The Elizabethan Reaction
Conscience and the King. A Study of Hamlet. By Bertram Joseph. (Chatto and Windus. 12s. 6d.) THERE is a growing tendency to place great weight on the meaning which Shakespeare's plays had for Elizabethan audiences. Mr. Bertram Joseph is one of this school, for he says in his study of Hamlet, " We must refuse to make up our minds, as to the signifi- cance of anything that happens in this play until we have considered the Elizabethan reaction." Now this statement is capable of sharp discussion. It sternly contradicts the maxim that art, if it is to be great art, must transcend the period in which it was created. The dramatist if he is truly great should be able to make audiences of all ages aware of the fundamental conflicts of human nature ; fear, love, jealousy and the like. His art should have the same implication for the Edwardian as for the Elizabethan playgoer. Ben Jonson perceived that Shakespeaie had exactly this quality, and we must conclude that he was not talking through his Elizabethan ruff when he wrote of him, " He was not for an age but for all time."
" The Elizabethan Reaction ", as Mr. Joseph calls it, cannot add anything to our knowledge of the fundamental problems in Shake- speare. It can however help us to reconcile the flaws which appear in Shakespeare's characters, as they are woven into his play structure. An ever recurring problem is Hamlet's ruthlessness in disposing of Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstem. This is hardly the poet prince, the rose of the fair state, who wished for his friend one who was not passion's slave. But as Mr. Joseph adroitly points out, nobility and ruthlessness were frequent concomitants in the Eliza- bethan make-up. He quotes a most extraordinary letter which Sir Phillip Sidney, himself a courtier, scholar, soldier and a gentle poet to boot, wrote to his father's secretary : " I declare before God that if you ever read any letter I write to my father, I will thrust my dagger into you and trust to it for I speak in earnest." Elizabethan noble- men did not easily tolerate treachery in their lessers, and to sixteenth- century audiences Hamlet's action must have seemed as natural as blowing his nose.
Another perennial problem is Hamlet's harsh treatment of his mother. Her only fault (if it be one at all) was to have married her husband's brother. But as Mr. Joseph indicates, to marry the brother of a deceased husband in Elizabethan days was considered a crime as abominable as adultery or incest.
Mr. Joseph quotes from a contemporary dictate of the University of Padua which states : " Such a marriage is abominable and cursed of Christian man and is under the most cruel penalties by the laws of nature, God and man."
Mr. Joseph is not so successful in his treatment of the character of Claudius. He calls him " Not a mixture of good and evil, but an example of utter corruption." And he says he is almost " An im- possible puppet who fits nothing but melodrama." Now melo- dramatic puppets are just what Shakespeare's villains were not. He was too great an artist to distort them so, and like all mankind his characters had tendencies towards good as well as evil. Once Shakespeare had breathed life into his characters they became subject to the impulses of their own nature, and almost outside the control of their creator. The humanity of Shakespeare's villains is such, that in Hamlet our hearts are sometimes wrung with pity for the king just as in the Merchant of Venice and King Lear we are frequently in sympathy with Shylock and Edmund. To reconcile his characters with an often melodramatic plot was one of Shake- speare's great difficulties and it resulted in many of the anomalies which provide so much food for the commentators today. But commentators tend to lose sight of the fact that abpve all else Shake- speare was an artist. The great artist in his ascent towards the splendour of truth, embodies together the prime principles of our being. Sometimes for a moment we glimpse the vastness of his vision and then it vanishes leaving only the sensation of the beauty we have perceived. This aesthetic concept can never be properly analysed by the commentator nor is it his function to do so. His task is only to add to our knowledge, that our perception of the artist's form may be made clearer and more enduring.
Viewed in this latter light Mr. Joseph has succeeded admirably. His bibliography is extensive, his knowledge of the period considerable and altogether he gives us a capable picture of the times which shaped and moulded the mind of William Shakespeare.
ULICK O'CONNOR
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