If you read my recent ear-boxing of literary super star T. S. Eliot, “T. S. Eliot a Prissy Sh*t, studies show”, you know I’m not a big fan of the pride of St. Louis, making rather raucous fun of his abysmal mistreatment of his long-time (until he got tired of her) soulmate, Emily Hale, and going on to denounce his whole long-running act as the high priest of Anglo-Catholic high church Modernism, a church of which he was in the sole member, and not by accident, since he worked very hard to keep out as many people as possible. I promised at the end of my post to take a further poke at Eliot “by dissecting a famous early essay he wrote on Hamlet.” Naturally, when I actually got around to reading “Hamlet and His Problems” instead of just skimming it, I discovered that Tom didn’t always get it wrong. Frustrating! So, while there’s plenty to complain about in Tom’s piece, there are places where the guy is, well, lucid and even, you know, perceptive. Fortunately, there are still a few howlers—big ones, too!—for me to bitch about.
Tom begins by, naturally, making fun of his predecessors. What else is a young man—Tom was in his early thirties when he wrote the essay—supposed to do? Eliot makes fun of both Goethe and Coleridge for writing about themselves instead of Hamlet, and finishes with a zinger: “We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.” Pater, not so well known these days, died around the time Eliot was born. An aesthete’s aesthete, he was often regarded as an influence on Eliot himself and the two men of his generation that he regarded as his superior—James Joyce and Ezra Pound—but Pater’s florid subjectivity contrasts sharply with Eliot’s obsessive astringency.1
Of Goethe and Coleridge Eliot says censoriously “probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.” Yet, in the first place, perhaps neither of them would agree, and also it’s possible that what a writer come up with when “inspired” by the play might have greater value than Mr. Eliot’s “studies”. Let Goethe be Goethe, eh?
Eliot tells us “Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for ‘interpretation’ the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know.” I find this “curious” because that is not at all what Eliot proceeds to do. Instead, he criticizes Hamlet, and Shakespeare, for not meeting an absolute standard, which he invents himself, making pronouncements about human nature, which he grounds, not on “other works of art”, but simply by announcing that what he says is true.
He begins, however, by bouncing his essay off “small books” written by a “J. M. Robertson” and “Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota”, discussing earlier versions of the Hamlet story that Shakespeare used in coming up with his own play.2 (This is the “relevant historical facts” part.) Eliot offers particular praise to the latter, saying “Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” allowing Eliot to show off his knowledge of said labors in a footnote: “I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s objections to Othello.”
I will most unkindly guess that Eliot hoped that virtually none of his readers had even heard of “Thomas Rymer”, much less read his comments on Othello.3 Surely the whole point of this footnote is nothing more than literary one-upmanship of the rankest degree.
Eliot begins his actual discussion of Hamlet via the (conjectured) history of the play’s development, largely supplied, it seems, by Mr. Robinson, that Shakespeare reworked an earlier, cruder play by Thomas Kyd, which was in itself not original, so that there were other sources that Shakespeare might have drawn upon. “The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.”
One could argue, first of all, that the old play was “intractable” only because Shakespeare was too lazy to do a better job. If Shakespeare had been struggling with an “intractable” but entirely original first draft that he was forced to put on the stage due to financial pressures, and which he never bothered to “finish”, the effect would be the same. But the point of all this is to provide Mr. Eliot with a springboard for what is really the whole point of the essay, an occasion to declare “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure,” which is both striking and silly, because if the play were really a failure, it wouldn’t have been so famous for so many years, unless you want to believe that up until 1922, no one in the western world was a competent judge of literature. They liked Hamlet, it seems, not because it was a work of art but because they found it “interesting”—a motive, one can guess from Mr. Eliot’s tone, that is the infallible mark of the philistine, setting him for another zinger at the expense of poor Bill’s play, “It is the Mona Lisa of literature”,4 famous, one would say, for being famous.
Eliot contrasts Hamlet with Coriolanus, which he says is “with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success,” a statement that I find ludicrous. Eliot surely picked Coriolanus as Shakespeare’s “most assured artistic success” because no one would have predicted that he would, hoping to intimidate his readership by his daring—“wow, this guy is way over my head.” Coriolanus is an utterly one-dimensional play, with one-dimensional characters, a trivial anecdote laden with Shakespeare’s unfortunate weakness for aristocratic hauteur. I would be surprised if Mr. Eliot, if put on the spot at any time in his life, could recall a single memorable speech from Coriolanus, or even a line.5 Antony and Cleopatra, of course, is far different, an extraordinary play, almost in a class by itself. As for his “most assured artistic success”, which I would interpret as his greatest play with the least problems, I would pick Macbeth.
