7 MAY 1948, Page 18

Sweet Prince ?

THOUGH I have not yet seen any of the three Hamlets now being offered to the public by Sir Laurence Olivier, Mr. Scofield and, Mr. Helpmann, I cannot help wishing that at least one of these. actors had had the 'chance of reading Mr. de Madariaga's brilliant essay before deciding on his interpretation of the part. One would have thought it impossible to say anything worth saying about this tragedy—except on minor points of detail—which had not been said before • but Mr. de Madariaga's conclusions are not only so novel as to be almost revolutionary, but they are reached by a process of intuitive reasoning which, besides being as absorbing to follow as a good detective story, is so sensible and so consistent that one cannot resist the conviction that they are the right conclusions.

The author, engaged on translating Hamlet into Spanish verse; found himself necessarily in the closest possible contact with Shakespeare's mind and intentions ; " for a translator," he points out, " must retrace every mental step of the author, without skipping a single shade of meaning."' Hence, most fortunately, a study which despite its casual, matter-of-fact manner is a major contribution to Shakespearian criticism. Mr. de Madariagr starts from the premise that there is no " mystery " about Hamlet's character. Its outlines, he reckons, were perfectly clear to Shake-, speare, who—careless, frivolous and high-handed though he often was about the details of his craft—certainly knew, and saw to it that the Elizabethan audiences knew, the answers to such major questions as : Why did Hamlet delay ? What were his relations with Ophelia ? and so on. What the critics have long accepted as riddles to which only the most far-fetched solutions, or in some cases no solutions at all, exist, Mr. de Madariaga attributes, gently but firmly, to the sentimental preconceptions of the critics themselves, powerfully abetted by the actors. What he calls " the romantic measles of the nineteenth century " proved an infectious and lingering disease. It carried away Hamlet's beard, and the hat which in Shakespeare's time he always wore, even in indoor scenes, unless the King was on the stage. English puritanism— perhaps reinforced, though Mr. de Madariaga does not suggest this, by the actor's tendency to play for sympathy—did its utmost to turn Hamlet into a good boy. Bradley discerned in his nature a " peculiar beauty and nobility." " It is vital," wrote Professor Dover Wilson, " that we should retain our . . . admiration for him right up to the end. Rob us of our respect for the hero and Hamlet ceases to be a tragedy." This pro-Hamlet bias, this blind-determina- tion to see in him, au fond, a Christian gentleman who had a great deal to put up with, stems from " a disharmony between the taste of present-day Britain and that of Shakespearian England." The Victorians had their own views about what went on at a court ; these views differed radically from those held by Elizabethan audiences. When Hamlet was intolerably rude or grossly obscene the Elizabethans took it as a matter of course • it would indeed• have seemed extremely odd to them if a young blood in his position had not been at times overweening and licentious. But it upset the Victorians terribly. " I am unable," writes the plaintive Bradley of Hamlet's relations with Ophelia, " to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of some of his words and deeds." The same sort of trouble arose whenever Hamlet behaved like what the nineteenth century— but not Shakespeare's contemporaries—recognised as a cad. Instead of trying to explain his character, the critics strove desperately to explain about half of it away, blaming it on his madness, or on Shake- speare not having really meant what he wrote--on anything, as long as they preserved intact their picture, their bogus, weepy oleograph, of a fundamentally nice young man. -

" Egocentric " is the word which Mr. de Madariaga uses as the key to Hamlet's character as conceived by Shakespeare. Bar- barous and supersubtle, carnal and cruel, sane with an ice-cold

sanity throughout the play, this young man of thirty " could not pour himself into action because he was too egotistic for that. . . . Man can only act by, so to speak, mating with the outside world ; by forgetting himself for an instant . . . Hamlet could not forget himself." He cared for nothing outside himself ; he was wholly inconsiderate, wholly callous. He sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death with glee ; he humiliated Polonius whenever he had the chance and showed less than no remorse when he killed him ; because he at least had a conscience, " Claudius the murderer is a better Christian than Hamlet, who, indeed, is hardly a Christian at all." As for Ophelia (to explain whose use of dirty words the critics have had to invent a rather vulgar nurse never mentioned by Shakespeare), Hamlet treated her " as a young Elizabethan courtier would a young Elizabethan flirt with no particular inhibition about anything." Though Hamlet did not love her, she had been his mistress, a deduction which Mr. de Madariaga justifies both from the text and from the original story as told by Saxo Gram- maticus and Belleforest. Finally, Hamlet's procrastination is due to his egotism. Throughout the play he reacts violently only when he himself is directly threatened. As far as Claudius is concerned this happens twice. The first time Hamlet strikes instantly ; but it is Polonius, and not the King, behind the arras. The second time is when he realises that there is poison in his wound and that Claudius is responsible ; again he strikes instantly, revenging not his father but himself.

The whole thesis is worked out with fascinating clarity, and though at times—for instance when he accounts for Ophelia's madness—the author's arguments are perhaps a little strained, his main contentions seem to me irrefutable. It will be interesting to see what the pundits make of them. PETER FLEMING.