in this kingdom'; it will be performed immediately to an

39 Tellers

audience including 'the noblest' who are urged to 'haste to hear it'; Horatio will speak 'from his mouth whose voice will draw on more';2 four captains will 'bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage ...' This telling apparently will be of those acts briefly summarized by Horatio before all of these details except one, in v.ii. 3 66-71. Where is there a telling that seems to meet all of these conditions? In the Quartos and Folios the presentation of Hamlet begins with the entrance of two soldiers, followed almost immediately by another soldier and Horatio, without previous indication of a platform, the later addition of Malone and others.3 These figures appear precisely at the place where four soldiers have been ordered to carry Hamlet's body on a stage. There appear four men, three of them soldiers, the other Hamlet's intimate friend, and the ghost of a dead king. There is an interrogative apostrophe asking the causes of preparations for a war of a special kind, in that it is about 'the King /That was and is the question of these wars.' To Marcellus's 'Who is't that can inform me?' Horatio responds 'That can I' as firmly as his 'All this can /1 truly deliver' at the end of v.ii. It appears then that Horatio's telling is to begin here, and, as intimated corollary, that four soldiers do indeed at Fortinbras's command, immediately in some fashion, 'bear Hamlet's body ... to the stage.' Horatio's story seems far removed from Hamlet's 'wounded name'; it is an account of the killing of Fortinbras of Norway by Hamlet's father, and the present threat of reprisal by Young Fortinbras. Apparently interrupted by the court scene and Hamlet's first soliloquy, the first scene continues with Horatio's detailed account to Hamlet of the Ghost. But, except for these, there seem to be no further tellings by Horatio. Yet he apparently must be important to the story; what his character is from i.i to v.ii is not indifferent, and he is always, except, so it seems, in i.i, in the immediate context of Hamlet. i.i tells much about Horatio. He is a scholar. He seems utterly sceptical about ghosts until the 'sensible and true avouch' of his own eyes. Yet, as though in a second identity, he asserts without qualification mysterious disruptions in nature 'a little ere the mightiest Julius fell,' including 'the sheeted dead' squeaking and gibbering in the Roman streets. He displays knowledge of folklore; he combines it with allusions to Greek mythology. He affirms knowledge of 'the majesty of buried Denmark,' of 'the King' back to the day of Hamlet's birth (as testified by the Clown in v.i. 132-6). He asserts flatly that he can account for extraordinary preparations for war, and offers in explanation the Hamlet-Fortinbras-Fortinbras story. But in this last, immediately following his 'That can I [inform you],' there appears in 'At least, the whisper goes so' a curious qualification expressed five more times in the scene, three times by Horatio. We find:

40 EXHUMATION

(For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death) (i.138) I have heard The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth ... Awake the god of day ... (i. 149-52)

Marcellus joins in: Some say that ever, 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated This bird of dawning singeth all night long, And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad ... (i. 158-61)

Horatio concludes the pattern: So have I heard and do in part believe it. (i.165)

Where is the precise line between Horatio's scepticism and his belief? between his knowledge and his ignorance? Why are his asseverations of firm knowledge qualified by acknowledgments of whispers and unidentified reports underlying them - intimations of vaguenesses like shadows behind what is said? This rational figure, often thought of as a pure stoic, has evident non-stoic characteristics. Sceptical of ghosts, his immediate reaction to the Ghost is 'It harrows me with fear and wonder.' Possessing remarkable emotional control (from Hamlet's testimony in m.ii.63-4), he yet exhorts the Ghost: 'Stay! Speak, speak! I charge thee speak!' immediately followed by Bernardo's 'How now, Horatio? You tremble and look pale.' On the reappearance of the Ghost he appeals again and again that it speak. One asks once more just where the line is between the controlled, rational sceptic-stoic, and the man of very evident emotional response, if only of the moment. Horatio appears again immediately at the end of Hamlet's impassioned first soliloquy. After initial exchanges Horatio, in some measure seconded by Marcellus and Bernardo, tells of the appearance of the Ghost. This is Horatio's last telling of any story or account; Hamlet now begins an inquiry in which he never relinquishes the initiative. Just as he does after hearing the Ghost's story, he now demands repeatedly an oath that Horatio 'Never make known ... never ... speak of this that you have seen.' To this oath Horatio is faithful throughout, until the contrary plea that he tell the story, which he apparently begins to do in i.i.

41 Tellers

Scene iv, opening with seemingly casual remarks, indicates quickly something closely akin to Horatio's shadowy backgrounds for 'firm' knowledge. Although he has testified to a knowledge of Denmark as far back as thirty years and has been present since the funeral and marriage, he is ignorant of the custom of 'heavy-headed revel' which Hamlet does know and of which he gives a notably thoughtful, rational explanation. Only a moment later Horatio moves to excited exhortation in word and violent action to try to dissuade a Hamlet 'desperate with imagination' from following the Ghost. A pattern of swift, varied interplay of reason and excitation of the blood, of reason and 'madness,' between the two figures is most apparent here. This pattern is evident throughout the play either in Horatio's absences or presences in relation to Hamlet, or at times in close identity or difference in their dialogue. Typically Horatio is absent when Hamlet is most disturbed, present when he is a man of quiet rationality. A brief tracing through from this point to Hamlet's desperate wresting away the poisoned wine from a desperate Horatio so that he may live to tell the story will be enough for outlines of the pattern. Horatio is absent as the Ghost talks to a distraught Hamlet; he seems not extraordinarily moved with wonder, and can say, 'These are but wild and whirling words, my lord,' in Hamlet's subsequent wildly strange ceremony, shared by the Ghost, of oath-taking about silence. He is absent throughout the second act and to the point in the third when the play within the play is about to be presented. Hamlet's conduct in this long interim is reported to be utterly extreme, 'as if he had been loosed out of hell,' a 'confusion, / Grating so harshly all his days of quiet /With turbulent and dangerous lunacy.' When Hamlet appears directly it is in rationally 'mad' ambiguities with Polonius; in an emotionally intense dialectic of identity, in craft, and in passionate self-appraisal with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; in a farrago of non-nonsense about acting and Ophelia with Polonius; in the dark, bloody violences of Pyrrhus's slaughter of Priam with the actors; in the unpacking of his heart with violent curses 'like a very drab' to himself in soliloquy, which, nevertheless, ends in a carefully rational scheme to 'catch the conscience of the King'; in the quiet and reasoned soliloquy that begins 'To be or not to be'; in the very violent attack on Ophelia (and others) in the nunnery scene - 'blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy'; and finally in the curiously anti-climactic, reasoned advice to the players to 'beget a temperance' that will give smoothness to the 'very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion ...' It is just after this point of reasoning about desired restraint in the acting of passionate

42 EXHUMATION

inward states that Hamlet cries out 'What, ho, Horatio!' to hear without pause the response 'Here, sweet lord, at your service' from the Horatio, who, after a long absence, appears as suddenly as though he were an instantly embodied shadow.4 There follows Hamlet's considered praise of Horatio as one who 'is not passion's slave,' who is balanced in 'blood and judgment,' which ends nevertheless with 'Something too much of this.' But Hamlet's assessment of Horatio may well be in doubt, for preponderant evidence suggests that Horatio is as disproportionate on the side of reason as Hamlet is on the side of passion, or even more so. Throughout the players' play Horatio says no word while Hamlet is most ambiguous in playing out a private play concurrent with that on the stage upon the stage. Left alone with a wildly excited Hamlet at the disruption of the court, Horatio is briefly matter-of-fact. Present during the following scene in which Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude (in absentia), and Polonius bear the brunt of Hamlet's derisive and scathing wit, Horatio is totally silent, then disappears, not to be seen again until iv.v. Again it is instructive to observe Hamlet in this second long interim. Immediately on Horatio's exit churchyards yawn and hell breathes out contagion to the world for the Hamlet who could drink hot blood, as he anticipates his meeting with Gertrude. Claudius fears the hazard of his madness, but is spared when Hamlet prefers 'a more horrid hent.' Then, in a scene as violent as that of his attack on Ophelia, and as terrifyingly overwhelming as the final slaughter in v.ii, Hamlet attacks Gertrude in 'such bitter business as the day /Would quake to look on.' This action begins with the killing of Polonius - audience, spy, and, in Hamlet's mind, the king; in its middle Hamlet's hair stands 'an end' at the vision of the Ghost. Again, curiously and typically, Hamlet concludes by repeating the scene in an ordered reasoned passage of ambiguous counsel for Gertrude. The last sequence for Horatio includes iv.vi and almost all of v, the first almost a nominal acceptance of a message, and the latter, up to Hamlet's death, little more than a series of brief rejoinders in agreement with Hamlet's comments. In the middle of this pattern is the wild explosion of passion at and in Ophelia's grave. Here Horatio's only words are, to Hamlet, 'Good my lord, be quiet.' Now, at the beginning of v.ii, Hamlet is teller of the story of his disposal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and of his intention to 'quit [Claudius] with this arm.' Then follow Osric, a stoic attitude in Hamlet, and the briefest rational remarks by Horatio, until the dying Hamlet wrests the poisoned cup from him and pleads with him to tell his story.

43 Tellers

Usually this pattern has been treated as the simple opposition of two separate literal characters in terms of contrast. That is, Hamlet and Horatio are said to be made more vivid as opposed characters. But perhaps the evidence thus far may allow an hypothesis of an imaginative structure in art in which Hamlet/Horatio is indeed a single dramatic character, double in internal force, acting variously in different balances and extremes.5 Given this assumption, it may be meaningful to entertain a view consistent with a peculiar power in mythic vision, that of the eyesight turned inward, and to apply it to Hamlet's appraisal of Horatio at the moment of the latter's extraordinary reappearance in m.ii.6 To immediate comprehension, Hamlet's encomium is not particularly unusual: he praises Horatio's balance of discretion and impulse, his good spirits, his stoic acceptance of the vicissitudes of Fortune, his freedom from the slavery of passion. Horatio is one who has enjoyed Fortune's rewards and has suffered all - the full range of human experience. What is more striking is the intensity and direction, if it may so be put, of Hamlet's feeling for these qualities as epitomized in Horatio. His 'dear soul' has elected Horatio, of all men, for herself. Being not passion's slave, Horatio is 'in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.' But at precisely this moment of intense inward looking at the Horatio at the very core of his being, Hamlet interrupts himself to get on to his wild conduct in the Mousetrap scene: 'Something too much of this!' Something too much of praise of rationality, balance, judgment in his heart, for he must turn to rashness? Assuming the possible Tightness of this scene as metaphorical selfappraisal, and especially its abrupt termination, perhaps there may be significance in an earlier detail in it, the curiously provocative but ambiguous query to Horatio: 'Dost thou hear?' There is not the slightest reason to believe from his immediately preceding responses that Horatio is not listening - quite the contrary. Is this perhaps a self-directed query to compel attention to thought entertained only with great effort? If the two figures are dramatically one, this view of the scene seems tenable. Another detail has its bearing. Just before the Mousetrap Horatio is described as one whose passion and judgment are not separated to be 'a pipe for Fortune's finger/To sound what stop she please.' Immediately after the Mousetrap Hamlet, sharply rational, is not a pipe for Guildenstern to play, not one the heart of whose mystery may be plucked out. The Hamlet/Horatio identity is established and enforced in yet another way, one quite consistent with the subtle indirections so much

44 EXHUMATION

a part of the whole play: Small details cumulate in shadowy, not very conscious acts of one's memory, a kind of unaware retrospective formulation. Excision of all between these parts leaves what defines the identity: BER What, is Horatio there? HOR A piece of him. (l.i.19) HAM Horatio!-or I do forget myself. (l.ii.161) HAM What hour now? HOR I think it lacks of twelve. MAR No, it is struck. HOR Indeed? I heard it not. (l.iv.3-5) HAM What, ho, Horatio! HOR Here, sweet lord, at your service. (Hl.ii.50-1) HAM Would not this ... get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir? HOR Half a share. HAM A whole one I! For thou dost know, O Damon dear ... (HI.ii.263-9)

Of these identities, the third is probably the most indirect: neither hears the clock strike as Marcellus does. The fourth is the moment of Horatio's sudden reappearance, so curiously fortuitous after his extended absence. The last repeats the first, and enforces all with the allusion to Damon. Perhaps then it is not extravagant to believe that Hamlet and Horatio are as dramatic characters one, each in his kind given to ambiguous statements, their meanings (in Horatio) obscured in vague, shadowy antecedents, or (in Hamlet) disguised in image, wit, and all else in language and action - 'how strange or odd soe'er I bear myself.' Whatever shortcomings it may then have, Horatio's story must be the point of beginning, wherever it may lead, and it must, both from the textual evidence and from Hamlet's plea, be Hamlet's story. We must go then to That can I. At least, the whisper goes so,

and to A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

45 Tellers

Horatio's explanation of 'this post-haste and romage in the land' is that long ago one king, challenged by another, killed his challenger. In accordance with 'a seal'd compact, /Well ratified by law and heraldry,' he seized that part of his opponent's property the equal of which would have been the inheritance of the challenger had he conquered. Now the son of the dead king is seeking to recover what his father lost, well in accord, says Bernardo in accepting Horatio's story, with the appearance of the Ghost, 'so like the king/That was and is the question of these wars.' Horatio points out that the agreement, conflict, killing, and seizing of some property is known by the others; it is presumably common knowledge. But what is not known, except as Horatio has heard whispers of it, is that the king's son is mounting an attack to recover that which was 'so by his father lost.' This is the whole of Horatio's telling of Hamlet's story, unless his subsequent report of the Ghost to Hamlet is part of it, an account notable for its straightforward rational order, a literal, 'historical' account so simple as to have been given almost no serious consideration as important to the meaning of Hamlet.7 After there is agreement to inform Hamlet of the Ghost, the scene is apparently interrupted by the court council, followed by Hamlet's first soliloquy, then resumed. But both parts of the interruption deserve attention, as even more does the story told by the Ghost, for each of these is a retelling, from variant perspectives, of Hamlet's story. All four accounts differ, yet it seems that there are two pairs diametrically opposite in being rational and passionately emotional, but that the two halves of these pairs are alike in the manner and spirit of their telling. Claudius, in his first sixteen lines, says essentially that, although a king (and brother) is recently dead, he has married the king's widow with the common knowledge of the court. Insofar as they 'have freely gone / With this affair along' many of the court are then 'mutes or audience to this act.' But Claudius's phrasing has distinct echoes of Horatio's story: Therefore our sometimes sister, now our queen, Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we ... Taken to wife; nor have we herein barr'd Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone With this affair along.

The queen is an 'imperial jointress,' that is, she has an estate inherited legally from the former king. In Horatio's story Fortinbras forfeited that which was seized from him by his death,

46 EXHUMATION

by a seal'd compact, Well ratified by law and heraldry,

something which 'by the same comart' would have been his had he vanquished the elder Hamlet. Now just as jointress' involves common ownership of property, 'comart' means a mutual bargain. But this bargain seems more complicated than these relatively simple terms suggest. In the Hamlet-Fortinbras conflict the forfeiture of lands seized was 'ratified by law and heraldry/ Among the several meanings of 'heraldry' cited in the OED is this: 'the tracing and recording of pedigrees, and deciding questions of precedence'; or again, 'an old and obsolete abuse of buying and selling precedents.' The likely relevance of these possible meanings may become clearer when one considers that Claudius nowhere refers to the inheritance of property (his remark about the kingdom is only in respect to general woe). His only reference of this kind is clearly to the queen; it is she whom he inherits. And Gertrude is not at all jointress in the sense of an estate in property; she is 'th' imperial jointress to this warlike state.' She shares the inheritance of 'this posthaste and romage in the land'; she is part of the problem of 'the King/ That was and is the question of these wars.' Claudius's most controlledly rational statement goes on, just as does Horatio's account, to Young Fortinbras, but with differences. Fortinbras's challenge is not now news or opinion; it is stated to be immediate fact, known by all. Moreover he has 'pestered' Claudius with messages about surrender of the seized property. Next is an important variant: Young Fortinbras is identified in the context of his uncle, a king; he is referred to as a nephew who wants to recover something taken from his father, an erstwhile king. Perhaps at this point it is too much to believe that, through the common term 'nephew,' a king killed dim years past and a king recently dead are separated by so thin a line as to be more identical than different. But just as Claudius has heard Fortinbras's messages, so has Hamlet heard messages - Claudius's plans to prevent an attack from one whose identity is 'nephew.' Throughout this scene there sits in black, brooding silence a nephew bitterly moody after the death of his father, a nephew who openly reveals a deep and unswerving antagonism to the uncle who has just taken his mother to wife. He (who is about to say 'The time is out of joint. O cursed spite /That ever I was born to set it right') hears that Young Fortinbras believes 'Our state to be disjoint and out of frame'; he hears that the nephew harbours a 'dream of his advantage'; that two emissaries

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of Claudius are dispatched to prevent the nephew's attack. This time they are called Cornelius and Voltemand. Presently, before he is left alone to tell his story in the story, he offers, ambiguously, a brief prologue: it is not customary black nor ordinary sighs and tears, not a sad face Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief/That can denote me truly/ His condition goes beyond sorrow at the death of a father; he has that within 4which passes show.' Left alone he speaks out his version, not at all rationally, however much there is order in the words, but in the strongest emotion, which nevertheless, instead of obscuring significances, intensifies them. The essential story remains, except that the father is only dead, not slain. Nor are there many words given to the uncle who has taken the wife of his father, if, however, critical ones: he, whom we have just seen as a calm, controlled king, is a 'satyr' (so the nephew says), diametrically opposite in character to the dead king; he is partner in incest. But the nephew's passion seems to force his conceit so to his own soul as to * drown the stage with tears.' Yet his 'cue for passion' is neither uncle nor father, but mother. Her conduct, both before and after the king's death leads the son to excoriate the world; and indeed there is suggestion that the father seems, in Hamlet's memory, no less a satyr than Claudius is said to be: ... so loving to my mother Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on ; and yet within a month why she, even she (O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourn'd longer) married with my uncle ...

It is the mother who is beastlike without reason, who posts with wicked speed, 'with such dexterity to incestuous sheets,' to join a king who has just said, You cannot speak of reason to the Dane And lose your voice.

The story as told by the Ghost to Hamlet, and Hamlet alone, is again in essentials the same, but with differences and additions. A king

48 EXHUMATION

has been killed by a brother who has seduced his queen into adultery, has married her, and now wears his crown; the son is called on to revenge the murder, and to stop 'luxury and damned incest' in the royal bed. Presumably it is the full story; the other versions could not be complete. Horatio's analogical recollections vaguely attested to through hearsay seem a mere outline from a dim past; Claudius, making more immediate the circumstances, understandably leaves out what would condemn him and possibly what he is not guilty of; Hamlet speaks what he feels about 'luxury and damned incest' - his mother's and, curiously, as much his father's as his uncle's. The Ghost seems to bring all together and more, and with a peculiar parallelism to Hamlet's story. As Hamlet has done for his father, the Ghost draws an invidious parallel between himself and a 'wretch whose natural gifts were poor'; more than Hamlet he stresses his killer's bestial, lustful nature, and accuses him of initiating the seduction. Nevertheless the queen is not spared: '... my most seeming-virtuous queen,' the extreme of whose moral violation is vividly imaged forth: But virtue, as it never will be mov'd, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage.

Not only is the queen not spared; she is the lustful scavenger who 'prey[s] on garbage,' and is at the same time that 'garbage.' This seems much the same as Hamlet's ... she would hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what is fed on ...

in reference, not to Claudius as satyr, but to his father as Hyperion. This same inversion of moral culpability gains further emphasis, for indeed the Ghost's punishment for 'foul crimes done in my days of nature' is so extreme that the 'lightest word' in an account of 'the secrets of my prison house' Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes ... start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand an end ...

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Presently the Ghost's sins (and, by implication, punishments) are intensified: Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

What is new here is no less consequential than what is repeated, except that the call for revenge seems nominal in the great burst of accusation against lust. The manner of murder is as curious as it is detailedly explicit; the results, physical and metaphysical, no less so. These are matters for another, if non-contradictory, context. Finally it should be noted that, while the Ghost is free to walk the earth at night, he is confined to his horrible prison for the day beginning at dawn. There are many more tellings of Hamlet's story (some so figuratively obscure as to require other perspectives in their proper places later), but what has been noted thus far may allow a conditional assessment as to meaningful pattern. In the tellings of Hamlet's story it seems clear that Horatio and Claudius are closer together, as rational figures, than Horatio and Hamlet, or Claudius and Hamlet. Parallel, but opposite, Hamlet and the Ghost seem much more alike than Hamlet and Horatio, and certainly more than Hamlet and Claudius, who appear as strong opposites. But Horatio in his moments of emotion - his excitement in response to the Ghost, his violent action to prevent Hamlet from following the Ghost is more like Hamlet and the Ghost than like Claudius. There appear here to be not only diametric oppositions of reason and passion, but somewhere on a line between these, a varying and indeterminate blending of them. A diagram of time relationships may be useful. Horatio, in the present, reports the distant past, up to the present. Claudius reports what seems to be the very recent past, to his immediate present. Hamlet reports what seems to be the immediate past in his intense personal present. The Ghost presents (if one accept Horatio's story as analogue) in one statement the distant past and the immediate past in his extremely intense personal present. In diagram these relationships may be approximated thus:

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past

RATIONAL

present

Horatio Claudius

present Horatio Claudius Hamlet Ghost

EMOTIONAL

present

past

Ghost Hamlet

In the sense of Hamlet as an invented action in art, a play, being presented now, at this moment, all of these figures appear only on the line of the dramatic present. It is memory that demands the ever-present past. Another way of putting this is to say that Horatio and the Ghost represent, in discriminated ways, rational and emotional, the extremes of the past that point inward to a position occupied by those of mixed character between the extremes. The present then, is always both rational and emotional; it always observes what is outward in nature (including human conduct) and experiences what is inward in human nature. Vision goes outward and inward at one and the same time; there is agony in the attempt to reconcile the two. But a much more profound concept comes with the Ghost as early as the third line of the play. In the most direct sense the Ghost is character in a play, subject to the same criteria as all other character in a play. In another sense the concept of 'ghost7 is that of a disembodied but identifiable image of one who is dead, a figure precisely on, but extending in both directions from, the line between death and life.8 Such a figure, inhabitant, when seen, of neither death nor life, but paradoxically of both, is scarcely amenable to the demands of ordinary recorded history. It is not outside the boundaries of philosophic speculation, and may be a powerful part of mystical belief. It finds place in legend; it is at the very heart of myth, the primitive or sophisticated effort to image forth the imponderable and fearful unity of nature and human nature. The Ghost in Hamlet is both death and life, nexus for 'things in heaven and earth, Horatio / [undreamt] of in your philosophy/ a figure possible, in its power, only in mystic belief or in myth. What happens in v.ii followed by i.i is the identical pattern: the dead Hamlet becomes the living Hamlet in the mirror-myth of drama, as indeed do all the other figures of consequence in the action, except only Fortinbras and Horatio. But even if Horatio does not die as Horatio in v.ii, he dies as he is figuratively a part of Hamlet. He lives only as he is necessary for the expressed form of the myth.9

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Act i, although it probably contains the whole of Hamlet, seems in fact to be part of a much more comprehensive expression of form and meaning. What has transpired thus far has been almost entirely narrative, excepting some actions: Hamlet's following the Ghost after violent physical efforts to prevent him; and the curious ceremony of the oath of silence after the Ghost's story. There is a series of restatements of Hamlet's story, but after act i they take on a new, and often an obscure, quality of intimation however much they move towards a final ritual act that dominates or equals words said over it. To consider a further, more complex stage of the dramatic and mythic form, there must be a new awareness of the character of Hamlet as telling his story by living it. To see this in the perspective of the whole drama there must be a return to the end for significant details.

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FORTINBRAS

O proud Death,

What feast is toward in thine eternal cell...?

In its multiple killings the last scene of Hamlet is most violent; yet, despite appearances, these killings are anything but merely Senecan. Three questions, not answerable until the end of this inquiry, then not fully, may give direction to thought. Who are killed? By what agencies do they die? When do they die? Only the last seems to have the suggestion of a firm, if metaphorical, answer. Fortinbras coming on the scene apostrophizes Death as to why thou so many princes at a shot So bloodily hast struck?

The question somewhat identifies those who are just killed. But 'at a shot' seems to make the several dyings a matter of an intensely immediate moment. As to the agencies of death, evidence appears to be disjunctive. It seems that Hamlet, Laertes, and Claudius die by the sword; Gertrude by poisoned wine. In the single combat between Hamlet and Laertes the weapons appear to be the bated swords of fencing, in 'play/ But this is deadly, deceiving play, for one foil is not only the soldier's weapon, an unbated sword, but a not at all soldierly poisoned sword. In a somewhat warlike act two men die of poison, more nearly the true, if hidden, 'weapon/ Applied to Claudius, the sword kills no less by its poison - 'then, venom, to thy work' - enforced by the poisoned cup - a poisoning shared equally with the Queen. All die of poison. All die of hidden cause. Considered this way, the means of death are, first, objective, physical; second, still physical, but hidden partly because of the nature of the

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agency - poisons in physical nature do not show their violent destructive power. But more obscure is the force behind the choice of hidden agencies for death, choice that lies in character. It is poisoned and poisoning character that we are made to see. Thus in this crucial scene the movement is that of the pattern of myth - from objective phenomena to those hidden in nature, these equated with deeper obscurities in human nature. Somewhere between the extremes is the line of mythic mystery, the metaphor of poisons/'poisons.' The line is identified in Laertes' The King, the King's to blame/ Because Claudius is at the moment still King, and in that literally it is his choice to use Laertes against Hamlet, Claudius is to blame; he is the agent in conflict against Hamlet. But as the puzzle oí Hamlet not only remains but is at its greatest intensity at this point, Claudius alone will not do. The probabilities are that both 'poison' and 'King' are metaphors in a total controlling metaphor. In an apparently simpler sense the final scene is as complex in killers as it is in killings. Fortinbras, as soldier-conqueror, is a killer. Laertes, Claudius, Hamlet - each kills, however much Claudius's choice to use Laertes and poisons seems to identify him as the essential killer. But in a larger view, as well as at this moment, it is Hamlet who is preeminently the killer. He has killed Polonais; caused the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; now kills Laertes and Claudius. He has been accused in the death of Ophelia; he has been warned, and warns himself, not to kill Gertrude (and he does not do so in any literal sense). It has been argued that his own death is actually a form of the self-killing he debates as early as the first soliloquy. To attempt to discover meaningful pattern in this death-overwhelmed culmination we may again assess parts of the end as everywhere the chief thing, and at this point consider the relevance to killers of soldiers, hunters, and spies. Hamlet (and presently Horatio) is a soldier. Hamlet is no less the chief hunter, chief spy, and most versatile tactician. In the actions of these elements of his character we shall find retellings and metaphoric enactments of his story, consistent with the four versions in act i, again varying in their detail and meaning. Soldiers HAMLET What warlike noise is this? OSRIC Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland.

There is an apparent discrepancy in that, although Fortinbras bids that

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four captains bear Hamlet to the stage, there seem to be only three, accompanied by Horatio, in i.i. But four are there, for Horatio is a soldier, by Hamlet's testimony in i.v.141. What is more puzzling is that Hamlet himself, who is to be borne like a soldier to the stage/ is not seen in ü; indeed he appears nowhere in the play directly as a soldier, however much engaged in violent and bloody deeds. In our first view of him he is dressed not in armour but in the total black of the son/ nephew mourning beyond any ordinary mourning for a father. From the evidence of v.ii what should appear in i.i is a soldierking, one just dead, to be shown on a stage that his story may be told. What does appear is the ghost of a King Hamlet, 'armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe.' Having appeared twice before silently, in dumb-show, this Ghost will now appear again in dumb-show most shortly after the password, 'Long live the King!' - traditional formula not only for a new king, but for the unbroken line of kingship, or, given mythic birthdeath-rebirth, for the circularity of the concept 'King.' Presently this Ghost tells his story which is Hamlet's story in both detailed substance and intense passion. There seems good reason to believe that, opposed in passion to the Horatio/Hamlet figure of reason and restraint, Ghost and Hamlet are no less one dramatic character. What intensifies the puzzle of a non-soldier soldier-king is that nowhere in the play is there directly a literal war, certainly none in Denmark. There is Horatio's account of Hamlet-Fortinbras in the first telling of Hamlet's story, but this is single combat, not battle. There is the threat of war from Young Fortinbras, the nephew. There is Fortinbras's army on its way to Poland, and on its return. But there is no military action in the play, despite its emphasis on soldiers, and despite 'the King/ That was and is the question of these wars.' Yet this is a puzzle only in a literal view of the play. Clearly 'war' must be metaphor, a figure so inclusive as to account for the whole action. The question that remains is the term (or terms) that may complete the equation 'war equals .' 'War,' in the long history of its metaphorical uses, has represented almost any conflict, external or internal. Should a reader not be satisfied, in the endless complexities of indirection that make up Hamlet and Hamlet, with the perhaps too obvious Claudius-Hamlet conflict, he can seek to estimate the applicability of the age-old war/love or war/lust metaphor so frequent in Elizabethan literature; he can (and must) continue to pursue inquiry into ambivalences in Hamlet; he may hope that the structure and language of mythic tragedy may lead him to recognize conflicts as yet obscure. It may again be helpful to ask germinal questions. Given the conditions of single combat, who is the challenger? Who the challenged? Given

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the figure of war, what are the tactics? In either and both what are the weapons? The last question has an answer: the weapon throughout is the sword, but finally a poisoned sword, or, perhaps more accurately, poison, with the sword as its literal-metaphoric agency. Tactics are no less weapons - modes of attack as versatile or limited in form and application as the imaginative ingenuity of the user. Obvious examples come to mind: the monotonously limited armoury of Polonius; the smoothly conventional, urbane political arsenal of Claudius; the secret-agent indirections of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. All of these are dealt with in mocking savagery by Hamlet, as confident in apparently irrational attack as he is doubtfully melancholy in scruple-weighted rationality. But there are also attacks on Ophelia and Gertrude. What is their nature? What the response to them? In what sense are they, if at all, part of the action in single combat? How are these attacks resolved (if they are) in the context of the Claudius-Laertes-Hamlet violence in v.ii? We may turn to military detail. As always in Shakespeare the opening line and lines, whether of scene, act, or play, are of great importance. The three that begin the first scene, the first act, and all of Hamlet are remarkably provocative in establishing probability for total significances in the play. The third - 'Long live the King!' - has already been seen to have a critical function as nexus between the dead King of v.ii and the living King whose story must be told. The first and second lines have their own meaning, which is conveyed even more strongly by the first in itself. Just as the action of the whole begins and ends in single combat begun by challenge, so the first words of the play are a military challenge that assumes an enemy, a challenge marked by fear of a Ghost seen before. But, most important, it is made to the wrong person. The bearing of this on the meaning of Hamlet cannot be overemphasized. The words per se - 'Who's there?' - are the very epitome of Hamlet ; they may well in the most profound sense be termed 'the Hamlet question/ That the third line is a response does not really provide an answer, for the question remains: 'Who is the King?' J.K. Walton remarks: 'This inversion ... hints at a general inversion of the customary order of things.'1 It is an inversion that may be particularized as an action whose end is its beginning, whose characters are ghosts 'returned' from 'The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns.' Or going back more specifically to the challenge, we may note Voltemand's report to Claudius: Upon our first, he sent out to suppress His nephew's levies; which to him appear'd

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To be a preparation 'gainst the Polack, But better look'd into, he truly found It was against your Highness ...

Norway's solution, to exact a promise and provide funds for attack on Poland, does not keep Fortinbras away finally from Denmark. One need hardly press the point that another nephew is launching an attack, presumably on his uncle/King. Apart from narrative accounts of the military activities of Young Fortinbras there is nothing further about soldiers until the reappearance of the Ghost in full armour in i.v. Here the inappropriateness of armour seems obvious in the passionate cry for forcible repression of lust and punishment for adultery and murder - scarcely military matters. On the other hand, the Ghost's dress in the closet scene is precisely appropriate to place and action. This seems relevant to W.W. Greg's perceptive comment that the Ghost in i.v is in something akin to disguise, covered in an ambiguity resolvable only in metaphoric meaning. However during the oath-taking demanded by a wildly emotional Hamlet the Ghost is heard from under the earth (as though he were in a grave), 'a worthy pioner' in Hamlet's words, that is, a soldier who mines to place explosives under an enemy. This is a highly specialized kind of military character, scarcely consistent with a King-soldier or a Princesoldier, although Hamlet is to say, in precise identity with the Ghost, 'But I will delve one yard below their mines /And blow them at the moon.' We are again reading metaphor of such importance as to require detailed examination. The next and last military scene, except for the crossing of Denmark by Fortinbras's army, is the account of Pyrrhus's slaughter of Priam. In this we are brought again to a telling of Hamlet's story, of which this is, although we have noted only four thus far, the seventh. It is for several reasons of particular interest among the more than twenty narrated, acted, metaphoric, or ritual versions. It is the final narrative rendition, although represented as an excerpt from a play. It is the only scene in which Hamlet is shown as primarily a violent, bloody soldier/killer in heroic dimensions, ruthlessly slaying a king. And, as usual in the pattern, there is a queen (clad in a blanket and barefoot) distractedly waiting. Further, it is a kind of prologue to the Mousetrap play; it is preceded and followed in its violences by the attacks on Ophelia and Gertrude. It stands in a peculiar perspective in that Hamlet has already begun to be, since the curious ritual of the oath of silence, not at all a soldier as in the dress of the Ghost figure, but hunter, spy, cunning tactician,

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and always the teller, through wildly ambiguous actions, of his own story. But before we return to the oath-taking to consider some of its significances, the Pyrrhus scene offers insight into multiple complexities in the character of Hamlet conveyed by indirection through the blending of poetically invented alter-egos. Finally it shares a quality evident in other parts as well as in the play as a whole - what Maynard Mack has called a sense of 'receding depths.' This may be noted first. The patterns of receding depths are not obvious anywhere in Hamlet, pervasive as their effect is. It is not likely that many readers (certainly not modern ones) would be consciously aware of such a pattern in the Pyrrhus passage. It begins with Hamlet's asking the First Player, whom he has known before, to tell the story of Pyrrhus's slaughter of a king by way of a speech from a play. This story does not come at first hand but through a sequence of more and more remote tellings. In immediate dramatic fact Hamlet speaks part of it, the First Player the rest, with Polonius as audience (this time not behind an arras). But before the Hamlet/Player rendition, Hamlet mentions a play which has previously presented this story. Before that, it was told by Virgil through the figure of Aeneas, who retells to Dido what Homer first (presumably) told. It was at that point a legend embodying myth, written by a legendary poet of oral legends and myths even then receding into the past. An Elizabethan audience, at least in its ideal form, would not likely be unaware of these reaches into the past. A comparable return to the dim past we have already seen in the four tellings of the first act, but these in sequence from the past to present. In inverted order the Ghost is nearest to the imminent violent actions of acts ii and in in the graphic, intensified version of Hamlet's highly emotional soliloquy of two scenes earlier. One stage further back is Claudius's restatement which brings to the immediate present Horatio's earlier account of the story in its distant antecedents at the time of Hamlet's birth. This return to the past does not at all seem to go as far back as the Pyrrhus story although dimmed in its outlines by basis in hearsay. But there is still another version, again from Horatio, which also carries us back, this in turn enforced into a full pattern by Marcellus. In suggesting that the Ghost is 'precurse of fear'd events ... prologue to the omen coming on,' Horatio draws a parallel: A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets ...

This parallel to a great soldier is not at all casual. G.L. Kittredge re-

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marks: The story of the death of Caesar was to Renaissance Englishmen perhaps the most widely known event in all Roman history ... Caesar is always the greatest man the world has ever known and his murder a tragedy so cataclysmic as to be compared with the crucifixion of Christ/2 For its views of great Romans and Greeks the later English Renaissance depended largely on North's Plutarch, in which we read: 'for, when [Julius Caesar] was a young man, he had been acquainted with Servilia, who was extremely in love with him. And because Brutus was born in that time when their love was hottest, he persuaded himself that he begat him/ 3 The attentive and knowledgeable Elizabethan in the Globe could likely anticipate on hearing Horatio's words that he would presently see the cataclysmic death of a soldier-king, victim of something like parricide, and that ghosts would walk and talk in a fearsome way 'a little' before the climactic act. This awareness might well, if not in any directly conscious response, identify the dread act of a distant past with the dread acts about to unfold as Hamlet is borne 'like a solider to the stage.' A few lines later Marcellus remarks about the Ghost: It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever, 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, This bird of dawning singeth all night long.

We have then, in close sequence, references to the killing by his illegitimate son of a king and the miraculous birth of a king just at the point of question about the threat of violence attending 'the King / That was and is the question of these wars.' This is the point where Hamlet is to reappear, or has just reappeared, as the Ghost, just having died, and brief moments after 'Long live the King!' The receding depths are here, but paradoxically they enforce the absolutely immediate moment, a matter of consequence throughout the play. We are at once in the immediate and the dimly distant moment of dreadful and mysterious violence in a strangely repetitive and cyclical action. But there is a more strikingly significant parallel in that part of the Pyrrhus speech spoken by Hamlet, for indeed what is described is not merely a Pyrrhus/Hamlet, but a Pyrrhus/Ghost, a dreadful, bloody, damned figure come from hell to wreak his gigantic violences; the parching streets 'lend a tyrranous and a damned light To their lord's murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,

59 Killers And thus o'ersized with coagulate gore, With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus Old grandsire Priam seeks.'

This monstrous vision of Hamlet's imagination is not at all the ordinary soldier, nor is this an ordinary warlike act. Pyrrhus, dressed like the Ghost, armed with a sword, is here actually through the 'torrent, tempest and ... whirlwind' of Hamlet's wild projection, however controlledly spoken, an image of himself as dread Ghost/Killer. In all this we should not forget that the Ghost seems more burdened with the guilt of lust than is Claudius. With this conclusion of the soldier-war pattern per se (it appears elsewhere simply as metaphor) and before turning to the wildly strange oath-taking scene in i.iv, an assessment of multiple identities in Hamlet seems in order. The inference from patterns thus far, if these have here been read fully, without distortion, amounts to a principle: if there is a Horatio/Hamlet, a Fortinbras/Hamlet, a Ghost/Hamlet, a Pyrrhus/Hamlet, and, not by poetic invention but through historic allusion, a Brutus/ Hamlet and a Christ/Hamlet, then every other telling of Hamlet's story will provide a Hamlet. Again, although these identities can be in some measure categorized in that Horatio and Claudius are alike in rational order and restraint, and that Hamlet and Ghost carry a fearful burden of guilt, yet there must finally be one Hamlet, the sum of all, or, in ultimate mystery, more than the sum of all. If so, we seem closest to him in the violence of Ghost/Pyrrhus/Hamlet which has dominated thus far, and will, in the several tellings yet to come, continue to dominate. Having this overview, we may now consider further complex particulars in the play by returning to the scene in which Hamlet takes over the telling of his story in the character of hunter. Hunters FORTINBRAS This quarry cries on havoc.

Coming onto 'this sight... of woe and wonder,' Fortinbras apostrophizes Death the killer not only in the figure of war, as one might expect, but also as a hunter. This quarry has not been killed in a hunt merely - it has been brought to its dying with the single-minded, merciless violence of havoc, of overwhelming attack without quarter, like Pyrrhus's slaying of Priam. Nowhere else is there a hint of the hunter in Fortinbras, but Hamlet is in this as in all other character thus far, the essential figure with Claudius (or Claudius through others) apparently

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almost equally involved in some way. Fortinbras ends the action as though it were a war-hunt and Hamlet begins it precisely so, as Ghostsoldier/Hamlet-hunter. However the pattern in i.v is not as simple as this. But before Ghost-avenger becomes Hamlet-hunter, he is for the first time, briefly, writer of a dramatic character, a playwright, an important element of his identity and action. My tables! Meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; So, uncle, there you are.

He is about to become hunter/spy, but he will be this most strikingly in the character of playwright/director/actor. It may be noted at this point that, among the almost endless parallels, mirror images, echoes, shadows, that make up the Hamlet kaleidoscope, Polonius is a notable parody: he too is producer, director, actor. Perhaps closest to the heart of the Hamlet mystery, both are audience for - or spies on, if one read the play in its own terms - their own dramas. Hamlet's frantic ritual of the silence-oath which follows is so rich in tightly woven implications that any attempt at critical assessment of them necessarily distorts, by separation, the strangely wild impact of the scene. The most obvious because the most contradictory element of it is that it is a plea, a demand, that Horatio - after 'O God, Horatio ... tell my story' - be silent. The urgency for Hamlet of imposed silence is more than clear: he asks for it directly six times; demands an oath of secrecy no less than eight times; is joined by the Ghost who demands the oath four times in conjunction with him. It is apparent that the Ghost shares this ceremony to a point of near exactness; as Hamlet shifts ground, so does the 'old mole' - 'hic et ubique' as Hamlet says. In another perspective the ritual is conducted by Ghost/Hamlet both in the air and under the ground, one part alive, the other dead - a figure inhabiting both life and death, or, more precisely, equivocally on the line between these. And both/one are 'mole' and 'pioner,' a soldier beneath the surface who destroys, a creature that lives and moves underground, an enemy hidden in the dark. Horatio has been able to give only a vague account of the distant genesis of the story; there is nothing to indicate awareness in him of the implications in the Caesar allusion he has spoken. Claudius's account is clearer; Hamlet's intense; the Ghost's of horrifying immediacy. So hard upon this last is Hamlet's transition to sole teller as to be almost part of

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it. But the telling becomes something quite different. It will be (except in Pyrrhus, in Ophelia's madness, and in curious retrospective imagining in the grave-makers' scene) no longer a telling, but an acting out, Hamlet the protagonist as he re-enacts his own story again and again. Most complexly, he presently acts it as it is being acted on the stage within the stage in the Mousetrap, in the very centre of the whole play, which is also its enactment. The ritual has one more element of consequence, the form of the oath, the swearing upon Hamlet's sword. The usual interpretation of this, not at all irrelevant, is that Hamlet holds his sword hilt up, like a Christian cross. The sword obviously fits the character of the soldier. But, if the end is 'everywhere the chief thing,' this sword too must be poisoned in some sense: the rich ambiguity of the final scene must be implicitly present. In any event the emphases on sword and sword-play in v.ii (and iv.vii.70-106) seem to be matched by the reiterative demands for an oath upon Hamlet's sword. Both scenes can hardly be other than ritual. After noting these interwoven complexities we may now turn to the beginning of the theme of hunting that ends in Fortinbras's 'This quarry cries on havoc.' Hamlet seems to begin it in his wild falconer's cry, Hillo, ho, ho, boy! Come, bird, come,

but, strictly speaking, this is not the first view of Hamlet as hunter; Polonius has already so referred to him. But Hamlet's cry is vehement in an intense moment, not like Polonius's remark a subordinated, if important, detail. What begins here is not anything resembling literal hunting, not even as much as Pyrrhus may represent a warlike act; rather there develops a pervasive sense of qualities suggested by 'hunt.' Of these the more relevant seem to be whatever suggestions may lie in to seek; to spy out what is hidden; to use devious tactics in order to catch; to seek out in order to kill. Each of these in itself conveys its peculiar set of responses, intensified by the powers of language. Intermingled and so expressed, they create nuances of suspense, fear, terror, and other emotions. All likely have concurrent bearing on response. Shakespeare's use of the hunting metaphor is an extraordinary example of inventive power for, although a mood of impending violence becomes through it more and more intense, there are, in this very long play, only about twenty-five brief uses of it. No single scene (except perhaps the play scene) is dominated by it in any ordinary sense, but all major scenes are well-nigh dominated by it, as is the whole play, through

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its pervasive power. But, despite a thinly spread out disposition, there are meaningful patterns; the hunting metaphor appears and reappears in anything but a casual way. In rough distribution Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Gertrude use the metaphor. Hamlet, as might be expected, accounts for about half of its expressions, with the rest spread out among the others. But such an estimate is deceptive, for in almost every instance Hamlet is the substance of the metaphor, preponderantly as the falconer or the falcon, hunting, or - and here the metaphors merge - spying. Much of Claudius's use of it is at second remove in that Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are voluntarily or by implicit acquiescence agents for the king. In this pattern Hamlet and Claudius seem about equal, except that Claudius's uses of the figure concentrate almost entirely on Hamlet. Even its apparently minimal expressions by Gertrude and Laertes point finally to Hamlet. Its most inclusive expression is a principle in Polonius's instructions to Reynaldo as to techniques appropriate to spying. A metaphor from fishing, it is parallel to figures from hunting, and it emphasizes the trickery of a trap in bait: Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth; And thus do we of wisdom and of reach With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out.