Eliot goes on to say “The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother … This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the ‘guilt of a mother’ that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus.”
But let’s stop for a moment. Is the “essential emotion” of Hamlet “the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother”? For most people, the first thing they remember about Hamlet is his famous indecision. Furthermore, is Gertrude “guilty”? If people knew that Claudius had murdered old Hamlet, they would all agree with young Hamlet’s detestation of his uncle. But everyone knows that Gertrude married her brother in law after the death of her husband, and no one except Hamlet cares. Is Gertrude guilty to begin with?
A number of years ago I wrote a long take on *Hamlet. What I did not know then, and have never read in any discussion of Hamlet, is that Shakespeare and his audience were quite familiar with a king who married his brother’s widow, and that king was Henry VIII. Henry was not the eldest son of his father, Henry VII. The eldest son was Arthur, who was married to Catherine of Aragon.6 Thanks to her distinguished lineage, Catherine was considered so important politically that when Arthur died shortly after their marriage she was married to Henry—legal, obviously, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, though forbidden in Leviticus 20:21, “And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless”.7
Regardless of the state of the law in England at the time of Shakespeare’s play, within the play itself it is only Hamlet who considers Gertrude’s actions to be “incestuous”. Shakespeare never addresses this contradiction, and neither does Eliot. However, Eliot does have a lot more to say about the topic, and what he has to say is quite interesting, because, even if you assume that Gertrude is “guilty”, as Eliot says, this is not the “whole story”. Shakespeare could have handled the “guilt of the mother”, Eliot says, as he handled such issues in his other great tragedies. “The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight.” But that isn’t the case. What Shakespeare is writing about really isn’t the guilt of the mother, Eliot says, rather contradicting himself, because he just said that it was the “essential emotion” of the play, but, since what he has to say is interesting, perhaps it’s a fortunate contradiction:
Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize.
The “some stuff” of the sonnets, which Eliot rather dances around—not too surprisingly, since he’s writing in 1920—is very clearly homosexuality, the “fair youth” whom Shakespeare is rather compulsively urging to get married and have kids, and whose eventual involvement with the vulgar “dark lady” the poet finds disgusting, though the poet ends up with her too.8
At this point, Eliot introduces his famous “objective correlative”:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
The problem with Hamlet, Eliot says, quite perceptively, is this:
Hamlet (the man) 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. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.
What is this feeling? Eliot explains a good deal, yet not without a good deal of dancing as well:
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. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.
It's a bit curious that this intense feeling, which no one can adequately describe, is identified by Eliot as the source of all art, including, one must presume, his own art. And the phrase “it often occurs in adolescence” strongly suggests that what Eliot “really” meant was “It occurred to me in my adolescence.” Eliot goes on to say that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not an adolescent, which is literally true, because Shakespeare lets us know repeatedly that Hamlet is 30, but in all his behavior Hamlet is an adolescent, so contemptuous of “phonies” that he makes his kid brother Holden Caulfield look like a back-slapping frat boy.9
What Hamlet is experiencing is the often-ridiculed anguish of adolescence, which adults often love to chuckle over, because it often is absurd, yet often very real. Nothing is more clear that Hamlet’s “disgust” with his mother is the same disgust he feels for Ophelia—he’s disgusted because they, as women, desire to provoke the desire of men—they’re “wanton”, which he finds even more repulsive in his mother, supposedly on the grounds that she’s too old to feel desire, but really (of course) because she’s his mother. They repel him most of all because they awaken his desire, they make him lose control of himself, and it is the loss of self-control that is both terrible and ecstatic, terrible because it is ecstatic, because it cannot be resisted, creating the sort of disorientation that renders all the world, and all its myriad delights, stale, flat, weary, and unprofitable, robbing him even of the will to avenge his father’s murder.
Shakespeare’s misogyny, rampant as it is in Hamlet, is scarcely less so in many of Shakespeare’s other plays, including Othello, where, contrary to Eliot’s language, Othello’s jealousy is not so fully “handled” as Eliot appears to believe. (Why is Othello so eager to consume Iago’s lies, and why is Iago so eager to tell them?) This is also true of Measure for Measure, with its famously unsatisfying ending (mentioned by Eliot), and Troilus and Cressida, which Eliot does not discuss, in which Hamlet’s darkest view of the world, that love is nothing more than lust and honor nothing more than vanity, is depicted as the only reality—that there is nothing, as Eliot himself would say, other than birth, copulation, and death, each (according to Eliot) as ugly and meaningless and disgusting and horrible as the other. For Eliot, of course, though not for Shakespeare, the one escape from all this, afforded us by God’s infinite grace, is Eliot’s own brand of Christianity, stringently orthodox (“the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life”) yet remarkably obscure, since no one seemed to understand it but him.
