Shakespeare and His Audience
A mica feast is all the better for an appetising hors d'oeuvre, and Professor Dover Wilson gives Shakespeare lovers both. His initiatory autobiographic fragment yields a vivacious narrative of the adventures of a soul among masterpieces during a long course of years and demonstrates once more how vigilant travel in regions imperfectly charted spells a material increase of knowledge. Of a surety the days are long passed when he could be accused,- as Dr. B. A. P. Van Dam once accused him, of approaching Shakespeare with a purely modern intelligence. Not but that some inkling of the old Adam still remains. Mr. Dover 'Wilson's most ardent followers must needs admit that he still retains the defects of his outstanding qualities, and that even in his maturer work there are deplorable manifestations of the mischievousness of that Puckish sprite which lurks in some corner of his mental make-up and insists on the advancement of freakish solutions of baffling problems. Let it be said, however, with emphasis, that, despite the occasional collabora- tions with his familiar, he has, in this book, succeeded in writing what will prove to be a classic of Shakespearian inter- pretation. What has been for so long a crying need has at last been achieved by independence of outlook and accuracy of approach. As Mr. Dover Wilson rightly insists, the vital question is, not what the protagonist or the play signifies to the modern mind, but what was intended to be conveyed to Shakespeare's audience. The problem in all 'its complexities must be attacked in an Elizabethan spirit, and it is in that spirit Mr. Wilson successfully wrestles with it.
Undoubtedly, the most important result of his labours is that the last word has now been said on the much-vexed question of Hamlet's madness. Oddly enough, a double irony attaches itself to Mr. Wilson's impeccable summing-up on the point. To the inevitable conclusion modern science contributes no jot or 'tittle : even pathology and psycho- analysis are ruled out of court. This, in the conditions, affords no room for surprise, but it came upon me, personally, with some measure of astonishment to find- that the whole truth, as now logically demonstrated, had been advanced, sans phrase, by a discerning dramatic critic two hundred years ago. Writing in 1783 in his Dramatic Miscellanies, Toni Davies took occasion to point out that " Aaron Hill had, above forty years ago, in a paper called The Prompter, observed that, besides Hamlet's assumed insanity, there was in him a melancholy which bordered on madness arising from his peculiar situation." Than this, there could be no neater epitome of Mr. Dover Wilson's reasoning.
To approach- Shakespeare, we are told, as the Elizabethans approached him is to be debarred from any expectations of archaeological exactitude- or persistent loCal colour. Our interest must be primarily in the telling of the story. For the better understanding of a 'public largely illiterate and credulous, the story, when it passed in a foreign country and in remoter times, was told in terms of current Englishry. CoMPrehension was made easy for the masses by intentional anachronisms and the absence of unfamiliar customs. Hamlet is a case in point. In the matter of local colour, there is little that can be styled characteristically Danish in the conduct of the play. Mr. Wilson is clearly within his rights in insisting that the court of Claudius was prat-' ticallY an English court, even to the copying of a meeting of -the Privy Council. But, in maintaining that it was a reflex of the Elizabethan court to the extent of being exclu- sively Protestant he involves himself in perplexities. All sorts, of contradictions arise. If the Ghost is a credible witneSs, King Hamlet died a good Roman Catholic, yet we'are asked:to:believe that he so little valued his faith that he ,;sent his only son, and heir presumptive to certain prose- lytisin at the hands of the ruling powers in the Protestant university of Wittenberg. (Was it Shakespeare's intention to 'lay any stress on the curriculum pursued there ?) More- over; if Hamlet was a heretic, lie had a curious way of showing it, for he swears on occasion by St. Patrick, in the saint's capacity as keeper of purgatory. Then again, consider his attitude when he finds his uncle engaged in prayer. Without desiring to give offence, one may. say that it is in a sense a Catholic attitude, and it is certainly one that has never been taken except in Catholic .countries. The principle of , " kill with damnation " originated in mediaeval Italy and came to form part of the renascence spirit. Hamlet actually followed it when lie arranged that Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern should be "put to sudden death, not shriving time allow'd."
One dwells on this point because Mr. Dover Wilson's con, ception of a prevailing Protestant atmosphere in the play tempts him towards the end of his labours to read a riddle in a somewhat fantastic way. From the fact that in the scene of Ophelia's funeral, as given in Q. 2, and there only; the Prie'st'S two speeches are allotted to a mysterious " Doet." he draws the inference that the restricted rites were of the Anglican order, basing on his belief that the speech-prefix is an abbreviation of " Doctor of Divinity," otherwise a Protestant divine.. But there is an alternative and no IO sensible solution. It appears to me that " Doct." was the printer's misreading of an ill-written actor's name, or nick- name. We know from other Shakespearian texts that it was not uncommon when a trifling minor character made its first appearance for 'the player's name to be substituted for
the character's the speech-prefixes in the prompt 1094. The reason of this was that, it being customary then for the minor players to double several characters—sometimes as many as four-An almost every play, the prompter required to be reminded of the name of the player, in case he had forgotten to take up his cue. To accept this solution would, of . course, .be to give support to the contention that the Second Quarto was printed from a prompt copy, a contention capable of sonic substantiation: But Mr. Dover Wilson is bound to ' discredit it, seeing that he maintains that the quarto is richly authentic in being derived from Shake- speare's original manuscript, a manuscript which, in his view, was not, contrary to custom, put at the prompter's service. All of which is a trifle arbitrary.
W. J. LAwnENfeig.
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