The chief exerciser of this principle is not Polonius, nor Claudius, but Hamlet. But before this, in the first expression of the hunting metaphor, Polonius identifies Hamlet as a special character, the sexual hunter who sets a snare. To Ophelia's assertion of Hamlet's 'almost all the holy vows of heaven' Polonius retorts, Ay, springes to catch woodcocks! I do know, When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows.

The larger part of Reynaldo's spyings are to be of this kind; Laertes is thought of as a libertine, indeed is implicitly encouraged to be one. Presently Hamlet himself assumes the figure, with a ribald emphasis: We'll e'en to't like French falconers, fly at anything we see ... Come, give us a taste of your quality. Come, a passionate speech.' On the surface these expressions seem to indicate, as Polonius puts it to Reynaldo,

63 Killers ... such wanton, wild, and usual slips As are companions noted and most known To youth and liberty,

but they may show a more excessive character: ... the taints of liberty, The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, A savageness in unreclaimed 4 blood, Of general assault.

There may be implications here and in the many further developments of this character in Hamlet that go back to the gaining of a Queen by the killing of a King, and to lust in Ghost/Hamlet; and forward to the culmination of killings, or dyings, by a poisoned sword. We may now briefly note a quasi-hidden emphasis observed earlier in Horatio, the implications in a name. Reynaldo is traditionally the fox. Here, however appropriate the wiliness of the fox may be to spying, it is likely that underneath, if vaguely, there may be for us a sense of the hunted creature. The obvious quarry of the fox is a young man very closely identified in the action with Hamlet. Presently Hamlet's response to Guildenstern as he runs away in an ecstatic wildness makes the fox the quarry, but quarry that provokes the chase: HAM The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King is a thing GUIL A thing, my lord? HAM Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide, fox, and all after.

In terms of Hamlet/Laertes as one character, and identity in 'fox,' one may possibly sense again that hunter and hunted are one and the same. If this seems an extravagant, tenuous connection, in retrospect it may become part of an essential element of the action. Just why a hook is to be baited to catch Laertes in actions of lust may not seem clear; there is nothing directly of this kind in his conduct, and Reynaldo never reappears to tell the story of his conduct. If the Reynaldo scene is not a loose end (how could it be, so sharply defined and carefully developed?), the hunting-spying must be aimed elsewhere. But in Hamlet Laertes' story is told; it ends in precisely the same way and at precisely the same moment as does Hamlet's story. It too has the same beginning if we take Hamlet's word and many corroborative scenes and speeches as reliable evidence:

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For by the image of my cause I see The portraiture of his ...

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, twin-puppets, faceless not too secret agents for Claudius, provide Hamlet with several occasions for the figure. Having been told that the Queen wants to see him, Hamlet asks them: 'Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?' They are then hunters, but more particularly setters of a snare. The same pattern is found in v.ii, except that Claudius sets up the scheme in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, like Cornelius and Voltemand, are emissaries to instruct a King to dispose of a nephew. Of this Hamlet says, identifying the trap as a play in which he is to be caught, Being thus benetted round with villainies, Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play,

an unmistakable parallel to 'the play's the thing' and the Mousetrap, even to the detail of revision of the lines by Hamlet. A few moments later, in justifying his intent to kill the King, he repeats Polonius's figure to Reynaldo. Claudius, he says, has 'thrown out his angle for my proper life...' But it is as spies that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern provide Hamlet with the opportunity to express through the figure his subtler cunning as a counter-spy. Having gained their admission that they are the King's hunters, Hamlet cuts off a possible explanation: 'I will tell you why [you were sent for]. So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and Queen moult no feather.' He persuades them that he believes the King's spying on him is no more than concern for his melancholy so that they may continue to spy. This both protects him immediately and provides him with the best kind of vantage to spy on the King's machinations. They become his agents by indirection. In the figure they are (as always indistinguishably one in two, stylized caricature of double identity) a hunting hawk, but in Hamlet's manoeuvrings of them he is the falconer. These are fairly simple examples of Hamlet as hunter/spy, setter of snares. The whole pattern is much more inclusive and sophisticated. Its strongest concentration comes in what Wilson says is 'the central point of Hamlet... the climax and crisis of the whole drama,' the play scene (138). The pattern begins with news of the players; Rosencrantz reports their approach. 'We coted them on the way,' he says, 'and hither are

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they coming to offer you service.' 'To cote' is a term from hunting with hounds; a half page of commentary in the Variorum includes precisely relevant detail.5 When a greyhound outruns its fellows and 'gives the hare a turn' the action is a 'cote.' It means that one dog 'reaches the game first.' The game must be reached, else there is no 'cote.' Perhaps most important for its possible meaning in Hamlet, 'going beyond is the essential point, the term being usually applied under circumstances where overtaking is impossible [because dogs start together].' Translated from metaphor, Rosencrantz is identifying a group of actors outstripped by the King's two spy/hunters who, starting at the same time, reach the quarry first. This seems necessarily to mean that the players' quarry is Hamlet himself. Next Rosencrantz refers to the child actors as 'an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on top of question ...' Child actors, then, before they become older 'common players,' as are the company about to arrive, are young hawks, in an 'eyrie,' a nest or brood of birds of prey. They also 'cry out on top' of question, a phrase descriptive of hounds. They are then both hawks and hounds. The actors about to appear must be fullgrown hawks and full-grown hounds, and Hamlet the hunter will use them. No less, the company that plays Hamlet is made up of common players; it may be seen, as Mack has intimated, that they play a comparable role, so that one asks, 'Whom do they hunt?' A moment later Hamlet, in his 'mad' tactics, speaks of himself as falconer: 'I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.' Context suggests that 'handsaw' should indeed be 'hernshaw,' but the emendation is not particularly important. The point that Hamlet makes is that he has confidence in himself as falconer. That the players' play, said to be written in part by Hamlet, and in some measure directed by him, is a mode of hunting is not in doubt: he says he intends it as a way of 'catching' the true identity of the Ghost, and the conscience of 'the King,' presumably, in the more obvious context invited by the apparent action, the conscience of Claudius. Once well into the use of his actor-hunters, Hamlet identifies the play as the Mousetrap. Ordinarily taken to be a facetious challenge to the King, this ridiculous identity for a hunting trap will deserve more than amused reaction to Hamlet's not so wayward wit. The next expression of the figure, from Claudius, is peculiarly interesting both in its place and in a pattern of receding depths in obscurities of cause in Hamlet. As to place, it comes immediately after Polonius's unsuccessful attempt to catch the meaning of Hamlet's madness in the violent scene with Ophelia; it comes immediately before Polonius's pro-

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posai of a second trap to catch Hamlet's cause in the Queen's chamber, scenes so parallel as to be nearly identical, and both tellings of Hamlet's story. Claudius's metaphor also comes most briefly before the Mousetrap, the epitome of the pattern of huntings. Of Hamlet he says: There's something in his soul O'er which his melancholy sits on brood; And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose Will be some danger ...

We have seen Hamlet the mature, confident falconer, a hawk as destroying as Pyrrhus. He will take charge of the hawks grown from the eyrie of child actors. But now, in Claudius's image, we are driven into the obscure depths of genesis in the egg, into the centre of Hamlet's soul.6 What hawk or hunting creature may be 'the hatch and disclose' is sufficient fear to drive the King to quick determination: Hamlet must die. In the play scene little is said directly of hunting. At its outset one might conjecture that Hamlet is hinting that he is a virile hawk by disclaiming identity as a capon. Near its end comes the exchange, KING What do you call the play? HAM 'The Mousetrap.' Marry, how? Tropically.

As the court rush out in disorder, matched by Hamlet's wildorderly reaction, his words are those of hunting and hawking: Why, let the strucken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play ... Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers ... get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?

The players are still a 'cry,' a pack of hunters. A 'forest of feathers' seems most likely to be, like Pyrrhus, a gigantic projection of self, in actors' plumes as player hawk. A moment later, chided for his wild responses by Guildenstern, Hamlet concludes the hawking metaphor, I am tame, sir; pronounce,

and agrees to enter the next snare, a springe to catch a woodcock when the blood burns. It is set for him by Polonius, spy or audience at scenes of 'savageness in unreclaimed blood,' scenes of actions by one who has said: Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.'

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Every one of the nine angling, hawking, and hunting metaphors so far has been expression for a constant metaphor of indirection: the bait, the snare, the net, the trap. Pyrrhus too, the hellish soldier-destroyer, lies 'couched in the ominous horse' before his dread act, a trap for Troy. Implications of hiding, of wiliness in both hunter and hunted, of trickery, of 'miching malhecho,' create a pervasive quality of devious stalking of what is hidden by what is hidden. But there is no mention, as in Lear, or Antony and Cleopatra, or the Oedipus Rex, of the Gods as the ultimate, obscure, mocking, destroying enemy. The enemy seems to be in man himself, in nature in man, an imponderably violent, obsessed, selfdestructive force. Whatever the cause, it too is trap or snare, hidden, under the surface, the Vicious mole of nature,' the pioner who will destroy from depths of darkness. Hamlet seems to be a reiterative series of murky, hell-engendered traps and snares. Of these we have just seen, in part, the Mousetrap; much more of it is yet to be seen, as are Polonius's efforts to catch Hamlet's dangerous mystery in arranged and observed encounters with Ophelia and the Queen. These considerations lead us to one further part of the hunting-trap pattern. The King is the first to say it; Laertes the last. Brief expressions, and only two, they are perhaps more important than all the other hunting metaphors. About to die of his own poisoned sword, Laertes speaks an ironic epitaph in the identical figure applied in i.iii to Hamlet as sexual hunter of Ophelia: ... a woodcock to mine own springe, ... I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery.

Earlier, just before the Mousetrap, in the middle of a plan to kill Hamlet, the King, attempting prayer for forgiveness for brother-murder, cries out, O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, Art more engag'd !

Each is ironically caught in his own snare, the trap of poison at the end. So too Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been killed by the very 'net' carried for Hamlet's death cast about them by deceptive use of a King's seal. Earlier Polonius is killed in his trap for Hamlet. Again Hamlet, identifying himself with mole/pioner/Ghost, expresses with wild anticipation the principle of snares set only to catch the setter: For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard

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But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon.

Who then is caught in the Mousetrap? A Ghost and a King for whom Hamlet says he sets the trap? In the pattern of identities and of self-snaring, must it not be Ghost/Hamlet, King/Hamlet, or Ghost/King/Hamlet? We are inevitably led to invite consideration of a Hamlet caught in his own springe. But apart from Ghost/King/Hamlet, there may be a more unexpected catch concurrent with and necessary for Hamlet's self-snaring.

Spies HAMLET But where was this? MARCELLUS My lord, upon the platform where we watch. OPHELIA Th' observ'd of all observers KING ... not single spies, but ... battalions ...

That Hamlet conveys a feeling of spying is scarcely a discovery. There are such obvious instances of 'lawful espials,' in the King's words, as those in the closet scene and its counterpart, the attack on Ophelia. Everyone knows that the Mousetrap is a scheme to spy. Equally familiar are the proposed spyings of Reynaldo and those directly attempted on Hamlet by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and by Polonius. Mack, intimating much more about the several audiences watching several dramatic actions at once, has caught a good deal of the sense of persistent, ubiquitous surveillance that pervades Hamlet. We approach the Mousetrap with Hamlet in a state of emotions so curiously complex as to defy any other expression of it than the play itself. We share the pathetic distress of Ophelia, the concern and controlledly subordinated fear of the King, the gigantic blood-smeared violence by Pyrrhus. We enter the Mousetrap caught in a strange, encompassing exultation with Hamlet the hunter setting his snare and watching its mechanism with frenetic impatience and wild-eyed, ambiguous, destructive wit. Spying and all it suggests contributes not minimally to this extraordinarily concentrated ferment, this intrication of excitement. It seems to begin with the second act, which consists more than anything else of 'not single spies, but... battalions,' an act that opens with Polonius's instructions to Reynaldo about spying on sexually

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appetitive young men, and ends with Hamlet's The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch ...'It should then be meaningful to trace out spies in a pattern which is part of but perhaps more revealing than soldiers or hunters. We may begin by considering spying as literally as possible. The first, fourth, and fifth acts are alike in almost complete absence of direct reference to spying, although spying is there. The second and third acts are dominated by it. The second is a rapid sequence of many attempts to discover the meaning of Hamlet's conduct, each of which seems to be reversed by him with subtle mockery. In the third act the two major spyings on either side of his own Mousetrap are marked by violent sexual disgust towards Ophelia as he simultaneously threatens the King, and an even more savage revulsion towards the Queen, at the beginning of which he not threatens but kills one he believes to be the King. In this still rather obvious and general pattern the spyings in the second act are so insistent in emphases as to require a careful sequential review. This, in turn, will be clearer if a fuller context of Polonius-Laertes-Ophelia be looked into first, not in the traditional literal sense, but as part of the metaphorical action that is emerging. For the literalist reader oí Hamlet Polonius has had varying identities. Generally the trusted old court councillor, he is a Renaissance political pragmatist; oppositely he is a tiresome, sententious purveyor of worn-out wisdom. He is said to have the dignity of high courtly position; he is called a buffoon, the butt of Hamlet's mockery; or, somewhere in between, he is a harmless old bore, tolerated with affectionate amusement by Ophelia and impatient irritation by Laertes. However accurate any of these views may be in what is the surface action of Hamlet, none is relevant in the metaphoric plot. For the Polonius in this, and perhaps as corollary the essential Laertes, we must go back to i.ii. 'What would'st thou beg, Laertes,' asks the King, 'that shall not be my offer, not thy asking?' - an affectionate generosity springing from Polonius's closeness to the King: The head is not more native to the heart, The hand more instrumental to the mouth, Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.

Here is indeed a closeness, the kind one might expect in brothers, in twin brothers. This is the Polonius who is alter-ego for the King in planning schemes of espial; who shares them with the King as spy; who dies alone in the identity of King-spy. This King is a brother-killer.

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If this is Polonius, metaphorical brother, or metaphorical self for the King, what is Laertes except metaphorical nephew as well as son? In immediate parallel we read, But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son or again, ... think of us As of a father; for let the world take note You are the most immediate to our throne, And with no less nobility of love Than that which dearest father bears his son Do I impart toward you.

Here we have a nephew who is son; in Laertes we have a son who is a metaphorical nephew. Both are parallel to Young Fortinbras, a nephew who plans to attack a King. Each appears to be both; each appears, in the dominant pattern of invention, to be the other. This King presently seeks to be a son/nephew-killer, just as the nephew seeks to be an uncle/ King-killer. As we move into i.iii, still shaken by Hamlet's bitter revulsion at his mother's promiscuous sexual accommodation, we find not at all just a sententious Polonius in a bit of domestic comedy. Almost everywhere underneath is the dominating image of a not to be trusted sexual hunter - Hamlet. Again, although it appears that Polonius and Laertes are very alike in their warnings to Ophelia, Laertes simply warns, whereas Polonius extracts information about Hamlet from her; he conducts an espial by inquiry. Moreover his treatment of Ophelia is blunt, coarse, grossly suggestive in punning in a severe attack on his obediently passive daughter. This becomes a pattern, for, quite unlike Laertes, Claudius, and Horatio, who are consistently gentle and considerate with Ophelia and the Queen, Polonius's treatment of his daughter is very like Hamlet's offcolour wit, sadistic cruelty, and outright violence against the two women. Finally Polonius's inquiries about Hamlet's sexual conduct are parallel to his planned indirect inquiries about Laertes through Reynaldo. This pattern of spying, essentially directed at Hamlet by one very much like him, is developed in acts u and m in an elaborately complex configuration. First, scenes i and ii of act n are equivalent in the scheme of spying by delegation. Just as Polonius instructs Reynaldo, so does the King instruct Rosencrantz/Guildenstern in respect to Hamlet. These delegations of the spying function stand as brief examples of a series of disap-

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pearances both before and after n.i, which are important as a key to the involved spy ings around and in Hamlet. Reynaldo's disappearance, indeed all of this, comes back once again to the initial fact in Hamlet: the expressed challenge is to the wrong person. How many brief appearances at the outset of actions are there? The first is Francisco at i.i.l, who is present for only eighteen lines. FRAN Give you goodnight. MAR O, farewell, honest soldier. Who hath reliev'd you? FRAN Bernardo hath my place. Give you goodnight. MAR Holla, Bernardo! BER Say What, is Horatio there? HOR A piece of him.

Exit.

He is replaced not only by Bernardo but on the instant by Horatio. The last is Hamlet, who begs Horatio to replace him so that Horatio may begin the story which for five acts is Hamlet's, and no less is Hamlet's brief prologue to 'the rest is silence.' Between these extremes there are several parallel instances of appearances-disappearances. Cornelius and Voltemand are silently present for forty lines, then disappear after speaking one line in unison, to be seen again only most briefly, except that Rosencrantz/Guildenstern 'hath their place.' Next is Laertes, present briefly before a long absence, then returning in ambiguous identity with Hamlet. The Ghost appears, stained in sin; disappears after delegating Hamlet to act out his strictures against lust, to reappear briefly in ambiguous identity with Hamlet in the Queen's chamber. Next Horatio, as has been seen, disappears, reappearing only as a kind of twin-shadow when Hamlet is a rational figure. Now we come to Reynaldo, and then to that notable abridgment, Prologue to the Mousetrap, who is to 'tell all' but gives way to enactments of Hamlet's story, metaphoric on one stage and actual yet metaphoric on a second stage that contains the first. There are more. If we consider the scene in its own unity (all scenes have been identified as plays in themselves), Polonius is such a figure in the closet scene: he speaks brief prologue to the action, then disappears behind an arras to let Hamlet act out his story. Again Young Fortinbras appears for one initial speech in iv.iv in which he delegates the telling of his action to a captain, this in respect to an agreement (one remembers a 'sealed compact') made by the King that Fortinbras may march across his

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lands. The captain in turn speaks briefly, a preliminary to Hamlet's putting the whole matter once more into his own story in passionate soliloquy. In act v, the end/beginning oí Hamlet, the pattern has a strange, obscure repetition. At its outset the Second Clown stays only long enough to help begin a telling of Hamlet's story, although he concludes, as does Hamlet in a sense in v.ii, 'Mass, I cannot tell.' The First Clown says more, but again Hamlet completes the telling. Yet none of these is really a disappearance. Rather there are shifts of identity, modulations from teller to teller, from second teller to actor (i.e., one who does an action, and, not indifferent in Hamlet, one who acts out an action on a stage). The final figure is always Hamlet, directly or metaphorically. He always completes the telling of his own story. These multiple relationships are carefully vague, ambiguous, and interfused in the receding pattern of time. Typically there appears to be an incomplete and/or vague rational account; a fuller rational retelling; a similar account mixed with emotion that intensifies into dominance; a passionate enactment to the culmination of dying. This is of course an oversimplified and not precisely complete or accurate statement. But all the patterns, which are together one pattern, are keys to the complexities of spying in acts n and in, just as the latter are, inversely, keys to the parts and whole oí Hamlet. The two plans for direct espial on Hamlet arranged by the King and by Polonius are carried out in that order. The first is the exchange with Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, in which Hamlet is not only the falconer manoeuvring enemy hawks, but a philosophical analyst of self in the Denmark universe, and of man, a troubled creature seeing only paradoxes and receding mysteries of being. What was mirth is now a heavy disposition; '... this goodly frame, the earth ... a sterile promontory'; 'this most excellent canopy, the air ... this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire' now 'a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.' Man himself, 'noble in reason! ... infinite in faculties! ... express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!' - yet the 'quintessence of dust.' The world is a prison, the shackles bad dreams; dreams themselves but shadows; dreams of ambition only shadows' shadows. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch'd heroes the beggars' shadows. Shall we to th' court?

But shortly after this concern for fading but never lost identities, graspings for ghosts in an action peopled by ghosts, there appears Polonius

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as spy. Now comes a diametric change in Hamlet's attitude as he shares in a curiously developing pattern the initial grossness of Polonius towards Ophelia. Reynaldo, the fox, instructed to spy on a young man marked by 'taints of liberty,' by universal 'savageness in unreclaimed blood/ has disappeared, and there is no further word about Laertes. But there is immediate espial by 'encompassment and drift of question' on Hamlet, 'implorator of unholy suits.' It would seem that the tutelage given Reynaldo is exercised by Polonius himself, that we have a Polonius/Reynaldo spying on a Hamlet/Laertes. Act u, beginning with this elaborate example of a spy who is brief surrogate for another into whom he disappears, continues in a complex extension of the pattern. Apparently the King is the source of espial on Hamlet, but he too is only briefly seen, to remain vaguely behind the active spies, Polonius and Rosencrantz/Guildenstern. When we consider the consistently corroborative evidence thus far, and the fact that Hamlet is seen in many identities and guises, there seems indeed to be an extraordinary intricacy here of self-espials. There is a curious polarization throughout the play, and very much here, that comes about by Hamlet's provocation of opposed forces within himself to spy on each other in some inscrutable conflict. In respect to these forces all comments on Hamlet appear to be oversimplifications. Yet Horatio seems one-dimensional or nearly so, the extreme rational antithesis to a 'turbulent and dangerous' Hamlet. There is no identifiable median for these extremes; there are only blending nuances like a spectrum. These subtly shifting interweavings of rationality and passion as expressed in Shakespeare's poetry are quite beyond prose explication; the degrees of passion even more so. But, although inseparable from the total quality of Hamlet, kinds of rational attitudes and powers come to the surface in identifiable if still shifting patterns. These can be seen directly in Hamlet, but perhaps more easily in his alter-egos, especially in Polonius. Horatio, except for very brief moments of intensity, is quiet, steady, observing, and self-effacing. Similar, but the least accurately assessed figure, is the King, probably, one guesses, because of acceptance of Ghost/Hamlet's repeated and intensifying attacks presumably on him and his sexual excesses: Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen (l.v.42-6)

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... this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! (ll.ii.565-6)

Readers have noted that the King is not at all like this in that there is not one embrace with the Queen nor any scene or language of a sensual nature. Despite references to rouses, he is, as we see him, consistently marked by sobriety, indeed sobriety of spirit. What seems most on his conscience is the killing of a brother, and in this the gaining of the Queen appears to be, if not indifferent, not primary: 'Forgive me my foul murder'? That cannot be; since I am still possess'd Of those effects for which I did the murder My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.

The King's language never shows impairment, much less loss of emotional control; he is always restrained, as is Horatio, but with the controlled order, diction, and phrasing of the careful politician, which border at times on the orotundities of dignified kingship, these echoed in the pompous, often ridiculous sententiousness of Polonius. The qualities of the King's spirit and speech are nowhere exactly matched among the figures on the rational side, although there is a kind of courtly tone at times in Rosencrantz/Guildenstern and in Hamlet, but these with subtle differences in effect. Extensions of the defensive machinations of the King, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern are as self-effacing as Horatio is, but in a different way. What is a consistent quality of quiet honesty in him is in them a formalized, deferential politeness, hinting of obsequiousness. This attitude, superficially the same towards the King and Hamlet, is again qualified: from the formalities of royal audience there is modulation to the context of Hamlet as friend and wit. Again, within this, although the exchange of wit seems sometimes precisely equal, the King's spies reveal an underlayer of deferential acceptance, and quite lack the edges of inner excitement that come to the surface in Hamlet. Similarly, while they share the scholar's capacity for sophisticated dialectical exchange, they lack Hamlet's reach and depth of thought; in this, pressing delicately to trap him, they observe, but are not moved by, his melancholy. Rational chameleons without private identity, indistinguishable shadows of the apprehensive King, they stand as impersonal guards on the ramparts of his fears. Yet in the complex literary pattern of multiple identities all these qualities are shadows of a spying, hunting Hamlet.

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But Hamlet, however acute, subtly witty, and in comprehensive control of the whole complexity, shows a scarcely disguised explosive tension under the rational surface. To move to the fuller pattern, this 'mole of nature,' this ghostly pioner within the setter of snares, seems always to have a woman as corollary, and this is especially evident in the spyings of acts n and HI. We are brought again, as always, to memory of the past as a vital shadow in the present, for whereas spying is not obvious in act i, woman is present in ways that lead to her essential place in espials in acts n and HI, and in a strangely modulated mood in act v. In Horatio's initial telling the Queen is only vaguely suggested in the forfeiture of the King's property and in the nephew's intent. In i.ii the woman gains immediate identity; she is the King's King-brother's Queen-widow, his Queen. The brief account of 'mirth in funeral... dirge in marriage' turns immediately to a nephew who 'hath not fail'd to pester us with message / Importing the surrender of those lands / Lost by his father ...' The threatening, dangerous nephew is always present with the Queen-woman; she is always, if sometimes shadowily, present in espials. This brings us to woman in spyings in acts n and HI on Claudius apparently and Hamlet certainly; even, in less obvious verbal equivalents, on Polonius. In these she seems not to be the object of surveillance, however much she is involved in the actions being spied upon. In the opening scene of act n woman is generalized as object of lust and as prostitute. Reynaldo may go so far as to insinuate drabbing as a 'wanton, wild, and usual' slip in the young man spied on, part of faults which seem to be ... the taints of liberty, The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, A savageness in unreclaimed blood, Of general assault,

but yet in curious contradiction, no more than 'slight sullies ... /As 'twere a thing a little soil'd i' th' working.' In response to indirect questions, the answer will be, says the knowledgeable Polonius, 'I saw him enter such a house of sale,' Videlicet, a brothel...

Shortly after Polonius proposes an espial in comparable terms:

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... I'll loose my daughter to him. Be you and I behind an arras then. Mark the encounter.

Ribner's note on 'loose' includes 'let loose a bull to a cow.' The espial itself in iii.ii observes Hamlet violently attacking not just Ophelia as woman, but marriage as serving lust in both man and woman. It is something less to be wished than, or equal with, life in a nunnery, 'videlicet, a brothel.' 7 Immediately we move to a scene in which a smoothly satirical Hamlet mocks a spying Polonius as a 'fishmonger,' a procurer offering his daughter, with not a slight implication of Hamlet's activity in this. POL Do you know me, my lord? HAM Excellent well. You are a fishmonger. POL Not I, my lord. HAM Then I would you were so honest a man. POL Honest, my lord? HAM Ay, sir. To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man pick'd out of ten thousand. POL That's very true, my lord. HAM For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion Have you a daughter? POL I have, my lord. HAM Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive - friend, look to't.

Here man is a fertility god, woman the vessel of fecund breeding. That both, in the act, are grossly foul is vivid in the image, just as in Hamlet's attacks on Ophelia and his mother. Polonius leaves to 'suddenly contrive the means of meeting between him and my daughter.' On his return, after Hamlet's long scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet picks up his attack as though there has been no interim whatever, and as though he knows exactly what Polonius has gone to do, that is, to be a fishmonger. His remarks now become through allusion much more specific. HAM O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou! POL What treasure had he, my lord? HAM Why, 'One fair daughter, and no more, The which he loved passing well.'

77 Killers POL [aside] Still on my daughter. HAM Am I not i' th' right, old Jephthah? POL If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that I love passing well. HAM Nay, that follows not. POL What follows then, my lord? HAM Why, 'As by lot, God wot,' and then, you know, 'It came to pass, as most like it was.' The first row of the pious chanson will show you more ...

Polonius's plan to 'loose' Ophelia to Hamlet has here its immediate comment: Jephthah too offered up his daughter in sacrifice. But Hamlet is not content: playing skilfully with 'nay, that follows not,' he not only emphasizes the sacrifice of Ophelia, but also, through 'follows' in a second sense, he achieves another intensifying scriptural allusion. 'As by lot, God wot' means in any literal reading merely 'by chance.' But Hamlet, fully in the context of Genesis, is alluding to Lot, who offered up his two virgin daughters to divert a violent mob of Sodomites. However the sexual sacrifice of woman is only half of Hamlet's obsession. From the first soliloquy, through the violences of his attacks on Ophelia and his mother, and further, he expresses bitter revulsion at woman's initiative in gross sexual encounter. The allusion to Lot goes on to this: 'It came to pass, as most like it was.' In Genesis we read what came to pass: And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him ... And the firstborn said ... Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us ... Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father ... Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.

Once again we are in receding depths, this time back to Genesis, the extended account of the 'generations of Adam,' a story that grows out of the first sexual guilt and punishment; that emphasizes primogeniture in a long history of the family of man; that gives account of the first brother-murder; that contains implicitly universal incest (who were the wives of Cain and Abel?); that in the story of Lot shows the initiative of woman in perpetuating the line of descent through acts of incest. In all this a figure haunted by Mnemosyne spies on himself in kaleidoscopic perspectives back to dimmest antiquity, always in passionate desire and equally intense revulsion as he sees himself as nephew, as

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father, as uncle, always in some incestuous pattern with mother/daughter/sister. And in all the Hamlet espials Ophelia/Queen is essential for it is the act that is spied on. Typically Shakespeare provides much more for those who can bring Genesis to the theatre. Jephthah is the son of a harlot, that is, one whose 'black and grained spots ... will not leave their tinct'; he goes to a foreign country to live in worldly pleasure ('Take thy fair hour, ...' says Claudius, granting Laertes permission to return to France); like Fortinbras he comes back as a soldier to become head of the state; he asks the Ammonites the cause of their war against him and is told that it is to regain land seized by the Israelites. Too, just as Fortinbras does, he asks permission to pass through kingdoms; and, as Fortinbras intends early in the action and Hamlet does throughout, he attacks when his direction seems elsewhere. In the same kind of likely allusion Lot is first referred to as the nephew of Abram, progenitor of the Israelites, later as his brother. It is this familial dynasty that Lot's virgin daughters perpetuate by their incestuous acts. Every espial in act n tells Hamlet's story, with important variants. Always there is one - a king, a father - who has familial possession of a woman; always there is a nephew, a son, who threatens to seize her. But in Polonius there is an ambivalence: he seeks to protect the woman or to retain her only to push her into encounters with him who seeks to dispossess him of her, and then to spy on the encounter. The Polonius/Hamlet identity is the most surprising, least easily discernible, and perhaps most revealing in a search for meaning in the play. This is so not only in espials, but also in actions in which 'mutes or audience to this act' watch 'the observ'd of all observers' - Hamlet. From the beginning Polonius/Hamlet is interwoven with other Hamlet identities. This can be seen best through attitudes towards lust, the dominating concern in Polonius/Hamlet. In the first soliloquy Hamlet attacks the Queen's 'rank and gross' conduct with Claudius. Then in sequence there are closely relevant passages. Laertes offers a most rational 'good lesson' to Ophelia: she must protect her 'chaste treasure' from Hamlet's 'unmastered importunity' and against her own desire. The antithesis that marks the PoloniusHamlet interplay comes in her immediate response: Laertes may himself 'like a puff d and reckless libertine, /... the primrose path of dalliance' tread. He who opposes sexual accommodation may nevertheless be a gross violator, a kind of conduct at the heart of both Polonius and Hamlet. Next comes Polonius's advice to Laertes, a compact compendium of self-seeking, worldly conduct, and precursor to gross particulars of

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accepted sexual freedom in the Reynaldo scene. Then in absolute aboutface Polonius warns Ophelia against Hamlet, as Laertes did, but in coarse language. Hamlet is an 'implorator of unholy suits,' a dangerous sexual hunter setting a springe for a 'woodcock.' Almost without pause we hear cannon marking Claudius's rouse and Hamlet's attack on the King's gross conduct, followed by the 'mole of nature' speech. In this Claudius is an exemplum for a general principle governing 'particular men' who, infected by nature or fortune, are not responsible for their conduct. The argument fits Hamlet exactly, whether in his own figure, or in the Claudius, Polonius, Laertes disguises. So oft it chances in particular men That, for some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth, - wherein they are not guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin, By the o'ergrowth of some complexion, Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens The form of plausive manners, that these men Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, His virtues else - be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. The dram of e'il Doth all the noble substance often dout To his own scandal.

At the instant of Hamlet's last word the Ghost appears to condemn 'that incestuous, that adulterate beast' and 'my most seemingvirtuous queen,' partners on 'a couch for luxury and damned incest.' But the Ghost's words attest the 'vicious mole in nature' in himself: 'cut off even in the blossoms of my sin ... sent to my account /With all my imperfections on my head.' In what follows in acts u and in two emphases emerge: (1) active sexual engrossment strong in Polonius seems to recede to almost complete subordination while an opposite progression is evident in Hamlet; (2) Polonius is charged with being, and is, a procurer, and no less clearly a voyeur, that is, a spy on an act embodying life literally and death metaphorically. If we look at Polonius first in n.i we find no less than seven obvious instructions to Reynaldo that encourage libertinism. Shortly later in n.ii

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he reports his command to Ophelia that 'this hot love on the wing' must not be. Then, in the grossest terms for assignation, he arranges a meeting between his daughter and Hamlet to spy out the nature of a nephew's conduct, an encounter precisely opposite to his strictures. From this point on to his death as 'King' there is little in his language that has any obvious erotic tinge. Very like Horatio and Claudius, he seems to become the almost nominal, minimized voice of one indifferent to emotion and passion. However (apart from possible metaphoric meanings) there are brief exceptions, and his essential attitude remains unchanged. As this apparently mitigating movement develops, that of Hamlet in respect to precisely the same values intensifies into extreme, frenetic violences of passion. In this, our fare here is indeed 'of the chamelion's dish'; the dexter-sinister evolution of Polonius/Hamlet moves underneath ambiguous detail with the orderly inevitability of dark-light, light-dark in nature. It is finally so balanced a pattern that, watched as though the eye of imagination were viewing an expanded stage, it resembles formal ritual in parallel-opposite movements from Laertes/ Polonius/Hamlet-Ophelia, through the Mousetrap, to Polonius/King/ Hamlet-Queen. But the tracing out of Polonius's fading into the shadows to his death is more complex than it appears. First we have in m.i.181-5 his plan to repeat in exact parallel the nephew-daughter confrontation, this time a son-mother encounter, with Polonius/King as spy: Let his queen mother all alone entreat him To show his grief.

The next equivalent scene is arranged, so to speak, not by Polonius, but by Hamlet (if literal division of identities remains at all possible). Throughout it Polonius is an observer who emphasizes the consequence of what is observed: QUEEN Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me. HAM No, good mother. Here's metal more attractive. POL [to the KING] O, ho! do you mark that? HAM Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Sits down at OPHELIA'S feet. ] OPH No, my lord. HAM I mean, my head upon your lap? OPH Ay, my lord. HAM Do you think I meant country matters? OPH I think nothing, my lord. HAM That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.

81 Killers OPH HAM OPH HAM OPH HAM

What is, my lord? Nothing You are merry, my lord. Who, I? Ay, my lord.8 O God, your only jig-maker! What should a man do but be merry? ...

Between this scene and Polonius's death there seems little in his remarks that is not merely nominal, except perhaps his literal directions to the Queen in iii.iv.1-5. But if we retrace our steps from the point at which Polonius arranges the encounter between Hamlet and Ophelia, we will see that Polonius is always identified as a procurer, sacrificer in one way or another of the woman, and that this identification is always made by a Hamlet to whom the woman is sacrificed. In other words we must now see the whole pattern through Hamlet's eyes and note Polonius's responses. We will find an inner conversation, an inner confrontation. In ii.ii Hamlet calls Polonius a 'fishmonger' (i.e., a bawd), which Polonius denies in 'not I, my lord/ then immediately proves in action. Next Hamlet identifies Polonius with Jephthah, daughter-sacrificer, and with Lot, doubly so as well as victim/participator in incest. Throughout this scene Polonius's answers are brief and nominal. Hamlet's next remark about him, addressed to the Players and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is in the same vein: 'He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.' The Players having arrived, Hamlet jokes with sexual emphasis (in the character of hunter), using the gross mockery of the French which is so standard an Elizabethan cliché: 'We'll e'en to't like French falconers, fly at anything we see.' There follow now Polonius/King/Hamlet as spy on Hamlet and Ophelia and Hamlet's violent attack on woman and.marriage. But this is qualified by self-condemnation: 'You should not have believ'd me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.' And again, ... I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me ... with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all...

This Polonius/Hamlet-woman action, having its own precisely identifiable end, beginning, and progress, seems to stand as an illuminating parallel to patterns both smaller and larger than itself, which end in v.ii, and i.i. It inevitably forces us to the centre, the Mousetrap.

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If in the simplest sense the sequence is that of a King/father defending himself in respect to the 'owning' of a woman, but killed by a son/nephew who immediately takes the Queen/mother, we may look centripetally at The Murder of Gonzago' as all of Hamlet on the stage at that moment. Or we may adjust our vision from the centre to the perimeter, or apply both views at once to the whole oí Hamlet. If in this we sense that the son/King/father is metaphorically also hunter of himself, spy on himself even as he 'kills' himself, and that 'mutes and audience to this act' are not to be excluded - indeed are necessary in the tragic ritual - then perhaps we come very close to plucking out the heart of the mystery of Shakespeare's art, if not that of Hamlet. While the patterns in tellers, killers, soldiers, and hunters have all begun with the simplest concept of Aristotle's 'the end is everywhere the chief thing,' the intricate formulations of spies seem to have begun with Polonius's interrogation of Ophelia in i.iii. But it is clear that audiences are to be thought of as those who watch, who observe, and are yet participators in the very act of watching. We have the audience in v.ii equated exactly with that in i.ii and that in the Mousetrap. We have as the final action the bearing of Hamlet 'to the stage' where his story may be observed, and we have as the beginning action the intense watching by sentinels not, as one might expect, for a military enemy, but for the reappearance of the Ghost of a Hamlet. Once more then end is beginning, in acts of watching, observing, spying. That this spying is done by multiple-parallel figures and audiences on a stage and in the theatre is not indifferent, and this will presently bring us back to the peculiar importance of the Polonius/Hamlet identity. Mack is most helpful to the gaining of a significant perspective: The most pervasive ... image ... is the pattern evolved around the three words, "show," "act," "play." "Show" seems to be Shakespeare's unifying image in Hamlet. Through it he pulls together and exhibits in a single focus much of the diverse material in his play. The ideas of seeming, assuming, and putting on; the images of clothing, painting, mirroring; the episode of the dumb show and the play within the play; the characters of Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet himself- all these at one time or another, and usually more than once, are drawn into the range of implications flung around the play by "show"' (43-4). This view, however correct, would seem to indicate that something is indeed shown. But Mack is just as aware as a host of other readers that Hamlet remains an enigma. 'Shakespeare's mind seems to worry this phrase ["put on"] in the play as much as Hamlet's mind worries the problem of acting in a world of surfaces ... But what does "put on"

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mean? A mask, or a frock or livery - our "habit"? The King is left guessing, and so are we' (40-1). Would it then not seem correct that the essential fact is an agonizing attempt to show that which finally cannot be uncovered however many times and in however many ways there may be attempts to show it and to spy it out? Does not Hamlet himself say this where we began? You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death, Is strict in his arrest) O, I could tell you But let it be. O God, Horatio, ... tell my story.

It would seem that the very essence of great tragedy is that it seeks to spy out and show something destructive and terrifying which in any final sense cannot be grasped or said rationally, something which can be represented only in images of the experience. Yet this experience cannot be shown in its pure state, for then it becomes chaotic, a madness, as Hamlet offstage grates 'so harshly all his days of quiet /With turbulent and dangerous lunacy,' or it remains mute as the Hamlet whose look is 'so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell /To speak of horrors ...' Tragic myth is quest for self-discovery in the most profound sense of that term, the final discovery that self and what controls it to its own agony remain mystery, riddle, enigma. Amlothi is a riddler. Oedipus's pride lies in his reputation for solving a childlike riddle that disguises merely the appearances of beginning, middle, and end of man in his life; he is forced to his own bleeding, empty eyes by the riddle of self in nature. Shakespeare, as his great Greek predecessor, uses the art form which is, of all, the most powerful and flexible mode of espial and selfespial. In the immediate fact of Hamlet this brings us again to the curiously central position of Polonius/Hamlet. Divided into literal entities, this invented figure is director, actor, critic, part or all of an audience. Hamlet, who is also a writer or reviser, is more in this than Polonius, but Hamlet is always more than any of the alter-egos that together make up the enigma of man that he is. These functions, whether they seem to be in Polonius or in Hamlet, are exercised over and over again in tellings of Hamlet's story. A consideration of the several elements of drama will

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again bring us from one part of the play or another, or from its whole inevitably to its centre. To paraphrase Coleridge, the whole lies in every part; so in this sense it does not matter where one begins: the end (and the beginning) is always the same. Of peculiar interest is the utterly sophisticated interplay of patterns achieved by Shakespeare in the ordering and imaging forth of what is a very simple action per se. It will be well to note that always, everywhere, there is Hamlet's obsession with that which is hidden and which, if uncovered, is horrifying, disgustingly revolting, however much at the same time he is compelled to find himself through espial at the very centre of that which he abhors. It should not be surprising that in subsequent inquiry this centripetal intensity will show an identity with structure. In Pater's words all art constantly aspires to the condition of music - total identity of matter and form. We turn now then to elements of drama as these appear in characters and in the disposition of parts as they are interrelated in the whole, and are the whole, of Hamlet.

5 Players

HAMLET Play ...

I'll have these players

Maynard Mack's illuminating remarks on multiple but identical audiences should be enough to indicate the use of drama as an element of drama. Throughout, drama and various elements in and relevant to the theatre are means within Hamlet. And as Mack points out in his question, Where ... does the playing end?' the outward view from the Mousetrap moves invisibly through an invisible wall between stage actors and the real audience watching Hamlet. The next inference seems inescapable: the circumferential wall of the Globe is just as much doubly penetrated with humanity all around it looking in and Hamlet at its centre looking both outwards and inwards at his heart and centre. Many inferences have already been drawn here from what is perhaps the most distinguishing element of Shakespeare's art, its manner, that is, the almost endless parallels between parts of scenes, scenes, scenes and acts, characters, and all else.1 Here, if parallels hold, i.ii and the Mousetrap each must be a duel just as much as the final scene in v.ii is, and with the same contestants. Moreover what is contested for must be the same. Shakespeare himself identifies his audiences as spectators, spies, observers of this duel and its consequences: HAM You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act...

Mutes are actors who speak no lines - here the court all around the protagonists. However Shakespeare does not write 'mutes and audience' but 'mutes or audience,' that is, the audience in the ordinary sense of spectators at the theatre are interchangeable with mutes; they are not observers merely but silent participators in the act.

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So far considered the identities and relationships in audiences have been fairly simple. But the term must be discriminated more precisely. If we explore the implications from one extreme to the other, or from both extremes to the centre, we will find ourselves deep in the pattern of. Hamlet.

Audiences HAMLET ... whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe.