Shakespeare “resolves” Hamlet’s problems, but he does so off-stage, while he is in England. Hamlet does not undergo the sort of purgatory that Lear experiences. He does not reconcile with his mother, nor she with him, nor does he “expose” Claudius. Yet somehow he reconciles with himself, no longer appalled, it seems, by a world defined by birth, copulation, and death.
Obviously, I feel that Freud’s “Oedipus” theory of Hamlet has much to commend it. I don’t know if this theory had even been formulated at the time that Eliot was writing his essay, or, if it had been, whether Eliot was familiar with it. I also don’t know what Eliot thought of Freud, but, though a famous “Modernist”, he generally had little patience with anything that was actually “modern”, other than his own verse. He certainly would see Dante as a better guide to life than Freud.
Yet if Eliot wanted a less modern authority, I believe he might have found one in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s remarkable story, “Young Goodman Brown”, set in the early days of the New England settlement, describing a newly married young man who insists on leaving his wife to go on some unspecified but urgent errand, at sunset, no less, through the dark forest, depicted as the natural home of the devil.
"There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," said Goodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!"
And it is precisely the devil whom he meets. He witnesses a black sabbath, attended by “everyone” in Salem. He seems to see the ghost of his father beckoning him forward (though the ghost of his mother perhaps tries to warn him away) and he ultimately witnesses the induction of a new member, his wife “Faith”. The next day he returns home, bewildered and blasted, and cold and distant towards his wife. “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”
There’s no doubt that Shakespeare had what we would call a “romantic” idea of the artist, the poet “with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling”. Shakespeare was not much of a stickler for consistency, believability, or motivation: the important thing was the frenzy. He had ideas and scenes that he wanted to put up on the stage, and he didn’t particularly care how he got them up there, or how he resolved them. And Hamlet, as so many people have noticed, is particularly uncontrolled. Brooke Allen has a particularly fine article in the Hudson Review, “The Shakespeareans”, discussing the activity of “The Club”, the famous group of 18th century Brits more or less founded by Samuel Johnson, and she quotes Voltaire’s take on Hamlet, which I guess would best be described as “very French”:
Hamlet is a gross and barbarous piece, and would never be borne by the lowest rabble in France or Italy. Hamlet runs mad in the second act, and his mistress in the third; the prince kills the father of his mistress and fancies he is killing a rat; and the heroine of the play throws herself into the river. They dig her grave on the stage, and the grave-diggers, holding the dead men’s skulls in their hands, talk nonsense worthy of them. Hamlet answers their abominable stuff by some whimsies not less disgusting; during this time one of the actors makes the conquest of Poland. Hamlet, his mother, and father-in-law, drink together on the stage. They sing at table, quarrel, beat and kill one another.
But wait, there’s more:
One would think the whole piece was the product of the imagination of a drunken savage. And yet, among all these gross irregularities, which make the English theatre even today so absurd and barbarous, we find in Hamlet, which is still more strange and unaccountable, some sublime strokes worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as if nature took pleasure to unite in the head of Shakespeare all that we can imagine great and forcible, together with all that the grossest dullness could produce of everything that is most low and detestable.
Mr. Eliot, to return to him, ends his article on a very curious note, wishing that we could know exactly why Shakespeare felt compelled to write the play Hamlet:
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; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
This, it seems to me, merits some unpacking. Why wouldn’t Shakespeare seek to dramatize “[t]he intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, … something which every person of sensibility has known”? One wonders if describing this feeling, which Eliot identifies as the source of art, or at least “sensibility”, were not the first duty of a poet. (I would add that “ecstatic or terrible” is not the same as “inexpressibly horrible”.) One also wonders whether the fact that Shakespeare sought to address this mysterious feeling via Hamlet, regardless of his very partial and incomplete success in doing so, is not the cause for the play’s, and the character’s, unique fame. Hamlet is not famous for being famous, but rather famous for addressing the modern human condition11 in a manner matched by no other work of art.
