SWEET PRINCE ?
Sta,—Mr. de Madariaga is always read with pleasure and profit, and obviously On Hamlet will give most of us an invigorating shock. " The romantic measles of the nineteenth century " prevented us from realising, as Mr. Peter Fleming now does, that Hamlet was " barbarous and super- subtle, carnal and cruel . . . wholly inconsiderate, wholly callous," while Ophelia was an uninhibited flirt who used dirty words. Hamlet's hasher qualities have, in fact,-often been slurred over. Act 3, Scene 3, probably impressed an Elizabethan audience, most of whom accepted its theology, far more than it impresses the majority of a modern audience. Nashe, in The Unfortunate Traveller, tells a story illustrating the refine- ment of cruelty involved in devising a man's death in the act of sin, and thus simultaneously achieving his damnation. Hamlet is certainly ego- centric, and shows the callousness of neurosis. The question is whether Shakespeare's Hamlet is essentially a " bad " man, or whether Mr. de Madariaga has not, like Gulliver scrutinising the Brobdingnagian lady's skin, been repelled by a magnified vision of that which in its correct pro- portion is natural and human.
The Victorians must not be saddled with the responsibility for making
Hamlet a " sympathetic " character. Rowe, in 1709, speaks of Hamlet's " piety towards his father " and " abhorrence of his mother's guilt, which, to provoke him the more, is heightened by incest." It was Goethe, no prim Victorian, who compared Hamlet's nature to an exquisite porcelain vase shattered by the too powerful growth of an oak sapling planted in it. As to Ophelia, Dr. Johnson, born little more than a century after Hamlet was produced, speaks of her as " the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious." True, Saxo and Belleforest make her Hamlet's mistress ; but Shakespeare's sources also make King Lear defeat Goneril and Regan and regain his kingdom. Dr. Johnson does not seem to have noticed Ophelia's use of dirty words—presumably when, insane, she sings a coarse ballad—or to have considered them as evidence against her innocence.
• Let us read On Hamlet find re-read Hamlet. Perhaps, after all, some of us may find that our Hamlet, if not quite Professor Bradley's, is not quite Mr. de Madariaga's either.—Yours faithfully, M. JUDSON. 5 Longley Road, Farnham, Surrey.
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