Dialogue is apparently the simplest element of dramatic manner, so familiar as to have no longer any special identity except that which poetry or other elements of style allow, for example, recognition of this or that figure, or of poetic force. But dialogue means minimally that two figures stand alternately (or if more than two variously) in the positions of speaker and/or actor, opposite or confronting a listener, observer, audience. Dialogue is not typically thought of as a technical element of drama in the sense that soliloquy and dumb show are. Yet it is through dialogue that a playwright can, indeed must, present so essential an element as thought, that is, either extended arguments or single assertions of universals that are the basis for choice to act or not to act. For examples we may recall Creon's long speech in self-defence against accusations of treason with Oedipus as audience, or the dialogue between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth as to whether or not they shall kill the king, where each in turn becomes audience. We may note actions not arranged by a character in the play yet observed by an audience in the dramatic action. The clearest of these are the two scenes of Ophelia's madness. In the first the King, the Queen, and Horatio are audience; in the second, the King, the Queen, and Laertes. Of the same kind but qualified in an important respect are the gravemakers' scene and the burial of Ophelia. Horatio/Hamlet is the audience at the beginning of the first, then deliberately spy-audience at the beginning of the second. Horatio/Hamlet also becomes actor in both scenes, in the first rationally contemplative, in the second violently aggressive. The element of espial in the burial scene shows in an obvious way that in Hamlet all spies are audiences, all audiences spies. Interplay of audience-actor gains complexity and ambiguity in two other scenes. The Pyrrhus speech is asked for by Hamlet; he wants to be audience for it. But in fact he himself acts part of it to Polonius, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, and the Players, then exchanges positions with the

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First Player to become part of the audience. Again, in i.i the Ghost is the actor; sentinel-spies who have been audience to this dramatic action twice before are now joined by a special character, Horatio, as audience who may be able to take part in the action. But Horatio cannot take part in the Ghost's drama which needs a violent, passionate participator. This kind of audience appears în i.iv and v, when Hamlet becomes part of the sentinel-spy group, a critical difference concurrent with a difference in the Ghost, who no longer appeals, but directs Hamlet to another place on the stage. Here only Hamlet is audience, and a most special one; he cannot escape listening: 'Speak. I am bound to hear/ Further instances have their claims on our attention. There are, for example, actions arranged by someone to be observed, spied on, with the arranger as audience, sometimes in a fairly literal sense, always in the metaphor of alter-ego. The clearest parallel in this is Polonius/Hamlet, the one almost a total parody (no less deadly) of the other. Two such scenes obvious to common knowledge are the nunnery scene and its counterpart with the Queen, arranged and acted in as audience by Polonius, acceded to and ambiguously acted in as audience by King and Ghost. Less obvious is i.ii up to the first soliloquy, which appears to be a formal political audience arranged and conducted by the King, who seems also to be the chief actor. In exactly the same place we find the action of v.ii.210-346, the final single combat, again arranged by the King, with the same dramatis personae as audience, excepting the absence of a literal Polonius and the notable absence of Rosencrantz/Guildenstern (Cornelius and Voltemand in i.ii). As many scenes have already been recognized as Hamlet's story, it would seem reasonable that each scene having an audience is the playing of that story to that audience. But the only scene generally thought of as having an audience, because it is a full play within a play, is the Mousetrap. That it is Hamlet's story in a far more sophisticated complexity than has yet been noted may be true. That Hamlet is its director and part of its audience and no less its chief actor, and a good deal more, remains to be explored in a separate central consideration. Here at the centre of the play we see audiences in contracting depths, and at the same time in expanding distances; here we can best grasp the identity of play and myth. Here, if we could extend Mack's view to its farthest extreme, not just to the essence of Hamlet as imaginative literary invention, but beyond it to its ideal meaning, we would be in the incommunicable substance of myth. This macrocosmic/microcosmic centre can be found again and again in the soliloquies, intense self-dialogues that interfuse actor and audience.

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The whole Mousetrap is the heart of the mystery, the agonizing inward spying to find the mole, the pioner, to see the violence hidden in the canker, the imposthume, the dram of e'il, the corruption from which contagious blastments are most imminent. But this violence does not act alone; there must be a recipient. Bend the line of myth from the heart of Hamlet to meet the point of mystery, its other extreme in Nature, and we are at once in the Globe in its multiple senses: the living skull, the round-walled theatre, the world, the circling universe. Hamlet and Man are one; myth and Hamlet are one. With Hamlet we celebrate a ritual again and again, without end, 'whiles memory holds a seat/In this distracted globe.' But audiences, however ubiquitous and possibly dominating, are only part of the drama used within the drama. Other details already touched on deserve more attention.

Critics POLONIUS The best actors in the world ... scene individable, or poem unlimited ... HAMLET ... caviary to the general; but... an excellent play ...

Other elements of drama used within Hamlet present extraordinary complexities of detail and arrangement. Only in acts n and m are they explicitly expressed, however much they are present from the first line to the last. Beginning with what is most explicit will immediately focus attention on Polonius/Hamlet, just as every other part or extension of the pattern is in terms of the unified diversity of Hamlet. Polonius/ Hamlet is almost always the image of parody, Hamlet mocking a garrulous, foolish, aged extension of himself. First there is general knowledge of drama and typical companies as exemplified by the travelling players. Hamlet's comment, although general, is subtly particular in that the personae identified have fairly clear resemblance to those in Hamlet-, more particularly, Hamlet identifies himself in '- his Majesty shall have tribute of me ...' Too, the parallel to Ophelia's language in madness is quite explicit: 'the lady shall say her mind freely, or [i.e., 'even though'] the blank verse shall halt for't.' A little later Polonius gives his assessment of the players and something of historical influences in the theatre: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-

89 Players historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and liberty, these are the only men.

Despite the manifest foolishnesses there are echoes here, towards the latter half, of what Hamlet is, notably in the apparent but not actual violation of unity and order. Next we come to Polonius/Hamlet as a specific critic in a pattern emphasizing the parody: a dominating Hamlet illuminates it with both a large grasp of theatre and the usual mockery of his parodied self. Requesting a 'passionate speech,' he thoroughly explores what is a good play, a comment just as suggestive oí Hamlet as are the personae in ii.ii.313-19. I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted ; or if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleas'd not the million, 'twas caviary to the general; but it was (as I receiv'd it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember one said there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, nor no matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation; but call'd it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine.

After the Pyrrhus speech this same serious view is completed in 'Let them be well us'd; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.' During the Pyrrhus passage there is a minimal echo from Polonius. Of Hamlet's performance he says, 'Fore God, my lord, well spoken, with good accent and good discretion,' but he interrupts the Player with This is too long,' only to gain Hamlet's rude rejoinder, It shall to the barbers, with your beard ... He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps. Say on; come to Hecuba.

This leads to the 'mobled queen': 1 PLAY But who, ah woe! had seen the mobled queen HAM 'The mobled queen'? POL That's good! 'Mobled queen' is good.

Presently diction becomes subject matter for Hamlet as director. It suggests the essence of all the ambiguities in Hamlet, that is, Hamlet's reply

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to Polonius in iii.ii that he reads 'words, words, words/ Granville-Barker remarks that Claudius 'habitually hides behind a smoke screen of words,' as do all the others save Horatio, Ophelia (except innocently in her madness), and, for the most part, the Queen.

Emotional ends HAMLET ... guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul...

We come now to conscious use within the play of something patently the final consequence in drama, its power to move. In this we find Polonius/Hamlet as completely one, and in parallel the PyrrhusPlayer as both actor and audience: his own playing and what he plays bring tears to his eyes. We have the Hamlet story acted by Player/Hamlet, responded to by Polonius, and, most violently, by Hamlet in soliloquy. Polonius's response is immediate: 'Look, whe'r he has not turn'd his colour, and has tears in's eyes. Prithee no more!' Hamlet's response moments later, but after he has carefully begun plans for the Mousetrap, shows him once again in a passion that turns inward: Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That, from her working, all his visage wann'd, Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech ; Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears.

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Quite apart from the attested power of drama we find cunning of a superior kind, for surely this melting of the fictive into another fictive in the guise of the real is more insinuating than the drama within the drama. But Shakespeare does not cheat; the dramatic fiction is admitted if obliquely in 'cue for passion/ and 'drown the stage.' Immediately Hamlet (an actor on a stage) recounting his passionate story does 'cleave the general ear with horrid speech' (likely at its beginning and end in tears), then again turns to the power of drama, 'the very cunning of the scene/ to strike the soul. He will have the players play even as he plays to catch a guilty Ghost and a guilty King.2

Playwrights HAMLET My tables! Meet it is I set it down ...

We now turn to another element of Hamlet's character: he is a playwright or an emender of dramatic writing, a function he shares with the King. No other figure has this characteristic. The obvious evidence comes near to and preceding the Mousetrap: ... You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in't, could you not?

But we must go back to act i: My tables! Meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [Writes. ] So, uncle, there you are.

The ultimate position will be clearest if we consider the King's writings first and Hamlet's final writings last. The King's are always the same in kind as are Hamlet's, that is, they are all products of King/Hamlet, part of the consistent reiteration of the Hamlet story. They are letters, commissions, 'sovereign processes' designed to divert attack by a son/nephew, finally to have him killed, or they are rewritings of a play or kingly process to catch the King. The King begins: ... we have here writ To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras,

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to suppress His further gait herein ... and we here dispatch You, good Cornelius, and you, Voltemand Giving to you no further personal power To business with the King, more than the scope Of these dilated articles allow. [Gives a paper. ]

Next, after the threat to the King from Hamlet in the Ophelia encounter, we read, with possible surprise at the King's celerity (he has just stepped from behind the arras): I have in quick determination Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England ...

But the journey to violent death is postponed; the players are to be seen and heard first. The son/nephew's intention now being even clearer to the King, although not in terms generally understood, the King reasserts his intention to control the action by written commission, this time to the twin King-egos, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern: I like him not, nor stands it safe with us To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you; I your commission will forthwith dispatch And he to England shall along with you.

After the violence in the Queen's chamber and the resulting fear of the King at Polonius/King's death, the King finally completes his writing of the act (he is as dilatory as, so famously, Hamlet is): Away! for everything is seal'd and done That else leans on th' affair.

Immediately after in soliloquy the King makes his last reference to his writings in apostrophe to England: ... thou mayst not coldly set Our sovereign process, which imports at full,

93 Players By letters congruing to that effect, The present death of Hamlet.

What remains as playwrighting in the play is Hamlet's. First there are letters to the King and to the Queen. Those to the King, shared with Laertes, indicate that Hamlet will confront Claudius 'naked' and 'alone'; they are phrased diplomatically. It is this writing that moves the King to immediate action with Laertes: Hamlet must die. In the mythic pattern Hamlet/King challenges King/Hamlet, and in corollary Laertes/Hamlet, to the final act. The complete manuscript of the dramatic act, written by King/ Hamlet, rewritten by Hamlet/King, in a version authorized by the Danish seal of kingly succession, that is, by Father/King, comes immediately before the final encounter. Hamlet gives account of another 'dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in't': Rashly And prais'd be rashness for it; Up from my cabin, My sea-gown scarf d about me, in the dark Grop'd I to find out them; had my desire, Finger'd their packet, and in fine withdrew To mine own room again; making so bold (My fears forgetting manners) to unseal Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio (O royal knavery!), an exact command, My head should be struck off. Being thus benetted round with villainies, Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play. I sat me down; Devis'd a new commission; wrote it fair. An earnest conjuration from the King, He should those bearers put to sudden death, Not shriving time allow'd. I had my father's signet in my purse,

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Which was the model of that Danish seal; Folded the writ up in the form of th' other, Subscrib'd it, gave't th' impression, plac'd it safely, The changeling never known.

With this the dramatic writing within the drama ends-, King/Hamlet has written in brief the double character in which the conflicts lie. What is more, and this within it, is what Shakespeare has written. Actors POLONIUS Upon my honour HAMLET Then came each actor on his ass -

To remark that actors in Hamlet are made to act the part of actors might well deserve Horatio's reply to Hamlet: There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this.

Yet there are two brief passages showing especially Shakespeare's amusedly sophisticated yet serious use of the technique. Both suggest the meaning and form oí Hamlet through Polonius. HAM My lord, you play'd once i' th' university, you say? POL That did I my lord, and was accounted a good actor. HAM What did you enact? POL I did enact Julius Caesar; I was kill'd i' th' Capitol; Brutus kill'd me. HAM It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there. Be the players ready?

The echo here of the Hamlet story obscurely present in i.i, Horatio's account of the killing of Caesar, has been noted. The passage is also prologue to Polonius/King's being killed by Hamlet in in.iv; it stands halfway between the planning of the act and its doing, a kind of centre in the whole action. The second passage, again superficially a bit of comedy at Polonius's expense, appears in his function as director of Reynaldo's spying.

95 Players POL Marry, sir, here's my drift, And I believe it is a fetch of warrant. You laying these slight sullies on my son As 'twere a thing a little soil'd i' th' working, Mark you, Your party in converse, him you would sound, Having ever seen in the prenominate crimes The youth you breathe of guilty, be assur'd He closes with you in this consequence: 'Good sir,' or so, or 'friend,' or 'gentleman' According to the phrase or the addition Of man and country KEY Very good, my lord. POL And then sir, does 'a this - 'a does - What was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something! Where did I leave? REY At 'closes in the consequence,' at 'friend or so,' and 'gentleman.' POL At 'closes in the consequence' - Ay, marry! He closes thus ...

Polonius loses his lines, needs a cue, which he asks for and gets in prose. This is no new speech for him but part of a script. He has enacted it as many times as Hamlet has gone through its unending cycle. Directors HAMLET Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing ...

There is no way of examining any one of the dramatic elements within the dramatic elements of Hamlet without mentioning others. The function of directing has already been touched on, but we may now consider directors of dramatic actions. Polonius/Hamlet is again the most obvious example. If all actions, not just those in an obvious dramatic framework (i.e., a kind of staging and an audience), be considered, as seems necessary, we may note so apparently non-dramatic a series of directions as Polonius gives to guide the actions of Laertes/Hamlet and Ophelia in i.iii. But what achieves a fuller dramatic form is that he shortly provides an audience for each in terms of his directions: Reynaldo/Polonius as spy on a

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sexual Laertes/Hamlet; Polonius/King behind the arras as Ophelia is 'loosed' to Hamlet to act out an encounter. Ophelia's T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!' suggests that within the scene she is audience also. Moreover after the confrontation of Hamlet and the Queen we hear the Queen: 'Ah, mine own lord, what I have seen tonight!' At the beginning of the first Polonius directs Ophelia: Ophelia, walk you here ... Read on this book That show of such an exercise may colour Your loneliness.

At the beginning of the second, Polonius directs the Queen: Look you lay home to him. Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with, And that your Grace hath screen'd and stood between Much heat and him. I'll silence me even here. Pray you, be round with him.

This seems to be the full extent of Polonius/Hamlet as director. Far more detailed as one might expect is Hamlet, almost purely as Hamlet, in the centre of the play or near it in preparation for the Mousetrap. There is something hinting of direction in the preliminaries to the Pyrrhus speech, but there is much more in his directions to the Player-hunters. Very little is overlooked in this passage from the most practical detail to a controlling concept of the nature of drama: Hamlet sees the theatre clear and whole. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.3 Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who (for the most part) are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipp'd for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

97 Players Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely), that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably ... And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it...

This passage immediately precedes the Players' representation of the Hamlet story but is clearly so comprehensive as to apply anywhere in the play, indeed to drama generally. There remain several brief instances of Hamlet as director, but four of these can best be considered in detail in a separate exegesis of the Mousetrap in its full form; three more come in v.ii. In the Mousetrap we have, to Horatio: I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot, Even with the very comment of thy soul Observe my uncle ... Give him heedful note; For I mine eyes will rivet to his face ...

Next, to Lucianus in the play within, ... Begin, murderer. Leave thy damnable faces, and begin! Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.

From this direction we move to Hamlet's self-direction as he is about to go to the Queen's chamber, a reiteration of part of the Ghost's direction of Hamlet. Finally in this central context is the passionate, violent

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series of adjurations in the closet scene to the Queen as to her sexual conduct. We have noted Hamlet as director in v.ii, for playwrighting is itself directing actors throughout a play. In turning the King's deadly commission back onto the King by rewriting it, Hamlet is controlling the action. The duel is begun with King as director; then two discoveries, the poisoned wound and the poisoned Queen, turn Hamlet into director: O villainy! Ho! let the door be lock'd. Treachery! Seek it out.

Next, dying, he becomes director of the whole tragedy: Horatio, I am dead; Thou liv'st; report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied.

Now, in his purely rational form as Horatio, he directs the whole again: ... give order that these bodies High on a stage be placed to the view ...

But let this same be presently perform'd, to be echoed by the soldier-Hamlet, Fortinbras: ... call the noblest to the audience Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage; Take up the bodies ... Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

We have seen Hamlet as director of the act in several guises: in what seems to be his pure form in parts of acts 11, HI, and v; in what seems his least obvious identity, Fortinbras, at the end; in his almost purely rational character as Horatio/Hamlet at the end; in the very obvious but not in the least non-serious buffoonery of Polonius/ Hamlet. All of these Hamlet forms are brief, or relatively brief, as contrasted to Claudius, who is extensively the director from i.ii into v.ii.

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King/Hamlet is the political version of Horatio/Hamlet; he is a specialist in the devious patterns of delegated functions, in hiding behind extensions of self which act; he is inherently a kind of compromiser with the pressure and danger of all too real fact, the attacks of his own passionate nature from the obverse Hamlet/King. He is throughout on the defensive; his delayed and delaying attacks are defensive, and finally he loses just as does a passionate Hamlet. Much of Claudius/Hamlet's direction we have already seen: Cornelius/Voltemand is directed to direct Norway to re-direct a dangerous nephew; Rosencrantz/Guildenstern is directed to spy on a dangerous nephew; is directed to direct England to kill a dangerous nephew. This last, despite urgings for speed, is delayed through many repetitions from m. i to the end of iv. After these follows the apostrophe to England directing 'the present death of Hamlet/ Several other scenes show King/Hamlet as director in one matter or another, but the sequence aimed at the death of Hamlet has further parts. The first several of these show King/Hamlet as director of Laertes in the attack finally made: 'Will you be rul'd by me?' Laertes responds: 'Ay, my lord, / So you will not o'errule me to a peace.' King/Hamlet is the director, Laertes/Hamlet an eagerly violent tool. What remains in this part of the action is the King's direction of the single combat. In an echo of 'the seal'd compact' the King begins the act; he asks 'Cousin Hamlet, /You know the wager?' to hear 'Very well, my lord'; he seeks to end the act, 'Part them! they are incens'd'; and presently he dies by Hamlet's poisoned sword, the poisoned Queen dead at his side. Whatever this final enigmatic action may mean, we may gain understanding of it by recalling its similarity to i.ii in which the King seems in complete control. Whom he directs and how has its parallel at the end. After a narrative prologue, a retelling of the Hamlet story, he addresses himself to smooth political disposal of three young men: Young Fortinbras, soldier-nephew of the successor of dead Norway; Laertes, courtierson of a counsellor so intimately involved with the throne as to be a brother; 'my cousin Hamlet, and my son -,' sombre auditor, and most profoundly committed enemy. In the most concentrated sense of myth King/Hamlet is here directing three other selves: one, a violent potential attacker is sent on a diversion; another, equally dangerous, is to be kept near and under strict surveillance, however smoothly disguised this fact is in rhetoric. But he who appears to be least of the three is dealt with most interestingly and most provocatively, Laertes/Hamlet. To him, the King says,

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Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine, And thy best graces spend it at thy will!

- a direction parallel to what Polonius intimates to Reynaldo in n.i. Sexual liberty is encouraged even as the danger of violent attack because of it requires diversion and surveillance. But King in the sense of Claudius is not the beginning. He is only surrogate for a King-director more mysterious and more powerful by far - the Ghost - and this brings us back to both the end, a dead King Hamlet, and the beginning, the Ghost of a dead Hamlet. In i.iv, still mute, Ghost/Hamlet begins his directing: HOR It beckons you to go away with it, As if it some impartment did desire To you alone. MAR Look with what courteous action It waves you to a more removed ground. HAM It waves me still. Go on. I'll follow thee. Still am I call'd. Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me! I say, away! - Go on. I'll follow thee.

Equalled only by the first and sixth soliloquies as telling, and by Hamlet's attack on the Queen as acting of the story, Ghost/Hamlet's directing of the act is an urgent version of King/Hamlet's careful political direction of Laertes/Hamlet in v.ii. The Ghost is, like the dying Hamlet/King in v.ii, director of the whole action, which in turn will be directed and acted by Hamlet in a multiplicity of ways. As he acts it violently against the Queen, Ghost/ Hamlet appears again as director: Do not forget. This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. But look, amazement on thy mother sits. O, step between her and her fighting soul! Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Speak to her, Hamlet.

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There remain three more elements of drama within drama that may reinforce what has so far been set forth: (1) prologues, and, as essentially the same in function, presenters; (2) dumb shows, perhaps the most significant of all dramatic forms in Hamlet; and (3) choruses. These elements are best seen in m.ii, although as always they are present in the end.

Prologues HAMLET Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play.

Shakespeare's reshaping of conventional forms is nowhere more evident than in his uses of the function of prologue. Sometimes quite traditional as in Romeo and Juliet, or inventive to meet some unusual need, as in Henry v, he achieves his most notable adaptation before Hamlet in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. Here, while mocking traditional prologues through travesties by the mechanicals in Tyramus and Thisby,' he establishes probabilities for the several other actions in initial scenes that are prologues in function but nevertheless organic parts of the whole action. The function is subtly retained; the old traditional form disappears. The one obvious prologue in Hamlet is mocked also, not for egregious efforts to reduce imagination to literal equivalents as inMSND, but because of its brevity, and, by implication, its complete lack of reference to the dumb show which it follows or the play which it precedes. Such relevance, however, is established for it by Hamlet, who, in the whole sequence, suggests clearly what the action of Gonzago will be as he sees it. OPH Belike this show imports the argument of the play. Enter Prologue. HAM We shall know by this fellow. The players cannot keep counsel; they'll tell all. OPH Will 'a tell us what this show meant? HAM Ay, or any show that you'll show him. Be not you asham'd to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means. OPH You are naught, you are naught!4 I'll mark the play. PRO For us, and for our tragedy, Here stooping to your clemency, We beg your hearing patiently. [Exit. ]

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HAM Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring? OPH Tis brief, my lord. HAM As woman's love.

The action in Gonzago will deal with the brevity of woman's, and the lustful demands of both woman's and man's, love. Hamlet once more shares character with another: it is he who is prologue to the action, a matter inextricably intertwined with the function of dumb show as will presently be seen. But the brevity of the Prologue is of consequence too, both in respect to other prologues in the art of the play, and much more profoundly in the meaning of it. The equivalents in art we have already seen in a whole sequence of brief appearances before disappearances. In short review, we have noted Francisco, Cornelius/Voltemand, Laertes, Ghost, Horatio, Reynaldo, Prologue for Gonzago, Polonius in the closet scene, Young Fortinbras in iv.iv, and the Second Clown in v.i. But if we consider the cyclical nature of the actions, the possibilities for prologue-like scenes and statements seem without end: everything is prologue to what follows. This is, of course, construing the formal prologue as equivalent at all times to expression of its essential meaning, however it may be expressed.5 For example, Horatio as narrator in both the Fortinbras and Caesar passages is not readily distinguishable from what a prologue is. Prologues are a special form for the establishing of probability: at their best they tell all without telling all in any obvious sense. In Hamlet, as often as not, narrative, or advice and command, or ambiguously acted story is both prologue for what follows and identical with it. There seems no particular need to attempt to identify every instance; the principle and its various forms in the simpler sense seem clear. But one further prologue is of particular interest in that it tells the Hamlet story in parody akin to the parody in Polonius/Hamlet, and in that it is in a form underlying the action from i.i.l, the challenge. This is the formal challenge from the King to single combat with Laertes through 'this waterfly,' Osric. Osric is a courtier in the extreme of affectation in dress, but especially in language. If one is not just amused at Hamlet's deliberate self-mockery of another alter-ego, but translates the extravagances into as clear and unequivocal a language as possible, the story is quite apparent. Osric's first line is no less than what happens mysteriously in i.i.3, 'Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark.' Hamlet continues the pattern: '... 'tis a vice to know him. He hath much land and fertile. Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king's mess ... [He is] spacious in the possession of dirt.' Once again 'property,' this

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time fertile land, is the criterion, and no less is it dirt, something disgusting and worthless. Next we find again the 'seal'd compact': '... his Majesty bade me signify to you that 'a has laid a great wager on your head ...' Then, echo of the Ghost's plea, although in ridiculous reference to Osric's hat, 'I beseech you remember/ Now Laertes (i.e., Laertes/Hamlet) is described as full of 'excellent differences ... the continent of what part a gentleman would see/ in Kittredge's words 'the sum total of whatever qualities one gentleman would like to find in another. A "continent"'is literally "that which contains."' Taken in his fullest identity Hamlet is indeed the 'continent' of man. Hamlet's mocking response, really to and about himself, is a masterpiece of euphuistic double entendre. In part, 'to divide him inventorially would dozy th' arithmetic of memory ... in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article, and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.' Horatio's comment is to the point: 'Is't not possible to understand in another tongue?' Kittredge helps in providing another tongue to reveal the Hamlet behind a thick smokescreen of words.6 It does indeed stagger 'th' arithmetic of memory' (in what distant darkness is Cain?) to gain inventory of Hamlet's identities. But in truthful praise 'his infusion [is] of ... dearth and rareness ...' His infusion, writes Kittredge, is 'the nature with which he is .. endowed,' something so rarely rare that only he is his own image, 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form' in Ophelia's weeping. '... Who wishes to keep pace with him can do so only as the shadow follows the substance' (160). In Hamlet not only does the shadow follow the substance - 'I am most dreadfully attended' - but the substance follows the shadow. Our own memories too should serve. His 'infusion' is attested early in the play in Hamlet's own words: So oft it chances in particular men That, for some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth, - wherein they are not guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin ...

If dreams are memories 'who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more': HAM O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

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GUIL Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. HAM A dream itself is but a shadow. ROS Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow. HAM Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch'd heroes the beggars' shadows. Shall we to th' court?

Of Laertes Hamlet says: 'to know a man well were to know himself.' It would appear that, despite the protean voices and figures which are Hamlet, Shakespeare was quite aware that Hamlet, mirror image of Hamlet, is yet the shadow of Hamlet; although Hamlet cries out at the end, 'O, I could tell you -,' the shadow follows: 'the rest is silence.' This much is the character of Hamlet in his story. Having just before Osric's challenge said of Laertes, 'by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his/ Hamlet now turns with Osric to the 'seal'd compact' that will govern the final single combat. His oblique words are no less bawdy than the more direct words to Ophelia in m.ii. They are as indirect if lighter in spirit as those used to the Queen in ni.iv. But as this part of the exchange must be explored in a fuller context, a few lines must here suffice: OSR I mean, sir, for his weapon ... HAM What's his weapon? OSR Rapier and dagger. HAM That's two of his weapons - but well. OSR The King, sir, hath wager'd with him six Barbary horses;... six French rapiers and poniards ... Three of the carriages ... are ... very responsive to the hilts, most delicate carnages, and of a very liberal conceit. HAM ... But on! Six Barbary horses against six French swords ... and three liberal-conceited carriages: that's the French bet against the Danish.7

In all this, as in all the representations of the act, Hamlet against Hamlet always is in some fashion, if sometimes obscurely, involved with woman. There is also a special related form, the presenter, not so much a prologue as a figure who comments on a dramatic action throughout its presentation; as might be expected this figure is Hamlet. Immediately after the dumb show he answers Ophelia: 'Marry, this is miching malhecho; it means mischief.' Later he says to the Queen about the PlayerQueen, 'O, but she'll keep her word,' and goes on to give details of 'a murder done in Vienna' and to explain a character coming on stage:

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'This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.' As Lucianus poisons the Player-King Hamlet again explains. This is all quite in the tradition of presenter, but in the middle of it Ophelia says, 'You are as good as a chorus, my lord/ another variant term for the interpretative function in prologue and presenter, one which will demand a separate consideration presently.

Dumb shows HORATIO What, has this thing appear'd again tonight?

Granville-Barker remarks that 'dumb shows are apt to be, as Hamlet says, "inexplicable"' (93). John Dover Wilson is less casual. The dumb show in m.ii is, he says, essential to the stability of the whole edifice. Greg has taught him, he writes, that there is 'something odd about this dumb-show ... that [needs] an explanation ... which could not possibly have anything to do with the character of [Hamlet] ' (19-20). But somewhat inconsistently he also remarks: ' [Shakespeare] put the whole plot into a dumb-show' (146). To begin an attempt to understand what seems inexplicable, one can turn equally to v.ii, the end, to i.i, the beginning, or to m.ii, the Mousetrap, the very centre. Only in the last is there a dumb show in the formal dramatic sense. Although the choice has been to approach much of what has been explored from the position of m.ii, perhaps the end, that is, what we find at the culmination of v.ii, should be used again. What seems to be relevant is between Hamlet's 'the rest is silence' and the last speech of the play, where Fortinbras commands that all the bodies, in the silence of death, be taken up, presumably like Hamlet's, to the stage. Here dumb show and prologue come together in precisely the same order as in m.ii. As Fortinbras sees the just-dead Hamlet, he asks a question that indicates some sort of foreknowledge; his next remark, in the language of successful hunter and utterly violent soldier, makes clear that he is querying the mystery of the dumb show of death, just as do the words of Horatio: FORT Where is this sight? HOR What is it you would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search. FORT This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death, What feast is toward in thine eternal cell

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That thou so many princes at a shot So bloodily hast struck?

This sight' is the eloquently silent dead - Laertes/King/Hamlet and Queen: together they are the dumb show in which, in 'woe or wonder/ is hidden the meaning of Hamlet's act. In receding depths behind them are the now silent Polonius and Ophelia; behind these an earlier Hamlet and an earlier Fortinbras with their Queen; behind these Brutus, Caesar and Servilia, Pyrrhus, Priam and Hecuba, a ghostly procession of the silent dead, past and ever-present dumb show. Behind them all, in the rank and gross garden, Adam and Eve, and the brother-killer Cain. Immediately Horatio asks that 'these bodies/High on a stage be placed to the view' and proposes that he tell the 'unknowing world / How these things came about'; then without pause he epitomizes the action of Hamlet. Fortinbras orders this to be done. We have here a prologue after a dumb show, voiced together by a Horatio/Hamlet and a Fortinbras/Hamlet - the embodiments of reason and of the hellish violence of Pyrrhus - a prologue to what will, in the telling and acting which begins at i.i.l, become the conflict in which Hamlet is both compulsively driven and compulsively resistant, with Queen and Ophelia essential acquiescent figures in the act. From this beginning at the end one can go at will to any of several parallel scenes in any order without losing the essence of Hamlet. And although in almost every sense the Mousetrap is the totality of Hamlet, its dumb show is perhaps an exception. This dumb show is complete, although the Mousetrap appears to be interrupted; but other formulations of dumb show are equally indicative of significance, especially as one finds structural niceties that always emphasize a centre. We may then consider act i first. The Ghost is a dumb show in i.i and, in continuum, in i.iv. It enters silently, leaves, and enters again after Horatio's narrative prologue, then disappears, despite Horatio's repeated pleas that it speak. In the continuation in i.iv, after Horatio's account of the Ghost to Hamlet in i.i, the dumb-show Ghost beckons Hamlet, who follows to hear in i.v the prologue for the whole action spoken by an articulately passionate Ghost. The order is the same: first dumb show, then spoken prologue. Contained as a centre between i.i and i.iv and v we find another dumb show, this the first physical appearance of Hamlet from i.ii.l to 65. As the King speaks, announcing the disposition of Fortinbras and Laertes, Hamlet, in deepest black, sits silently, a dumb show in cerements beyond any ordinary blackness. His own future having been

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determined by the political King/Hamlet, he speaks in soliloquy his passionate perturbations about his mother's sexual liberty, prologue to the acts that follow. Indeed, although the silent grave be dumb, Toul deeds will rise, /Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes/ The grave has been silent, but it speaks its own prologue when the Ghost speaks. The next variation, in which Polonius is director-prologue after Hamlet as dumb show, is both more complex and more extended, from ii.ii to ni.iv. The complexity is much greater, for Hamlet in dumb show is precisely identifiable in a series of parallels with the Ghost. Ophelia describes Hamlet's dumb show: OPH O my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted! POL With what, i' th' name of God? OPH My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, No hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd, Ungart'red, and down gyved to his ankle; Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors - he comes before me. POL What said he? OPH He took me by the wrist and held me hard; Then goes he to the length of all his arm, And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow, He falls to such perusal of my face As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so. At last, a little shaking of mine arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. That done, he lets me go, And with his head over his shoulder turn'd He seem'd to find his way without his eyes, For out o' doors he went without their help And to the last bended their light on me.

This dumb show unmistakably combines elements of the Ghost seen as dumb show in i.i; as reported in i.iii; seen again in i.iv; as narrating his story and condition in i.v; as seen in m.iv. Just as Ophelia is

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affrighted, Horatio trembles ancTlooks pale and the three sentries have before been 'distill'd /Almost to jelly with the act of fear ...' Hamlet too cries out: What may this mean That thou ... Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition ...?

Hamlet's paleness, his 'look so piteous' and 'sigh so piteous,' and his 'perusal of my face ... long stay'd he so,' 'with his other hand thus o'er his brow' (as though it were the visor of a helmet) are all anticipated in i.ii. HAM Then saw you not his face? HOR O, yes, my lord! He wore his beaver up. HAM What, look'd he frowningly? HOR A countenance more in sorrow than in anger. HAM Pale or red? HOR Nay, very pale. HAM And fix'd his eyes upon you? HOR Most constantly. HAM I would I had been there. HOR It would have much amaz'd you. HAM Very like, very like. Stay'd it long? HOR While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. BOTH [MAR and BER] Longer, longer.

Ophelia reports that Hamlet's stockings were 'down gyved,' that is, as though his feet were manacled like a prisoner's, and describes him As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors ...

The Ghost intimates just these things to Hamlet, explaining his need to be silent: 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...

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His 'prison house,' although usually identified as purgatory, is filled with hellish horror: My hour is almost come, When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames Must render up myself ... No reck'ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

But why should Hamlet show fear in looking at Ophelia, 'his knees knocking each other?' Now the Hamlet-Queen-Ghost scene seems the equivalent: Hamlet looking on the Queen with violently disarrayed sexual revulsion just as with Ophelia in the nunnery scene; the Ghost appearing in the dress of the bedchamber; the Queen describing Hamlet's fearful response in almost exactly the same words as those of the Ghost talking to Hamlet of the secrets of his prison house: QUEEN Alas, how is't with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy, And with th' incorporai air do hold discourse? Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep; And, as the sleeping soldiers in th' alarm, Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements, Start up and stand an end. GHOST 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 an end.

Hamlet's fear lies somehow in scenes in which he is in an encounter with the woman and is watched by his own Ghost, notably in the identity of King/Polonius, hidden, watching his attack on Ophelia; as King/Polonius, and then Ghost, observing his attack on the Queen. It is his own imagination 'foul as Vulcan's stithy,' his own sense 'of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me,' as essential part of encounters with woman, that distill him 'almost to jelly with the act of fear.'

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Hamlet's dumb-show appearance to Ophelia as precursor to both the Ophelia and Queen encounters emphasizes the identity of these two scenes. Both warn against the 'act' and in some sense encourage consummation of it. Between the two is the Mousetrap with its complete dumb show. There are small echoes: Polonius as act HI begins, Til silence me even here,' doubly ironic; the King's comment on the Queen's silence as act iv begins, 'There's matter in these sighs. These profound heaves/You must translate,' preliminary to her report of Hamlet's act in her chamber. Far more interesting is what is found as act v begins, the grave-makers and the dumb show they uncover. The scene is a churchyard cemetery. Observed for a time by Horatio/Hamlet while they dig up bones, and emphatically skulls, the grave-makers provide opportunity for Hamlet to explicate the dumb show of Death uncovered. It is Hamlet's story once again.8 In sequence we read: That skull had a tongue in it... How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if 'twere Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder! This might be a politician ...

a palpable description of Claudius/King/Hamlet as brother-killer. Next we have the conjecture that this skull might be that of a courtier - a Laertes, a Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, a Polonius, an Osric, a Hamlet, 'now my Lady Worm's': Here's a fine revolution, and we had the trick to see't ...

Hamlet continues the story: 'Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer ... his tenures and his tricks?' And This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries,' a clear parallel to 'a seal'd compact' about a King's 'property.' Not the least of this is 'recoveries,' the re-seizing of property seized (not Vouchers' but 'double vouchers'). 'The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box; and must th' inheritor himself have no more, ha?' The total of kingly processes is enough to fill a coffin; the inheritor will gain only a grave. There is further testimony from the silent skulls as Hamlet and the grave-maker collaborate to tell their common brief chronicle, parallel in time. Yorick is finally equated with Alexander, memory going back once more, only to be something rotten in the state of Denmark: HAM Dost thou think Alexander look'd o' this fashion i' th' earth? HOR E'en so. HAM And smelt so? Pah! [Puts down the skull. ]

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There is one further brief dumb show, parallel to 'Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage; /... Take up the bodies ...,' a solemn funeral procession. Enter [PRIESTS with] a coffin with LORDS attendant.

[in funeral pro cession] ,KING, QUEEN, LAERTES,

This too has its prologue, the grave-makers' discussion of Ophelia's death and the First Clown's ambiguities to Hamlet as to who is to be buried. It has its following act, Laertes' and Hamlet's violence at and in Ophelia's grave, a somewhat different version of the Hamlet story, brother fighting brother over the love of a sister-woman. Symbolically both die with her, then immediately come out of the grave to once more re-enact the whole story in v.ii. Choruses OPHELIA You are as good as a chorus, my lord.

The classic chorus in the Oedipus conveys both a sense of immediate engagement and a vision so large as to challenge the limits of human understanding. It is intimately part of Oedipus the agonized individual; it is the voice of man searching out his ultimate parentage on Kithairon, place of Oedipus's mythical birth, symbolic murder, and re-birth. But this chorus is a voice distinctly separate from Oedipus himself. Hamlet is, just as all else is in him, his own chorus in the several soliloquies. Much of what is in them is ambiguous; there are apparently self-contradictory meanings obscure to literal assessment, but perhaps clearer in some final metaphor. If the soliloquies are consistent with Hamlet's story in its most spare sense, as surely of all parts they ought to be, we should expect to find the nephew/son and father/uncle in conflict about possession of a woman. Too, if the soliloquies are choruses, they are likely to reflect, or repeat, or build up in some fashion, elements of Hamlet's character in the various elaborations of the 'act,' for example, Hamlet as playwright, hunter, spy, soldier, King-killer, and self-killer in some ambiguous sense. Again, if these are choruses, we may expect to find in them echoes of inescapable memories, for example of the persistent sense of hidden evil, of bad dreams; equally there will likely be intimations of what is to come.

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We have already seen that the first soliloquy (i.ii. 129-59) is, after Horatio's and the King's accounts, the fourth retelling of Hamlet's story. It must now be considered not as narrative, but as a pattern of related values, those which have driven Hamlet into an impenetrable mourning. It is 'that within which passes show' which we are made to feel in the soliloquy that images forth the universe, the world, the 'garden,' and the bedchamber in terms and figures that reveal the heart of Hamlet. What he sees is a Queen/mother/woman bedded in incestuous sheets with a 'satyr.' What he remembers is the same woman with an Hyperion on whom she would hang 'As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on ...' He sees an unweeded garden in a desolate world, nature rank and gross. This micro-macrocosmic vision we see again later in his dialogue with Rosencrantz/Guildenstern: ... 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 appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

What is farthest in Hamlet's vision is the 'Everlasting'; what is closest is the bedchamber, and central in it the sexually insatiable woman. But she can be so only by way of a King, or Kings, either Hyperion or satyr, or, what is more accurate, Hyperion/satyr. For this too the elaborate repetition comes in his encounter with the Queen, as Hamlet describes Father/Ghost and uncle/King in their microcosms even as he attacks the Queen violently in her bedchamber, this in turn repetition of the Ghost's command in i.v. That all of this is in Hamlet's mind is evident not only in the fact of soliloquy, but in that self-revelation begins and ends in his person: he contains the whole multiple image. Beginning and end have their peculiar interest, the first examinable here, the end later. The first four lines must be read in the context of the rest of the soliloquy. They seem to express two similar wishes that Hamlet may escape a world of incestuous lust. The third and fourth lines are usually taken at traditional face value: suicide is a sin against the will of God. But in the context of both soliloquy and play the meaning is really, 'I am compelled to live in this world, this "unweeded garden" by the law of the "Everlasting."' The first wish is no less ambiguous and no less governed by 'most wicked speed ... to incestuous sheets,' for, although

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its innocent sense is clear, its relevant sense is not innocent. Ribner's note is apropos: 'solid ...; WILSON: ''sullied," ... Critics who favour "sullied" or "sallied" [variant spellings] argue that it is to the impurity of his flesh rather than its solidity that Hamlet is referring' (14-15). He is in fact referring to both, in that his flesh would be sullied in losing its solidity, in resolving itself 'into a dew' in the erotic sense. In sum we have here incestuous sexual conduct, a King who is Hyperion, a King who is satyr, a Queen/woman endlessly receptive to the procreative act, a son/nephew praying ambiguously for an act of dying - wishing it first then inveighing against it. But there is no word about killing a King in any literal sense. There is at the end the curious 'But... I must hold my tongue.' There follows the second soliloquy (i.ii.255-8), whose brief four lines have their importance. The emphasis is on 'foul': I doubt some foul play ... Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

Kittredge remarks: '"Foul play" did not to the Elizabethans, as to us, suggest exclusively murder' (20). The first soliloquy makes plain that foulness is already in Hamlet's mind. The foul deeds that will presently arise include not just the murder of a King, but 'the foul crimes done in my days of nature' by that King, including the killing of another King, in full armour like Pyrrhus, to seize his Queen. Hamlet is also to say to Horatio that his imaginations may be 'as foul as Vulcan's stithy.' The foul thing that rises is the Ghost, that is, Ghost/Hamlet. The third soliloquy (i.v.92-112) follows the Ghost's 'Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me,' after an account emphasizing the foulness of 'a couch for luxury and damned incest.' But its emphasis is not on compulsive repetition of foul sexual conduct; it is on Hamlet's decision to be faithful to memory by uncovering the truth through the means of drama. He proposes to excise from his memory all except the Ghost's commandment which 'all alone shall live /Within the book and volume of my brain,' and, ironically, 'unmix'd with baser matter.' Through drama he will catch a King, not forgetting the Queen: O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables! meet it is I set it down ...

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Hamlet begins to be the writer of his own action 'whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe.' Further points should not be overlooked: memory of the Father/ Ghost is reiterated no less than five times; the past will be the present and future. Too, what was 'Heaven and Earth! /Must I remember?' of the first soliloquy now becomes O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell?

The geography of Hamlet's agony seems now complete and it will be, as it really already has been, expressed in a drama in which the protagonist exclaims paradoxically, 'But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue!' The soliloquy choruses so far seem fairly simple. They become complex both in themselves and their interrelations, and in their interrelations with other parts of the play, a curiously unified interweaving that often seems disjunctive, as Hamlet's mind appears to be. The first, fourth, sixth, and eighth soliloquies are in many respects alike in their violently dark mood. The fourth and eighth are alike in being severe self-recriminations. The seventh, as the King prays, is open to a probably significant understanding not yet hypothesized. The sixth, prologue to the encounter with the Queen, seems not only completely in rapport with the Ghost in i.v, but, however interrupted, a continuation of the player-poisoner's speech. In the centre of all of these is the fifth, the quiet, contemplative To be or not to be' soliloquy, in which there ought to be details critically important to the whole pattern. The fourth soliloquy (n.ii.534-91) is intricate; it brings together several of the elements of the action. The most obvious emphasis lies in its end and beginning: both have to do with acting, with drama as a means of uncovering emotions and inner states of the most powerful kind. This soliloquy comes not directly after the great and moving violence of the Pyrrhus speech; in between is Hamlet's quite controlled request for 'The Murder of Gonzago' augmented by 'a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down ...' It is after this that he says, 'Now I am alone,' and 'unpack[s] his heart' in language that rivals Pyrrhus's (actually spoken, it will be remembered, by Hamlet/Player). Here Hamlet cries out that his cue for passion, a king's life and property, would make an actor 'drown the stage with tears ... /Make mad the guilty and appal the free ...' Just as the soliloquy begins with a description of the emotional effects Hamlet's story should engender, so it ends with a fuller reitera-

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tion of how The Murder of Gonzago' will 'tent [a King] to the quick/ This is, as the whole soliloquy-chorus is, prologue to the Mousetrap. So far we have seen a cumulative image of Hamlet as spy/hunter through his powers as playwright, critic of acting, and director. In this he is, of course, an actor, but this part of his character is shown most fully in the centre of the soliloquy in an outburst of self-recrimination equalled only in one or two other scenes; it will indeed 'cleave the general ear with horrid speech,' and seems to end in tears.9 Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face? Tweaks me by th' nose? Gives me the lie i' th' throat As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha? 'Swounds, I should take it! for it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites, With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! 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 And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion!10 Fie upon't! Foh!