It is also curious that, later in the paragraph , Eliot goes on to wish that we, in effect, knew everything about Shakespeare—though it seems that Bill rather valued his privacy—for Eliot was a very great foe of the idea of understanding a work of art by understanding the artist.10 The reference to Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond is a final fussy flourish of one-upmanship. I am probably not the first to think of Shakespeare as “Montaigne for the masses”—“there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”—even though Shakespeare surely wrote Hamlet before the famous English translation of Montaigne’s essays (by John Florio) was published (in 1603), and Shakespeare, as I understand it, didn’t read French. Shakespeare did read Plutarch, Montaigne’s favorite author. In any event, specifying Apologie de Raimond Sebond rather than just “Montaigne” strikes me as absurdly affected.12 As a final quibble—I promise!—if “[w]e should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable”, then why, in effect, pry into every aspect of Shakespeare’s life when, no matter how much we know, we’ll never know what we really need to know, defined for us by Mr. Eliot as “by hypothesis unknowable”? It sounds like the very definition of a pointless endeavor.
Okay, I think that’s enough. Mr. Eliot made fun of Walter Pater some 20 years after his death, and now I’ve made fun of Tom more than 50 years after his. I guess the mark of a critic is to never forgive, and never forget.
1. Wikipedia makes this claim/charge, citing Harold Bloom’s introduction to a collection of Pater’s essays published back in 1974. Eliot famously made a point of not looking like a poet, but Joyce was a dandy and Pound, with his wild hair and fixed glare, couldn’t not look like a poet.
2. Love’s Labors Lost is believed to be the only one of Shakespeare’s 36 plays that was an “original”.
3. Thomas Rymer, according to Wikipedia, was “Historiographer Royal” from 1692 to 1712. It would not surprise me at all if Eliot had not read Rymer’s criticism of Othello either. Rymer’s work was discussed by both John Dryden and Samuel Johnson while commenting on Shakespeare, and it’s likely that Eliot had read both. As a “critic”, Rymer was, hopefully, in a class by himself, writing rather as if Fielding’s Squire Western had put aside his bottle and his hounds, not to mention his occasional habit of raping the wives and daughters of his tenants, and taken up the pen. Among his objections to Othello that Eliot failed ever to find cogently refuted are the following: “But shall a Poet thence fancy that they [the Venetians] will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Blackamoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shakespear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor: And all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match.” Rymer was also not much impressed by the character of Desdemona: “Yet examine throughout the Tragedy there is nothing in the noble Desdemona, that is not below any Countrey Chambermaid with us.” So perhaps the match was suitable after all.
4. I learned from Wikipedia something I did not know, that Walter Pater wrote what was once a very famous essay on the Mona Lisa, with which Eliot was quite possibly familiar, which includes the following sentence: “She is older than the rocks; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy of which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.” So maybe we should be glad with Tom, that Walter didn’t write about Hamlet.
5. I once went to a performance of Coriolanus (because I was given a ticket). I sat squirming in my seat until intermission, when I gratefully escaped.
6. Catherine had quite a fascinating life. Presumably because of her powerful family connections, she did not get her head chopped off after Henry took England out of the Catholic Church and had their marriage annulled. Her one child by Henry, their daughter Mary, eventually became queen as Mary I (“Bloody Mary”), but Catherine did not live to see this.
7. I don’t know the legal definition of incest in England during Shakespeare’s time, but it certainly doesn’t seem that anyone expressed any moral horror at Henry and Catherine’s marriage when it occurred. Clearly, Henry decided that Catherine’s failure to produce a male heir (plus his infatuation with Anne Boleyn) “proved” that God was punishing him for his marriage.
8. Along the way, Eliot throws in another tediously obscure reference, to “the author of the Revenge of Bussy d’ Ambois, Act v. sc. i.” (i.e., Thomas Chapman, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, but a “Jacobean” playwright rather than an Elizabethan one), so tedious and irrelevant that I won’t bother you with the details.
9. Yes, “phony” is Holden’s word, not Hamlet’s, but the emotions are identical.
10. In his sadly petulant protest of Emily Hale’s decision to leave the love letters he wrote her, which I discussed in an earlier post, Eliot makes it clear that he much prefers having people know as little about his personal life as possible, and surely many other writers have felt the same.
11. We moderns uniquely orient ourselves not on the unimpeachable wisdom of the past but rather on our own uncertainty.
12. As it turns out, I have read Apologie de Raimond Sebond, though not in French, and I didn’t like it as much as many of Montaigne’s other essays. I certainly didn’t find in it anything that couldn’t be gleaned from the others.
