Rescuing Hamlet
Hamlet : a Study in Critical Method. By A. J. A. Waldock. (Cambridge University Press. 5s.)
" IT is strange," notes Mr. Waldoek, " that a play, which depends so much for its effect on ready comprehensibility, should ever have become a problem." Yet such, since the end of the eighteenth century, has been the fate of Hamlet, to its detriment as a play. Shakespeare was luckier in his Elizabethan audiences, who could be affected by it in the theatre as a child is by his first sight of the sea, than he is in us. We go to see it staged bursting with a superfluity of know- ledge, the most insidious element in which—the most likely to come between the author's intentions and our appreciation is our familiarity at second hand with the numerous and conflicting interpretations put on the play by better men than we in the course of the last century and a half. Since Hanmer and Johnson first smelt a rat behind the arras of bardolatry, *critics and commentators have gone baying down parallel and divergent trails, kicking up a dust of minor conundrums on their way and reaching conclusions which have, for the most part, little in common beyond their inconclusiveness. Mr. Waldock follows the more beaten tracks and show them to be misleading. Goethe, who saw Hamlet as a sentimentalized prig, Coleridge, who read his own introspective personality into the part, Bradley, convicted at times of super-subtlety, and throughout of a still more dangerous tendency to treat the whole play as if it had actually happened—as if it was le cas Hamlet—by reference to these and other interpretations Mr. Waldock examines and does his best to destroy the barrier of preconceptions which stands as irremoveably between a stage Hamlet and his audience as the footlights. In an excellent piece of analysis he shows that the problem " Why did Hamlet delay ? " which criticism regards as dominating the whole play, represents for an audience only a small and not very insistent query in the rush of events on the stage. " We are here in an Einstein world," he says, " where time has strange oddities, where intervals are a delusion and durations a snare." But none of these oddities is given dramatic force ; Shakespeare does not press the problem of delay. We are forced to remind ourselves that Hamlet is a play, with " the eternal piquancy of its imperfection" : not a crossword puzzle. The chief virtues of Mr. Waldock's sane and sensitive contribution to Shakespearian criticism are his exact and profound appreciation of the limitations and possibilities of a stage play, and his unswerving insistence on their relevance.
PETER FLEBEING.
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