This utterly emotional self-attack has several points relevant to the function of the chorus, all of them in terms of Hamlet as a multi-ego, composite figure. It begins actually in the second line of the soliloquy: 'O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!' Who indeed attacks him as a coward, a villain, an utter liar? No one else in Hamlet. Only he, and even as he is saying it. Details within this deserve attention. 'Who calls me villain?' Hamlet: 'Bloody, bawdy villain! /Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous villain!' In what sense is he a liar? He is challenging the wrong man, who in the inventive paradox of art is the right man, for there is only one man in Hamlet, mysteriously complex universal Man. Who is the slave whose 'offal' should be thrown to kites - birds of prey as well as scavengers? 'O, what a ... peasant slave am I!' Who is bawdy and lecherous? Laertes/ Hamlet, Polonius/Hamlet, and Hamlet have all warned Ophelia about a

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sexual hunter - Hamlet - and here Hamlet cries out, This is most brave, / That I ... /Must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words /And fall a-cursing like a very drab, / A stallion!' He is cursing himself, proclaiming his own malefactions in the very cunning of the scene. Not indifferent to all this is Hamlet's self-identification as 'a ... muddy-mettled rascal,' for 'mettle' has its oblique implication, and one's prospective memory may recall that Ophelia is 'Pull'd ... /To muddy death.' Finally who seeks to be a bloody King-killer like Pyrrhus? Hamlet. In these many parallels soliloquy surely functions as chorus, but with far greater sophistication and complexity than is found in the traditional mode. But there is more, a most complex paradox, repeated throughout the play, but especially evident here. Its earliest expression in words is in the first soliloquy: 'But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.' Its last is, 'Had I but time ... O, I could tell you ... the rest is silence.' Its most frequent expression is in the various and varied dumb shows, most eloquent, perhaps, the skulls in v.i, which, now silent, are given voice by Hamlet, just as all the dead in and before v.ii are given voice by Shakespeare. In the fourth soliloquy-chorus Hamlet exclaims, in the middle of extended, powerful speech, Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing!

only to turn on himself with 'This is most brave, / That I ... Must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words,' and even this is qualified further. The power of the language and action of a play, 'the very cunning of the scene,' can compel a killer to react, so that in dumb show ... murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.

The apparent contradiction may possibly be accounted for in an hypothesis that may also account for what seem to be sudden shiftings in mood and identity in Hamlet. When seen in his discriminated characters - Horatio, Laertes, Polonius, Claudius, etc - each is quite clearly consistent. Less stable are his mixed identities compounded of soldier, spy, hunter, and multiple figure in the theatre. In his own character in interplay with his other selves he is volatile, mercurial, unpredictable, as though he were playing mocking but grim games with himself. But in

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soliloquy he is the one total Hamlet who 'could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.' Soliloquy in Hamlet brings together all the contradictory, conflicting elements in man, always in respect to an act profoundly divisive and chaotic in society and in nature, an act twofold but nevertheless indivisibly one in myth and ritual: the killing of the fertility-god-surrogate, priest or father, to supplant him with the fecund mother/woman,11 and this, in ancient ritual, celebrated annually by 'a seal'd compact.' Put as simply as possible, the essential act is compounded of forces so enigmatic that one 'can say nothing' to convey the qualities of the experience; language will not suffice, although the power of poetic language as an attempted equivalent for such meaning is attested - Hamlet 'must... unpack [his] heart with words.' To try to convey the meaning of the act without words is a 'dumb show' that represents the experience in intense revelations of inward states. The act itself is a dumb show. Turned into dramatic dumb show, ritual in art, it may lose directness by being only a surface image, like Plato's imitation merely, or by being done badly, as, for example, 'Begin murderer! Leave thy damnable faces, and begin!' It is no wonder, considering the profoundly mysterious implications in the act, that Hamlet is so insistent to the Players that they must not imitate humanity abominably, and is so thorough and precise in his directions for acting. But although the poet 'can say nothing' exactly equivalent to the radical sense of the experience, he can put metaphoric words to the metaphoric act, the mimed action. He can write something to have 'these players / Play something like the murder of my father,' and so intensify the power of the acted metaphor. This is what Shakespeare is doing in Hamlet throughout; his players too play something like the murder of a father and a sexual encounter; they play the Hamlet act. There is here not the slightest intention to argue that Shakespeare was consciously working in these terms (although he may have been); critical assessment always follows the poetic act. But that Hamlet here expresses these conditions of myth and literary myth seems clear. The eighth soliloquy (iv.iv.32-66) - 'How all occasions do inform against me' - is, especially in its self-recriminations, much in the spirit of the fourth. The occasion is different in degree only, for Hamlet in the fourth is a 'rogue and peasant slave' in his estimate of how much more violently Pyrrhus/Hamlet should be acted, while now it is another soldier/ Hamlet, Fortinbras, whose example leads him to 'My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!' The basic contradictions are here again fully: not to do the act is to be a beast; to do the act is beastlike. Reason is the mark of man not to

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'fust in us unus'd'; yet 'Rightly to be great / Is ... / Greatly to find quarrel in a straw /When honour's at the stake'; 'My thoughts be bloody ...' We remember 'that incestuous, that adulterate beast / ... won to his shameful lust / The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen/ We remember Til loose my daughter to him,' and 'if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion.' We remember 'man ... the paragon of animals!' We remember falcons, doves, and kites. We remember a 'muddy-mettled rascal' and we shall hear of a 'strucken deer' and a 'hart ungall'd.' We remember a Hamlet 'of the chameleon's dish,' who is not a capon. We may remember and shall presently note a 'gall'd jade' just as we remember 'a stallion.' We shall presently be in a mousetrap and see a 'rat, dead for a ducat.' We shall see a King who is a 'paddock,' 'bat,' and 'gib.' We have seen a wager for Barbary horses and shall have an image of a centaur. We have seen Osric, a 'waterfly,' a 'chough,' a 'beast ... lord of beasts.' We see the King and Queen together 'making love / Over the nasty sty!' - in Hamlet's words in the Queen's bedroom. Except for the Queen as worse than 'a beast that wants discourse of reason,' as the 'strucken deer,' the 'gall'd jade,' all these figures are Hamlet, the paradigm of man in one guise or another. The details of the eighth soliloquy are quite full; the self-indictment is eloquent in its reiteration of earlier warning against lust in commonly understood metaphor at the same time that such action is encouraged. What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed?12 A beast, no more. Now, whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple - I do not know Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do.'

Next thought goes to an example 'gross as earth,' an army led by 'a delicate and tender prince, /Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd /Makes mouths at the invisible event...' There is little to suggest 'a delicate prince' in a Fortinbras who has 'shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes' to 'recover of us by strong hand / And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands / So by his father lost,' a soldier who will violate Poland like a Pyrrhus. But there is evidence that Hamlet has been this kind of prince to Ophelia, however much he treats her as grossly as earth. His mockery throughout may also have its relevance to making

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'mouths at the invisible event.' And here again, hidden deeply in paradoxical metaphor, we have an invisible death under the surface. '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,' that is, 'to stir' quickly at the slightest excitement of the blood. Although hidden, the contradictory antithesis is here just as in Polonius's warning against Hamlet/Laertes' sexual proclivities and encouragement of them to Reynaldo, or in the nunnery scene. What makes the point clearer is 'stir,' for it too is a word less suggestive to us than to Elizabethans.13 A number of other obscure terms similarly contribute their meanings (as, e.g., 'spirit' in the sense that Mercutio uses it). Again as in the fourth soliloquy and elsewhere the cause is the Hamlet story: How stand I then, That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep, while to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men That... Go to their graves like beds.

This reiterated memory as all the others in the cyclical action has its many prospective implications, as, for example, to Laertes' words: And so have I a noble father lost; A sister driven to desp'rate terms.

Laertes too will have 'thoughts ... bloody, or ... nothing worth.' This chorus appears to present some difficulties. That it is less violent than the fourth may be ascribed to the fact that the latter precedes the violence against Ophelia and the greater violences against Polonius/King and Queen, whereas this precedes immediately the quieter, sadder mad scenes of Ophelia, and at very considerable distance the fight in the grave and yet later the final killings and dyings. It may appear unconvincing to read a reiteration of the need to act so shortly after the utterly violent act against the King-surrogate and Queen. But when Ophelia's mad scenes and dying are explored, the place and quality of the eighth soliloquy should be clearer. The sixth soliloquy (m.ii.370-9) is patently prologue to the encounter with the Queen, although both the King and Hamlet have intervening

120 EXHUMATION

soliloquies. It reiterates Hamlet's ambivalence about doing the act and not doing it, but in the present context we must note its striking interrelations with earlier elements of the play. Its opening lines are an unmistakable description of the Ghost's appearance: 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world.

But more interesting is the connection of the words and mood to Hamlet's prompting of Lucianus, 'nephew to the King' in the Mousetrap. We have already been amused at Polonius's need for prompting by Reynaldo and have seen a more elaborate procedure of the same kind, not at all amusing, as Hamlet prompts the Player in the Pyrrhus speech a prompting so extended as to be part of the acting. The prompting of Lucianus is more complicated and establishes a nexus with the sixth soliloquy. Lucianus is indulging in an extravagant dumb show that 'out-herods Herod': HAM ... Begin, murderer. Leave thy damnable faces, and begin!

Hamlet's next words blend directly into the Player/nephew's words which in turn blend directly into the sixth soliloquy: HAM

... Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge ... (llI.ii.241-2) LUC Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing; Confederate season, else no creature seeing; Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected, Thy natural magic and dire property On wholesome life usurps immediately. (111. ii.24 3-8) HAM 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. (HI.ii.370-4)

The first soliloquy-chorus, the second, the Ghost in i.v, the third chorus, Pyrrhus, the fourth soliloquy, the nunnery scene, the Lucianus passage,

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the sixth soliloquy-chorus, the attack on the Queen, and the eighth soliloquy - these in sequence establish a consistent pattern of cause for violence, violences, and compulsive resistance to and self-condemnation about them that epitomizes Hamlet. The two soliloquies that remain contribute to an understanding of this radical ambivalence. The seventh soliloquy (m.iii.73-96) is usually interpreted simply as an application of the belief that a sinner killed while praying or in a sanctuary will go directly to heaven. That is, an historical principle is applied to a dramatic action. Dramatically it is what Hamlet's character in the action requires that is consequential. He wants to kill the King just as the first Hamlet was killed: 'A took my father grossly, full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May ...

That King died, in Ribner's words 'in full bloom/ 'full of life and vigour' (100), perhaps, the text would suggest, as on May-day and all it implies. It is dying in this sense that Hamlet wants for this King: When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage; Or in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed ...

But such dying in the context of Hamlet is possible only in the full condition of his story - there must be present the woman, else the condition cannot be satisfied. Therefore Hamlet cannot kill the King at this point. And, if parallels hold, this must be the nature of Hamlet's dying too, in whatever dramatic-ritual form it may take. The action that immediately follows is a dying arranged by a fishmonger, a Jephthah, Polonius/Hamlet - the encounter between Hamlet and the Queen, with Polonius/King as voyeur behind the arras until he too dies concurrently by the sword. These seven soliloquy-choruses have shown much of the complex internal state of Hamlet. But the most famous of all soliloquies - 'To be or not to be' - leads us indeed to the germinal centre of the 'hatch and disclose' of Hamlet's soul. Its extraordinary richness of meaning flows from the metaphors of dreams and of travels in the strange geography of Hamlet. It is so important as to deserve a separate chapter, which will complete the discussion of the dramatic elements so intricately used in the art of the play.

6

Dream travellers

HAMLET O God, I could ... count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

The fifth soliloquy (m.i.56-90) is a quiet, contemplative chorus which appears to be the most largely detached view expressed by Hamlet anywhere. This detachment is made to appear even greater in that the soliloquy comes between Pyrrhus and *O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,' and, on the other side, the attack on Ophelia. It stands like the eye of a typhoon. In this chorus four matters invite the closest attention: travellers, dreams, falconry once again, and finally the collocation of the last with the character and attested knowledge of Ophelia. In all of the Hamlet puzzles there is nothing more puzzling than ... the dread of something after death The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns ...

But in the invented myth not only does Hamlet return from death, but so do all the others who die in the play. Elsinore is a cemetery and all the action is in it, if one's imagination gains rapport with the poet's. Of 'travels' Granville-Barker has written: The action of Hamlet is concentrated at Elsinore; and this though ... the story abounds in journeys. As a rule in such a case ... we travel with the travelers. But we do not see Laertes in Paris, nor, more surprisingly, Hamlet among the pirates ... Shakespeare is deliberately concentrating his action at Elsinore ... and, sooner than that Hamlet should carry the action abroad ... Horatio is left behind there [to keep him in our minds] ...; he even adds to our sense of [journeys] by such seemingly superfluous touches as tell us that Horatio has jour-

123 Dream travellers Norway

England

Denmark.

Poland

France

neyed from Wittenberg, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been 'sent for' - and even the Players are traveling. (40-1)

But this is only part of the comprehensive pattern of travels with Elsinore as centre. How totally 'travels,' and in the centre of these 'dreams/ are epitome of the whole action and whole character can best be understood through diagrams. In the first we see the basic configuration expressed in simple, literal terms; in Hamlet there is some reference to Germany (Wittenberg), and hints of Italy in the Italianate fop, Osric. In the second diagram this pattern is extended to include both additional literal places and figurative geography, all encircled by Hyperion/Apollo and Diana. Specifically, both larger and smaller, through Hamlet's eyes (just as the whole pattern is in Hamlet's mind) we see the total view of what is illimitable in the third diagram: 'infinite space' and 'the Everlasting.' The extremes are co-equal, microcosm-macrocosm. The heart of the mystery is both at the centre and in infinite space - the place of chaos and the place of final silence. At the very centre we find, in Hamlet's 'foul imaginings,' the secrets of the prison house 'whose lightest word /Would harrow up thy soul,' the 'bloat King,' 'that monster, custom,' the 'rank corruption' that 'infects unseen' - all these the bad dreams that rise from the grave: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Hamlet is bounded in a nutshell which is infinite space, the Everlasting, and in it has dreams that mark what is a king, any king, all kings. For 'King,' as always in Shakespeare, is the word, in Hamlet sadly, for what man ought to be:

124 EXHUMATION Eden and post-Eden (through Adam and Cain)

Bethlehem (through Christ)

Norway

England

.Denmark

I Poland

France

Rome (through Caesar and Brutus)

Greece and Troy (through gods, satyrs, nymphs, Pyrrhus, Priam, Hecuba, Alexander)

... how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! -

and in Hamlet bitterly, for what man is: ... lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage.

All of this is intensified by a very complex, definitive pattern of travels which lead to the bad dream of death, then back to the identical nightmare which is life, travels concentring inevitably on one point. A

125 Dream travellers infinite space: the Everlasting

heaven - firmament

globe - earth

globe - theatre

globe - head nutshell Ghost bad dreams hell

diagram for this is possible but so intricate as to be more confusing than helpful. Alternatively, patterns can be explored in terms of categories of travellers, figures we have seen in detail in other contexts, identifiable combinations or groups, some who appear to be non-travellers, some who fit extraordinary patterns, that is, those who have unusual emphases within the tellers and alter-egos already considered. The lesser figures have almost all been seen in two other functions which have their bearings here. They all disappear after having been brief prologues to actions done by others. Of these, Francisco, Bernardo, and Marcellus seem not to be travellers away from or to Elsinore, as patently the grave-makers - who must in a very important sense be considered separately - are not. The Norwegian captain is a traveller, as is Voltemand/Cornelius, and as has been Osric.

126 EXHUMATION

There seem to be other non-travellers: presumably the King; obviously, except as metaphor may qualify, Polonius; the Queen; and Ophelia. There are travellers who, having been away, seem to be at Elsinore to remain: Horatio, Osric, and finally Fortinbras, who claims 'rights of memory in this kingdom/ But niceties in these apparent categories will become clearer when major figures are examined; with one or two exceptions these are clearly travellers away from, and back inevitably, to Elsinore, sometimes in multiple, and always in parallel patterns. As all the figures except the Queen and Ophelia are finally Hamlet/Ghost, order in this explication is not important, but there are increasing complexities that can be observed. Claudius seems always to be in Elsinore, but his apostrophe to England's king indicates his conquest there, parallel to Fortinbras's in Poland, and the conquests of the elder Hamlet: And, England, if my love thou holds't at aught, As my great power thereof may give thee sense, Since yet thy cicatrix looks raw and red After the Danish sword ...

Metaphorically England, Poland, Norway, Denmark are all the same the act is always the same. The King is finally killed to begin his journey to hell, Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damn'd and black As hell, whereto it goes.

From this relative obscurity we move to the simpler, more obvious Fortinbras action. Planning a military travel to Denmark to kill a King, he is diverted to Poland where he smites the Polack to seize worthless land for 'honour's at the stake/ and soldiers 'go to their graves like beds ...' He returns not to Norway but to Elsinore, where, after declaring his 'rights of memory/ he orders a funeral procession, a 'journey' in which Kings and Queen go, lust-infected, 'to their graves like beds/ to hell, to Elsinore, to the stage at the centre of the Globe in all its senses. Horatio has left Denmark to go to Wittenberg, as has Rosencrantz/ Guildenstern: 'being of so young days brought up with him, /And since so neighbour'd to his youth and haviour/ and as has Hamlet himself. Horatio has returned to see the funeral of a King/Father and has stayed on through a royal marriage; in Hamlet's words,

127 Dream travellers I prithee do not mock me, fellow student. I think it was to see my mother's wedding.

He stays to observe a King observing the killing of a King and the lovemaking of a murderer-nephew and his aunt as played by travelling players; to know of the killing of a Polonius/King; to see the madness, and, it is commonly thought, the 'muddy death' of Ophelia. He stays on to report these things 'aright/To the unsatisfied.' The 'elder Hamlet/ in his own figure as reported by Horatio, not as the Ghost, has killed the King of Norway and has smitten the Polacks presumably in Norway and in Poland - to seize property which in turn will be seized from him by a Claudius/Cain on his return to Elsinore. He goes to death, he is sent to hell, all his foul crimes on his soul, at the centre of the Globe, Elsinore. Laertes has gone to France not as a student but to pursue his 'fair hour ... to spend it at [his] will' with the King's encouragement. He has returned for the funeral of a King and stayed on for a royal marriage. He goes back to France only to return at the death and interment of his father, alter-ego to the King. He stays on to see the muddy death of a sister, and to share a central part in the killing of two Kings, himself, and a Queen, then to join them all in a journey to the grave, all his 'imperfections on his head' (none have shriving time allowed), a journey to hell, to the stage on which he lies dead. It is in this 'sleep of death' fearful of 'what dreams may come' that Hamlet lies with all the others, about to begin the funeral journey as player, to be the mirror of nature, 'to show ... the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.' That he is all the others, and, as always, more than all of his alter-egos together, is evident again as we follow him through his nightmarish travels. Like Horatio, Laertes, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, he has gone to a far place, at the edge of 'this side of our known world,' to return to see the funeral of his King/Father, and stays on to see the incestuous marriage of uncle and mother. But unlike (yet most like) the nephew who is to be diverted unsuccessfully to Poland, and the 'nephew' encouraged to feast on life in France, he is in effect compelled by the King, and pleaded with by the Queen, to stay in Denmark. Presently his killing of Polonius hurries the enforced journey towards England, that is, away from Elsinore, from his own compulsive desire, although even this does not succeed, as will presently be clear. Having arranged for the killing of Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, also sent on a journey to death, he returns to Elsinore. Here he is compelled by

128 EXHUMATION

King/Father/Laertes/Self to kill all these his own identities at once. All that he is, and all his 'travels/ end in a death shared by the Queen/ Mother/Woman, in a journey to hell at the centre of the Globe, Elsinore. There remains only his final but ever recurring funeral journey, to hell, 'with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' This is a journey into the memory of a self inhabited from the most distant past by all his fathers stretching back to the Everlasting in the round globe of infinity. Stated simply in the King's words, ... your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his ...

But as in the Oedipus the chorus seeks to trace parentage back to the mysteries of Kithairon, 1 so in this chorus, which seeks the meaning of the 'undiscover'd country/ Hamlet's thought reaches into the mystery of a journey in memory that baffles the utmost imaginings of the human spirit. We are now at the obvious traveller from the 'undiscover'd' country, at the absolute centre, the very essence of Hamlet: the protagonist - the Ghost. It is always the Ghost, the heart of the mystery in the act played again and again, who is the 'imposthume/ the canker in the 'infants of the spring/ who is always the hidden force, the 'old mole/ the 'pioner' in all we see acted by players, or players within players, at the eye of the round Globe. It is what the Ghost is that everyone is, all are, however much passion may be subordinated to reason, even to the point of apparent exclusion as in Claudius and Horatio. In absolute identity with the Ghost is Hamlet, who, in this sense as in common acceptance, is the visible protagonist. The Queen and Ophelia, it would appear, do not travel from Elsinore, certainly not in any sense equivalent to a named literal geography. They receive action at Elsinore; their nature invites it. They are parts of 'travel' only in the sense that they die in an act only to live to act again and again, in the sexual metaphor so constantly a part of Elizabethan imagination. But if we think of the invented image in Hamlet for both 'die' and 'travel/ the funeral, it is possible, indeed necessary, to consider Ophelia apart from the Queen, although in the mythic whole they are as much one as any of the other double identities or the total multiple identity of Hamlet, over against whom they are poised. The Queen has one funeral; Ophelia two, and in both she is accompanied by and watched over by Horatio/Hamlet, in what appear to be separate travels for the double Hamlet figure. This very sophisticated complexity requires

129 Dream travellers

special attention, as do the grave-makers, the death of Rosencrantz/ Guildenstern, and finally the Players. Horatio's long disappearances are a kind of 'travel,' not only in that he is nowhere in sight (i.e., elsewhere), but in that the rational spirit leaves Hamlet, or is notably mitigated or qualified. In act m Horatio's last words come near the end of Hamlet's frenetic response to the chaotic exit of the King and court, words seized on for a pun by Hamlet to link an intensely emotional yet incisively witty Horatio/Hamlet to Rosencrantz/Guildenstern and 'this mother': HOR I did very well note him.2 HAM Aha! Come, some music!

Horatio stays, silent, through the exchange with Rosencrantz/Guildenstern and then Polonius, and then leaves. Typically he reappears only after Hamlet's encounter with the Queen and its preceding and following violences in soliloquy, and precisely at the beginning of Hamlet's journey towards 'England.' Immediately after Hamlet's disappearance Horatio's reappearance at rv.v coincides with that of Ophelia, who has been away for exactly the same interim, now to reappear in a madness in which, in one gravemaker's words, 'she drown'd herself in her own defence.' Horatio's conduct in this scene and those which follow until he rejoins Hamlet in the churchyard seems curiously important. It can perhaps be thought of as a kind of travel in which he sets out to accompany Ophelia at his own suggestion and in response to the King's command. After Ophelia's recollection in ballad of sexual encounter which lays cause equally on maid and man but stresses the initiative of woman, the King gives his command to Horatio: 'Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you,' to be obeyed instantly and wordlessly. The Ophelia whom Horatio follows is described by the King in words no less immediately applicable to Hamlet: ... poor Ophelia Divided from herself and her fair judgment, Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts ...

Gone on his 'travel,' Hamlet is divided from his fair judgment, and, as always with Horatio away, becomes a 'beast' of utter violence. But the pattern at this point is more complex than this, as becomes evident when we ask questions about not only Horatio and Hamlet, but also Laertes.

130 EXHUMATION

Horatio has scarcely left when Laertes, returned from France, bursts in with a 'list of lawless resolutes' in violence that matches Hamlet's. But he orders his rabble out in order to face the King in a kind of single combat, which almost immediately he loses to the King's calmly rational persuasion. Moments later Ophelia reappears, 'A document in madness! /Thoughts and remembrance fitted,' but unaccompanied by Horatio. She leaves again, and a few lines later Horatio enters an empty stage with an attendant, at precisely the time when Ophelia is drowning, to read Hamlet's letter and to arrange to join him speedily. And when Ophelia's death is reported 165 lines later, it is not Horatio who describes it, but the Queen. The rational Horatio is not with Ophelia to protect her from his alter-ego, the Hamlet/satyr. The complexities of Hamlet's bad dream here are extremely intricate. On the stage we see a violent Laertes/Hamlet returned to kill a King; it is not difficult to see at the same moment a Hamlet busy arranging the death, by way of an altered text and a King's seal, of a King's double alter-ego. But to see him at the same moment in Denmark doing violence to Ophelia, dragging her to muddy death with her own voluntary participation - this asks us indeed to share a grotesque nightmare in Hamlet's mind. It is impossible to accept this in any way but by complete involvement in myth and in the total art of Shakespeare. But all the evidence in the text points to the oneness of this complex multiplicity, another version of the Hamlet story.3 Both Hamlet and Horatio have been absent before in their persons in a general fashion, that is, one's unconscious assumption is that they are somewhere in Elsinore to reappear when the ordinary demands of drama require them. The most notable variant in this, so far, has been discussed and documented: Horatio's instant reappearance, after a very long absence, when Hamlet calls for him. But the present scenes are quite different. Both are gone, but this time we know where each is supposed to be: Horatio sent to watch over Ophelia 'divided from her fair judgment'; Hamlet departing in frantic, strangely gleeful mockery for England. Hamlet is not given to cooperating with the rational force of his Horatio/King self, and certainly in this journey he kills the King and pesters him with message of his 'sudden and more strange return' - 'set naked on your kingdom.' And certainly the salient fact about the dependable, steady Horatio, who is 'not passion's slave,' is that he too is not where he himself advised, and the King commanded, watching over Ophelia. It is Ophelia herself who, both retrospectively and immediately, identifies the whereabouts of the passionate Hamlet, that is, of the spirit, the Ghost of Hamlet.4

131 Dream travellers

Ophelia's 'mad' songs celebrate in an ambiguous mixture two experiences: the death of a father killed by her lover; the death (in England) of a lover killed by a King, alter-ego to her father. In the inventive dialectic of the play, this death is celebrated ambiguously in her dying with him, her self-destruction described by herself, by the Queen, and almost without interruption, by the grave-makers. Other elements of the myth, not excepting the fifth soliloquy-chorus that has led us to these travels, are here. 'Where,' she asks, 'is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark?' - reminder, perhaps, of a 'majestical roof fretted with golden fire' now 'but... foul and pestilent.' Next she asks a question about a lover, the answer to which is that he is a pilgrim, a traveller: How should I your true-love know From another one? By his cockle hat and staff And his sandal shoon.5

Her next snatches of song are sad requiem for a dead father. Then come the revelations of the rest of the Hamlet story: the co-equal seizing of the dead father's 'property' and the initiation of the act by the woman: To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine. Then up he rose and donn'd his clo'es And dupp'd the chamber door, Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more.

Her next remark has its relevance to the Ghost's accusation of a seduced wife, that is, the sexual experience not 'ratified by law and heraldry' - 'Indeed, la, without an oath, I'll make an end on't!' - that is, she will do the act. The culmination comes in a song marked by at least one vulgar oath, that blames man; answered by a song that identifies Hamlet, and the Ghost as Hyperion, living father; that condemns woman as whore. By Gis and by Saint Charity, Alack, and fie for shame! Young men will do't if they come to't

132 EXHUMATION

By Cock, they are to blame. Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me, You promis'd me to wed.' He answers: 'So would I'a done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed.'

The lover claims he would have chosen Hyperion against satyr, if only the woman had not come to him; nevertheless he has chosen to 'do't,' giving the provocation the response it invites. In an earlier context we read: HAM O wonderful son, that can so stonish a mother! But is there no sequel at the heels of this mother's admiration? Impart. ROS She desires to speak with you in her closet ere you go to bed. HAM We shall obey, were she ten times our mother. Have you any further trade with us?

There is scarcely a difference: the King's son; the King's agents as panderers for the Queen; a woman who is a whore, or in the natural nonpejorative terms of myth, 'the Earth Mother/ There is a great deal in the two mad scenes that seems to substantiate the meanings adduced here. Perhaps the best way to indicate this is to cite comments recorded by Furness (nn, i, 329-35; 344-8 passim): 'COLERIDGE: Ophelia singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts ... never ... in disjunction, the love of Hamlet and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concerning the dangers to which her honor lay exposed. This play of association is instanced in lines 67, 68 [iv.v. 67-8, 'My brother shall know of it, and so I thank you for your good counsel. ]; - 25. cockle-hat] WARBURTON: The description of a pilgrim. While this kind of devotion was in favor, love intrigues were carried on under this mask ...; - 59. Cock] DYCE (Gloss.): A corruption, or euphemism for God. This irreverent alteration ... was formerly very common-.' Ophelia's second appearance provides additional relevant commentary. Her first ambiguous snatch of song, possibly about her father, is, in the light of evidence, as much about Hamlet: '- 161. nonny] NARES: ... It appears from Florio's Diet, that the word had not always a decorous meaning. STEEVENS: I am informed that among the common people of Norfolk to nonny signifies to trifle, or play with.' When we come to Ophelia's language of flowers there is much more. '170. rose-

133 Dream travellers

mary] ... HUNTER (ii.259): ... when Laer. was warning Oph. ... he urged her to consider [Hamlet's] trifling but as "A violet in the youth of primy nature" [the reference here is to i.iii.17] ... STAUNTON: ... To Laer., whom in her distraction she probably confounds with her lover, she gives "rosemary" as an emblem of his faithful remembrance ...' As we consider further the flower meanings we find: '175. Fennel] ... NARES: ... an inflammatory herb ... STAUNTON: ... she has "fennel," signifying "flattery" and "lust"; and "columbines," which marked ingratitude ... columbines] S[TEPHEN] W[ESTON]: Columbine was an emblem of cuckoldom on account of the horns of its nectaria ... HOLT WHITE: It was also emblematic of forsaken lovers ... 176, 177. rue ... Sundays] ... CALDECOTT cites a passage from Edward Alleyn's letters [Var. 1821, vol. xxi, p. 390; andS£. Soc., vol. ix, p. 26] ...: "Every evening" [Alleyn is telling his wife ... to take precautions against the plague ...] "... have in your windowes good store of reue ..."; 178. daisy] HENLEY: Greene, in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier, [writes]: "- Next them grew the dissembling daisie, to warne such light-of-love wenches not to trust every faire promise that such amorous bachelors make them."' The next provocative matter is that Ophelia's dying is described in minute detail, not by Horatio who is quite unable to tell a passionate story, but by the Queen, who is most qualified to do so. What is described is a dying and funeral in nature, distinct from the formalized 'maimed rites' watched by Horatio/Hamlet. What the Queen describes includes a great deal that is precisely relevant to a Queen/woman caught up in a lustful 'death.' Here again evidence from Furness's sources and their extension are meaningful. In the description of her 'muddy death' Ophelia is a queen in that she wears a crown, her 'fantastic' coronet of flowers. Of these, we read in Furness (nn, i, 371 passim): '171. FARREN (Mania and Madness, &c., p. 62): This line [... crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples] is an exquisite specimen of emblematic or picture-writing. The "crowflower," according to Parkinson, was called The Fayre Mayde of France \ the "long purples" are dead men's fingers-, the "daisy" imports pure virginity or spring of life, as being itself "the virgin bloom of the year." The order runs thus, with the meaning of each flower beneath: CROW-FLOWERS,

NETTLES,

DAISIES,

LONG PURPLES.

Fayre Mayde

stung to the quick,

virgin bloom

cold hand of death.

"A fair maid stung to the quick, her virgin bloom under the cold hand of death." ... BEISLEY (p. 159): ... The most common "nettles" which

134 EXHUMATION

blossom early are the white dead-nettle ... and the purple dead-nettle ... 171. Long purples] STEEVENS: In Lyte's Herbal, 1578, its various names, too gross for repetition, are preserved. MALONE: One of the grosser names Gertrude had a particular reason to avoid - the rampant widow.'6 Lyte's Herbal is actually a translation: A new herball, or historie of plants, &£., 'First set foorth in the Douch or Almaigne toonge by ... Raembert Dodoens ... And now first translated out of French into English, by Henrie Lyte Esquier' (London: Ninian Newton 1586). This is the second edition of 'Lyte's New Herbal'-, originally printed in 1578 (the edition referred to by Steevens); it was very popular, three editions appearing before 1600. The popularity of the book throughout the twenty years immediately before Hamlet and the fact that it identifies the formal and common names of plants in Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and 'base Almaigne,' would indicate, first, that Shakespeare could easily have read in it; and, second, that it provided meanings and images virtually universal in the western world.7 This book is well worth examination. Initially one should note that Ophelia's coronet can be symbolic, a microcosm parallel to the concept of 'King' in 'crown.' Too, one should remember that the 'vicious mole of nature' is identifiable with Ghost/ Hamlet as 'old mole' and 'pioner.'8 Nor can one forget that throughout Hamlet there is almost endless suggestion of disease, canker, imposthume, vileness - all that is rotten and stinks in corruption - all this at the same time that throughout there is rational, angel-like, godlike resistance to, and abhorrence of, sexual excess, a force always unsuccessful. These opposed forces are never separate; they are always deep in one unity, man, Hyperion/satyr indivisible. All of this, even in more particular detail, seems to be suggested by flowers in Ophelia's songs and especially in her coronet - crowflowers, nettles, daisies, 'long purples.' The last, orchis, is the only flower qualified by the Queen: ... long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.

All the flower references deserve attention, but, just as the Queen emphasizes it, 'long purples' invites particular scrutiny. There is scarcely any point in Hamlet in which Ophelia's coronet does not have relevance, especially in major scenes and soliloquychoruses, and in the identities of the major representatives of the central figure, man. Initially there is Hamlet's comment on the world:

135 Dream travellers Fie on't! ah, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.

Or, more fully, in his encounter with the Queen: Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, That not your trespass but my madness speaks. It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen. And do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker,

a passage which places the coronet in the context of sexual trespass, madness, imposthume, a rankly corrupt pioner 'mining all within' with infection. And again the blame is placed on the woman by him who has just slain a King/Father and taken the position of King. In the first passage there is a well-hidden ambiguity in 'that grows to seed.7 Colloquially 'come to its natural end,' this also means 'having its life, its perpetuity within it/ At another point Hamlet says to Ophelia, 'virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not' (i.e., 'lust is perpetual; I only lusted for you'). In respect to the very heart of the mystery the Ghost appears with his helmet's visor up, making his face visible. In Lyte we read of the first sort of Orchios Cynosorchin 'the floures alone are ... like to an open hood or helmet'; of the second 'the spikie tuft is short & thick with a number of floures ...&... smal darke lines fashioned also like to an open hoode or helmet...' (246). Nettles are also part of Ophelia's coronet. Lyte writes: 'The first kind of Dead nettles ... [hath floures] fashioned like to a hood, or open helmet' (143). But there is yet a similar kind of reference under 'the second kind of Orchios called Testiculus Morionis,' in the male kind of which 'the ... floures ... grow ... like to a fooles hood, or coxcombe, that is to say, wide open or gaping before, and as it were crested above ...' (247). Here we remember Hamlet's 'What may this mean / That thou ... / Revisits thus .../... and we fools of nature / So horridly to shake our disposition ...' as he looks fearfully at the open helmet of the Ghost, each confronting himself in the other. Lyte provides further relevant emphases: he notes that there are male and female nettles (143). 'Orchios called Testiculus Morionis, is of two sorts, male and female' (247). Somewhat comparable, but with

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other implications, we read of Libanotis Rosemarie, spoken of earlier by Ophelia, that there is 'one fruitful; one barren' (317). All of this (there is much more to come) must, of course, be read as Shakespeare would read it, as a series of vivid images having little or nothing to do with flowers, but everything to do with a ghostly force possessing Hamlet, a force 'foul and pestilent/ seen in a vision 'foul as Vulcan's stithy.' Steevens's opinion that the names for long purples' (itself an image for phallus) are too gross for repetition is blindly beside the point. It is precisely the vision of gross sexual foulness, of violent lust and incest in himself and in woman, that obsesses Hamlet. But it cannot be overlooked that Ophelia/Queen displays this kind of knowledgeability, in mad songs or in the Queen's description of her other self, but that she does not, except once, share Hamlet's guilt and revulsion about the act; rather there is a receptivity, in Ophelia sad, in the Queen nearly an overblown voluptuousness. In this light we may consider what is revealed when the helmet is open. Of the third kind of Orchios, the Hirci Testiculus, Lyte remarks: '... when it openeth, there groweth out of it a litle long and slender taile ... the residue of [which]... hangeth downward. The floure is of a rank stinking savor, like to the smel of a Goate ...' (248). Shakespeare's concern was surely a kind of double-single image in something coming out of, or going into, an open, purple-violet flesh-coloured flower.9 (Almost all of the orchios are of this colour.) In a more gentle sense in respect to Ophelia's dying it should be noted that almost all in her coronet are spring flowers, identified frequently as blooming in May, or from April to June. It would appear that May-day with all its ritual implications is probably a part of Hamlet, with three figures so identified: Ophelia, in Laertes' 'O, rose of May!'; Ghost/Hamlet, 'With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May'; and Hamlet, who is in Ophelia's eyes the 'fair rose of the state.' The bitterly ambivalent battles within Hamlet and the Queen 'O, step between her and her fighting soul,' the Ghost adjures - are everywhere evident in the meanings of Ophelia's flowers in song and in the Queen's description of her coronet. First we find aphrodisiacs. The juice of the Roman or male nettle, 'dronken with sweete wine, doth stirre up bodily pleasure ...' (142). Of 'the right Satyrion, or Dioscorides Satyrion,10 'the rootes ... provoketh Venus, or bodily lust...' (252-3). If we turn to the crowflower of the coronet, remembering that one may 'die' in sexual terms, we may be reading in an appropriate way: 'All the Crowfoots are dangerous, and hurtful, yea, they kil and slay ...' (492). On the other hand we read that the decoction of violets 'is good against hote fevers ... driving foorth by siege the hote and

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cholerike humors' (165); and that rue, or herbe grace - this goes directly to a term deep in Hamlet - is good against all poison (295); too, that it, if 'pound with Bay leaves, & laid to, is good to dissolve and cure the swelling and blastings of the genitols' (296). The ambivalence is most sharply evident in a passage on the virtues of 'long purples': The full and sappy rootes of Standergrasses (but especially of Hares Ballocks, or Goates Orchis) eaten, or boiled in Goates milke and dronken, provoketh Venus, or bodily lust, ... and is good for them that are fallen into a consumption or fever Hectique ...' (250). The King, in passionate apostrophe to England, cries out about his 'son': Do it, England; For like the hectic in my blood he rages ...

'Goates Orchis' (i.e., Goat's testes) is the image of satyr. Orchios is 'Satyrion,' Satyrion is satyr, a deity with head and body of man, and legs of goat, the very embodiment of lechery in man/animal. The 'withered or shriveled roote' of Goates Orchis, said to be helpful against lust, gains extension fully in respect to the 'poisoning' of the ghostly 'father' of Hamlet, which, in the Ghost's words resulted in 'a most instant tetter [that] bark'd about/Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust/All my smooth body.' Lyte'sHerbal provides many a remedy against this loathsome disease. Dried orchis root and rue are anti-aphrodisiacs; of the latter we also read: 'mingled with hony and allom, it cureth the foule scab or naughty tetter' (296). In its usual Elizabethan sense 'naughty' suggests here a venereal disease. The first Clown says: 'we have many pocky corses now-a-days...' Rosemary has the same power: 'They call it in Latine Rosmarinum coronarium, that is to say, Rosemarie whereof they make crownes and garlands ...' (298-9). Of Libanotis Rosmarie we read: 'It doth also dense and heale the white dry scurffe, and manginesse ...' (319). Crowfoot too ('hurtful, yea they kil and slay') is such a cure. 'The leaves of Crowfoote may be also used against the foule scurffe or tetter ...' (492). The Ghost's 'vile and loathsome crust,' mentioned only once, is so vivid as to be inescapable in our memory, but imposthumes, cankers, hidden diseases, 'the hectic in my blood,' all inner corruptions, are kept fully in our responses through a variety of images. Moreover the loathsome open imposthume is here: the Queen's refusal to acknowledge trespass, as Hamlet 'speak[s] daggers to her,' 'will but skin and film the ulcerous place.' For these also Ophelia's flowers provide cure. 'The leaves of Nettels [which can 'stirre up bodily pleasure'] pound with salt, are

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good to be layed to ... virulent and malignant ulcers, as Cankers, and such like corrupt and stinking ulcers or sores, and upon all... imposthumes...'(143). Of the 'Great Daisie' which blooms in May, 'the herby part... is good against all burning ulcers and impostumes ...' (190). 'Violets brused or stamped with barley meale, are good to be laid upon phlegmons, that is to say, hote impostumes or carbuncles ...' (165). The roots of orchis, 'but especially of Serapias, or flie Orchis ... being yet fresh and greene, doth waste and consume all tumors, and mundifieth rotten ulcers, and cureth fistulas ... and the same made into pouder, and cast into fretting and devouring ulcers and sores, staieth the same from any further festering or fretting. The same roote ... boiled in wine with a little hony, cureth the rotten ulcers ...' (250-1). The rottenness of hidden or open sores is indicated early in Hamlet: 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark/ just as Hamlet follows the Ghost; this has its echo in the grave-makers' scene: HAM Dost thou think Alexander Ipok'd o' this fashion i' th' earth? HOR E'en so. HAM And smelt so? Pah! [Puts down the skull. ]

Near the middle, just before Hamlet goes to the Queen, the King joins that which, just out of the grave - foul, tettered - stinks: O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.

Presently, having lugged 'the guts into the neighbor room/ Hamlet mocks the King: ... if, indeed, you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.11

The flowers in Ophelia's madness, while not completely without pleasant odour and taste, are predominantly evil-smelling; especially so is the orchis called Hirci testiculus, 'Goates cullions.' Of 'Archangel, or Dead Nettel' Lyte writes that the second kind 'hath a strong and stinking savour' (143). Whereas one kind of TesticulusMorionis has a 'pleasant savor/ another is 'of a grievous unpleasant savor' (247). The third kind has a 'floure ... of a rank stinking savor, like to the smel of a Goate ...' (248). This, 'because of his ranke savour, is called ... Testiculus bird in Latine' (249-50). (It is this, noted earlier, which 'provoketh Venus' and is, more than the others, 'good for them that are fallen into ... fever Hectique ...')

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But diseases are not restricted to the Ghost-inhabited king figures. Subjected to Hamlet's violences, the Queen cries out, O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct.

Ophelia's flowers include, in the 'long purples/ spots within the fleshcoloured flowers and on the leaves, which, if black only once, are always spots in the sense of 'grained' (i.e., irremovable) blotches. One sort of the cynosorchin has flowers 'faire and sweet, and of a carnation or fleshly color like the color of mans body, but speckled full of purple spots ...' (246). Another has leaves 'ful of black spots' (247). All this multiplicity of correlated imagery makes well-nigh positive Shakespeare's use of Lyte, but there is more that cannot be ignored, the 'dead men's fingers' apparently abhorrent to 'our cold [i.e., frigidly chaste] maids'; these are the palmated roots of orchis or 'long purples,' the source of the widespread, commonly known terminologies and images so distasteful to Steevens's sensibilities. Lyte lists these under 'The Names.' 'The first kind is called in Greeke ... Cynosorchis [dog's flesh; sark, Gr. front muscle of the thigh; seat of affection and lust] ,12 In Latine ... Testiculus canis, that is to say, Dogs cullions, or Dogs cods: ... in English some call it also ... Priest pintell [\spintel, penis], Ballock grasse ...: in French Couillons de chien, and Satyrion a deux Couillons: in Italian Testiculo di cane: in Spanish Coyon de perro ...' The 'second kind is called ... in English ... Fooles ballocks' (249). 'The third kind ... because of his ranke savour, is called ... in English Hares ballocks, and Goates cullions ... The fourth kind is called ... in English Serapias stones, Priests pintell ... The fift kind is called Testiculus odoratus ... that is to say ... Sweete Ballocke ...' (249-50). All are, of course, relevant, but it is the third kind, the stinking 'Goates cullions,' the satyr, that is opposed in Hamlet to the fertility god Hyperion. But the descriptions are fuller than merely the images of testes. We have already seen the flesh-colored, spotted flowers, open like the visor of a helmet or fool's hood. There are also descriptions of what remains of male genitalia. Of one kind of rosemary 'the roote is long, great, thicke, and white, with a certaine kind of great thicke haire above ...' (318). For each of the kinds and sorts of orchis there are similar descriptions of stems, in one of which is 'a certaine sweete juice or moisture' (248). Dover Wilson's comment about 'O that this too, too sullied [solid] flesh would melt, /Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!' is relevant.

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... 'sullied flesh' ... strikes the keynote of what follows ... in everything he says for the rest of the play. 'Sullied-melt-thaw-dew';... Hamlet is thinking of snow begrimed with soot and dirt in time of thaw, and is wishing that his 'sullied flesh' might melt as snow does. For his blood is tainted, his very flesh corrupted, by what his mother has done ... ['sullied flesh'] anticipates 'incestuous sheets' at the end of the soliloquy, and so binds the whole soliloquy together ... It gives expression, for the first time, to one of the leading themes of the play. Why are Hamlet's 'imaginations ... as foul as Vulcan's stithy'? Why does that 'couch for luxury' so perpetually haunt his thoughts? What does he mean when he warns Ophelia that virtue cannot so innoculate [sic] our old stock but we shall relish of it', or again, 'I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me'? 'Sullied flesh' is the clue to these and other passages; it is partly also the clue to his strange conduct towards Ophelia and his equally strange language about her to Polonius. Hamlet felt himself involved in his mother's lust; he was conscious of sharing her nature in all its rankness and grossness; the stock from which he sprung was rotten. (42)

If we are compelled to feel that the Hamlet vision is a monstrous, evil conception of birth, life, and dying only to perpetuate the same rotten life and monstrous birth, the following passage in Lyte is to the point: ... the floures alone are but smal and like to an open hood or helmet out of the inside whereof, there hangeth foorth a certaine ragged thing, fashioned almost like the proportion of a little fourefooted beast. The roots (over & besides certain smal hairie things growing about them) are round like to a paire of stones ... one hanging somwhat shorter than the other, whereof the highermost is the smaller, fuller, & harder, & the nethermost is the greatest, the lightest, and most wrinckled or shriveled ... [out of the floures of the second] there hang certain things as it were smal rabbets, or yong mice, or litle men without heads, with their armes and legs spreadcast abroad, in like maner as they were woont to paint litle children hanging out of Saturns mouth ... (246)

It seems reasonable that all of this is testimony to Shakespeare's extraordinarily comprehensive powers of imaginative synthesis concentring on a multiple-imaged unity. After this it is in the Queen's figures and images that Ophelia goes to her muddy death. Her 'clothes spread wide' bore her up 'mermaid like.' For Elizabethans 'mermaid' was not only siren, but prostitute. Ophelia is one ... incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element...

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that is, unable to resist her distress at the same time that she is in her natural element in her dying. 'Dying' she 'chaunted snatches of old tunes/ which chanting we have already directly heard. But there is more to bring Ophelia to the end of her journey, her grave, another telling of Hamlet's story, this by the grave-makers, and an account of the end of Rosencrantz/Guildenstern's 'travels,' their death, a complex symbolic act. Finally there are the violences at her 'maimed rites.' The grave-makers' scene has three major parts: a colloquy between the Clowns, divided into discussion of Ophelia's death and the nature of grave-makers; a conversation between Hamlet and Horatio while the Clown sings, already explored in Hamlet's reconstruction of the Hamlet story as skulls are tossed up out of the grave by 'Goodman Delver'; and, third, a conversation between the sexton and Hamlet. To attempt to understand the relevance of the grave-makers to Ophelia's 'travels,' now about to end in the grave, it is necessary to understand their character, and indeed why the Second Clown is present at all. Shakespeare's clowns in tragedy typically have two distinctive characteristics: they have no names - they are everyman - and they are very important to the significance of the action. Hamlet as director has made this clear: ... And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered.

These clowns do not laugh, though one of them sings a song which seems to be relevant to the Hamlet of act v. In this sense these clowns are extraordinary figures, not at all comparable to the Fool in Lear, but very much like the 'rural fellow' who brings asps to Cleopatra. Who is a grave-maker? A builder stronger than a mason, a shipwright, a carpenter, or a gallows-maker, for the houses he makes last till doomsday. In diametrically opposite direction, to the furthest extreme in human time, ... There is no ancient gentlemen but gard'ners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam's profession ... The Scripture says Adam digg'd.

The grave-maker never travels; he has been in the unweeded garden of Elsinore from the beginning; will be there to the end. Moreover he is a

142 EXHUMATION

'mole,' a 'pioner,' digging under the dead to throw them out of darkness back into light. It is he who makes graves tenantless, so that they may have new tenants. Although not immediately relevant to Ophelia's travel to 'death/ it is not indifferent that the sexton's tenure as grave-digger is exactly coordinate with Hamlet's life. He began to dig graves the day 'our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras'... 'that very day that young Hamlet was born ...' (Evidently the elder Hamlet too 'won to his shameful lust/The will of [a] most seeming-virtuous queen.') In these mythic parallels of time Hamlet was then born with Adam, and will hunt, spy on, and act his mystery till doomsday. Hamlet, in the Hamlet cemetery, is a 'gravedigger' who in his frenetic imagination exhumes a Ghost which inhabits him, a Ghost who, as we have so fully seen, is the corruption that leads to Ophelia's dying. Of this the Clowns have something to say. The Second Clown does not seem to be a grave-digger. In all, presumably as the sexton's helper, he is present for only fifty-two lines, scarcely time to do much digging. It would seem that what 'is set down for him* is an ambiguous, quibbling, 'comic' discussion of the nature of Ophelia's dying rather than grave-digging. Only twenty-three lines long, this discussion must be read in the lexicon of Elizabethan double entendre. Is she to have Christian burial after 'wilfully' killing herself? 'The crowner hath sat on her,' reports the Second Clown, that is, the coroner has conducted an inquest. 'Crowner' is, literally, 'the King's man,' the King's substitute. Thus Hamlet and the whole of Ophelia's drowning under her coronet come sharply into view again with 'hath sat on her,' for 'sit,' in the sixteenth century could be, often was, synonymous with 'lie.'13 The 'crowner,' then, hath lain on her, and, although the finding is that she killed herself 'in her own defense,' the First Clown's 'blunder,' as some footnotes have it, 'It must be se offendendo* - in self-offense - seems not irrelevant. It was self-offense, the Clown argues: For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act; and an act hath three branches - it is to act, to do, and to perform; argal, she drown'd herself wittingly.

In this, 'act,' 'do,' and 'perform' are synonymous. For 'do' the obvious instance is in Ophelia's earlier song, Alack, and fie for shame! Yoimg men will do't if they come to't By Cock, they are to blame.

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'Performs/ usually in 'performance/ is commonplace, as in Macbeth n.iii. 29-38, and Henry iv, Part 2 n.iv.260-1. For 'act' we may note 'the act of sport' and the 'act of shame' in Othello n.i.228; v.ii.212. 'Act' in turn is synonymous with 'go' in the First Clown's following speech. So we read of Scoggin's jest, 'sir, I would have a medicine to make me goe to it lustily (he ment of Venus acts).'14 'Goodman Delver' continues his argument: Here lies the water; good. Here stands the man; good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes - mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself.

In the context of Ophelia's watery death this is clear enough. But while 'stands' is a usual phallicism, universal mythic meaning enforces the implications. Simone de Beauvoir writes: '[woman] is Water and [man] is Fire ... the Sun is the husband of the Sea; the Sun, fire, are male divinities; and the Sea is one of the most nearly universal of maternal symbols.15 Hamlet is a spy, a searcher out of his own nature in an agonized quest, and this, in a colloquialism for 'inquest/ ends the Clowns' argument. OTHER [CLOWN] But is this law?

CLOWN Ay, marry, is't - crowner's quest law.

Half of Hamlet's violent story has been told again. Its other half, the killing of the King, is in the dramatic action midway between the two accounts of Ophelia's dying, but more precisely quite coordinate with it, although Hamlet's account of it comes in v.ii. It is the death of Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, a King-killing curiously significant to our understanding of the essence of Hamlet, and of the perplexing sense of change in him from the beginning of the play to its end, especially what he is like in act v. If in one sense Hamlet never dies literally, or if in the mythic conversion his dying is an act inseparable from birth, it seems nevertheless that in Shakespeare's invention we can recognize possible variables as to what part of him dies in the dyings of his alter-egos. Of Rosencrantz/ Guildenstern, considered so far, it would appear that it is in some sense the end of political intriguing. But this quality does not die in Claudius: it is fully evident in his skilled handling of Laertes as agent for a treacherous killing. Moreover this kind of character, while not irrelevant to the objectives of lust, is not sharply clear in respect to Ophelia's dying. If

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Rosencrantz/Guildenstern is the invented King-figure who must die at this moment, perhaps other qualities should be considered. First, there is the relationship to Hamlet in the King's greeting to his spies: I entreat you both That, being of so young days brought up with him, And since so neighbour'd to his youth and haviour, ... so by your companies To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus That, open'd, lies within our remedy.

This suggests an identity of character no less complete than that shared with Horatio, but different in two emphases: behaviour has been shared from 'young days' through the intimacies of 'youth/ To get to the specific qualities of and changes in attitude towards this long-shared behaviour we must consider together the meanings in the courtiers' names and those in Hamlet's other selves. As Horatio, he is the almost purely rational spirit; as Fortinbras, 'Strong-in-the-Arm,' the violent Pyrrhus soldier; as spy, the fox in Reynaldo. In the Rosencrantz/Guildenstern identity there is from the very beginning the paradox of self-violation, a complexity made more intricate in Hamlet's effective treachery in killing this part of himself. Murderous spy and hunter, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern is 'Rose Garland'/ 'Golden Stars.'16 'Rose Garland' is identified with Hamlet, and especially with Ophelia; 'Golden Stars' entirely with Hamlet. For the second there is eloquent testimony in Hamlet's first conversation with the King's spies: I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth ... indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that... this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire - why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

What was in Hamlet's vision the golden beauty of stars has changed, as early as the first soliloquy, into something foul and pestilential. What does Hamlet destroy in manoeuvring the companions of his childhood and youth to their death? Insofar as they are living violations of their own names, he is destroying that which is evil in its destruction of beauty and virtue; he seems then to be asserting these qualities. But

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in the act he too bears witness to radical and gross change in his own nature, for indeed carnal knowledge come to him from the Ghost (already evident in him in the first soliloquy) has led him to say to Rosencrantz/Guildenstern that all his vision is foul. In Hamlet's encounter with Ophelia 'loosed' to him there are relevant words: OPH Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? HAM Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

Or again, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern is a rational, cunning creature bent on the act of killing. Hamlet paradoxically uses cunning violence against hidden violence which has sought to prevent his violences. This he does with hyper-cunning rationality covering an explosive tension. Ophelia too is wearing a 'rosencrantz,' which is a foully repulsive coronet. These violations come together in gross denigration of the crown, symbol of King as moral Man. As Horatio says it, 'Why, what a king is this!' and as Laertes cries it out, 'The King, the King's to blame.' Yet there is another view consistent with all these others that may shed light on the Hamlet of act v. In killing Rosencrantz/Guildenstern the hidden force of destruction in himself, he destroys the negation of value that it represents. He seems to become the purged man, the quiet, thoughtful companion of Horatio in the churchyard. Again, after sudden brief reversion to passionate violence at Ophelia's grave and after the mocking of his Osric/Self, we read his mature, fatalistic, If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Brief words of reconciliation to Laertes have the same dignity, and something of typical paradox. But the 'purged' man again explodes in the violence of multiple killings that lead to the plea: 'Tell my story.' The paradox of the traveller in the fifth soliloquy-chorus has led to many travels that are always one. There remain only the travelling players, the exact counterpart of the players who play Hamlet. The opposite of this argues that any actors who play Hamlet are 'travelling' players, and that any 'mutes or audience to this act' are 'travellers' in the Hamlet universe, from Adam to doomsday. Hamlet asks, 'What

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players are they?' knowing already that they have been 'coted' by Rosencrantz/Guildenstern and so are Hamlet-hunters. In the very speech which ends in the question he has identified them individually. First is the King: '- his Majesty shall have tribute of me.' Next the adventurous knight, who 'shall use his foil and target/ A 'target' is a small, round buckler, a foil a fencing sword; but the combination of sword and buckler was a common image for sexual encounter.17 Next 'the lover shall not sigh gratis.' Hamlet the lover pays in 'the pangs of despis'd love,7 that is, love which he despises. There follows the 'humorous man' who shall 'end his part in peace.' Staunton writes: 'not the funny man, or jester, ... but the actor who personated the fantastic characters, ... who ... were represented as capricious and quarrelsome.'18 Hamlet is certainly capricious; and he cries out: 'Rightly to be great /Is ... greatly to find quarrel in a straw ...' Next is the clown who 'shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o' th' sere.' Halliwell comments: 'Tickle of the sear, wanton, immodest. In [this] passage it means those whose lungs are wanton, or excited to laughter by coarse ribaldry.'19 These are all the male characters in the company of travelling players. Clearly each is Hamlet, who plays his own story in all its parts except that of the woman. She is finally accounted for in 'the lady shall say her mind freely, or [i.e., even though] the blank verse shall halt for't.' We are again with Ophelia: She speaks much of her father; says she hears There's tricks i' th' world ...20 Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they aim at it, And botch the words up to fit their own thoughts; Which ... Indeed would make one think there might be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

In this dramatis personae there is again before us compactly the full Hamlet story. We have been far in travels, in the nightmare dreams of Hamlet's foul imaginings. Throughout, whether it be Reynaldo, Polonius, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, the Players, always there is the spy/hunter; the hunter who hunts himself and woman: the hawk, the falcon, the 'something in his soul that sits on brood.' The fifth soliloquy-chorus, so introspective, so brooding, ends with a 'hatch and disclose' that is 'some danger' to Ophelia. As are other soliloquies, it is again self-recriminatory about not doing the act.

147 Dream travellers And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment ... lose the name of action.

'Pitch' is the ultimate height achieved by a falcon. 'Great pitch' suggests a height even higher, so that in this 'enterprise of great moment' the victim of the hawk will be subjected to an extraordinarily violent attack. At precisely this point Hamlet apostrophizes the approaching Ophelia, Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins rememb'red.

In calling attention to the one instance in Shakespeare's time of 'nymph' used for other than a water-deity, Halliwell makes clear for us the relevance of the word in Ophelia's 'drowning.'21 When we also consider that nymphs were typically, in Greek myth, pursued, not as 'maidens loth,' by satyrs, Hamlet's 'enterprise of great pitch' is not indifferent. And all his sins can be remembered in her prayers only if she knows what all his sins are. With this we are at the end of elements of drama used as means within the drama. But there remains the Mousetrap, a whole drama within the drama, that has gained the puzzled attention of all who have read or seen Hamlet, the heuristic analysis of which by Greg led to Wilson's longer analysis. In the light of the present inquiry it seems to deserve further examination.

7 Mousetrap

KING What do you call the play? HAMLET 'The Mousetrap.' Marry, how? Tropically. OPHELIA What means this, my lord? HAMLET Marry, this is miching malhecho ...1 POLONIUS If circumstances lead me, I will find Where truth is hid, though it were hid Within the centre.

Of what is usually identified as the Mousetrap - dumb show, prologue, and play - John Dover Wilson writes: The play scene is the central point of Hamlet... the climax and crisis ... Owing to its crucial character and its central position, [it] is the point at which all the threads of the plot may be expected to meet' (138; 140). Yet there have been doubts as to the necessity for and the dramatic impact of the dumb show, and negative responses to the play as a rather dull, stilted version of the Ghost's story; certainly the prologue has had short shrift. But what Wilson is reacting to is not the 'play within the play,' per se, but to what goes on at the same time, a complicated parallel playing of Hamlet's story by Hamlet, Horatio, Polonius, the King, Ophelia, and the Queen. And even this, frenetic as it may be, does not equal the power of that which immediately precedes and follows, the nunnery scene, Pyrrhus, and the attack on the Queen. It may very well be that the climactic centre embraces all these; that the meaning of the Mousetrap lies more in Hamlet than in the arranged play; that he is the crucial centre. This brings us again to 'centre' as not only an immediate structural concept, but a metaphysical one that Maynard Mack calls 'The World of Hamlet1: 'I do not of course mean Denmark ... I mean simply the imagi-

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native environment that the play asks us to enter ...' This environment we have seen in detail as 'geography,' a blending of Renaissance cosmology and the psychological-emotional character of Hamlet. Another consistent pattern, that of mythic time, will lead us, as all else does, to the Mousetrap. This, marked throughout by urgent haste, hurries insistently to the moment of act. Here again end is the best point of beginning. Horatio having ordered Fortinbras and the English ambassador to order 'that these bodies/High on a stage be placed to the view/ Fortinbras responds, 'Let us haste to hear it [Horatio's story],' and in turn Horatio says, 'Let this same be presently [i.e., immediately] performed.' This last is at least the thirty-seventh account of or direct urging to haste. A sense of great urgency is scarcely ever relaxed. Bernardo urges sentries to haste to watch for the Ghost. Horatio and Marcellus discuss the reason for 'this sweaty haste,' 'this post-haste and romage in the land': it is the impending attack of a nephew, Young Fortinbras. Next the King euphemizes haste in 'Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother's death /The memory be green,' and Hamlet, in soliloquy, spends much passion on the Queen's haste to speed to incestuous sheets, shortly echoed by Horatio's comment, 'Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.' The next pattern is frequent: one attitude or action enclosing another. Hamlet can scarcely wait for the Ghost: 'Would the night were come!' Seeing the Ghost, he urges 'Haste me to know't, that I ... may sweep to my revenge.' Within these two urgencies Laertes is aware of time: 'I stay too long.' Polonius immediately enforces this: 'Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!' only to detain him for a long sententious list of worldly precepts. Laertes is eager to continue to 'take his fair time' in Paris; Polonius no less eager for him. But one impedes his haste to warn his sister against Hamlet; the other contradicts his acquiescence to command his daughter to stay away from Hamlet. There follow many urgencies directed at Hamlet, first to discover his intentions, next to dispose of him. These again are so arranged that between them is another compelling urgency, this in the Mousetrap. Before it the Queen asks that Rosencrantz/Guildenstern 'instantly' visit her son. The King conjectures Hamlet's attitude as originating in 'our o'erhasty marriage.' Polonius reports his action to prevent 'this hot love on the wing,' and indicates he will board Hamlet presently. The King, in turn, decides 'He shall with speed to England.' After the Mousetrap we hear the King in fear: 'Arm you ... to this speedy voyage' [to England]; 'This sudden sending him away must seem / Deliberate pause'; 'tempt him with speed aboard. Delay it not. / Away!'; 'The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch / But we will ship him hence.' He repeats this urgent need directly to Hamlet: 'this deed ... must send thee hence / With fiery quickness.'

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Between Hamlet's intentions and the frantic efforts to get rid of him is the Mousetrap; approaching it, the King, the Queen, and Hamlet all urge haste: HAM How now, my lord? Will the King hear this piece of work? POL And the Queen too, and that presently. HAM Bid the players make haste. [Exit POLONIUS.] Will you two help to hasten them?

After the Players' play Rosencrantz/Guildenstern convey 'this mother's' desire to speak with her son, and Polonius intensifies her wish: 'My lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently.' Hamlet's answer, 'Then I will come to my mother by-and-by,' repeated in '"By-andby" is easily said,' completes the pattern.2 Hamlet's words near the end of the play echo the urgency in the Mousetrap: Being thus benetted round with villainies, Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play.

There are many other scenes and intimations of haste, of tense urgency to act and to prevent an act. Laertes is like 'The ocean, [which] overpeering of his list, / Eats not the flats with more impiteous haste' in his return to kill the King. The King urges him 'swoopstake' to kill Hamlet. Hamlet urges Horatio, 'repair thou to me with as much speed as thou wouldest fly death,' and reports first that 'on the supervise, no leisure bated, / No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, / My head should be struck off.' He himself arranges that 'those bearers [be] put to sudden death ...' If there is any passage especially relevant to this ever-present tense urgency in Hamlet it is this: HOR It must be shortly known to him from England What is the issue of the business there. HAM It will be short; the interim is mine, And a man's life's no more than to say 'one.'

All contracts to an intense moment, a violent act most violently seen in the Mousetrap. But to grasp that act fully, as Shakespeare's art intensifies it, we must consider the mythic time scheme which too has its boundaries and centre, and some details in those parts of the Mousetrap that precede the encounter with the Queen.

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That Hamlet is different in act v has been best stated by Mack. 'Hamlet/ he writes, 'accepts his world and we discover a different man.' He shows 'the deportment of a man who has been "illuminated" in the tragic sense ... he has now learned, and accepted, the boundaries in which human action, human judgment, are enclosed ... It is ... the haunting mystery of life ... that Hamlet's speeches point to, holding in its inscrutable folds those other mysteries that he has wrestled with so long ... The mystery of evil is present here - for this is after all the universal graveyard ... After the graveyard and what it indicates has come to pass in him ... he accepts the world as it is, ... as a duel, in which ... evil holds the poisoned rapier and the poisoned chalice waits ../ (54-8 passim). This is sensitive assessment but it fails to see that Hamlet's 'world' lies totally inside of him; Hamlet is thought of as a literal man rather than a mythic representative of Man. Hamlet does not accept the world and its evil in its own terms ('O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!'); those terms are that it must be lived forever, be always begun again, or, more correctly, be transmitted endlessly from father to son through woman, with only a brief interregnum. This Claudius may mean in This grave shall have a living monument. An hour of quiet shortly shall we see ...

Similarly Mack sees Hamlet at the beginning as 'a very young man, sensitive and idealistic, suffering the first shock of growing up.' This is not very accurate, for in i.ii he is not very young, and anything but innocently idealistic; most briefly later he is a sexual hunter to be feared. To see him at the beginning and then in the middle of the action, we must again consider meanings implicit in the end, in the mystery of death and birth, in the dying of King Hamlet and the 'birth' of Hamlet in Ghost. It will be helpful first to consider briefly Hamlet's literal life as details in the play suggest it. The youngest Hamlet we see is younger than seven years, for he is, by the testimony of the sexton, thirty years old as he nears his imminent death, and Yorick, who bore Hamlet on his back 'a thousand times/ has been buried twenty-three years. We know too that Rosencrantz/Guildenstern were 'brought up with him ... and neighbour'd to his youth.' We know that he was a scholar at Wittenberg with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Horatio. From his letter to Ophelia (n.ii) we can assume a Hamlet who is an inarticulate, unsophisticated young lover,

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although metaphors and parallels belie this. So much we have of a literal Prince of Denmark. But in attempting to assess the mythic-dramatic lifetime relevant to the action up to the Mousetrap, we note first that the literal age of Hamlet poses irresolvable contradictions. The most obvious is that Hamlet seems quite young, perhaps eighteen or twenty early in the play, and older than thirty in act v. Moreover, if Horatio remembers the elder Hamlet as of the day when 'he th' ambitious Norway combated/ although at the same time 'I knew your father/ the Horatio who is Hamlet's co-equal at Wittenberg must have been reasonably mature at the time of Hamlet's birth. If in i.i Hamlet is about twenty, Horatio must be a good deal older, although they are always presented as of the same age. What has had more attention is the age of the Queen in relation to Hamlet. Somehow she must not be old, but as Hamlet's mother she must be in i.ii, by the standard of Juliet, in her thirties, but in act v in her forties. She is somehow ageless, physically attractive, physically demanding in a passive way. This response can, of course, not be literal. Almost completely obscure in these considerations is Claudius, who seems no less ageless than the Queen, although the Player King and Player Queen will shed light on his age. In sum, any effort to arrive at a literal measurement of the age of anyone in this metaphorical drama is quite meaningless. To gain a sense of the cogent, unified meaning in the 'age' or 'life' of Hamlet in reference to the rest of his imagined but most real world, we must again go to mythic reality as mythic time reveals it. Our initial question may well be: what is necessary, if there is no successor to a kingship, to gain one? We know that Claudius has said, 'You are the most immediate to our throne' in i.ii, and therefore that Hamlet is King when he dies, and we know that Hamlet prophesies the succession of Fortinbras. That we do not see Fortinbras in Elsinore in i.i is exactly as significant as that we do not see Hamlet, for the figure is Fortinbras/Hamlet. In a quite appropriate sense each is in a far country in the geography of Hamlet. We do not see a Hamlet until after we have seen a silent Ghost. This is a time of quiet guard; there is 'not a mouse stirring,' a phrase of not minimal importance. When we do see Hamlet he is dressed in a cloak so dark, so like black clouds, 'a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,' that ordinary mourning clothes fade into insignificance. To grasp the mythic implications we must do what Greek thinkers did as a matter of course - turn the coin, sense the paradox - for Hamlet may be said here to be wearing a shroud, and shrouds are the swaddling clothes of death. To gain a King in the line of Kings requires procreation and birth. To be considered later as ritual, the end of v.ii provides what is necessary:

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a Queen 'dying' from a drink poisoned by the King with an aphrodisiac, and a multiple King-figure 'dying' from the poisoned tip of his 'rapier.' The dead King will be carried to the stage to act his act, but before he can do so his inevitable spirit must be formed, or, more properly, conveyed, from his father and mother, and his father's/mother's father and mother, and so back and back. 'Father and mother is man and wife; man and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother,' Hamlet says to King/ Hamlet. It is not casual that there is 'not a mouse stirring' as the guards wait in fear and wonder for the coming of the Ghost. We have seen the Ghost; we have seen the black swaddling clothes. What remains is birth, which comes in i.v, where Ghost gains voice and Hamlet purpose.3 But between the silent Hamlet and the articulate Ghost is more than a hint of character already formed; in the first soliloquy we know that Hamlet's demon already possesses him, for Ghost's voice and Hamlet's are one and the same. Born as playwright, hunter, secret man, spy, prophet, man of desire ('every man hath business and desire'), scholar, soldier, diseased, corrupt man, scourge, self-scourger, madman, Hamlet speaks his own natal epitaph, The time is out of joint. O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right!

But Shakespeare does not convey his meaning in such direct simplicity. Hamlet's gestation comes to term in miraculous 'birth' of a fullblown man in some forty pages of suggestive art. The invention is the more remarkable in that it uses metaphors utterly familiar in literature, well-nigh topics in the Renaissance (and so the more readily effective for an Elizabethan audience): life equated to day and year, but not, it may appear, in full cycle. There is selection and modification: not day, but night from midnight to dawn; not the year, but two blending seasons, midwinter to spring. These sequences at first seem not to be completed in the rest of the play; Hamlet's 'dying' cannot be in his old age, however much ordinary dying is suggested in his aged and infirm and old counterparts, Young Fortinbras's uncle and Polonius. It is just as important that his Ghost is confined to the flames of punishment from dawn to dark. Extended to metaphoric counterparts, day is night, life is death, hell is here and now. Mythic intimations begin at once; the sound of funeral cannon still echoes as we hear, only a breath apart, 'Long live the King,' and Tis now struck twelve' - midnight, the precise moment between the last hour and

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the first. Horatio has been entreated to 'watch the minutes of this night/ intimation of a long, slow, waiting watch. But almost immediately Bernardo's literal contradiction as to the appearance of the Ghost, 'The bell then beating one' - advances the time. A moment later Marcellus confirms the collapsing of twelve and one: the Ghost has appeared twice before 'jump at this dead hour.' The fluid permanence of the moment comes in Bernardo's 'the King / That was and is the question of these wars.' The Ghost reappears, then disappears as the cock, the 'trumpet to the morn,' the 'bird of dawning,' crows. In a matter of moments we are in dawn after a fearful dark midnight. This swift brevity is microcosm in a temporal macrocosm: 'A little ere the mightiest Julius fell' ghosts walked in the Roman streets, a time of 'disasters in the sun';4 too, the 'bird of dawning' sings at the time of Christ's birth. The allusion to Christ's birth works its effect on us with similar subtlety. This midwinter dawn of the nativity ('Tis bitter cold,' says Francisco) is not only gray and cloudy - it 'walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.' We are in the dew of spring even as we are in the bitter cold of winter, or perhaps more accurately in terms of Hamlet, still in the bitter cold of winter while in the dews of spring. Again it is only a few lines to the King's first remark to Hamlet: 'How is it that the clouds still hang on you?' Presently in the echo of the King's 'great cannon' Hamlet excoriates the haste of his mother's incestuous marriage: 'But two months dead! Nay, not so much, not two ... yet, within a month - ... A little month ... married with my uncle.' Two months become a month, then a little month. This scene is immediately followed by another that is obliquely but not obscurely in spring. The court giving way to the re-entry of the guards, we are in the ambiguities of Horatio's return and the time he has spent in Denmark; he has come back for the funeral, two months, one month, one little month before, but Hamlet has not seen him until this moment. The Ghost has appeared three sequent nights, so there are three nights between midwinter and spring. It stayed 'while one with moderate haste might tell a hundred' ('longer, longer,' say the others, to be denied by Horatio), reiteration of dawn on the very heels of midnight. Now Laertes warns his sister against the 'perfume and suppliance of a minute' in the figures of the Violet in the youth of primy nature' Hamlet's springtime. Love, he says, becomes lust most quickly, a canker galling 'the infants of the spring' for 'in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent.' Spring and dawn share the 'foul and pestilent congregation of vapours' that hangs on

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Hamlet. Think yourself a baby/ says her father, Tor Lord Hamlet, / Believe so much in him, that he is young ...' Now we are again with the guards; 'the air bites shrewdly; it is very cold'; Hamlet/Horatio is unconscious of the striking of the midnight bell. We are in i.i again, but we now know the pre-set mould of Hamlet's character. Time slows in Hamlet's quiet reflection on 'some vicious mole of nature' but hurries again as the Ghost beckons. 'My hour is almost come,' begins the Ghost, and a moment later, '... methinks I scent the morning air. / Brief let me be.' Two months, one month, one little month before this cold midwinter night, sleeping within his orchard, 'the leperous distillment ... swift as quicksilver ... with a sudden vigour ... at once dispatch'd' a King. Swiftly speed and season merge; the evil act is always in the spring though it be winter too. Now not the dew but the glow-worm of May ends the dreadful midwinter story, and we are at the beginning of Hamlet's madness as he curses the force that lies behind his birth. We are now deep in what is probably the radical analogy of primitive myth, death in winter, rebirth in spring, virile conception and fruition in summer (May-day the nexus of these latter two), and decline in autumn. If the first two are here, the others should be. The largest form of Hamlet indicates that they are. We have seen Hamlet in act v fatalistically aware that the human condition is inevitable, that he must die not having set it right ('You will lose this wager,' says his reasonable soul). We have seen in act i the ghostly spirit come to monstrous birth. What is between winter-spring and autumn-winter is the summer of acts n, in, iv. Hamlet inherits his madness in i, dies of it in v. But he lives it in 'dying' in his summer. It is a pattern of growing intensity from n.i through violence to the utterly passionate violence of m.iv, then diminishing through iv to v. The pattern has been familiar time and again: all goes to a crucial centre, which for the whole action is the act called the Mousetrap. Act ii briefly under way, Hamlet appears in his first madness, the dumb show for Ophelia. Polonius and the King haste to assess it, and hard upon this reappears Voltemand/Cornelius to report on a dangerous nephew. Moments later we read Hamlet's letter to Ophelia, testimonial to the innocence of inarticulate young love, spring love. But in it we find worldly knowledge, a most quickly achieved sophistication. 'To the celestial, and ... the most beautified Ophelia.' This, says Polonius, is 'a vile phrase; "beautified" is a vile phrase.' Here is more than passing criticism of diction. Hamlet incorporates an angel with one 'who paints an inch thick.' It is indeed a vile phrase. Then, transliterated, his apprentice-lover's poetry reads, doubt that I love you if you doubt that stars are fire, that 'the sun doth move.' 'I have not art,' Hamlet writes, 'to reckon my groans.'

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'Sun/son,' Hyperion/satyr, cannot be doubted to 'move.' In Romeo and Juliet we read: SAMSON A dog of the house of Montague moves me. GREGORY To move is to stir; and to be valiant is to stand,

and the passage is even more explicit to Samson's conclusion, 'Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and 'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.' As to Hamlet's reckoning his groans, we may briefly anticipate part of the Mousetrap: HAM I could interpret between you and your love, if I could see the puppets dallying. OPH You are keen, my lord, you are keen. HAM It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge.

Briefly later Polonius 'boards him,' to be warned not to let his daughter 'walk i' th' sun' lest she conceive. Then suddenly mythic time is fully explicit: 'for you yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.' In simplistic reading Polonius could become as young as Hamlet now is; mythically Polonius will have to go back with Hamlet to Adam, to the ravaged garden. As act m opens, all of Hamlet's 'days of quiet' are marked by 'turbulent and dangerous lunacy'; fifty lines later we have the thoughtful 'to be, or not to be' soliloquy. At its conclusion Ophelia asks: 'How does your honour for this many a day?' The attack on Ophelia, like the immediately preceding soliloquy, indicates the full compass of life, filled not with 'the scorns of time,' but with offences beyond imagination, this in turn epitomized by Ophelia as 'blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy,' youth in its full flower gone rank in madness. Now comes the Players' play, and its preliminaries, in which all the earlier complexities of mythic time have restatement. First we read: HAM O God, your only jig-maker! What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within's two hours. OPH Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord. HAM So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year. But, by'r Lady, he must build churches then; or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is 'For O, for O, the hobby horse is forgot!'

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This passage is very rich in references to mythic time and action. Like so many other passages, for example, the several soliloquies, it has its own fully enclosed unity, ending as it begins in sexual innuendo - continuation of the grossly suggestive conversation with Ophelia, the 'country matters' passage of which it is part. What earlier was two months, one month, one little month, is now 'two hours,' corrected by Ophelia to four months. Her estimate brings us again, approximately, to spring. And if we consider Shakespeare's use of the Globe, the theatre, as part of his invented geography, we need not question his use of dramatic time in the same way. How long is Hamlet"? Polonius has said that Hamlet 'sometimes ... walks four hours together / Here in the lobby.' If this is a reference to the play, are we not in Hamlet's 'two hours' exactly at the centre of the action, and exactly two hours away from the end, the dying of a King, and from the beginning, the birth of a King? Hamlet's next ambiguous remark is quite relevant. If the spirit we see dressed in black in i.ii is Ghost come from hell, and a King wears sable robes of state, then the brief pause between 'the King is dead' and 'Long live the King' is clear in 'let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables.' There is more: 'For O, for O, the hobby horse is forgot!' The hobby horse, an 'animal' made up of a man hidden underneath a covering, a ridiculous but here serious equivalent of Pyrrhus's Trojan horse, or of a centaur, is a character in May-day games. The truth is indeed well 'hid in the centre.' Finally the passage has its enclosing beginning and end in terms of the act. 'O God, your only jig-maker! What should a man do but be merry?' Both 'jig' and 'merry' had distinctly questionable meanings for Elizabethans, and just as clearly so the 'O' of 'For O, for O,' at the end.5 Seconds later, in the dumb show, the King 'lays him down upon a bank of flowers,' a more explicit spring scene but the same as 'sleeping within my orchard.' The Prologue that follows is brief 'as woman's love,' that is, 'life's but a moment.' Next, the Player King identifies his and his Queen's life together exactly with Hamlet's full 'lifetime': Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round Neptune's salt wash ... Since love our hearts, and Hymen did our hands, Unite commutual in most sacred bands.

'The fruit unripe,' says the Player King, 'sticks on the tree, / But fall unshaken when they mellow be,' in Hamlet a most swift ripening. The

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play ends as we move on to the Very witching time of night,' immediate prologue to the violence with the Queen, the moment of madness in action. We have been hastened in mythic time to the crucial moment; now we are to be led through a series of implications of time that will bring us to the sane Hamlet of act v. Echo of Hamlet's earlier contractions of time comes quickly: 'if, indeed, you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.' Before and after this are the King's frantic hastes to dispose of Hamlet. Then we hear Ophelia singing of St Valentine's Day, 'all in the morning betime.' It is 14 February, winter close to spring, when a maid 'out a maid / never departed more.' Now some time goes by - Ophelia's madness and Laertes' swiftly violent return. Then Hamlet's letter: 'I am set naked on your kingdom. To-morrow ...I shall recount the occasion of my sudden and more strange return.' The King's reaction, 'Naked! ... alone,' reinforces the curious sense of echo of an earlier 'birth.' Immediately he plans another death for Hamlet. There are other echoes, for example, the King's recollection, 'Two months since / Here was a gentleman of Normandy' - Lamord (i.e., the Death -)6 'incorps'd and demi-natur'd' with his horse, a centaur-like creature.7 Whether it be two months or two hours, we are always at the centre of what is begun and ends by dying. Now we see Ophelia's crowned dying, then are with the sane Hamlet of act v, in autumn, about to go into the ritualistic violence of winter dying. It is to the centre of the play, the nucleus of man's life, that we have been 'dreadfully attended.' But always the core is in the Hamlet we attend. Everywhere around him are figures who are mocking, smoothly or violently threatening, all frighteningly himself, driving him, with only his fleeting rationalities to resist, to stand between his passion and his fighting soul. At the confluence of this nightmare are the shifting chiaroscuros of that wildly moving hall of mirrors, the Mousetrap. The most helpful comment on the Mousetrap is still Greg's 'Hamlet's Hallucination.' Greg poses what continues to be an essential question: Why did not the King react to the murder of his brother in its explicit, re-enactment in the dumb show? He argues that 'the language of the play adds nothing to the pointedness of the allusion [to the curious mode of murder]: the only hypothesis consistent with the King's behaviour is that... he actually fails to recognize the representation of his own crime ... There is but one rational conclusion: Claudius did not murder his brother by pouring poison into his ears.' Yet, Greg points out,

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'[theMurder ofGonzago] is, indeed, a minutely applicable representation of the affairs of the Danish court...' Greg comes to two conclusions: that 'the Ghost's story was ... a mere figment of Hamlet's brain,' and that the King 'retires [sic] to his private apartments, convinced ... that Hamlet is a dangerous madman, who has designs on his life ...' It is, says Greg, 'such a play as Hamlet might have dreamed' (quotations passim). Greg is quite correct in all of this, even in details of the direction of Hamlet's remarks and acts. But these remain both general ('he insults Ophelia, outrages the Queen, jibes at the king'), and without adequate reference to the whole of Hamlet, although the correspondence to Hamlet's all-engrossing compulsion is here. Greg overlooks another revealing discrepancy between the Players' play and Ghost/Hamlet's soliloquy. There is no reference to seduction and adultery in the Players' drama and its dumb show. In fact, the Queen resists the nephew after the killing in the dumb show, and the play ends before this action can take place. What seduction is it that Ghost/Hamlet dreams of? Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts 0 wicked wit and gifts, that have the power So to seduce! - won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.

The answer is not far to find. In Hamlet's dream world Ophelia and the Queen are one, Woman: as fresh as Juliet, and at the same time as blown and insatiable as Cleopatra, at once nymph and votaress to Hecate.8 It is the nymph in whose orisons 'be all my sins rememb'red' who echoes the seduction described by Ghost/Hamlet as the Mousetrap begins a recurrence that will end in the Queen's chamber: OPH My lord, I have remembrances of yours That I have long longed to re-deliver. 1 pray you, now receive them. HAM No, not I! I never gave you aught. OPH My honour'd lord, you know right well you did, And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd As made the things more rich.

The witchcraft of the seduction takes more obvious form in both Lucianus and in Lucianus/Hamlet. Thus Lucianus:

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Thou mixture rank, of midnight-weeds collected, With Hecate's ban[e] thrice blasted, thrice infected, Thy natural magic and dire property On wholesome life usurps immediately.

Through an immediate dying/'dying' wholesome life becomes unwholesome. Hamlet's words are little different: 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. Soft! now to my mother!

Greg is right in emphasizing that the Players' play and Hamlet's words and actions point to the Queen's conduct (and Ophelia's, no different). 'Strangest of all,' he writes, ' [is his] harping on the idea of remarriage.' There are 'side glances ... all aimed at the marriage of the Queen'; 'the striking relevance of the language of the play ... noticeably to the marriage of the Queen'; 'the prologue ... brief indeed ... "As woman's love," snaps Hamlet, his mind on the Queen';' [The performance] is a coarse insult to the Queen - gross, open, palpable. And Hamlet's question, "Madam, how like you this play?" is a slap in the face ...' Of the King's question, 'Is there no offense in't?' Greg says, 'it was of the Queen, not of the poison, that the King was thinking.' Of all this Greg says: 'for Hamlet the supreme moment, so long anxiously expected, has arrived' (quotations passim). This is the moment (longer in the text, but immediate in mythic time) of disposal of the King and encounter with the Queen/Mother. The whole of the conflict is also being acted in the audience to the Players' play - actors in a complex and wildly vivid action contrapuntally arranged in front of, and interfused with, the ritual play before them - Hamlet always the intense, explosive centre. The ritual play is not action. It is thought. It stands strangely yet in total relevance to the action in its foreground: it will be echoed in act v by the King advising Laertes/Hamlet just before another violent ritual act. Of the dialogue of Player King and Player Queen (unbelievable from this sensitive reader) Wilson remarks: 'The first twenty lines [to the end of "My operant powers their functions leave to do"] ... contain nothing to interest either Claudius or anyone else' (189). To the point where the King reclines to sleep out forever the late autumn of his life the topic of discussion is love. Begun at Hamlet's ' [Brief] as

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woman's love,' it ends in Hamlet's 'If she should break [her oath of constancy] now!' What follows is almost in the form of conventional debat. In it Hamlet's life and lust are inextricably woven. P KING Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground, And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen About the world have times twelve thirties been, Since love our hearts, and Hymen did our hands, Unite commutual in most sacred bands. P QUEEN So many journeys may the sun and moon Make us again count o'er ere love be done!

Although Hamlet is born at the beginning of the marriage, his 'birth' coincides exactly with the King's death thirty years later, just as it coincides with the death of Fortinbras thirty years earlier. This latter then is the day of the 'first' Hamlet's marriage, the day he seized a King's property after he killed that King. Similarly in the dumb show the Queen accepts nephew as lover moments after the King's death, to begin the cycle again. Hamlet's life coincides with the life of the King, but the Queen goes on into a further lifetime with a new consort. Only in a dream-myth can this multiple-figured, cyclical life be lived, and only in the invention of literary myth can it be shown. Not only the time, but the nature of the life lived is here. Surely Shakespeare's curious choice of figure to express the time is extravagant for time merely. Simple arithmetic applied to simple astronomy moves us from mere years to the quality of a life: Phoebus/Hyperion has circled sea and land thirty times; Diana/Hecate has circled the world thirty dozen months, and thirty times each month. Astronomical timekeeping is only approximate, but it does add up to ten thousand eight hundred nights of love-lust, enough for a King's 'operant powers their functions leave to do,' if not enough to satisfy a fertility goddess. As to the King, the Queen grieves: But woe is me! you are so sick of late, So far from cheer and from your former state, That I distrust you.9 Now what my love is, proof hath made you know; And as my life is siz'd, my fear is so. Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear; Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.

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Simply put, 'my fear of your incapacity to love increases my need for it.' The Player King acquiesces mildly: Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too; My operant powers their functions leave to do

and he suggests a second husband, only to hear the lady 'protest too much' before she accepts the nephew-lover. Against and within this background of ritualized thought the multiple Hamlet acts out in sharp-edged madness the nephew's part as, baiting the Mousetrap, he hunts down his quarry. It is a quarry already hunted down - Ophelia - but the same act must be repeated: the Queen too must defensively, then passively and willingly, submit. This brings us to the King's 'What call you this play?' to hear the answer, '"The Mousetrap." Marry, how? Tropically.' Who is the mouse? Surely not the King. Hamlet calls him goatlike satyr, adulterate beast, paddock, bat, gib, ape, but he is no mouse. Again we remember the opening challenge to the wrong person. Not to the King in any direct sense, it is to Hamlet/King, that is, to Ghost/Hamlet. But in the Mousetrap it is to the Queen. For this there is corroboration in the play directly, and elsewhere in Shakespeare. Subject to Hamlet's violence, the Queen cries out, 'What shall I do?' The answer, most ambiguously, is, Not this, by no means, that I bid you do: Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed; Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse -

In Romeo and Juliet we read, LADY CAP Ay, you have been a mouse hunt in your time; But I will watch you from such watching now. CAP A jealous-hood, a jealous-hood! -

In explanation of 'mouse hunt' Partridge offers 'a whore monger; a womanizer' (156). This, in turn, has its special qualification as the action begins, in dead of winter when spirits are formed as ghosts: FRAN For this relief much thanks. 'Tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart. BER Have you had quiet guard? FRAN Not a mouse stirring.

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In the metaphor no mouse will stir at the moment of birth, however much she may be receptive at any other time. The trap for the mouse (warned against by Laertes/Hamlet and Polonius/Hamlet as a springe to catch woodcocks, i.e., innocents) is baited most elaborately by Hamlet, but typically so that he too will be caught. In the centre are the Player King and Queen after the dumb show. On one side are Hamlet and Ophelia, Horatio wordless behind them; on the other the King and the Queen, with Polonius behind them. For the audience that watches an audience watching play within play, the Player King, Queen, and Nephew are behind the 'real' King with the Woman, twice seen, involved in sexual innuendo that becomes grossly direct. This most symmetrically invented image of the heart of the conflict mirrors symmetry in the whole dramatic action, dying and birth as close together as The King is dead / Long live the King/ But, although it be symbol of the act, this scene is yet preparation, bait, for the act itself. Hamlet's gross provocations of Ophelia are directed at the Queen, although Ophelia does accept them. As the Players' play goes on, Hamlet becomes more and more explicit as to the thrust of his intentions. In his indirect and often direct sexual provocations, Hamlet makes the King aware that he must die if Hamlet's desire for the Queen is to be consummated. The Queen is not indifferent. Her first remark in 'sit' (i.e., 'lie') begins the sexual byplay; Hamlet responds in kind: QUEEN Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me. HAM No, good mother. Here's metal more attractive.10

The play tells us that Polonius, the fishmonger who has loosed his daughter to Hamlet, similarly arranges for Hamlet's assignation with the Queen. But Polonius is Polonius/Hamlet. Hamlet whose gift-giving and word-witchery have seduced Ophelia is the bawd who plans the encounter with the Queen, once the king is disposed of, indirectly in the play scene and by rapier as Polonius dies. All that immediately follows, Rosencrantz/Guildenstern and Polonius urging him to haste to the Queen, is extension of self in his mad vision. It is not just what Polonius/Hamlet has projected before the Mousetrap; it is what he has persuaded the receptive Queen to do in the play scene. This is exactly what Lucianus, the nephew, persuades the Player Queen to do, after the Player King's death. We must then expect the Queen to resist Hamlet although she must be, and is, desirous of the love/lust of her son/nephew, her 'second husband.' There are other details that substantiate this meaning of the Mousetrap. There is the King's distraught exit at Hamlet's words, shouted violently, Greg says. 'You shall see anon how the murderer

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gets the love of Gonzago's wife.' There is Hamlet's triumphant cry, Why, let the strucken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play ...

The strucken deer is female; the hart the male. There seems little reason here to believe that the trap is for the King. Yet, although the deer and not the hart be caught, Hamlet is not only coted by the falcon/hound player/hunters under his own direction - he has already in an earlier soliloquy identified himself as a hart in such a way that we cannot mistake the destroying quality of the experience in the Mousetrap, the same quality, indeed, that marks Ophelia's dying: Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing!

Usually accepted in its commonest meaning, 'a rogue or knave,' rascal derives from ONF rasque, filth or dirt; in Shakespeare's day it meant a scrubby, unhealthy stag. All of these meanings are quite appropriate to Hamlet's 'ungalled hart,' for it is not ungalled; it is hurt from within, from a canker, an imposthume. Moreover he is a 'muddy-mettled rascal.' 'Muddy,' as Partridge notes, meant 'smutty, dirty, ... bawdy,' so that Hamlet is marked by foul sexual impulses. As her crown testifies, Ophelia is pull'd to muddy death. The poisoned words have gone into the ears of the Queen, the King, and once again Hamlet. He has heard them first from King/Hamlet: 'Tis unmanly grief; It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense ...

and from the Queen: Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet. I pray thee stay with us ...

He has heard them from his Ghost:

165 Mousetrap I find thee apt; And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Wouldst thou not stir in this.

He has expressed them, implorators of unholy suits, to Ophelia in 'words of so sweet breath compos'd / As made the things more rich/ and again in other words: 'that's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs ... It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge.' The Queen and Hamlet have both taken the poisoned bait; each will prey on garbage when the trap snaps shut as Polonius/King dies by the thrust of a rapier. Throughout the play scene to near its end Horatio is silent; throughout m.iv he is, as he must be, absent. At this point it seems appropriate to comment on an overwhelming attitude in Hamlet that is not thought to have been in primal myth. Essentially an imaginative absorption in physical nature and self, early myth seems to have had, when it took on ritual-religious form, no pejorative attitudes towards sacrificial slaying and accompanying sexual experience. But blood-guilt and darkly ravaging self-assessment about incest developed to become the matter of many Greek tragedies. Oedipus and Hamlet are perhaps the most powerful expressions of these feelings. Of this change Rose writes: 'As the Greek moral consciousness developed, the ideas of rewards and punishments based on ethical conduct in this life gained strength; by about the sixth century B.C. Hell, Purgatory and Paradise were fairly familiar concepts' (56). At the heart of Hamlet's enigma is not only the mysterious dying, life-giving act of sex, but the utterly intense point of conflict between physical desire and deeply powerful guilt and revulsion against it. The self-shattering act is finally driven to, even though, when done, it is in Hamlet mostly words spoken over a ritual act. Even so it is frighteningly violent; the power of the scene in metaphor, character, and act is matched only rarely in poetic expressions of the cataclysmic experiences of man. Wild as Hamlet is at the close of the Players' play, there is an interim of controlled caustic wit preliminary to the encounter with the Queen. Rosencrantz/Guildenstern relay a mother's command; Hamlet's several replies all point to one judgment: she is a whore. These begin with a discrimination and a pun: 'you shall command; or rather, as you say, my mother. Therefore no more, but to the matter! My mother as you say ... is there no sequel to this mother's admiration? ... We shall obey were she ten times our mother.11 Have you any further trade with us?' Just as

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Polonius/Hamlet is assignator, so Rosencrantz/Guildenstern are panders here. And Hamlet, earlier, as though he were already describing the encounter, 'Must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words / And fall a-cursing like a very drab, / A stallion!' Hamlet's Mousetrap has caught both its victims, set and baited how long before? where? by what unknown force? Inevitably what must happen comes about. There is another revealing soliloquy, the brief prologue to the encounter with the Queen. Its parallel to the Ghost/Hamlet dream-soliloquy has been noted, but its expression is now immediately intense: Let me be cruel, not unnatural; I will speak daggers to her, but use none. My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites How in my words somever she be shent, To give them seals never, my soul, consent!

These words are revealing: if tongue be hypocrite, its expression of sexual violence as against the soul's desire is false. If soul be hypocrite, it is in not fulfilling its desire in action. In simple terms Hamlet desires the Queen agonizingly, but will substitute words that are sexual attack even as they excoriate the act. He is hypocrite both ways, caught in a desolate paradox. The scene is approached in terms of gross moral violation, and is so conducted. Like two scenes in other plays, Othello's killing of Desdemona and Antony's violent tongue-lashing of Cleopatra, 'tripleturned whore,' it is an attack on a 'whore.' The parallel to the AntonyCleopatra scene is especially striking in its suggestive tropes and rhythms. Although its sexual emphasis has long been recognized, there is need to explore the passage in full detail, both in itself and in its many echoes and parallels to other parts of the play. It is the only direct acting out of Hamlet's story, the only time he is alone with the Queen, the focus for all other metaphoric or ritualistic tellings and actings. Wilson writes that as Hamlet speaks to Ophelia he has his mother in mind (132). Granville-Barker writes that Ophelia is to him 'womankind, the matrix of this evil which has corrupted the world for him ...' (265). Wilson notes six passages in which Ophelia is spoken of or intimated to be a prostitute, three of which refer to a brothel. Of the gross language used to Ophelia in the play scene, he writes: 'that Shakespeare intended us to interpret Hamlet's speeches here ... with some of those in the nunnery scene, as, like Othello's, belonging to the brothel is, I think, incontestable.' He cites 'the question "are you honest?" that is to say "are you not a whore ...?"' He concludes that [Hamlet comes] very

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near to calling Ophelia a prostitute to her face ... since "nunnery" was ... cant term for a house of ill fame' (102; 130; 134). Mack remarks: 'he treats her as if she were indeed an inmate of a brothel' (38). In the bedroom scene the Queen, just as Ophelia, is specifically identified as a whore six times, as in the reference to the brand of the harlot which 'takes off the rose / From the fair forehead of an innocent love, / And sets a blister there' - precurse to Ophelia's coronet. There are also six definite references to incest. The difference here is that Hamlet, a 'stallion' in his own words, shares whoredom, having pandered it, to gall a 'jade' (another Elizabethan term for whore). If we choose to look at the scene in the familiar pattern of dumb show, prologue, and act, we find it more complex than usual. The dumb show is the same for both brothel scenes, Hamlet's dishevelled, silent appearance in Ophelia's bedroom. (His detailed equation here to the Ghost we have already seen.) Prologue is apparently multiple. Hamlet's brief ' 'Tis now the very witching time of night' soliloquy serves best perhaps, but why are not the nunnery scene, the Players' play, and Hamlet's conduct during it not equally prologues to the act? There is even one within it, the first forty-five lines. 'Ay me, what act, / That roars so loud and thunders in the index' (i.e., prologue) cries out the Queen. These words lead us again to end and beginning. As the final dying of Kings and Queen in duel is about to begin, we hear the thunder of the King's cannon, in a pattern of receding depths ending with a violent reverberation that shakes heaven and earth. KING ... let the kettle to the trumpet speak, The trumpet to the cannoneer without, The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth.

At the end of the first court scene, when Hamlet is about to be left to condemn the act of an incestuous mother, the King directs: No jocund health that Denmark drinks today But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, And the King's rouse the heaven shall bruit again, Respeaking earthly thunder.

Just before the Ghost appears to tell Hamlet of the killing and incestuous acts, and Hamlet is to discourse on the vicious mole of nature, 'a flourish of trumpets, and two pieces go off,' explained by Hamlet, 'The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse / ... This heavy headed revel...

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takes / From our achievements, though perform'd at height, / The pith and marrow of our attribute/ Finally the last sound in the play, after the stage is bare, is 'a peal of ordinance' at Fortinbras's order, a sound that should reverberate as prologue as the whole act begins again with a fearful 'Who goes there?' The true Mousetrap begins (immediately, not ultimately) in the Very witching time of night' soliloquy. Of this, Wilson says, 'For whom is this itching dagger intended? He is going to his mother ... His feet are set towards his mother ... and he has forgotten the King altogether! It is the most glaring instance of "bestial oblivion" in the play' (244-5). Granville-Barker remarks about the effects of the Queen's message for Hamlet to come to her chamber: 'That canker spot is set throbbing again ...' Of Hamlet's entrance to the bedroom he says, 'The infection works on, this "mother ... mother ... mother" beating like a pulse ... he will avenge, not a father's murder, but a husband's shame, hers too and his own, and gratify and exhaust and betray himself in doing so.' Later he adds: 'to this impeachment of his mother, which has been expressly forbidden him, he goes with a dreadful zest. Nor does the offense against his father account for the ferocity of his attack' (101; 102; 255). In this context we may examine the several parts of the scene. An essential point is that the Queen at first resists him; she does not acquiesce to incestuous adultery. Equally important, Hamlet says: 'You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife, / And (would it were not so!) you are my mother.' The obvious meaning is that he simply wishes his mother had not committed incest. But in terms of his own driving compulsion the meaning can be something quite different: 'I want you physically, but you are my mother.' The act has begun, now to be interrupted by Polonius/King's cry for help, and his dying by Hamlet's rapier. In the mythic sense this is consistent: the King must die immediately with the sexual consummation. Now surely Fortinbras's 'strong hand / and terms compulsatory' are evident. Wilson writes: 'he whips himself into greater and greater frenzy ... Three times [she begs] him pitifully to "speak no more." Yet he only grows more violent; and would apparently have proceeded to greater lengths, had he not been interrupted ... by the Ghost' (248-9). Polonius/King killed, Hamlet turns again in violence to the Queen, in words that brand her whore, and in other words, some not generally understood, that enforce this meaning: 'sit you down,' 'penetrable stuff,' 'damned custom.'12 As Hamlet makes the nature of the act most clear, the Queen continues resistance, like the Player Queen's:

169 Mousetrap QUEEN What have I done that thou dar'st wag thy tongue In noise so rude against me?

Hamlet responds, Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty; Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, And sets a blister there.

His further words again echo sun, heaven and earth, doomsday, and inner sickness, all vital metaphors in the act: Heaven's face does glow O'er this solidity and compound mass, With heated visage, as against the doom Is thought-sick at the act.

As the 'dreadful zest' of the attack continues to the words Proclaim no shame When the compulsive ardour gives the charge, Since frost itself as actively doth burn, And reason panders will,

and further to Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty! ...

the Queen's responses indicate more than resistance simply: painful entreaty to stop merges into endearment. O Hamlet, speak no more! O speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in mine ears. No more, sweet Hamlet!

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Again Elizabethans would know what was well beyond the literal in 'speak/ 'daggers,' and 'ears.'13 'Sweet Hamlet' could be no clearer. Now just as the Ghost is about to enter, presumably to interrupt the act, two matters deserve attention. Hamlet having alternately attacked his King/satyr/self and the Queen/whore, now reverts to the 'vice of kings,' A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole And put it in his pocket!

The precious diadem is on a shelf or in a pocket, never on a kingly head. Not merely an abdication of rationality and morality, this is the assumption of the devil's black for a suit of sables. Hamlet, in all his identities, has, like Ophelia and the Queen, exchanged his precious golden crown for crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples. Yet herein none are guilty, says the rational Hamlet, 'since nature cannot choose his origin/ although his violence is as much guilt as it is inherent passion. The second matter is the circumstance of the Ghost's appearance. Shakespeare frequently uses juxtapositions to suggest important significances. An instance so sharply defined as to have had much comment is Horatio's reappearance at Hamlet's call in m.ii. Now we have Hamlet shouting, 'A murderer and a villain ... a slave ... a vice of kings ... a cutpurse ... a king of shreds and patches -' and on the instant the Ghost appears, still burdened with crimes so foul that the punishment described Would harrow up thy soul... Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand an end,

all of which happens immediately to Hamlet. Two inferences follow: the Ghost is summoned by Hamlet; and Hamlet, in the Queen's bedchamber, in the doing of the act, sees the 'O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!' punishment. The act is its own horror, its own hell: 'heaven hath pleas'd it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister.' There is only one moment of truth in the play: this is it, however endlessly lived through in nightmares.

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J.K. Walton remarks about the wrong challenge in i.i.l: This inversion ... hints at a general inversion of the customary order of things/14 Confrontation of Ghost and Hamlet must be understood in these terms. The Queen is right in identifying the quality of the moment by denying the visible presence of the Ghost, who is present only inside Hamlet, as he, like the Queen, turns his eyes into his very soul. HAM Do you see nothing there? QUEEN Nothing at all; yet all that is I see. HAM Nor did you nothing hear? QUEEN No, nothing but ourselves.

Only in themselves together is 'all that is.' But the Ghost is powerful part of 'all that is,' the act. Just what his part is here has been misunderstood. The colloquy with the Ghost is usually believed to be, both from Hamlet's words and the Ghost's, a reminder for Hamlet to sweep to his revenge. But the Ghost has mentioned vengeance for murder only once, before his passionate cry against allowing 'the royal bed of Denmark to [be] a couch for luxury and damned incest,' and Hamlet responds 'that thy commandment all alone shall live,' that he will set down in his tables that his uncle is a smiling villain, and that he will remember the Ghost. The second confrontation, briefly one speech for each before Hamlet and the Queen are immersed again in each other, and one further plea to the Ghost, is no different than the confrontation in i.v. Revenge is not mentioned, but the Ghost's command is. This 'dread command' has nothing to do with vengeance. It is a self-urging by Hamlet's violent soul, which has been excoriating itself, to complete or to repeat the passionate act. He describes himself as a 'tardy son ... laps'd in time and passion, [who] lets go by /Th' important acting of your dread command.' A son is 'lapsed in passion,' which can mean that another objective is lost sight of in the compelling urgencies of passion (as it is usually construed). Ribner senses another meaning, that the passion itself is lapsed: '107 laps'd ... passion having permitted the moment to slip and passion to cool' (106). Again we are deep in Hamlet's conflict: he summons the Ghost at the very moment that he must deny completion of the act, so that it will inevitably urge him on. The Ghost's reply, Do not forget. This visitation15 Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. But look, amazement on thy mother sits.

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O, step between her and her fighting soul! Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Speak to her, Hamlet,

is clarified by other contexts as well as its own. The King directs Rosencrantz/Guildenstern to urge Hamlet to go ahead with the Mousetrap: Good gentlemen, give him a further edge And drive his purpose into these delights.

In the Mousetrap we read, OPH You are keen, my lord, you are keen. HAM It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge.

It is now costing the Queen a vividly delineated groaning, although Hamlet's dark spirit must whet his blunted purpose, urging him, in the Elizabethan understanding of the word, to 'speak' to her again. Hamlet himself completes the image of bitterly sad conflict in self and Ghost/self as the two come together in Do not look upon me, Lest with this piteous action you convert My stern effects. Then what I have to do Will want true colour - tears perchance for blood.

His stern effects prevail as he again attacks the Queen, blaming her trespass and not his madness. 'My pulse,' he says, 'as yours doth temperately keep time / And makes as healthful music.' How temperate is the pulse of either in a savage scene of lust? Truly equal. What healthful music can there be when the hectic rages in the blood by the very aphrodisiacs that cure the hectic and the tetter: goats orchis, the 'right satyrion,' nettles, and crowflowers? 'Bring me to the test,' challenges Hamlet, 'and I the matter will reword' ('I will speak daggers to her'). His very words are flattering unction to his own soul as they 'skin and film the ulcerous place,/Whiles rank corruption mining all within, / Infects unseen.' This figure, Ghost and Hamlet, mole and pioner, has been with us from the moment of his 'birth' as soldier, hunter, playwright-spy, and will end this scene in renewed intense action. The earlier image, the unweeded garden, follows directly: 'do not spread compost on the weeds / To make them ranker.' Then once more the germinal paradox:

173 Mousetrap Forgive me this my virtue; For in the fatness of these pursy times Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.

What follows in this third attack too catches the paradox, but this time curiously different, as it might be expressed by a politician, a worldly counsellor: Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom,16 who all sense doth eat Of habits evil, is angel yet in this, That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery, That aptly is put on.

A moment later: Tor use can almost change the stamp of nature.' Almost, but not really; 'the stamp of one defect/ 'the dram of e'il/ the Vicious mole of nature/ is a black and grained spot that will not leave its tinct. There remains one final attack in the repetition of a vivid image of the act, perhaps its most gross image, the mouse in the eternal trap. This too has its special quality in the shifting character of Hamlet: he begins with an obvious contradiction that he maintains throughout. Not this, by no means, that I bid you do: Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed; Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse; 'Twere good you let him know; For who that's but a queen, fair, sober, wise, Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,17 Such dear concernings hide?

Here is Hamlet in his double character: 'Do not do this, but do it'; 'do not tell, but tell/ for who would not do and tell? And underneath this always, 'I cannot tell, except to do, and I must do/ which yet becomes, finally, 'I cannot do, except to tell/ as in this scene - words said over a ritual act. From the middle of the third attack, just after the vision of the Ghost, to the end, there is another reiteration significant to the power of the act and its repetition. Hamlet cannot tear himself away from the Queen. Like a bemused lover he says goodnight to her five times: 'Good

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night - but go not to my uncle's bed'; 'Once more, good night'; 'So again, good night. / I must be cruel, only to be kind'; 'Mother, good night'; 'Good night mother' - the last ending the scene just as 'Mother, mother, mother' began it. We have seen the bait, the trap set, the victims helplessly beating themselves and each other in it. We have been totally caught up in the heart of Hamlet's agonizing mystery, been led to the truth, 'though it were hid in the centre'; we have seen 'the hatch and the disclose' of 'something in his soul / O'er which his melancholy sits on brood.' This is not an end, as no act in Hamlet is anything but 'prologue to the omen coming on.' Hamlet says, just before lugging a dumb show, 'most still, most secret, and most grave' into the neighbour room, 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon. O, 'tis most sweet When in one line two crafts directly meet.

The depth in darkness of the act is testified to by Kittredge, who comments on the last line, 'Hamlet imagines ... the King and himself as digging a mine and a countermine and suddenly coming face to face in their excavations' (111). But there is another pioner in the deep dark where all begins. The mysterious mythic pioners are Father, Son, and Ghost, or, if one wish, without contradiction Ouranos and Hyperion and whatever mysterious force lies behind them - two visions of ultimate reality, both requiring Woman, in whom the mole of nature must do its dark work to bring life to light, another name for darkness. One can only guess whether primitive man's original myth had a natural innocence that accepted the light of life as good, before awe and fear made of it a bloody ritual. That in the play the act and its consequence, life, is represented as man's dread scourge, is testified by Shakespeare's own paradigm of Hamlet: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjur'd, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust: Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

175 Mousetrap Mad in pursuit and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe; Before, a joy propos'd; behind a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

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Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill: A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man.

The 'House of Hamlet' is as marked by doom as is the House of Kadmos. The peculiar power of both lies in some measure in circularity: each is the house of doomed man in its ever-recurring, ever-present past. In Hamlet horrifying intensities come in part from inversion of perspectives in the cycle: that which is within, although we see it outwardly; the evil burden of the past in the present, both one; night, not day, although a malevolent light shines on its snared and trapped figures; doomsday, here and now, ghosts walking in judgment of men, the 'sheeted dead' squeaking and gibbering in Elsinore. In our initial views of myth extremes at the ends of a line - mythic substance and equally mysterious literal fact - were postulated, and these, to attempt a meaningful reconciliation of paradox, were bent to form a circle. In this, beginning can be determined only by understanding the end, for they are the same. This concept has brought us to the concurrent lines of paradox in Hamlet, which appear in obscurely repetitive interweavings, part of the structural manner of Shakespeare's art. That these complexities can be reduced to the few limited topics of essential myth emphasizes the extraordinary invention that Shakespeare displays. But in Plato there are two further views of invention that have their bearings: the use of extant myths and legends, and the controlling (and controlled) power of poetic 'madness.' These add breadth and plumb depths in the myth being invented.

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The incorporation of extant literary myths, legends, and quasiliterary stories into sophisticated literary myth has been shown in the Phaedrus and the Oedipus Rex. Hamlet may have fewer such allusions than either, but what there is from Greece and Rome, the Old Testament, and the Christ story invites attention. It seems reasonable that the hypothesis so far advanced should be served by such mythic-legendary-historical matter if the invention in Hamlet is of a piece. Extant myths are used in Hamlet in two ways: occasionally as independent details to enforce a significant meaning, or in continuous symbolic parallel to the whole action. There appear to be two large, intertwined, containing patterns, one Greek, ending in death, the other beginning with the Garden and ending with doomsday. At the centre of the first is Hyperion, of the second, Christ. Frequent interplay of the two turns on Hamlet's puns on 'sun-son.' The concept of sacrificial ritual death appears more obviously in Christian than Greek allusions. There seem to be intermixtures of the figures of Hyperion and Phoebus Apollo; the latter's various attributes appear in Hamlet; the former's identity with Hamlet comes by way of the essential identity of Ghost-father and Hamlet-son. Within this sophisticated totality appear various independent allusions not only from the Greeks and the Old Testament, but also from folklore. The large patterns will be explored first, both substantively and in terms of their arrangements in the play. As usual, Shakespeare's disposition of elements in his invention seems both free and ordered, in both the parts called acts and the whole play. Act i is preponderantly Greek in emphasis, although its allusions begin with Julius Caesar and end with a parallel between Hamlet's birth and Christ's. Scene i of the act has the same containing pattern. The whole act has, between its termini, various Greek, Christian, and Old Testament allusions, so woven together in implications as to be one mythic tapestry, yet so nicely discriminated as to emphasize the nature of action and character. Its end, Hamlet's fate to be born to set right a chaotic world, is matched by a last act that, still containing Greek and Roman matter, begins in a Christian and Old Testament context and ends in a promise of the retelling of a mysterious and meaningful life and death. The second and third acts, preliminary to violence with the Queen in m.iv, are almost totally Greek, with some Old Testament allusion. Within this there are brief Christian references, although the section ends in Old Testament terms. The fourth act, obscure in other respects, as in Ophelia's dying and Hamlet's absence-presence, is no less mixed in mythic allusion. Every kind noted is present in what appears to be, but probably is not, an

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extravagantly casual sequence. The last act follows in terms already noted. What is almost surely not indifferent or accidental is the direction and force of Greek allusion. It dominates the dread forebodings of i.i, the first soliloquy, critical parts of i.iv and v, almost all of the second act, all of the darkly violent Pyrrhus scene, much of the Players' play, the centre (but not the Old Testament and Christian end) of the attack on the Queen. There is little Greek myth in act iv, but that is important. It is still present, but minimally, in act v. The pattern seems to be this: where violence is sexual towards the Queen/Woman, Greek myth is dominant; where this violence is modulated into sacrificial dying, always at the end of a sequence - act or play - the emphasis is Christian. There are variables in this pattern and inclusions of disparate yet not irrelevant allusion, but not enough to qualify the thrust of the whole. Receding depths seem evident once more. No one knows how precise Shakespeare's knowledge was of Norse and Greek myth (except as contextual meaning is a test). But sensitive readers have testified to matter and impact like that of ancient myth in their reading of Hamlet, notably Gilbert Murray, who writes: Thus ... we finally run the Hamlet-saga to earth ... in that world-wide ritual battle of Summer and Winter, of Life and Death ...' The Hamlet story, he says, comes clearly from Greek or pre-Greek legends, the primeval kings in Hesiod (408-9; 405). Northrop Frye writes: '... the literary anthropologist who chases the source of the Hamlet legend from the preShakespeare play to Saxo, and from Saxo to nature-myths, is not running away from Shakespeare: he is drawing closer to the archetypal form which Shakespeare recreated/1 It may be, as has been contended by Fergusson, that Hamlet had 'nothing in common with Saxo's primitive savage/ or that he is, as Murray suggests, sharer of Amleth's ancestry, his father 'an ancient Teutonic god connected with Dawn and the Spring' and a mother 'said to be the Green Earth ...' (408). But what is important is not Norse background, nor even the Greek in itself, which is mostly quite clear, but the interweavings of Christian and Old Testament implications with primal Greek matter. The key to this appears to be the figure of Hyperion, alluded to by Hamlet twice in extravagant encomia for a Father as over against the satyr uncle/father. If in Hamlet there actually is Father-Son-Ghost in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it may well be that Shakespeare chose typically to interfuse such meaning with parallels to Hyperion in scenes in the depths of the mystery. In the most distant beginnings, according to Greek myth, Hyperion is one of ten children of the union of Sky or Heaven and Earth,

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Ouranos and Gaea. He is a Titan, who in turn is the father of Helios, not the sun god as Apollo, for example, but the Sun himself. In its simplest terms this appears to be parallel with, or possibly prototype for, Son, Father, and 'Ghost/ i.e., a reaching back into ultimate enigma. What may strengthen the likelihood that Shakespeare is working in these terms is not only that Hyperion is the father of Moon and Dawn, both important in Hamlet, as well as the Sun, a critical word for Hamlet, but also that Mnemosyne, memory, is Titaness sister of Hyperion. Just as 'son/ 'father/ 'mother' are of the essence of Hamlet, so is 'memory/ Here the force in life that generates, that is put into the form of marriage, that endlessly disrupts marriage to allow the fecund mother to procreate again, gains its most relevant word, in contemporary terms 'racial memory/ Murray recounts from Hesiod and through Frazer the pattern that moves towards us to the moment we are soul-shaken by Hamlet: Ouranos, Gaea, Kronos; Kronos, Rhea, Zeus; Laios, Jocasta, Oedipus; Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes; Hamlet/Aegisthus/Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet. But Shakespeare does not press the point directly: Hyperion is mentioned only twice. Even had he chosen to make the allusion frequently, it would not have altered the much richer implications that lie simply in 'sun/ for, on the one hand, Hyperion in his true identity has little of suggestive character that could be used, and on the other, almost everyone thinks him to be the sun god Phoebus Apollo. All of this is enriched even further by the meaningful ambiguities in 'sun/son7: Apollo in his various and paradoxically divided nature is prototype for Hamlet's multiple identities and puzzling ambivalences. At the same time his character as fertility god is incorporated with the sacrificial Christ figure. And just as with Hyperion, all of this is done obscurely: Apollo is mentioned only once as Phoebus; we must infer Hamlet's Apollo character through the 'sun* passages, and from Hamlet, a typical obscurity. That Hercules is at times a sun god is probably not indifferent.2 The complexities of the several allusive patterns throughout the play can probably best be clarified by examining them in the order that Shakespeare uses them, in conjunctive clusters or individually. Each act may appear to have its identity in these terms, but there is continuous interlinkage; any major pattern that may seem to disappear is reaffirmed, sometimes almost fugitively, by some line or word. We turn then to act i at the point where, the Ghost having appeared once, the Caesar-Brutus story and 'our Saviour's birth' are together one of the early tellings of the Hamlet story. In this relatively brief passage we find a complex of allusions from Roman and Christian mythic history, Greek myth, and folklore. These are interwoven as prologue for all allusion and action

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that follows excepting only Old Testament references, which begin in i.ii. All of this establishes probability in its matter and order for the end of the whole action; it deserves close examination. The allusions to Caesar and Christ together are the second telling of the Hamlet story. But the two parts of this version seem to be interrupted by a brief reappearance of the silent Ghost. Although our concern at the moment is matter relevant to extant myths, it should be noted that the scene in its three parts is exactly parallel to the underlying order of the whole play: Hamlet's death, the appearance of his silent Ghost, his rebirth. There is then no interruption; whatever matter there may be in Horatio's remarks to the Ghost should be consistent with what is in the Caesar and Christ parts. Among the omens preceding Caesar's murder are a spotted or obscured sun and a moon almost 'dying' in eclipse. These terms and others in the passage almost always receive a simple naturalistic interpretation, or one that takes into account current Elizabethan beliefs and meteorological phenomena. But Shakespeare establishes both a Roman and a Greek context. It seems reasonable to think of a moon so dark - part of the 'precurse of fear'd events/ 'dews of blood,' the murder of a King as to be Hecate, moon goddess in Hades. Edith Hamilton identifies her as 'the Goddess of the Dark of the Moon, the black nights when the moon is hidden ... associated with deeds of darkness.' She is the antithetical form of Artemis or Diana, 'Huntsman-in-chief to the gods ... "protectress of dewy youth" ... In her is shown most vividly the uncertainty between good and evil which is apparent in every one of the divinities' (31-2). That the 'moist star' is in fact Hecate is clear in a passage that is prologue to the killing of a King: LUC Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected, Thy natural magic and dire property On wholesome life usurps immediately.

Hecate's awesome presence seems equally evident as Hamlet is about to do another dread act: 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood ...

There is more primal Greek myth in the omens of both Caesar's death and the harbingers of 'fear'd events ... demonstrated / Unto our ...

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countrymen.' Hecate/Artemis's twin brother Apollo is here and equally threatening: 'As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood, / Disasters in the sun ...' 'Disasters' may be the sign of some unknown sickness in the great fertility god, or of imminent destructive attack by him. These two relevances to Hamlet are borne out by several more. Apollo is musician; hunter; the healer ('O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!'); god of truth, his oracle at Delphi, like Elsinore, the centre of the world ('O my prophetic soul!' - and Polonius/Hamlet, 'I will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre'); often the sun god ('my cousin Hamlet, and my son -'; 'I am too much i' th' sun'). Hamilton writes: 'Apollo at Delphi was a purely beneficent power ... the purifier ... able to cleanse even those stained with the blood of their kindred. Nevertheless ... [he could be] pitiless and cruel. Two ideas were fighting in him as in all the gods: a primitive, crude idea and one that was beautiful and poetic' (31). Relevant to this deep ambivalence in man projected by him into his ideal identities, the gods, is the chorus in the Parodos of the Oedipus Rex: [Strophe 1] What is God singing in his profound Delphi of gold and shadow? What oracle for Thebes, the sunwhipped city? Fear unjoints me, the roots of my heart tremble. Now I remember, O Healer, your power, and wonder: Will you send doom like a sudden cloud, or weave it Like nightfall of the past?

This fearful inquiry is followed by a prayer to Athene, Artemis, Zeus, and Apollo himself to save the 'sunwhipped' city, from 'this attack by fire,' this plague which 'burns on.' In the middle of the complex of Greek myth is one startling detail, in that it is Christian. The moon is 'sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.' 'Doomsday' reappears only once again directly, in the grave-makers' scene, prologue to ritual death in v.ii. But Christian allusions beginning here are equal and interwoven with Greek myth, most clearly in the third part of the present scene. These begin just after the cock crows, the 'bird of dawning' that 'Doth ... / Awake the god of day'; that warns ghosts and devils of coming light, that keeps evils away all night' 'gainst that season comes / Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated.' Just as 'sun-son' is nexus for Apollo/ Christ, so is the cock, which wakens Apollo and is harbinger of the

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saviour-god. There is nothing directly of it in the play, but perhaps for many readers there may be here sufficient allusion to the cock's crowing at the betrayal-death of Christ shortly after his thirtieth year. Certainly the dawn observed by Bernardo, Horatio, and Marcellus is not the full glory of a brilliant Phoebus; Apollo's face is obscured by the clouds that hang on him. Between this end and the Caesar beginning is the brief reappearance of the Ghost, to whom three appeals by Horatio that it speak are unsuccessful. What seems contextually significant is, as Kittredge points out, that Horatio's questions have 'abundant illustration' in European folklore. There is, then, a consistent pattern of folklore, history, and myth in Roman-Christian terms, and Greek myth back to the beginnings, with a well-established common identity of Apollo, sun god and destroyer, and Christ, the son/sacrificial king. The second scene will add Old Testament allusions to make full the controlling pattern of myth throughout the play. Although there are partial act and scene divisions in the Folio Hamlet, the artificialities of the very many imposed divisions that give the contemporary reader and theatre-goer a feeling of interruption were apparently not observed in Shakespeare's theatre. Yet there are separate identities in action, both large and small, which must have their organic interweaving. Shakespeare is a master of interlinking elements: suggestive parallels, minimal repetitions, unobtrusive, even obscure, images, rather than formal means. The Christian-Greek allusion which completes i.i is thus the first allusion in i.ii, preliminary to the critical Old Testament reference. Already dealt with, it needs only restatement: the King's inquiry why the clouds still hang on his 'son,' and Hamlet's cryptic response, 'not so my lord. I am too much i' th' sun.' What appears to be an Old Testament allusion moments later seems much too general to be such an allusion. To persevere so, says the King, is a fault to heaven, to nature, and to reason, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corse till he that died today, 'This must be so.'

'The first corse' seems to be so lacking in context as to refer only to the dimmest unknown dying in antiquity. But there is a context, a brother's murder. The only corse that would occupy the King's mind would be Abel's, as the prayer scene makes clear; before that, and immediately after the King's remark, Hamlet's 'unweeded garden ... things rank and

183 Myths

gross in nature possess it merely' takes us to Genesis, to the despoiled Garden, and then, by association, to Cain. The rank garden almost immediately merges into a series of Greek allusions. First is 'Hyperion to a satyr,' paraphrased two lines later in 'Heaven and earth!' As Hamlet's mind dwells more and more intensely on the Queen's wicked speed to incest, other Greek allusions add their meanings. The Queen 'followed my poor father's body / Like Niobe, all tears.' The Queen wept excessively, protested her grief too much. But who was Niobe, and why did she weep? Sister of Atreus, granddaughter of Tantalus, she was a member of the tragic family of whom Orestes was one. Tantalus, a mortal son of Zeus, arranged the death of his son Pelops to show his hatred of the gods. But Pelops was restored to life by the gods, and became the father of Niobe. She in turn offended Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, by invidious boasting of her queenship and her children. Consequently Artemis and Apollo killed all of her children. How much here is relevant to Hamlet himself? A son killed by a demigod father; restored by divine decree to another life to become a father; his queen's children killed by the sun god and moon goddess. The initial force which creates creates that which kills, restores the killed, kills again, although it be god of light and fertility. Next we come to an encomium of the Hyperion-father as against the satyr-uncle/father, who is My father's brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules.

This analogue is significant in several ways. The father already having been identified with Hyperion as sun god, Hamlet here associates him with another sun god, and himself in parallel, with uncle/father-satyr. This antithetical shift in identity from heavenly light to earthly lust is curiously carried out further in an extension of the figure as Horatio and his two companions seek to restrain Hamlet from following the Ghost. Violently fighting off their restraint, Hamlet shouts, My fate cries out And makes each petty artire in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.

'My father is Herculean; I am as fiercely strong as the Nemean lion.' But Hercules was the slayer of the Nemean lion. Like Tantalus, Niobe's forbear, Hamlet's father, just as the present King/uncle, is a son-slayer,

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at least in intent. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to remember that Laios sought to kill his son Oedipus because of Apollo's prophecy, but was killed by that son in accordance with Apollo's edict, and that that son then slept with his mother. Hercules appears again in Hamlet's discussion of the state of the theatre with Rosencrantz/Guildenstern: HAM Do the boys carry it away? ROS Ay, that they do, my lord - Hercules and his load too.

Hercules once relieved Atlas of his load. More particularly, the sign of the Globe theatre, metaphoric centre, omphalos, of the action of Hamlet, was Hercules bearing all the world on his back, not an indifferent image in the meaning of Hamlet. There are further details about Hercules that are likely relevant. Rose points out that he was always a man, not a god; that the original Herakles may have been a figure famous in war and hunting; that his alternate name Alkeides has an ending that 'forms a patronymic, a surname signifying "son" (or at least descendant of So-and-So).' His mother was Alkmene, his father Zeus. His mother's husband, Amphitryon, had killed his uncle, which put blood guilt upon him. He was driven mad by Hera and murdered his sons. In his last three labours he overcame a power of the other world, or death. He is 'regularly shown as amorous' (W5-18 passim). It is not unimportant that the Nemean lion allusion comes at the moment when Hamlet will join his cursed Ghost to hear his own voice urge him on to the act whose blastments will kill him. Following the first soliloquy Hamlet is joined by Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus; they will lead him to the Ghost who already possesses him. What is said to Hamlet by Horatio, their spokesman, may be within Christian implication. (Here one must note the temptation to assume Christian allusion whenever 'three' is intimated or emphasized - an interpretation to be resisted, but not ignored.) Three nights, Horatio reports, the Ghost appeared, and thrice he walked in the darkness of the night, a figure entombed, yet present in the 'eruption of our state.' It may seem extravagant, but not beyond belief in the context of myth, to note that at the end of i.i, the Ghost having appeared silently just after the Saviour's birth has been emphasized, Marcellus says, for the three engrossed in the mystery of the Ghost; 'I this morning know / Where we shall find him ...' Why this morning? Why this certainty of one of three men who will search him out, where Hamlet/Christ will be? Shortly after they have found him he bitterly speaks of the curse of the birth that will lead him to his dyings.

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After the Ghost's reference to purgatory (as much a Greek as a Christian concept) he praises Hamlet: I find thee apt; And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Wouldst thou not stir in this.

Again Shakespeare is mildly obscure, or assumes sophistication about myth in his audience. The 'fat weed' has been identified as asphodel, a flower rich in implications. For the Greeks asphodel had antithetical meanings. As symbol of primal birth it was the flower that formed the celestial bed for Zeus and Hera, but it was also the flower of death, this with a special implication. Those who in life had been distinguished by neither virtue nor vice were sentenced to a monotonous, joyless existence in the meadows of asphodel in Hades. In Christian terms asphodel is also symbol of death and eternity, but yet is dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Finally, in the simplest sense of the 'language of flowers,' it is appropriate to Laertes/ Hamlet, brother/lover of Ophelia, for it represents memorial sorrow 'my regrets follow you to the grave.' The most interesting detail is that the Ghost avers that Hamlet is not characterized by asphodel: he will 'stir' in the matter of his mother's beastly lust. How much of this strikingly complex applicability to Hamlet is in fact part of Shakespeare's art one can only believe or disbelieve. But the play is so marked by images, metaphors, and symbols of comparable richness in implication, and so totally consistent in a unity, that it is difficult to disbelieve. Now begins the wild ritual of the oath of silence, repeatedly demanded by Hamlet and Ghost together as the latter delves in darkness although the former be in daylight. It is the moment when the spirit that is the essence of both goes in darkness to its purgatorial punishment at the very moment of its birth into the life that is a nightmare of gross conduct and guilt - a fantastic double movement in one figure over the line of myth. Symbol of the oath is the sword, double symbol of Hamlet's fighting soul: held hilt up it makes Hamlet Christ or Christian priest; but held like a dagger the sword is a phallic symbol. Heaven and earth, Hyperion and satyr, radiant angel and blistered whore - all are here in this cursed time of sacrificial birth, for 'all that lives must die.' The second act resembles the first in brief Christian allusion near its beginning and end. Between, Hamlet's intensifying sexual rage moves

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through various identities - Apollo, Jephthah, Lot, Pyrrhus (with relevant Trojan figures) - in several allusive tellings of his own story. These come to an end in an equation of his Ghost/self with the devil. We may best follow the act as it develops. Hamlet's appearance, 'so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell... thrice his head thus waving up and down ...,' may possibly be part of the Christian pattern. But in his absence for nearly 150 lines there is no further allusive detail. Then a passage already discussed, his poem to Ophelia, begins a sequence of Apollo allusions all of which stress Hamlet's sexual intent towards, or experience with, Ophelia. The sun incontrovertibly 'moves' in the poem's argument. (As Gregory has said in Romeo and Juliet, 'To move is to stir'; the implication is clear). Briefly later in the 'fishmonger' passage Apollo breeds maggots in carrion woman, and Ophelia has walked T th' sun.' 'Conception is a blessing,' Hamlet remarks to Polonius, 'but as your daughter may conceive - friend, look to't.' There is nothing to dissuade one that Hamlet has been 'a god kissing carrion.' The same emphasis shifts to Old Testament allusion, again with Polonius. Polonius is Jephthah, Ophelia the daughter sacrificed by her father in death by burning (Apollo seems always near). Then comes 'As by lot, God wot,' and 'It came to pass, as most like it was,' allusions to incest and to Ophelia's dying. This blending of Greek and Judaic allusion now moves to the violence of Hamlet/Pyrrhus, with emphasis on the bloody Herculean soldier and the trap of the Trojan horse - all this ending in the violent death of an old king. But there are mythic overtones here not yet observed. Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, is Neoptolemos ('Young Warrior'), equivalent to Fortinbras/Hamlet. Rose comments that at Troy Achilles 'is represented as quite young when he died' at the same time that Pyrrhus is in his young manhood, an apparent contradiction not unlike the literally questionable chronology in Hamlet (143). Pyrrhus too inherits his father's essential character. But most important in Hamlet's thought is Hecuba, both in the Pyrrhus passage and the following soliloquy - for Hecuba is patently the Queen, his mother. Hecuba is not in queenly robes; she is barefoot and has a blanket 'about her lank and all o'erteemed loins.' Niobe, too, had no less than fourteen children. This suggests that each, and with them Gertrude, is a fecund mother. The soliloquy that follows, a recapitulation of his story, begins with Hecuba and progresses to most violent self-recriminations in which he is 'a very drab, / A stallion!' withal a 'muddymettled rascal' who 'can say nothing!' Within the Pyrrhus scene are two brief passages requiring attention:

187 Myths ... so, after Pyrrhus' pause, Aroused vengeance sets him new awork; And never did the Cyclops' hammers fall On Mars's armour, forg'd for proof eterne, With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword Now falls on Priam.

This requires retrospective reference from m.ii. 78-82: If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, It is a damned ghost that we have seen, And my imaginations are as foul As Vulcan's stithy.

The involvements here are complex. The Cyclopes were Hephaistos' helpers. Their forging of Mars' protective armour was ironic in that Mars cuckolded Vulcan with an Aphrodite always eager for adulterous love. The nature of Hamlet's foul imaginations is identified; the first soliloquy is their eloquent expression; the Ghost's account a darkly dreadful repetition. The second part of consequence is this: - anon the dreadful thunder Doth rend the region; so, after Pyrrhus' pause, Aroused vengeance sets him new awork ...

Thunder signals the frightening weapon of Zeus/Jove (Hamlet's father is presently identified with Jove) and of Jehovah. In Hamlet the act is preceded more than once with the King's cannon, reverberating from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth. Zeus, or Kronos, or Ouranos, god of the sky, eternal primal father, is always present, threat and quarry for his son. The act ends as it began, with Hamlet's acceptance of his Christian identity after the horrible scenes of primal Greek myth: The spirit that I have seen May be a devil; and the devil hath power T' assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me.

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This is indeed a sad moment for Hamlet. No longer the curse of being born, but now the desolate awareness of being alive in the purgatory of life, and always the compulsion to 'dying' which will only create living for further dying in an endless cycle. Act m, the centre enclosing the Mousetrap, is singularly rich in mythic allusions, some of which need only brief re-identifying. Others seem less important, or single enforcements of some point. But there are both allusions and interweavings of them that seem especially to invite comment. Not surprisingly this act, like the second, the first, the whole play, like m.iv and the Mousetrap itself, begins and ends in Christian allusion.3 'The spirit that I have seen,' says Hamlet at the end of act n, 'may be a devil; and the devil hath power / T' assume a pleasing shape/ A few lines into act in Polonius/Hamlet says, having readied Ophelia, probably with a prayer book, to be loosed to Hamlet, We are oft to blame in this, 'Tis too much prov'd, that with devotion's visage And pious action we do sugar o'er The devil himself,

and this condemnation, which seems of self, becomes that of Ophelia, as King/Hamlet continues the allusion to the devil. O, 'tis too true! How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word.

The Hamlet who is Ghost/devil at the end of act n presently attacks 'the most beautified Ophelia': 'I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.' The Ophelia encounter has its richness of allusion. It begins with a word the appropriateness of which has been questioned: 'Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins rememb'red.' There should be no question, for nymphs - Dryads, Hamadryads, Nereids, and more - were little fertility creatures haunting natural places, and frequently companions and sexual quarry, albeit willingly, of satyrs, extremely lustful goat-men. To these Pan, also goat-footed, may have been related and through him Silenus, Pan's brother or son, represented as an older satyr given to drunkenness. Together nymphs and satyrs are imagined creatures in nature that empha-

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size both joyfulness and beastliness in man. It is scarcely a break in thought that Hamlet shifts to the Garden in Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it,' which may be an attack on a daughter of Eve as much as self-condemnation. 'What should such fellows as I do/ cries Hamlet, 'crawling between earth and heaven?' Easily explained, and quite correctly, as the usual Renaissance image of man struggling unsuccessfully to be angel, not beast, the figure is congruent with each of several other mythic themes in the play. Hamlet's words describing an inmate of purgatory are consistent with both Ghost's and Hamlet's assertions and intimations that day, not night, is the place of dire punishment. Or, if one begin with the angel-beast antithesis of Christian meaning, how far is it to satyrs, centaurs, and lovely, joyous nymphs? Ultimately in Greek myth those who crawl between earth and heaven are products of Ouranos and Gaea - Gaea the mother of Ouranos, then his wife; of Kronos and Rhea his sister-wife, the Kronos who, armed by Gaea, castrated Ouranos to seize power, and who in turn suffered the rebellion of his son Zeus, thereafter progenitor at large. The beginning is the mysterious mating of Sky and Earth, and man has crawled at the centre of their procreative powers ever since, both product and compulsive counterpart. For Hamlet the encounter with Ophelia is the encounter with his Queen/mother: he must slay a father and avoid being slain because Gaea/Eve is insatiably there. In the light of Greek mythic marriages endlessly disrupted by bloody violences of sons to establish natural incestuous unions, Hamlet's wild shoutings at his hidden Polonius/King selves (directed, too, at Ophelia/Queen) are entirely consistent: Go to, I'll no more on't! it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no moe marriages. Those that are married already - all but one - shall live.

His last remark to Ophelia, its fourth repetition, poses in Christian terms the two alternatives where there are no marriages: angelic abstinence or 'the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption ... making love / Over the nasty sty!' 'To a nunnery, go' can lead to either a convent or a brothel. Where Hamlet's compulsions lead him as he sets the 'nunnery' trap becomes clear most quickly. In the advice to the players that immediately follows two violent figures are equated: Termagant, a Saracen deity, and Herod of Judea. The latter appears in the Gospels as a raging, bloody king, slaughterer of children in an effort to kill Christ, or again as deadly enemy of Christ when the latter was about thirty years of age. Moreover, condemned by

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Christ's cousin John of incest for marrying Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, he was led to the slaying of John through a sexually seductive dance by Salome. These all seem to be parallels that would lead an obsessive Hamlet to allude to him, although the discussion is, on the surface, about acting. Hamlet describes actors who rant in playing such figures as 'neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, ... they [imitate] mankind so abominably.' The categories are fundamental: 'man' is separated from Christians and pagans. It would appear that Hamlet (and necessarily Shakespeare) is aware of three contexts: two hypotheses as to the place of man in the universe, Judeo-Christian and pagan, and behind these, out of which they grew, natural man as metaphor in the metaphor of primal nature. The next four allusions, just before the players' play begins, have all been dealt with. Yet, all within 47 lines, they are together an unobtrusive interweaving of allusive themes that contribute to the coherent flow of the action. Vulcan's stithy reaches back to the foul imaginings in the first soliloquy and the Ghost, and forward to the gross attack on the Queen and the implications in Ophelia's coronet. Polonius's enacting of Caesar reaches back to the second telling of the Hamlet story in i.i, and forward to Polonius's death. 'Nay then, let the devil wear black' brings back the image of the inky-cloaked, brooding Hamlet of i.ii. Finally 'For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot' goes back to 'rose of the fair state,' and ahead to 'flush as May,' and 'Rose of May,' to the pervasive vernal folklore celebration of amorous rites. The exchange between Player King and Queen needs little further comment. We remember that the marriage is measured in a thousand nights of love-lust by way of Greek allusion. There follow, in Hamlet's wild little rhyme, two Greek allusions, the second of particular importance. The first, his reference to Horatio as Damon, leads us by immediate association to Hamlet/Pythias. Mythologists have said that the Damon-Pythias story is probably a seasonal myth the point of which is the late return of spring, i.e., of a fertility god. More complex and more important is Hamlet's disruption of rhyme. As Horatio says: 'You might have rhym'd.' Had he rhymed, Claudius/King would be an ass. But the substituted word is 'paiock' (Quartos), or 'Paiocke' (First Folio), commonly agreed to be 'peacock.' This must be understood in the wholly classic context of the quatrain: Damon and Jove. Presently, in the attack on the Queen, Hamlet identifies his Father/ self with Jove, and in the quatrain, 'This realm dismantled was / Of Jove himself.' Not by a Claudius/ass but by a peacock, who now reigns. This leads us deep into Greek myth. Hera, having manoeuvred Zeus (i.e.,

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Jove) into giving her lo in the shape of a heifer, put Argus of the hundred eyes to spy on lo's conduct. Zeus in turn sent Hermes (Mercury, the cunning god) to kill Argus. Hermes succeeding in this, Hera placed Argus's eyes in the tail of the peacock, a bird sacred to her. Who then reigns instead of Jove, the father? Not uncle/King, the ass, but the Queen's many-eyed (i.e., spying) favourite. The Mousetrap play has, through Hamlet's compulsive baiting, determined, as in Greek myth, that the force to be provoked and then responded to is indeed the woman. It follows quickly and inevitably that son and mother come together in cosmic embrace, however metamorphosed in 'words said over a ritual act.' The next identifiable pattern, the King's prayer and Hamlet's soliloquy, begins with reference to Cain, whose offense 'hath the primal eldest curse upon't, / A brother's murder!' The King's prayer ends with 'Help angels! ... heart with strings of steel, / Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!' Hamlet's continuation of the prayer soliloquy moves from his father, '... all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May,' to the dire wish that uncle/King may die with no 'relish of salvation,' with a soul 'damn'd and black / As hell, whereto it goes.' Once more in the Mousetrap we can scarcely be surprised that it begins and ends in Christian allusion. To the Queen's, 'Have you forgot me?' Hamlet responds, 'No, by the rood, not so!' Then, the act resumed violently after the slaying of Polonius, we are quickly in Greek allusions that always mark sexual onslaught, but not until after anticipation of Ophelia's dying coronet: Such an act... [as] takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, And sets a blister there ...

A few lines later the sun appears in metaphor for a Hamlet more than 'flush as May' as he imposes the weight of his violence on the Queen echo of 'disasters in the sun ... the moist star ... sick almost to doomsday' that presages the violence of Caesar's death: Heaven's face does glow O'er this solidity and compound mass, With heated visage, as against the doom Is thought-sick at the act.

Now we find ourselves again in the first soliloquy and with the Ghost as Hamlet sets up what is indeed a 'counterfeit' image of his multiple self:

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See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill: A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man.

On the surface these allusions are extreme encomia, but not in the names. The praise is in the qualifying epithets: 'grace/ 'curls/ an imposing forehead; a fierce and commanding gaze; the fine and striking poise of a god 'new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill' - a bit of magnificent rhetoric. A combined form - a composite appearance - 'did seem ... assurance of a man.' But the reality is character, not appearance, and it must, in Aristotle's terms, be good, that is, essential for the gross act which is, even as Hamlet speaks, being acted against, and presently with, the Queen. The character is Hyperion, Apollo, fertility god and oracle, in whom violent primitive urges were at war with powers of light, truth, healing. It is Jove, the Zeus of the Greeks, usurper of his father's throne, married to his sister; married too, to Themis, Mother Earth, and an ardent indiscriminate seducer; inheritor of character from Kronos, father castrator also married to his sister; his mother, Gaea, then fertilized from the blood of the castration. It is Mars, the Ares of the Greeks, a violent, bloody destroyer, a Pyrrhus in the dimensions of a god, caught in adultery with Vulcan's wife Venus, a confirmed adultress, at least in her Greek counterpart. Mercury is here, the trickster who might have, had he been a hunter, set traps and snares; Vulcan, too, who benetted his adulterous wife in an invisible snare and was guide of the dead to Hades. 'Where every god did seem to set his seal,' exclaims Hamlet, in description of his Ghost/self. The character of the gods makes clear what the players in and within Hamlet act to 'show ... the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,' in the immediate scene 'the rank sweat of an enseamed bed ... love / Over the nasty sty.' As sexual violence dies fitfully, Greek images disappear; we move again from Garden to Christ, if most darkly. 'Either [master] the devil, or throw him out... heaven hath pleas'd it so / To punish me with this, and this with me ...' And finally we see Father and Son destroying each other as they probe in darkness to come face to face with, not only each other, but the omnipresent Ghost.

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The fourth act, the most obscure part of the play, shares with the preceding acts termini of Christian reference. Its centre, however, is more a mixture of allusions than a concentration on the Greek, although Greek references emphasize earlier meanings. Ophelia's coronet provides at least one provocative allusion. Her first song alludes to pilgrims. Her subsequent references to the folktale of the baker's daughter, to St Valentine, and even her mild oaths, 'By Gis and by St. Charity,' are all Christian in import (although St Valentine does but 'skin and film' a pagan spring rite). Then the messenger's words bring back Genesis and Ouranos-Gaea: 'as the world were now but to begin, / Antiquity forgot, custom not known, / ... They cry "Choose we! Laertes shall be King!'" Laertes' 'O rose of May!' follows, and then Ophelia's coronet flowers, a blend of folklore, Christian implications, and Greek meanings. Now in close sequence in the few remaining pages of act iv we find several relevant allusions. First the King refers to his love-lust for the Queen - be it 'my virtue or my plague' - in the figure of Apollo: She's so conjunctive to my life and soul That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her.

Next comes Hamlet's message: his 'sudden and more strange return' will set him naked on the kingdom. King/Hamlet immediately seeks to strengthen Laertes' eager violence by revealing a deadly practice, a devil's device, 'Under which he shall not choose but fall.' This movement in scripture from rebirth back to temptation and fall brings us to the critical moment of the father's death but 'Two months [or two hours] since,' and back to relevant Greek evil, the King's praise of Laertes' handling of his rapier over that of Lamord, the Death, who ... to such wondrous doing brought his horse As he had been incorps'd and demi-natur'd With the brave beast,

in short, a centaur. Here again, although Shakespeare's implication may not go beyond centaur as symbol of lust, Greek genealogy of the centaur is surprisingly apt in Hamlet. Ixion, says Rose, 'has some claim to be the first murderer, a Greek Cain'; he murdered his wife's father, 'according to Pindar ... the first slaying of anyone belonging to the same ... tribe,' i.e., Ixion and his

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wife were blood relatives. Cleansed by Zeus of blood-guilt, he tried to seduce Hera, but was tricked by a cloud-phantom shaped like Hera, who subsequently gave birth to either the first centaur or the father of centaurs, 'a monstrous race half-horse and half-man, violent and lustful...' (88 passim). There were other centaurs who were sons of Silenus, the drunken old satyr. Again the King to Laertes: would you show 'your father's son in deed / More than in words?' Laertes' answer takes us back to the prayer scene: To cut his throat i' th' church!' The King's smooth 'no place indeed should murder sanctuarize' heightens the ambivalence deeply within the Hamlet who spared King/Hamlet even as he plotted (as now) against Hamlet's life. To die or not to die is always the heart of Hamlet's Christian, if not Greek, question. But Hamlet's devil/Ghost exercises his cunning fully as the end nears: Therefore this project Should have a back or second, I ha't! ...

I'll have prepar'd him A chalice for the nonce ...

'For the nonce,' that is, 'for this special occasion,' must be taken in its fullest sense. Akin to the desolating allusions in Ophelia's coronet, the chalice is the last such reference. Near its end, then, act iv, as the others, echoes its Christian beginning in allusion to an envenomed Grail for whatever feast is toward in proud Death's eternal cell. Act v has its full share of mythic allusion, so intermixed as almost to belie the strong sense of unity that comes out of the whole act. One might say that its total impact is like that gained from sensing the quiet, threatening intensities, interrupted by violences, of the schizophrenic, to whom all surrounding phenomena become his utterly unified private vision. This, of course, has been true throughout, in the interwoven sequence of many Hamlet visions, whether Horatio, Ghost, King, Polonius, Pyrrhus, Queen/Ophelia's coronet, Lamord, or even the ridiculous (but dangerous) challenger Osric. As preliminary to act v it may be helpful to assess in it changes in Hamlet's attitudes, which appear to echo his strange shiftings of mood throughout the play. To the point where he joins Laertes in precisely shared violence at and in Ophelia's grave Hamlet's attitude seems to be quiet, reflective, ironic, at times close to cynicism in mordant wit. The grave scene is utterly violent in the style of Lucianus. Next his account of the attempt

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on his life at sea appears to have something of the temper of ' 'tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar' - an intense excitement, brittle under its restraint, a pent-up unquietness that resolves without modulation into reflective acceptance: 'a man's life's no more than to say "one."' Now Osric brings out in him an amusedly scornful wit, which again gives way to a thoughtful blending of scriptural and stoic acceptance, an attitude extended over the preliminaries with Laertes. Then ritual single combat, formally begun, bursts into violence, before Hamlet's final anguished pleading. In this sequence all of the several sources of allusion appear, tightly interwoven. Hamlet dominates in their use, but there is a significant sharing of allusion at Ophelia's grave and at Hamlet's dying. The initial reference is Christian. Can one who sought her own dying, asks the Sexton, be buried in Christian burial? This decided by worldly judgment, we are taken back to the despoiled Garden, for Scripture says that 'Adam digg'd.'That he 'digg'd' not only as a gardener but as a grave-maker seems evident as far back as the King's reference in i.ii, for 'the first corse' was Abel, slain by his brother. 'The houses [a grave-maker] makes lasts till Doomsday,' says the Sexton, and so we are again at the Christian end. But Hamlet takes us right back: 'How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if 'twere Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder!' Presently Alexander, and once again Caesar, become commentary on the 'base uses' to which we may return, by way of a stinking skull, as Ophelia's cortege comes into view. The violent grave scene which follows and closes the first section of the last act is extraordinary in its use of allusions. It begins in Christian terms, the 'maimed rites' of one who wilfully sought her own dying. The priest complains that Ophelia has been 'allow'd her virgin crants,' although her death was doubtful and she should 'in ground unsanctified have lodg'd / Till the last trumpet.' She will be, cries Laertes, 'a minist'ring angel.' Now comes what may well be an involved allusion in Laertes' curse. O, treble woe Fall ten times treble on that cursed head Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense Depriv'd thee of!

Here is Hamlet's thirty years again, and, in contradiction to Laertes' assertion moments before of Ophelia's 'fair and unpolluted flesh,' what may be reference to the 'dying' of his sister's 'most ingenious sense,' the manner of which her coronet has made clear, and against which Laertes warned her in i.iii.

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There follows a remarkable complexity of allusion. It resembles earlier patterns in which a centre is enclosed by common beginning and ending elements. Laertes begins with reference to Pelion and Olympus; Hamlet ends with reference to Ossa, and then makes a provocative reference to Hercules. Between the Pelion and Ossa allusions both shout violent Christian imprecations. Parallel to this enclosing order is a kind of cosmic geography: a mountain higher than Olympus buries in this vastly cramped hole in the ground, this entrance to dark purgatory, two wildly shouting tiny madmen who wrestle horribly over the body of a lover/sister, one who will catch her 'once more in mine arms/ the other who will 'be buried quick with her' too as he imagines 'Millions of acres on us, till our ground, / Singeing his pate against the burning zone, / Make Ossa like a wart!' That Laertes/Hamlet divide the Ossa-Pelion myth in exact proportions, just as they share Ophelia's body, and presently kill each other with the same exchanged weapon, is not surprising to those who see the scene as something more than wild ranting. In the distant protomyth Otos and Ephialtes, twin sons of Poseidon (known as the Aloadai after their mother's mortal husband) sought to pile Ossa on Olympus, and Pelion on Ossa, to war against the gods and to seize Hera and Artemis. In one story Apollo kills them. In another they pursue Artemis who leads them across the sea to an island. (Like all of Poseidon's sons, they can walk on water.) On the island Artemis takes the form of a white deer, stands between them, then disappears so that their hurled javelins kill each other at the same moment. Seen in another perspective, twin-brothers, half-god, half-man, seek to force Earth against Sky, to join the earth mother with the sky father, and at the same time to separate them in order to mate with a goddess fertility mother. The double pattern of man's procreation is here in the grave, satyr striving to be Hyperion, and, compounding the complexity, life fighting death even as it succumbs to it in dying and 'dying.' That there is Christian matter in the centre of this seems to complete the pattern. 'The devil take thy soul!' shouts Laertes. 'Thou pray'st not well,' responds Hamlet. Then, their violent wrestling prevented, Hamlet shouts his challenge, 'Swounds, show me what thou't do ... woo't fast? ... Woo't drink up esill... I'll do it.' 'EsilP has been identified with the vinegar and gall given to Christ when he was crucified. There is, of course, no contradiction in the two patterns of myth. In both man struggles to be godlike, seeking endlessly to wrestle birth out of the mortal grave. His fighting soul bitterly engaged, Hamlet flings out threateningly, the object of his threat once more Ghost/self, Hercules, not at all Claudius except as Claudius is indistinguishable from any other Father, or

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King, or Ghost, or Son. Hamlet is here, as everywhere, drama of the enigmatic absolute. Hamlet's report of his revision of the King/Father's commission to kill him is a mixture of allusions. His bitterly mocking 'As peace should still her wheaten garland wear' brings into vision a gentle Demeter (and perhaps a sadly distracted Ophelia under her coronet). He orders Rosencrantz/Guildenstern to be killed 'not shriving time allowed.' The altered commission is a 'changeling never known' - a reference from folklore to his own malicious, ugly act - and the King's twin alter-ego goes to death as 'they did make love to this employment.' Now, just before the 'fell incensed points' of single combat, comes Hamlet's reference to an ever-watchful father, 'there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,' ironic precurse to the poisoned cup which 'The King shall drink to Hamlet's better breath.' Now King/ Father/Jove's cannon thunders, prologue to the violent act that generates in the dark half of a changeling spirit, then turns upon itself to kill again. The battle with Jove/ and Jehovah/self ended, all becomes Christian as Hamlet turns pleadingly to his rational spirit: 'report me and my cause aright... tell my story.' Horatio's response ends the action for the moment in biblical allusion, but the irony that echoes 'the rest is silence' is here: 'flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!' For Christ/Hamlet there is no rest; the world of 'warfare' is still echoing in his silence: March afar off, and shot within. To Hamlet's 'What warlike noise is this?' and Horatio's 'Why does the drum come hither?' Fortinbras, the martial Pyrrhus/ Hamlet, has the present answer: 'I have some rights of memory in this kingdom.' There is a final allusion, obscured by the Elizabethan fondness for spectacle. It has punctuated the whole combat scene and the whole play from the King's command that cannon be shot in i.ii, and again just as the final duel is to begin. Cannon is heard again as Fortinbras approaches, 'afar off.' The last line of the play is Fortinbras's command, 'Go, bid the soldiers shoot.' The last sound we hear is Jehovah's and Zeus's thunder, 'prologue to the omen coming on.' What was created at the beginning continues in endless cycle through the Earth Mother's demand for violence from the 'most miraculous organ' which 'yea, doth kill and slay.' Carried off to live again and always with Ghost, Father, and Son is the Queen, who too has suffered a dying from the aphrodisiac pearl within the cup. In the Phaedrus Socrates takes two views of the old myths. As to religious meaning he remarks: 'The wise are doubtful,' and 'I have enough

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religion for my own use/ At the other extreme from mystical acceptance is an attitude he dismisses as 'crude philosophy/ the rationalists' efforts to give natural explanations for myths. But he does not dismiss myths. The 'religion for my own use' is their place in inquiry as to the truth of man: is he swollen with passion, or is he a creature of a gentler sort? Part of invention then, for Plato, is skill in incorporating past myths into poetic statement. We have seen that by this criterion Hamlet is so sophisticated as to equal the Phaedrus and the Oedipus Rex. Quite another kind of invention, which goes deeper, 'possesses' the play, makes poem and Hamlet one, is its total imaginative form. This will be examined presently. The Greek sources have had attention from Murray and others, which, with detail examined here, seems enough to establish their relevance. But perhaps the scriptural allusions deserve brief further attention. It seems revealing, first, to place in recollection almost all of act i in parallel to passages from the New Testament. In St Matthew we read: 'ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars.' In St John: 'This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead.' In St Luke: 'they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.' Again in St Matthew: 'as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be'; 'Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven ...' Jesus' comments on the second coming stress the corruption of the world, the abominations festering so deeply in Hamlet's imaginings. 'When ye ... shall see the abomination of desolation [the Son of Man shall come]'; 'as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage ...' (St Matthew). Of the days of Noah, we read in Genesis: 'the wickedness of man was great in the earth and ... every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually'; 'the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said ... the earth is filled with violence.' Both Old and New Testaments inveigh against lust, fornication, and adultery; Christ's strictures are as frequent and definite as Hamlet's, if not in grossly savage language. At the end Christ tells his disciples to teach the nations, to testify the truth. Having agreed to tell Hamlet's story, Horatio answers the bloody soldier who claims rights of memory in the kingdom:

199 Myths Of that I shall have also cause to speak, And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more. But let this same be presently perform'd, Even while men's minds are wild ...

It does not appear extravagant to see, concurrent with Old Testament and Greek primal myth, the Christ story as providing its full share in the meaning of Hamlet. But there may be yet another form of Christian-pagan ritual, the mediaeval romance, through which the myth may reach back to the New Testament, and back further to the depths of antiquity. It should be sufficient merely to cite certain conditions of the Grail quest as these have been explored to their origins by Jessie L. Weston, and note possible parallels in Hamlet. Weston writes: 'the Grail castle is always situated in the close vicinity of water, either on or near the sea' (51). Horatio cries out to Hamlet in warning against the Ghost: 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, 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.

Versions of the Grail story often have a Perilous Chapel, or Perilous Cemetery, into which the Quester goes, and where he finds supernatural and evil forces. The geography of Hamlet begins and ends in a cemetery; almost all of its characters are exhumed so that we may again share their action. The Quester is always a traveller who must in some fashion restore fruitfulness to a country desolated in some vague manner because a knight has died (12-14; 175-8). One thinks here of Hamlet's 'cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!' shortly after his own dying and mysterious reappearance. 'According to von Schroeder/ writes Weston, 'there was, among the Aryan peoples generally, a tendency to regard the dead as assuming the character of daimons of fertility. This view [von Schroeder] considers to be at the root of the annual celebrations in honour of the Departed, the "Feast of Souls," which characterized the commencement

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of the winter season, and is retained in the Catholic conception of November as the month of the Dead' (85). Further points made in this connection include: (1) belief in a troop of departed souls; (2) a spectral hunt; (3) a spectral army - the souls of warriors slain in fight; (4) a train of demons of fertility, including satyrs and nymphs (84-5). These parallels to act i and to particular themes throughout Hamlet - hunter, soldier, a troop of departed souls, satyrs, nymphs - all seem too conjunctively relevant to be ignored. Weston comments further that originally there was a fully integrated ritual pattern, its parts separated by the time of the Grail romances, including Grail, Sword, and Lance as fertility symbols, and the Sword Dance, Mumming Play, and Morris Dance. The Grail and Sword seem to have their place in v.ii; we have already seen the importance of May-day, with its central reference, Tor O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot!' Hamlet and the Grail stories seem to have other notable common matter. Voltemand reports that Norway is afflicted with 'sickness, age, and impotence.' Player Queen speaks of her husband: 'But woe is me! you are so sick of late, / So far from cheer and from your former state, / That I distrust you.' The Player King responds: 'Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too; / My operant powers their functions leave to do.' If the Player King stands, as all else indicates he ought to, in parallel to other king figures, the point should be applicable to them too - the ancient Priam, the Polonius who patently is an old man, and Claudius, who never is in any scene of a physical kind with the Queen. It may not be too extravagant to consider in this context the reserved acceptance of imminent death by Hamlet in v.ii. After all, in the myth he contains within himself all these figures, and others, exhibiting their dominating qualities in the moments that demand them. It is then possibly relevant that the King of the Grail stories has two forms: he is either a dead knight or an aged man who must be restored to youth: 'the forces of the ruler being weakened or destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes Waste and the task of the hero is that of restoration' (23). The Maimed King and the Aged King are 'two different aspects of the same personality ... probably ... represented as two individuals ... [But] as the two are, in very truth, one, they should be equals in age, not of different generations' (122). At the end Hamlet speaks of'how ill all's here about my heart'; both he and the King are destroyed by wound and death, and by the same instrument. And we have noted how carefully Hamlet's final age is equated more than once with a King's dying, just as his birth is so equated.4

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Having brought to bear also the Adonis myth, Weston writes: 'I would submit that... in the Grail King we have a romantic literary version of that strange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of the history of our Aryan race; the figure of a divine or semi-divine ruler, at once god and king, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land and people directly depends' (62). There is here, of course, no intent to suggest any direct connection between Shakespeare's thought and the Grail romances. It is simply that there are again curiously precise parallels that seem to appear in myths again and again, as though there were only one myth. But when we turn to ritual in Hamlet, other elements of the New Testament story and the Grail romances do seem to have specific relevance, and for these Weston is most helpful.

9 Rituals

HAMLET

And with such maimed rites?

FORTINBRAS I have some rights of memory in this kingdom. ... the rites of war Speak loudly for him.

Ritual, just as myth, needs definition and division if we are to realize fully the part it plays in Hamlet. It may be defined in its full form as ceremony, usually traditional, or in part so, a symbolic action with symbolic language, marked by the use of physical symbols, seeking to convey significances and powers beyond ordinary comprehension, meanings intuitive rather than rationally or literally conceived, with almost total reliance on metaphor. It may be action per se, mimed; it may combine action and words; it may use dance and/or music. It may use the suggestive powers of gesture and facial expression; it usually embodies spectacle in dress and other visual details. It is a group ceremonial which may, and usually does, involve spectators who are nevertheless participants in emotional-psychological responses. Much of ritual is so dim in its origins as to be as much an enigma as the meaning that lies behind it. In major respects this definition is scarcely different from the classical concept of tragedy, a not surprising matter; the outgrowth of the one from the other has long been an accepted hypothesis. Tragic theatre is, then, ritual: actors imitating natural man (however much contained in society) in controlled ceremonial; invented action requiring an exactly defined central character, that which is good for mythic meaning. Such character is indivisible from the action; the invented man acting his part is metaphor, just as the action is metaphor. His language is metaphoric, symbolic speech. If he is thoroughly representative man, universal man,

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all other characters in the myth-ritual contribute reflections of his inner dialogue through action and words. His perceptions and responses are all; everything else is organically part and, at any given moment, all of what he is. To seek to display the full refractions of the myth-hero's inner vision the poet of tragedy uses every symbolic means in his power. If he is a powerful poet and an extraordinarily powerful poetic spirit, his metaphoric man in action will be the display of this power through ritual and 'things said over a ritual act/ If the poet is completely possessed by the theatre of his work, it will become the cosmic theatre of his distilled imagination, in extraordinary uses of such familiar means as prologues, dumb shows, plays within plays, and clowns - finally even the theatre itself, and whatever else, including himself. Ritual ranges from simple natural forms to very complex political and religious ceremonials. The love rites of May-day have an innocent naivete that may belie sophistication: garlands and coronets of spring flowers, poems, songs, oaths of undying constancy, love-making on beds of blossoms. At the other extreme is high religious ceremonial, or the royal political audience, marked by fanfares, the dignities of protocol in procession (always exactly observed by Shakespeare), ceremonial robes, crowns, jewels, petitions and pronouncements, all the temporal splendour that signifies 'such divinity' as 'doth hedge a king.' Always the language, if the poet has the power, is such as marks sceptred might and its tributaries. Ranging from one extreme of this kind of ceremony to the other are the contributory rituals of oath-taking, which can, when critical, stand independently. The May-day lover's little poem - 'Doubt truth to be a liar; / But never doubt I love' - is oath of fealty that can be, and is, broken. Rites may have their emblematic objects, as 'a posie in a ring,' or some sacred object - a book, a cross, or a sword/'sword' that is both 'dagger' and cross. There may be ritual pearls in ritual chalices. There may be invocation to deity, Judaic, Christian, or pagan, or all together. There may be sacrificial slaying as ultimate oath of fealty to some overwhelming force, life or death, life in death, death in life. Singularly important in heroic ritual, as in little boys fighting on a playground watched by little maids on a playground, is single combat. In its early formulations it was or became 'by a seal'd compact, / Well ratified by law and heraldry' the forfeiting of a life for a precious property. This was not an individual heroic matter: upon the life of the King, co-progenitor with the Queen, lay the well-being of an entire nation, or people, or mankind. In human representation of this kind of rite there was always the panoply of court or church (like the elaborate ceremonial in i.ii). But in extra-mundane confrontations of 'mighty

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opposites' - Prometheus against the gods, Oedipus against Apollo, Satan against God, Christ against Satan, i.e., man always against himself in his desolate ambivalence - the inevitable bitter punishment falls on men, especially on the sacrificial man-god, symbol of hopeless, if endlessly attempted, divine aspiration. Historical, extra-historical, or some blending of both, the ritual of single combat is at the heart of myth. Hamlet begins and ends with it. Finally, deep in mythic ritual, far deeper apparently than the mystery of birth, is the funeral, death being so terrifying as to demand the compensation of rebirth. But a funeral is not just a funeral. There are kinds. The sanctified funeral has its prenominate conditions: chants, prayers, priests, processions, regalia, flowers, and, more than all these, virginity, if a maid be buried. In the unsanctified funeral, as for one who offends by seeking her own salvation through self-'dying,' shards, flints, and pebbles replace charitable prayers, says the churlish priest. But these extremes of Christian burial have a middle ground that offends both brother and priest, the 'maimed rites' of the unsanctified funeral qualified into the appearance of sanctity by intervention of temporal power, god challenged by man. Even this brings us back - in Laertes' words, 'from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring!' - to the fourth kind of funeral, that in nature purely, neither formal church nor formal court intervening. Laertes may perhaps not recall 'a violet... of primy nature,' symbol of unfaithfulness he has cited to Ophelia long ago, but we do not forget that Ophelia dies a mermaid, wearing her sad coronet of gross distress. The final funeral, Hamlet, Laertes, King, Queen at its centre, is of another kind, yet indivisible from Ophelia's burial - the soldier's rites. Its solemnity is that of measured march and of cannon speaking loudly for the violent hero come to his violent end, in words spoken by the military King-priest, Fortinbras. Theatre in its fullest sense, when dealing with the tragic, is living myth. Just what is may have been as ritual in the Globe is hard to say. Krutch has suggested a halfway point between myth and 'document,' between the fully symbolic, immediate experience and some quasiliteral, or even more completely literal, form attractive to the critical mind attempting rational restatement. Eliot's 'objective correlative' seems to be argument for necessary correlation between the 'idea' and the objective figure or action. Granville-Barker says that Hamlet is a mythic ritual figure surrounded by literal figures, making for an unassimilated whole. Surely it is a great deal to expect from a rational age that it respond to mythic-ritual performance or document. At best one may expect a mixed response, partial enigma for most experiencers, total enigma for far more, indeed 'caviary to the general.'

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There may be more difficulty in the theatre as against the reader. But, even so, an ideal reader is assumed for Hamlet, a reader for whom Greek culture and Renaissance and biblical culture and language are direct and immediate. Director and actor fall within the same demands. It appears, in the typical deletions and rearrangements of the whole to fit the Procrustean bed of time and physical conditions in the twentiethcentury theatre, that no one sees, hears, or is allowed to try to respond to Hamlet as the more sensitive of Elizabethan auditors may have been shaken to their very centres in the Globe. Ritual scenes cannot have been unimportant in such response. The oath-taking in i.v, so obviously a rite, has already been explored. The Player's play has been considered as a severely formal ritual in thought, the rational equivalent for m.iv and for the true ritual in the final scene. This last, the only scene not yet closely examined, deserves full attention.- it is the end in the comprehensive sense that Aristotle emphasizes the term. All is relevant to it; all leads to it. It is what is necessary to the beginning and middle of the art form. Again, as at the outset of this inquiry, one must ask: 'Where does this end begin?' In the ultimate sense it begins where it must, at the incarnation of the spirit when King and Queen 'die/ In the art form it appears to begin at the rebirth into physical form of a dark and frightening Ghost. In a more deliberately limiting sense we may choose to say that it begins at the point where the King and Laertes, both surrogates for Hamlet, plot the death of Hamlet/King, which becomes, with that of the Queen, a multiple symbolic act. The parallel to the first account of Hamlet's story in i.i is clear; the plot is for a single combat, in this instance to be resolved by treachery. The next parallel is most full: that of v.ii and i.ii. In both the King is the 'director' of actions to dispose of three 'nephews' who are one entity. For the beginning of this last action we must go to iv.vii, where King and Laertes set up the poisoned plot. For the ritual in v.ii we again gain insight from Jessie Weston. The Grail romances, she writes, ar& quite possibly the 'fragmentary record of the secret ritual of a Fertility cult,' the symbols of which were a group of mysterious objects at the centre of the action: the Grail (a cup or dish); a Lance; a Sword; a Stone (probably a castle or chapel) these conveying a sense of awe, sanctity, strange virtues. In Christian tradition, she explains, the Lance and Cup are not associated symbols, as they are in pre-Christian myth: 'Lance and Cup (or Vase) were in truth connected together in a symbolic relation long ages before ... Christianity, or the birth of Celtic tradition. They are sex symbols of immemorial antiquity and world-wide diffusion, the Lance, or Spear, representing the Male, the Cup, or Vase, the Female, reproductive energy.' Weston quotes von Schroeder: '"In the ancient Aryan religion

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everything is aimed at the affirmation of life. The phallus can be considered its dominant symbol'" (66; 75; 45). It is evident, without indulging in guesswork about Shakespeare's knowledge of Grail romances, Aryan or Celtic mythos, that the final scene is dominated by two symbols: a sword with a poisoned tip that 'yea, kills and slays7 Hamlet, Laertes, and the King in one dramatic moment; and the chalice, poisoned with a pearl, a 'union' thought by Elizabethans to be an aphrodisiac when dissolved in wine, that 'kills' the Queen at the same moment. This symbolic rite has its probabilities and parallels throughout the play. Most obvious in ritual miming is the act in the Mousetrap dumb show. It begins again, and only begins, in the players' play; Lucianus pours the poison in the King's ear to the accompaniment of Hamlet's shout, "A poisons him i' th' garden for's estate ... You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife,' a prediction consummated by a King's nephew in the Queen/mother's chamber, where she is subjected to poison poured most violently into her ears, as a son/ King seizes his estate. An equivalent poison is seen in the hellish Pyrrhus, and, shortly later, in Hamlet's attack on Ophelia, and in the same moment on King and Polonius/King. The symbolic action of v.ii is always present in one guise or another in the tellings of the Hamlet story. It must then be at the heart of the Ghost's adjurations. Granville-Barker is aware of this: 'The infamy of the adultery is stressed, and the physical foulness of the poison made vivid to us - so elaborately vivid that when, much later, there is talk of poisoning Hamlet himself, and when the Queen is dying from its effects, the picture should come before our eyes again' (65). Now while it is true that the nephew in the dumb show approaches a King who is asleep 'upon a bank of flowers' and 'pours poison in the sleeper's ears,' there is no reference to poison as such in the Ghost's words. His vial of 'cursed hebona' has had attention: is it the sap of ebony, or of henbane? The Ghost's description of its application and effects is more relevant. It is poured in his ear, that is, an 'ear' that is his 'property.' It is a 'leperous distilment' at 'enmity with blood of man'; it has 'a sudden vigour' which causes a 'most instant tetter' that 'bark'd about, / Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body.' For Elizabethans leprosy, the disease of lazars, was thought to be venereal. All these implications are fully symbolized by Ophelia's coronet, testimony of another, but the same, seduction. In symbol this is the act of the King's sinning twin self (so fully paralleled in twin figures in the play) who sends him to horrible 'dying.' Always, in the imagination or reality of Ghost, of Hamlet, of King, there

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is gross, violent, diseased 'luxury and damned incest.' It is this that is represented in endless ways in Hamlet, finding its most direct expression in the Queen's chamber; its most symbolic-ritual form in the last scene. Presently the rapier, the Sword or Lance of ritual, is at the centre of King/Laertes' plotting for the final rite. Horatio, Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras all are always armed with the sword, as are the guards. Polonius is slain by Hamlet's sword. Priam's 'antique sword, / ... lies where it falls, / Repugnant to command,' the 'unnerved father falls,' then, ... never did the Cyclops' hammers fall On Mars's armour, forg'd for proof eterne, With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword ...

The Ghost is in full armour, and so wears a sword. All these evidences of a central symbolic object come to sharp focus in the rite of oathtaking in i.v, with its repeated swearing of silence on the sword. The poisoned, bleeding sword, phallic emblem of the desolated garden, is the controlling symbol, the poisoned chalice accompanying it in the last scene. The plot begins with the poisoned sword; it takes full shape with the addition of the chalice. First is a proposal for a 'seal'd compact': Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will, And they shall hear and judge 'twixt you and me. If by direct or by collateral hand They find us touch'd, we will our kingdom give, Our crown, our life, and all that we call ours, To you in satisfaction ... ,

to which Laertes agrees. Now the King praises Laertes' superiority over Lamord in respect to his use of the rapier. The exchanges between the King and Laertes are rich in erotic implications, given Renaissance understanding of the terms. At the outset there is an ambivalent remark from Claudius: 'You have been talk'd of,' he says, ... for a quality Wherein they say you shine. Your sum of parts Did not together pluck such envy from [Hamlet] As did that one: and that, in my regard, Of the unworthiest siege.

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'What part?' asks Laertes; the answer is that, two months since, there was here Lamord, who ... to such wondrous doing brought his horse As he had been incorps'd and demi-natur'd With the brave beast.

This centaur (creature of extreme, beastly sexuality) has given a masterly report of Laertes' rapier most especially. This, says the King, has moved Hamlet to the desire for Laertes' 'sudden coming o'er to play with' him. Laertes contributes the next essential to the symbol: he will anoint his sword (anoint a word of religious ritual) with a poisonous contagion that will make even a scratch a death. Now the King arranges for the necessary correlative to the poisoned point, a poisoned chalice 'for the nonce,' the special occasion. There will be no escape: both the Male and the Female have their common deadly poison. All that remains is the ritual in which the multiple King and the eternal Queen must 'die.' Before there have been significant equations: Ophelia's muddy death; the Gravedigger's version of it; the double unity of brother/lover in the grave. The final scene is total ceremony, complete ritual. The wager for single combat is agreed upon; as in the King's command in i.ii, kettle to the trumpet speaks, trumpet to the canoneer, cannon to the heavens, heaven to earth, and the symbolic contest is begun. After the first hit: 'Drum; trumpets sound; a piece goes off within.' The Queen drinks the aphrodisiac cup; Hamlet challenges Laertes - 'You do but dally ... you make a wanton of me' - and in a brief interim Laertes wounds Hamlet with the irrevocable death that immediately turns on him.1 A King 'dies'; a violent soldier-King returns, to return immediately in i.i as soldier/King/Ghost. A Queen 'dies' to return as undying fertility consort, young as Ophelia, yet age-old. The King 'dies' by the poisoned sword; King and Queen together by the poisoned chalice. Mythic symbols which antedate Christian meanings, Sword and Chalice, signs of both fertility and sacrifice, are dominant here. All of Hamlet is here, in concentrated intensity.

10 Madnesses

POLONIUS Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. ... a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.

Hamlet embodies an involved combination of many identities, but the awkward, sometimes cumbersome terminologies used here for them (e.g., King/Polonius/Hamlet) scarcely help gain response to mythic character and action. The reductio ad absurdum, however accurate the term might be, would be a composite name stretching its length a third of a page. The usual alternative, each figure accepted by name as literal character in a literal story, is even worse. But it will have been noticed that there has been here a compromise, awkward terminologies giving way from time to time to the simple 'literal' names. Readers probably share the feeling that this aspect of the study is unsatisfactory, for indeed any such use of the names per se is invitation to a literal perspective, the same problem that disturbed the responses of Greg, Wilson, GranvilleBarker, Eliot, and others. Even with this limitation, which may have been Shakespeare's problem too, it may be that the inventive structure of the play makes acceptance of the complex character of Hamlet inescapable. The difficulty was not enough to discourage Greg from the belief that Hamlet may be so powerful a poem as to be beyond the art of the stage, but possibly apprehensible through reading. Yet Shakespeare relied on a stage a large part of which was the full imaginative participation of much of an audience more sensitive than we to metaphoric implications in language, character, and patterns of action. If so, our final problem is to attempt to set forth some approximating equivalent pattern which will allow fuller response to the shifting,

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blending identity that is the unrelenting unity of Hamlet's agony. Perhaps a brief review of 'madnesses' in Plato's sense of the term, lying at the heart of human experience, may be helpful towards a final understanding of Hamlet, of Hamlet, and of a major element in Shakespeare's invention. By Plato's standard that the use of myths is part of invention Hamlet has not been found wanting. But, although marked by large interwoven patterns of extant myths and enriched by allusions to particular myths within these traditions, the play yet must provide another mode of invention if Shakespeare is to satisfy Plato's concept of the true poet: he must be able to make a myth within which all poetic powers show themselves, including the significant incorporation of the mythic past. He must be able to construct, as the whole, a metaphor that is total, a language for truth (as far as man may experience it) of a different kind than the rational. So extraordinary is this kind of imitation that it can be apprehended only imperfectly and vaguely by the literal power of reason. It is beyond paraphrase, beyond rational equivalent; its quality can be approximated only by example, by a corresponding metaphoric statement, another myth; but this will yet be something different, for the only correlative to a myth is itself in the understanding of him who reads, and in dramatic myth who sees and hears it. Another way of trying to put this is to say that the Hamlet myth provides fullness of meaning to the extent that the private myth brought to the play corresponds to it, a private myth which at the same time must be a universal myth. Such myth-making, says Plato, comes about in the poet who is 'possessed,' who is in a state of holy or divine madness. Such madness is not, or need not be, although it always seems metaphorically akin to, madness in the ordinary sense. An exploration of this element in Hamlet may help resolve the awkwardnesses in attempts here to convey the multiple-single character of Hamlet. Such inquiry will be clearer if it is approached by a brief reconsideration of Plato's definitions of several kinds of divine madness. At this point it should be quite obvious that what we are about to consider has nothing to do with the quite irrelevant inquiry as to whether Hamlet is mad or feigns madness - a question that could become relevant if the point were raised whether Shakespeare wished to create a dramatic character representing one or the other state (or both, for that matter). As usually put, the question postulates a sane man (not a dramatic character) pretending to be mad, or a man once sane now mad; the assumption is extra-metaphoric, extra-poetic; it is predicated on the play as a literal action measurable by a mankind which is sane or 'normal.' Mythic

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man is, of course, if most uncomfortable company, quite normal in nature, however mad in conventional society. Here madness will be approached in Plato's terms as a condition required for myth, or in Aristotle's terms as character good for the action of a drama. If the action requires madness, the poet supplies madness in whatever degree or form, when, and where it may be needed, just as he gives extra-mortal or extra-historical creatures a 'local habitation and a name.' All four of Plato's divine madnesses are extreme; they are ideal forms of human power represented by gods or agents of gods. Hamlet gives evidence in what he says and in action of being possessed by each of these forces. There is prophetic madness, lying finally, for example, in the Oedipus in Apollo, and directly evident in Teiresias, the blind seer, who too could have exclaimed, 'O, my prophetic soul!' There is the madness of divine healing: 'Again, where plagues and mightiest woes have bred in certain families, owing to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has entered with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of deliverance for those who are in need ...' Hamlet is less cheerful; he curses the spite that he has been born to set evils right. Of lust Plato intimates that, if one believes it to be a simple madness (i.e., an indivisible state of evil), one might accept it. But he says there is 'also a madness which is a divine gift... [this] madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings ...' Hamlet is on a line between these compulsive twin states. He has lost the second (although he yearns for it), is slave to the first. The fourth, poetic madness, is the most interesting in Hamlet, for it suggests, through Hamlet's character as poet/dramatist/actor (with all its associated powers) a special application of precisely these powers in Shakespeare as he invents the profoundly searching myth that enters us as audience at the same time that it is an endlessly receding vision. While there is no reason whatever to conjecture about Shakespeare's attitude towards himself, and even less what he may have been in terms of the madnesses of prophecy, healing, or love-lust (although he presumably expressed himself as to the last in the sonnets), there is no way of escaping his use of himself, just as he uses the Globe theatre, as a richly provocative element in Hamlet. The possibilities for ambiguities, reflections, images, shadows, enigma pressing from all sides, the curious, dreadful sense of unreality, of phantasmagoria, a universe of dream-desolation, are infinitely enhanced by sophisticated use of the art of illusion. Add to it an inventive extension of the ordinary concept of madness into an extraordinary mythic madness in Hamlet and the combinations and permutations be-

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come well-nigh endless. That Hamlet is a courtier, young lover, prince, scholar, soldier, hunter, spy, challenger, challenged, prophet, man of desire, corrupt man, diseased man, scourge, self-scourge - that he is all these at once and at the same time is poet-dramatist - carries complexities beyond any full assessment; add Hamlet's definition of his Ghost/ Father/Self as Apollo, Jove, Mars, Mercury - indeed every god - and we do have essential man, primal man, somehow contained in the allembracing memory of the most sophisticated of Renaissance figures. There remains then one matter: how Shakespeare uses madness, in its ordinary sense as he may have understood it, by extending its implications, its power in represented extremes, as dramatic means. That Shakespeare knew a good deal about madness in the usual sense of insanity can be believed from both external fact and internal evidence from the plays. Elizabethan England was notably lax in its attitudes towards the insane. Some were locked in Bethlehem, and perhaps other such places; far more walked the roads of England and the streets of London freely. The plays show that Shakespeare was very aware of their vivid excesses in speech and action. Beyond a fairly extensive roster of eccentrics of many kinds, there is an inarticulate Othello mouthing his passionate distraction; a 'Tom o' Bedlam' echoing the cosmic madness of Lear, after the madman's lesser echo, the Fool, has beat his anguished heart out for his possessed 'nuncle.' These of course are no more examples of literal madness than is Hamlet. Mental distractions did not then have the terminologies now attached to them, but they were there; we have no new madnesses. There is little point in trying to categorize an Othello, a Lear, or a Hamlet in such terms. There is much point in recognizing one or another insanity to see how Shakespeare, having observed it and absorbed its phenomena and its artistic potential, used it, as all else, for the ends of dramatic myths, especially in one about a cosmic madhouse-prison. Thus the terms schizophrenia and paranoia are most useful in attempting some assessment of poetic madness that shapes the colossally obsessed and disturbed Hamlet. Other literary myths lend their support. Through a rather simple, mechanical device (yet with power) Robert Louis Stevenson has given us the frightening evil of Hyde destroying his twin self and thus himself. In a novel reflecting Melville's deep absorption in Shakespeare the story of Ahab, twin of an evil Moby Dick, is told by Ishmael through the overwhelming three days of final destruction, only to have the telling begin again by an Ishmael who survives in a coffin. There are more; indeed all tragic heroes are tragic heroes by virtue of deep ambivalence, enigmatic

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paradox within, although they are not always invented in terms of obvious parallel to madness. Hamlet is not represented as alternating between two characters, unless we choose to stop with Horatio/Hamlet. His character is shown in perpetual sea-change, a Protean image unequalled anywhere in mythicpoetic art. Yet it seems reasonable to postulate the fact of schizophrenia as preliminary to attempts to formulate metaphoric parallels to Hamlet in the prison of his mind. We may best begin by remembering, as Edith Hamilton points out, 'the uncertainty between good and evil... in every one of the deities,' and by noting the classic pattern of what is termed schizophrenia. In general terms the schizophrenic is caught up in a pattern like that of the primal myth-maker. It seems likely that the latter, from a state of direct response to intimations and forms of meanings in surrounding phenomena that appeared to correspond to his emotional, physical, and psychological forces, became gradually a qualifier of his self-understanding through conscious consideration of formal realities in such phenomena. The schizophrenic, on the other hand, is compelled in the dominating 'mad' half of his identity to an inflexible vision which absorbs all that he sees, hears, touches, smells, tastes into his world of private reality. Even here there appears to be a likeness. Many invented gods are counterparts, and the story, no matter in what myth it may appear, varies only in accidentals; its basic pattern remains constant. The myth-maker varies the particulars and eventually, in literary myth, controls an elaborate combination of past myths, whereas the schizophrenic has no such control; he has no choice; his compulsion forces any and all particulars into whatever idee fixe it is that shackles him. Again even this has its relevance to the true myth-maker, who is, or cannot help but be, totally faithful to the compelling, controlling unity of the vision he expresses in art. There are other general considerations. The schizophrenic's other 'sane' self is often indistinguishable from 'normal' man, just as poetvates need not be extreme in conduct, except as he may have been (or is) involved in actual ritual. Too, both have exactly the same phenomena to respond to; only their essential selves may have differences. Shakespeare had his profession, the Globe, the Renaissance world, a great deal of the past in memory, and his own experience and inner states to qualify his myth-making. So too the schizophrenic may have varying internal and external conditions and influences to identify him. But in basic elements all myth-makers and all schizophrenics are, respectively, the same: each has a universal form. What makes the whole consideration here extraordinary is that Shakespeare is a poet 'possessed' in Plato's sense, inventing a

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figure who is not only like an unendingly multiple schizophrenic, but also a possessed poet/dramatist/actor within the fiction. From these general elements we may now briefly note what appear to be relevant particulars in schizophrenia. The schizophrenic, when he talks (and typically talks beyond restraint except for periods of mute depression), tells his story to its end only to begin again, and yet again. He is caught in an interminable revelation of self through any and all phenomena of the reality he feels and sees. He is most often in a state of suspicion; he is surrounded by spies who intend him harm, even to kill him, and therefore he must spy on everyone and seek to kill. As spies, others are hunting him; in defence, he must hunt them. The ambivalence makes defence offence; he is always, when in the paranoid state, an imminently potential killer. Given his double, opposed character, he becomes the spy/hunter turned on himself, the potential self-killer. He battles his own vision. He is given to arrogance (or an arrogant humility) which often expresses itself in identity with Christ as sacrificial victim (or self-offered sacrifice). This arrogant identity may equally be with a god or gods or any other figure of great power, and especially of sacrifice. The paranoid quality is locked to the arrogance, which is often violent, always potentially so. He is also often obsessed by the compulsive power of sex. King/Hamlet speaks of Hamlet's ... confusion, Grating so harshly all his days of quiet With turbulent and dangerous lunacy.

The Queen says, And thus a while the fit will work on him. Anon ... His silence will sit drooping.

This is precisely descriptive of the manic-depressive form of schizophrenia. Too, the intelligent schizophrenic is extraordinarily skilled in the cunning guile of guileless imitation of sanity. He can be so persuasive in this as to be most dangerous. He is often extremely articulate, fluency and wit combining in an air of artful innocence. He can set forth his assumed character with as much modesty as cunning. One is led to believe or entertain the belief that, insofar as all of the schizophrenic's enemies - the spies, the hunters, the ever-present threat-

215 Madnesses

ening killers - are extensions of his own distorted dream, he may in some strange subconscious way be aware of this duality, aware that all is a twin-imaged projection of self-compulsion. But whether this be true in fact or not, it can be made a movingly true fiction by a myth-maker inventing some ultimate form of schizophrenia to 'catch the conscience of the king.' If so, we may expect him to invent many 'twins/ even multiple sets of identical twins. One thinks of Horatio/Hamlet, of King/ Polonius; back of these the indistinguishable Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, and back of these their lesser shadows, Cornelius/Voltemand; one thinks of Pyrrhus/Fortinbras; of Bernardo/Osric as challengers; and several more; all finally surrounding in near and receding images the centre - the anguished soul of Hamlet. There is further the twin form of Ophelia/Queen. These identities are not individual, either in the structure of the play or in the character of Hamlet. There are mergings, overlappings, modulations; indistinguishable shiftings: two become one, three become one or two, and so on variously; all, although they seem to move outwardly, move to a concentric Hamlet. The 'schizophrenic' repetitions of the story, single, interwoven, divided but combined, narrated, intimated mimed, acted out, presented in symbol and ritual, do not at all interrupt the literal dramatic narrative which has so long beguiled those caught in the Hamlet web. There is no satisfactory way of attempting to say how Shakespeare managed to create such a figure. But, beginning with Hamlet's own metaphors (invented by Shakespeare), through metaphoric use of those we see literally as 'madmen,' 'schizophrenics,' caught in the wards of the prisons of their 'Elsinores,' we may hazard some sense of the power of Hamlet, and from this, perhaps, respond more fully to Shakespeare's myth. Our introduction to this other world comes from Hamlet. He has been in a happy, beautiful world, only to find that I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth ... 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 appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

This desolate subjective state he has indicated in significant terms just before: HAM What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?

216 EXHUMATION

GUIL Prison, my lord? HAM Denmark's a prison. ROS Then is the world one. HAM A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst. ROS We think not so, my lord. HAM Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Or again, in his Ghost identity, he speaks of the 'secrets of my prison house' which are so dreadful that they may not be revealed. Or again, 'perchance to dream: ... aye, there's the rub! / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / ... Must give us pause.' But this, the prison of death, filled with mad and frightening dreams, with fearful threatening shadows moving about and towards him endlessly in a walpurgis night, is not an imagined thing for Hamlet: although he debates in his ambiguity whether he should risk going there, he is already, without choice, in this purgatory, this dreadful and bitter prison house. He has died out of it only to be reborn into it in the brief breath of 'Long live the King,' endlessly accompanied by a troop of spirits who, emanating from himself, hedge him about with revulsion and terror. In this invented madhouse prison wanders the invented madman Man; we are irresistibly drawn to imprisonment with him in the Globe, whether we read, or see and hear, mutes and audience to the act. Whatever compassionate, fearful empathy we may ever have felt, or feel, for the paranoic-schizophrenic and his troop of accompanying spirits, whether it were or be in our own sad, doomed family, or in the family that surrounds us to the furthest reaches of our known world - always beyond it the reaches of silence - this response can be only most imperfectly approximated by literal-metaphoric equivalents. But they may help in an assessment of the art of Hamlet. As metaphors schizophrenic-paranoids imprisoned in their frightful worlds are paradigm for lost man; in the Hamlet vision universal man. Here is confined a distracted young lover, fearful and resentful of interference by a father. This may be the father of the woman whose affection he shares, or, in his compulsive confusions, her brother; or the husband of a woman beyond the strictures of convention if not nature, a mother, wanting whom is a terrifying violation. This feeling is confined in a nutshell; it presses severely on the mind, the cumulative force of all of woman, all of man in conflict over woman who will take any man to satisfy nature's need for procreation. In these 'foul imaginings' all men

217 Madnesses

are dangerous, all women are a desolating temptation to the gross, violating act, the urgencies towards which lie no less within himself. In another cell paces a young man who has been a soldier, in reality or in imagination, in Hal/Henry's words one who will 'imitate the action of the tiger; / Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, / Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; / Then lend the eye a terrible aspect... The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, / And the flesh'd soldier rough and hard of heart, ... shall range / With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass / Your fresh fair virgins ... / What is't to me ... / If your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation?' (Henry v m.i.6-9; iii.10-21 passim). He is, in short, a Pyrrhus, a Mars, who is a terrifying violator. Or here is a hunter, a skilled falconer, an expert in pursuing the stag and deer with hounds, exercising his cunning to overtake or drive out of hiding his prey. His hunting image may give way spontaneously to that of horsemanship: not only 'let the strucken deer go weep/ but also 'let the gall'd jade winch/ an identity that may go through seachange to become Death, the centaur, if he is at all a scholar. Or he may be any or all of these yet have been scholar first - a university student, contemplator of self, of man and eternity, in chaoticordered estimates of the bitter complexities and limitations of man against imponderable forces. These he expresses in frantic repetition to himself (within the hearing of other madmen) in a series of choruses to his forever excoriatingly futile act to solve his private dilemma. Or again he may be a politically important figure, one on whose choice a madman without choice - 'depends / The safety and health of this whole state ...' His state can be his family, an Elsinore, a Denmark, a world. These several figures, and more, drooping in their cells, or walking, watched, in their wards, are in an identical outward world: the same doors, and stairs, and lobbies; the same walls and battlements; the same institutional head, the same orderlies and guards. The same visitors: fathers, mothers, old companions. Outside can be seen the same casual figures, man and woman, of any street: a company on military drill, two lovers under a tree, two guards; farther away, two soldiers walking towards him. Dawn; a dazzlingly beautiful spring day; a breathless starfilled snow-cold night. Fireflies; gray-clad storms; roosters crowing; wisps and clouds of fog. A painting of a great castellated fort where cliffs beetle over a raging sea. On some wall, or hung around the neck, family pictures or miniatures. In the near distance the sound of cannon for military observance, accompanying the laughter of a group of visitors. A cross in a chapel. Screaming violence, bloody oaths, an attempted

218 EXHUMATION

killing, a killing, a rape, a priest, a black confining cell from which waking is to the same doors, and stairs, and lobbies, and walls, and a troop of threatening faces all his own, and all again and again and again. And again. But none of these things need be actually around him, except perhaps the people, and finally not even these. He brings all with him from his past. Mnemosyne is his familiar. And when he lives and dies and lives at the centre of the round-walled Elsinore of the Globe, he has another familiar, the myth-maker of whom Plato has said, 'the vulgar deem him mad/ who can transliterate him into total myth. This image both divides Hamlet and is most incomplete. But we may from this limited division possibly sense something of the synthesis which is one of the great inventive powers in the play. What action these separately identified schizophrenics might see is not indifferent. Each need not be postulated; whatever one sees is seen by any other in his own defined character and context: the particulars vary, the essence is constant. It may be better not to take the simplest form; certainly we cannot take the most inclusive. He sits in a ward generally occupied. He sees and hears the director of the institution, distinctively dressed, issuing orders to two orderlies, identically dressed, to go to another ward where a young patient is overtly threatening to kill the director and seize his wife, or his chief nurse. Strangely, director, orderlies, other attendants, various vague figures, all remind him of someone he knows - his own face in a mirror. Moments later two orderlies enter his cell; they are apparently different, but his cunning mind seizes the deception: they are the same two sent to spy on, to punish sorely, to kill the threatening young man - who is himself. Suddenly it is apparent that they too are identical in appearance, twins - and identical with himself. But the director has somehow been murdered by the dangerous madman spied on and has been succeeded by his brother. There are visitors, or inmates - a young woman, an older woman; they are at once his mother and a girl he has seduced or who has seduced him. They are joined by the girl's father and brother, but the first is the same as the director's brother, and the latter again the mirror image of himself; the father no less image of the murdered director and the succeeding brother. Now suddenly seduced girl and mother come into his view: they are identical. He attacks both as each, for in some confused way he would not be locked in this desolate nightmare had they not tempted him to the violent compulsive act that incarcerates him in his purgatorial prison. In this kaleidoscopic dream he fights a twin, is killed by the other, kills the other, kills a mother and father, then wakes to the agony of the whole tormented nightmare again.

219 Madnesses

What we have thus far sought to imagine becomes far more complicated by all the confusing yet relevant cross-complexities and particulars that are interfused through the characters of hunter, spy, soldier, scholar, courtier, prince, and all the others, each of whom sees phenomena in his own way. But in Shakespeare's poetic invention all are seen at once, all act and speak at once, in one figure; there is no rational division possible. The whole figure is, beyond ordinary conception, one figure whose 'hallucinations,' never cancelling each other, create the obsessed, mad Hamlet who bears all of the desolations that destroy man. The invention in Hamlet seems to be something like this, infinitely magnified to create the play's power. But Shakespeare's art does not end here. In a sense it begins here, for the ultimate power in Hamlet is that of poetry and the theatre, of the total illusion which challenges what may be dreamed of as ultimate truth. The Hamlet figure is illusionary placed within illusion, inventor of illusion within illusion, chief illusory actor within the illusion, surrogate for the master of illusion who created him - the possessed poet working in the illusory world of the Globe, circled by England and 'this side of our known world,7 by Christ and Satan, by the desolated Garden, by God and his angels, by Apollo and Diana, Jove and Hera, and, in some strange silent terminus, by Gaea-Ouranos, Earth and Sky.

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PART THREE

Inhumation

HORATIO ... flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. FORTINBRAS Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage ... HAMLET I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room. CLOWN [Sings] O, a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet. PLAYER KING ... orderly to end where I begun ...

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223 Inhumation

Once again Hamlet, son of the Player King, has been exhumed, Ghostdoomed, surrounded in shadowy reality by a troop of lost spirits, drawn from a dream of angelic rest into the dread fires of daylight damnation. He could not so have been seen without the thought of profoundly inquiring spirits, long before Hamlet, who pondered the powers of the Oedipus and other myths stretching back to and beyond Homer. What has been attempted here is based on simple acceptance of the principle of organic context as the ancients found it in tragic myth, and proposed it for the seminal inventive act peculiar to the poet. It seems certain that Hamlet must and will be exhumed again and again (surely on the stage - one could wish in faithful and imaginative fullness), for there are many things left unsaid; indeed there is that which will forever be unsayable, except as Shakespeare has intimated it with unequalled power through the words and ritual of the stage. These matters remaining, Hamlet must be interred once more. Yet we must be ready again for the Ghost, who has no known limits, except those of Man wrapped in the enveloping fires of human experience, whatever they may really be. Edman writes: 'There are moments, Plato seems to say, when speech has gone as far as thought can reach ... at such points ... he passes from argument to myth.' 'He is not to be envied,' says Socrates, 'who has to invent these allegories.' Amlothi is a riddler; riddles are small allegories no less enormous for that. 'Myth and the provisional truths of science,' writes Grimal, 'are only different approximations to Truth, that enigma of enigmas, which after so many achievements and discoveries, still remains closed to us.' As Eliot's hollow men whisper it: 'Between the idea and the reality ... the motion and the act... the essence and the descent, falls the Shadow.' Hamlet asks the overwhelming question - gains the overwhelming silence that is his only answer. And we continue to find ourselves inescapably caught up in his agonizing quest.

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NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1 In E.D. Leyburn, 'Comedy and Tragedy Transposed,' Yale Review, 53 (1964) 553-62 2 T.S. Eliot, 'Hamlet and His Problems,' in The Sacred Wood (London 1928) 3 The Elizabethans' figurative identification of the moments of death and sexual climax is well known. Distant, but close to Hamlet, is its basic position in the Oedipus Rex, as, e.g., in the following passage where parricide and incest are imaged forth at once, the very epitome of classic matter in myth: For I am sick In my daily life, sick in my origin.

4

5 6 7 8

O three roads, dark ravine, woodland and way Where three roads met: you, drinking my father's blood, My own blood, spilled by my own hand: can you remember The unspeakable things I did there ... Hamlet has a kind of madness; his seething brain finds visions of forms of things unknown; he is a lover and a lunatic; he is exceptionally intense and articulate; he formulates in language what is mystery; he is mystery. Cf Grimal: 'Bit by bit the mythical universe comes to rule all aspects of life ... [Myth] becomes reality itself, more real than the objective universe' (10). Coleridge, 'Lectures,' in Shakespeare Criticism, ed. D. Nichol Smith (London 1946), pp 230-1 Francis Fergusson, 'Introduction' to Hamlet, The Laurel Shakespeare (New York 1958), passim Second set of brackets in the original Patrick Cruttwell, 'The Morality of Hamlet - "Sweet Prince" or "Arrant Knave"?' in J.R. Brown and B. Harris, eds, Hamlet, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 5 (London 1963), p 111

226 Notes to pages 16-25 9 J.W. Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York 1929), p 116 10 Ernest Jones, 'Introduction' to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (London 1947), passim 11 Eliot, pp 100-2 12 T.E. Hulme, 'Romanticism and Classicism' (1913-14) 13 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1957), p 46 CHAPTER 2

1 The notion that Plato banishes all poets from his ideal republic is as erroneous as it is unquestioned. He does so only insofar as he manages to make all poets appear to be mere imitators, i.e., able to show only outward, physical appearances of things, mirror images of truth, and these only by way of the limited and imperfect-evidence of the senses. Why he does this is clear enough: poets and poetry are being measured only as agencies for education in a rationally conceived society, the quality of which can best be trusted to 'the rational and measuring principle in the soul.' This power does not err as fallible senses do, and is free from the appeal of images of destructive passions that poets use to gain popular success. Long before the Republic Plato used poetic myth in the Phaedrus to persuade Phaedrus to a love of wisdom. In concerns larger than a proposed ideal society poetry needs no special invitation; it is charming handmaid of the difficult truths of philosophy. 2 'The seat of the emotions is located in ... deeper layers of the brain ... The layers generating abstract thought developed to such a state of refinement that they apparently detached themselves from the lower layers from which they originally derived ... the newer and more highly developed links in the chain of command ... can inhibit but not control the ... more deeply engrained ones, but not vice versa ... the emotions can color the reason, but reason can never influence the emotions': M. Sakel, Schizophrenia (New York 1958), p 5. 3 Ultimately the matter of man's being is comprehensible only as form in action; the two are identical. It is a characteristic of tragedy that character in it (i.e., the bases for choice to act, to act in a certain way, not to act) is not separable from action - the one is the other. The poet's myth-form is an effort to equal the form (i.e., the character) of man through images of action within a comprehensive image or action, the plot. This, in turn, may lead to the paradox, as indeed it does in Hamlet, that any art form that seeks to convey the quality of enigmatic chaos must yet have the power that lies in order. 4 Elsewhere in the dialogue the term is 'modesty.' Benjamin Jowett writes in his introduction to the Charmides that its subject is 'Temperance or aco0pooun7, ... which may also be rendered Moderation, Modesty, Discretion, Wisdom, without completely exhausting by all these terms the various associations of the word. It may be described as the harmony or due proportion of the higher and

227 Notes to pages 25-38 lower elements of human nature which makes a man his own master ...': Works of Plato (Boston n.d.), 1.3. 5 Gods, places, mythic monsters, muses, and mythic-legendary figures alluded to include Zeus, Ilissus, Boreas, Orithia, a temple of Artemis, an altar of Boreas, Pharmacia, Hippocentaurs, Gorgons, Delphos, Typho, Here, the Agnus Castus (and so Diana), Achelous, the nymphs of Achelous, Eros, Aphrodite, Homer, Stesichorus, Helen, Troy, Myrrhinisius, Euphemus, Himera, Dodona, Sibyl, Hestia, the gods generally, Ares, the Bacchic nymphs, Apollo, Ganymede, Anteros, Olympus, Odysseus, the Sirens, Terpischore, Erato, Calliope, Urania, Nestor, Pan, Hermes, Midas, Dionysus, Theuth, the Ibis, Thamus (Ammon), Adonis. 6 See pp 637, 641, 646. Not only is the story of the House of Kadmos itself a notable myth, but Sophocles' invention makes of it an extraordinary example of literary myth. Incorporated into it, all precisely relevant to the actioncharacter of Oedipus, are: (1) mythic characters: Kadmos, Labdakos, Laios, Oedipus, Creon, locaste, Polybus, Merope, Teiresias; (2) immortal gods: God (usually but not always Apollo); Pallas; Apollo (Phoibus, Helios) as Lord Apollo, Healer, 'timberline Apollo' on Kithairon; Zeus; Athena, Apollo, and Artemis as children of Zeus, the latter two twins and hunters, the last the 'divine midwife'; Bacchus, the maenads, nymphs, Pan, Hermes, Dionysus (these last four gods as on Kithairon); (3) other supernatural figures: the Sphinx ('virgin with her hooking lion claws' - 'the carrion woman'), Thanatos, the Eumenides; and (4) places: Thebes (a pre-historic place of myth); Delphi (already an ancient shrine of the earth goddess before it was the place of Apollo's purification of taint of blood), the omphalos, the navel, the centre, of earth; Kyllene, birthplace of Hermes; Parnassus; the place where three roads meet - those to Phokis (where Prometheus is said to have fashioned man from clay), to Delphi, and to Daulia, kingdom of Tereus, place of the rape of Philomela; Elis, place of Zeus's sacred wood, and of the seduction of Aerope, and the violation by Thyestes of his own daughter, mother thereby of Aegisthus, matricidal son of Klytemnestra. Details from Rose, passim 7 In an ideal form of myth all of the conflicts would finally be internal in the central character, as parts of it, or its whole. But literary myth may well, by the necessity of its own structure of images and of a degree of objective view required for its very existence, fail in some respect as to this ideality. CHAPTER 3

1 Examples are plentiful in the plays, usually in low figures: Falstaff, Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Jane Nightwork, Pistol, Shallow, Silence, Mouldy, Bullcalf, Feeble; Bottom, Snout; but also Peaseblossom, Mustardseed; and also Desdemona and Hotspur. Other instances in Hamlet will be examined.

228 Notes to pages 39-76 2 This is usually construed to be a reference to Hamlet's 'He has my dying voice,' i.e., his vote for Fortinbras's election. In its context, however, the statement is relevant to the telling of Hamlet's story: Horatio will be Hamlet's voice which will draw on more voices in the telling. Theobald has expressed this view. 3 In various editions: A platform; An open Place before the Palace; A Platform before the Palace; Platform of the Castle 4 Granville-Barker remarks: 'Thereafter he disappears ... for the best part of an hour; until Hamlet - and Shakespeare - need him again, and he is conjured as if from nowhere, by a simple 'What ho, Horatio!' - and the very simplicity of the business somehow suggests that he has been within call all the time' (218). 5 The use of a solidus (/) combining two names to indicate a single dramatic character is awkward at best. When identities are multiple rather than merely double, as they will be shown to be, the awkwardness is compounded. But a more satisfactory symbol has not been found to represent this particular imaginative mode of the poet. 6 Gertrude is compelled by Hamlet to the same kind of vision: O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct. 7 Jean Paris writes: 'I know of no major Shakespeare critic or scholar who has given to this speech of Horatio's the attention it would seem to deserve'; and further, 'King Hamlet is himself the first slayer of another's father and the conqueror of another's lands': 'The Three Sons in Hamlet,' Atlantic Monthly, June 1959. 8 The Ghost, as character, is, in Aristotle's terminology, good (for the action) and appropriate (to the concept of what ghosts are). 9 Cf Ishmael in Moby Dick. CHAPTER 4

1 J.K. Walton, 'The Structure of Hamlet' in J.R. Brown and B. Harris, eds, Hamlet, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 5 (London 1963), p 48 2 Julius Caesar, ed G.L. Kittredge and I. Ribner (Waltham, Mass 1966), pp x, xi 3 Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed C.F. Tucker Brooks (New York 1909), 1.114 4 A term from falconry. See Furness, 1,120, n34. 5 Furness, I, 160nn 6 Furness quotes The Booke ofHuntynge, Hawkyng, Fishyng: 'First they ben eges, and after they ben disclosed haukes; and commonly goshaukes ...' (1,223, n!66). 7 Ribner believes, despite the context, that the word is used in its ordinary literal sense: 'It is not likely that Hamlet here is using the word with its common slang meaning of "brothel," ...' (p 76, n!21).

229 Notes to pages 81-110 8 T - 'Aye' is a frequent pattern in Shakespeare. Here it may well indicate, as Ophelia's mad scenes do, that she is as active sexually as he. CHAPTER 5

1 Recognition of this dominating element of Shakespeare's manner goes back at least to Gervinus, who writes, about 1850: 'By this arrangement and relation of all the parts to one intellectual centre ... the most anomalous parts, even the comic interludes in the serious dramas, aim at one and the same effect ... this is a great and astonishing enrichment of art': G.G. Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries, trans F.E. Bunnet, 2nd ed (London 1875), pp 854-5. S.L. Bethell remarks: 'The Elizabethans ... were used ... to the necessity of penetrating an allegory in order to seize upon a play's full significance ...'; Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London 1944), pp 113-14. H.T. Price refers to 'mirror scenes,' which '[do] not advance the plot, but typically ... [add] enormously to our understanding of the theme ... A consideration of the technique used in building up drama from such scenes suggests that what we badly need is a new investigation of Shakespeare's art': 'Mirror Scenes in Shakespeare,' in Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies, ed J.G. McManaway, et al (Washington 1948), pp 107, 111. 2 A comparable scene of cunning in which Shakespeare seems to amuse himself is that in which Cleopatra considers Caesar's probable Roman triumph at her cost: '... Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' th' posture of a whore' (V.ii.21821). She is at the very moment being played by a squeaking boy, who will again show her in the posture of a whore. 3 Hamlet as playwright again 4 Ribner's footnote reads: 'naught obscene. The word had a much stronger meaning, with a specifically sexual implication, than it has in modern English' (p 86, n!39). 5 Here one must note a variant from the typical Aristotelian form. For Aristotle, the end, in the linear sense, is that 'with nothing else after it'; in the mythiccyclical Hamlet action there is no such end. 6 Kittredge's note reads, in part: 'One of the peculiarities of his style is the use of words in a forced or unusual sense. Polonius has a touch of the same affectation' (p 158, n80). 7 Cf this arranged soldier's conflict involving French rapiers, poinards, swords, and 'liberal' carriages 'responsive to the hilts,' i.e., scabbards or the equivalent, with the earlier hunting figure - 'We'll e'en to't like French falconers, fly at anything we see.' 8 I am indebted to Kozintzev for this understanding. 'Hamlet tries to describe the qualities that have vanished. He gazes at a skull, or, more accurately, listens closely ... [NB: silence; dumb show] The death's head seems to begin a worldly

230 Notes to pages 110-28

9 10 11

12

13

conversation ... "Good morrow, sweet lord! How dost thou, good lord?" The courtier-skull praises the horse of another amiable courtier, counting on being made a present of it. Hamlet suggests that [the second skull] might have been a lawyer ... Subterfuge, casuistry. ... [The third] is the skull of a land speculator': Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare.- Time and Conscience, trans Joyce Vining (New York 1966), p 137. It was so played compellingly by Maurice Evans in the only uncut production in modern times. Ribner notes: '(F1; Q2: "stallyon," which some editors prefer as meaning "a male whore'" (p 69, n573). Murray writes: 'There is something strangely characteristic in the saga-treatment of this ancient King's Wife, a woman under the shadow of adultery, the shadow of incest, the shadow of murder, who is yet left in most of the stories a motherly and sympathetic character ... "Gertrude," says Professor Bradley, "had a soft animal nature ... She loved to be happy like a sheep in the sun." Just the right character for our Mother Earth! For, of course, that is who she is' (p 407). 'Sleep,' just as today, was for Elizabethans a euphemism for 'lie with'; 'feed,' 'feast,' 'eat' are frequent metaphors for actions in lust - see Timon l.i.206-11; Venus and Adonis 232-4; Othello \\.\.221ii\Antony and Cleopatra I.v.26-31. For 'do' see Ophelia's mad-song, lV.v.57-65. See Measure for Measure Il.ii.183-5; Pericles IV.ii.91-8. CHAPTER 6

1

ODE III

[STROPHE

CHOR If ever the coming time were known To my heart's pondering, Kithairon, now by Heaven I see the torches At the festival of the next full moon, And see the dance, and hear the choir sing A grace to your gentle shade: Mountain where Oedipus was found, O mountain guard of a noble race! May the God who heals us lend his aid, And let that glory come to pass For our king's cradling-ground. [ANTISTROPHE

Of the nymphs that flower beyond the years, Who bore you, royal child,

231 Notes to pages 128-34

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

To Pan of the hills or the timberline Apollo, Cold in delight where the upland clears, Or Hermes for whom Kyllene's heights are piled? Or flushed as evening cloud, Great Dionysos, roamer of mountains, He - was it he who found you there, And caught you up in his own proud Arms from the sweet god-ravisher Who laughed by the Muses' fountains? Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, trans Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, in The Oedipus Cycle (New York 1939) It is easy to not note that Horatio's statement can mean 'I did very well play on him,' i.e., Horatio/Hamlet has played on the King skilfully in the preceding scene, or, considering 'coted,' on himself. What follows with Rosencrantz/ Guildenstern is precisely this point. Greg writes: 'the obvious interpretation of the action, which satisfies the generality, makes Shakespeare an astonishingly perverse bungler; while the alternative shows him not only a skilful craftsman, but likewise a considerable master of innuendo ... are we not perhaps justified, in the case of Hamlet, in looking for subtleties we do not meet elsewhere? or need we be surprised at finding literary devices employed in that play that would miss their effect under the conditions of the Elizabethan stage?' (p 420). By now those who adhere to what Greg calls 'the naive view' will likely have pointed out to themselves ridiculous violations in the time scheme. If so, they will also have to explain to themselves how the Ghost can appear 'jump at this dead hour' at both twelve o'clock and one o'clock; how on a bitterly cold night the Ghost sees glow-worms. Time, in this strange drama, is no more literal than geography or travels; indeed it is not even within criteria of what is called 'dramatic time.' It is mythic time, i.e., one moment ('life's but a moment') of radical experience. Kittredge writes: 'cockle hat and staff The signs of a pilgrim' (p 123, n25). Malone's source is unidentified; it is not Lyte's translation of Dodoens. This is an unequalled example of Shakespeare's taste for source material either suitable to metaphoric transference, as his use of Plutarch in Antony and Cleopatra, or already rich in metaphor, in this instance in the very nature of orchios (Greek: testicle). English names for orchis, 'too gross,' in Stevens's opinion, 'for repetition,' are, along with other metaphoric detail, what makes the passage attractive to Shakespeare's invention; he did not share Steevens's moral strictures on the aesthetic act. Cf Alls Well: HEL Ay. You have some stain of soldier in you: let me ask you a question. Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricade it against him?

232 Notes to pages 134-47

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10

11

12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

PAR Keep him out. HEL But he assails ... Unfold to us some warlike resistance. PAR There is none. Man, setting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up. (l.i.122-30) Kittredge follows the Folio in 'setting'; many editors prefer 'sitting'; this is consequential in the Clowns' discussion of Ophelia's dying. Hamlet is not for the squeamish any more than are The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. Lyte's classification of orchios is somewhat complicated. There are five varieties, the first of which has five sorts, all of which are 'Bastard Satyrion' as distinguished from 'right, or Dioscorides Satyrion.' Almost all of the characteristics and images cited are under 'Bastard Satyrion.' The word 'lobby' may have interesting implications in its various uses in the play. Ordinarily accepted in its familiar meaning of a hall-like room large enough to accommodate a fairly large group of people, but not at all an audience chamber, it meant, in the middle ages and likely in the Renaissance, a covered passageway in a monastery or a castle. For Freudians this lobby, access to which is by a stairway, should be a not unusual image. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon Cf Lear: 'Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill' (lll.iv.78). For this see Helge Kokeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (London 1953), p 81, and E. Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (London 1947), p 165. W.C. Hazlitt, Shakespeare Jest Books, 2nd series (1864), p 87. See also Partridge, p64. Simone de Beauvoir, 'Myths,' in The Second Sex (New York 1971), 144 'Guilden' is from AS guldin; among older German forms are gy Id en and guldein, most commonly used to identify gold coins. It may be coincidental that Shakespeare has Hamlet speak of coins just before and after this reference to golden stars: 'My thanks are too dear a halfpenny'; 'pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold be not cracked within the ring.' But this may have its importance in his attack on the Queen as whore: 'Have you any further trade with us?' See Much Ado, V.iv.15-22-, Amends for Ladies, II.iv.213ff; The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, II.iv. Furness, I, 161, n312 Furness, I, 161, n313 Cf The Case is Altered: 'This trick is onely for the chamber, it cannot be cleanly done abroad' (lV.iii.41-2). See also Troilus and Cressida, V.ii.23-4; Every Man in His Humour, lV.ii.79-91. Furness, I, 215, n89

233 Notes to pages 148-68 CHAPTER 7 1 Furness cites Hanmer who defines 'miching' as 'secret, covered, lying hid,' and 'malhecho' as 'a wicked act'; and Dyce's Glossary, 'Malhecho ... An evil action, an indecent and indecorous behaviour.' ... 'Mackay (Athenaeum, 16 Oct. 1875) says that it is to the wooing of the Queen by the Poisoner that Ham. refers as meaning mischief, not to the murder ...' (I, 243nnpassim). 2 'Presently' and 'by-and-by' both mean 'immediately,' 'at once.' 3 A literalist may object that swaddling clothes come after birth, but Hamlet himself makes it clear enough that his dress is not of cloth merely, but of the spirit; in one sense he is clothed in his flesh; in an enveloping sense in his mother's flesh (and his father's); but ultimately in the cerements of his Ghost. 4 The passage seems corrupt, but there is general agreement that 'disasters in the sun' means some sort of obscuring of the sun. Considering Hamlet's frequent punning on son-sun, part of a comment by A.E. Brae (Notes and Queries, 24 Jan. 1852) in Furness, I, 18, nl 17-18, is interesting. He suggests that if aster means a spot of light, disaster must mean a spot of darkness. We remember the Queen's 'black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct,' and the spots in orchis in Ophelia's coronet. 5 Cf Romeo and Juliet, Hl.iii.88-90 and II.i.33-8. 6 Furness indicates Lamord Qq, etc; I, 120. However a number of editors including Kittredge have violated Shakespeare's striking contextual meaning by substituting 'Lamound' or 'Lamond' on grounds of a curious non-relevant topical historicity, a disease from which Shakespeare has suffered frequently. 7 Rose's comment is revelatory: 'Ixion has some claim to be the first murderer, a Greek Cain.' He tried to seduce Hera, 'and was beguiled by a cloud-phantom in her shape ... the cloud-woman had a son who either was the first Centaur or became the father of the Centaurs, properly Kentauroi, a monstrous race halfhorse and half-man, violent and lustful except for the wise and gentle Cheiron' (p88). 8 In ancient ritual the 'King' was slain, and the sexual act performed by the new King with the earthly votaress substitutes for the goddess. 9 'Am worried about you': Ribner (p 87, n!56). 10 Partridge points out that 'metal' is a variant of 'mettle,' which means 'natural ardour'; 'mettlesome' can mean 'sexually vigorous or ardent' (pp 153-4). 11 One cannot know how much Shakespeare knew etymologies, but Partridge's comment tempts one to believe that he knew them thoroughly: 'Mud is of Low Ger. origin and cognate with mother, "scum produced by fermentation ... or the sticky sediment that forms in ... vinegar'" (p 156). Hamlet's several punnings on 'mother' and 'matter' may be relevant. 12 Cf George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), bk III, chap iv,

234 Notes to pages 168-88

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14 15 16 17

Language: 'for penetrate, we may say peerce, and that a French terme also, or brocbe, or enter into with violence ...' (p 123). 'Dagger,' along with 'sword,' 'pistol,' 'cannon,' is standard phallic metaphor. For 'speak' (equal with 'converse' and 'conversation') see Romeo and Juliet, II.iv.l52ff; Much Ado, IV.i.l77-83;Harman's;4 Caveat for Common Cursetors (1566), chap xix, 'A Walking Mort'; Greene, A disputation betweene a bee connycatcber and a shee conny-catcber (1592). For 'ears' see Antony and Cleopatra, II.v.5-7, 23-4. J.K. Walton, 'The Structure of Hamlet,' in J.R. Brown and B. Harris, eds, Hamlet, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 5 (London 1963), p 48 'Visitation' can mean the coming of an affliction or punishment; if a divine dispensation, a severe affliction. 'Custom,' 'habit' in the ordinary sense, is clearly 'prostitution' here. Ribner: 'paddock ... gib toad, bat and cat, all supposedly unclean animals ...' (p 109, n!90). Too 'queen' (as elsewhere in the play) is most likely, in Hamlet's utter sarcasm, meant to be 'quean,' i.e., prostitute. CHAPTER 8

1 Northrop Frye, 'The Archetypes of Literature,' Kenyan Review, 13 (1951), 101 2 I am indebted to P.J.M. Robertson for clarifying and enforcing this and other meanings through the etymologies of the names of characters. 'Polonius' appears to be a Latinized-Greek form of A7r6XXooj> or ApollSn,' i.e. 'Apollo.' Particular forms and meanings seem relevant: dTrdXXujui, dTroXXco, 'to destroy utterly,' 'to ruin'; hence 'Apollyon, the destroyer'; 'A7ri>XX