“Hamlet is a tragedy where there is a part left open”

Excerpt from W.H. Auden’s lecture on Hamlet, February 12, 1947, at the New School for Social Research in NYC:

If a work is quite perfect, it arouses less controversy and there is less to say about it. Curiously, everyone tries to identify with Hamlet, even actresses – and in fact Sarah Bernhardt did play Hamlet, and I am glad to say she broke her leg doing it. One says that one is like a character, but one does not say, “This is me.” One says, “I am more like Claudius, perhaps, than I am like Laertes,” o “I would rather be Benedick than Orsino.” But when a reader or spectator is inclined to say, “This is me,” it becomes slightly suspicious. It is suspicious when all sorts of actors say, “This is a part I would like to do,” not “This is a part I have a talent to do.” I would question whether anyone has succeeded in playing Hamlet without appearing ridiculous. Hamlet is a tragedy where there is a part left open, as a part is left open for an improvisational actor in farce. But here the part is left open for a tragedian.

Shakespeare took a great deal of time over this play. With a writer of Shakespeare’s certainty of execution, a delay of this kind is a sign of some dissatisfaction. He has not got the thing he wants. T.S. Eliot has called the play “an artistic failure”. Hamlet, the one inactive character, is not well integrated into the play and not adequately motivated, though the active characters are excellent. Polonious is a pseudo-practical dispenser of advice, who is a kind of voyeur where the sex life of his children is concerned. Laertes likes to be a dashing man-of-the-world who visits all houses – but don’t you touch my sister! And he is jealous of Hamlet’s intellect. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are yes men. Gertrude is portrayed as a woman who likes to be loved, who likes to have romance in her life. And Horatio is not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.

The plays of the period in which Shakespeare wrote Hamlet have great richness, but one is not sure that at this point he even wants to be a dramatist. Hamlet offers strong evidence of this indecision, becaue it indicates what Shakespeare might have done if he had had an absolutely free hand: he might well have confined himself to dramatic monologues. The soliloquies in Hamlet as well as other plays of this period are detachable both from the character and the plays. In earlier as well as later works they are more integrated. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet (III.i.56-90) is a clear example of a speech that can be separated from both the character and the play, as are the speeches of Ulysses on time in Troilus and Cressida (III.iii.145-80), the King on honor in All’s Well That Ends Well (II.iii.124-48), and the Duke on death in Measure for Measure (III.i.5-41).

Shakespeare, at this time, is interested in various technical problems. The first is the relation between prose and verse in the plays. In the early plays, the low or comic characters – Shylock as well as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, for example – speak prose. An intellectual character like Falstaff speaks prose, in contrast to a passionate character like Hotspur, who speaks verse. In As You Like It, contrary to tradition, both the hero and heroine speak prose. In Twelfth Night, Viola speaks verse at court and prose to herself, and the characters in the play who are false or have no sense of humor speak verse. Those who are wiser and have some self-knowledge speak prose. In the tragedies Shakespeare develops an extremely fertile prose style for the tragic characters. Hamlet speaks both verse and prose. He speaks verse to himself, in his soliloquies, and in speeches of violent passion to others, as in the scene with his mother. He otherwise usually speaks prose to other people. There is a highly developed relation to prose and poetry in all the plays of this period. In the last plays Shakespeare exploits verse more exclusively, and tends to use prose when he is bored, or when he needs to fill in the gaps. In Antony and Cleopatra, the boring characters use prose, the rounded characters, verse.

Shakespeare is also developing a more flexible verse. He started off with the end-stopped Marlovian and lyric lines that were suitable to high passion. In Hamlet he experiments with the caesura, the stop in the middle of the line, to develop a middle voice, a voice neither passionate nor prosaic. Hamlet also shows a development in Shakespeare’s use of the double adjective. From such a phrase as “sweet and honey’d sentences” in Henry V (I.i.50), which is tautological, he moves to pairs of adjectives in Hamlet that combine the abstract and the concrete: Laertes’ “And keep you in the rear of your affection / Out of the shot and danger of desire” (I.iii.34-35), for example, Horatio’s “These are but wild and whirling words, my lord” (I.v.133), and Hamlet’s “Led by a delicate and tender prince” (IV.iv.48). George Ryland’s book, Words and Poetry, is very good on Shakespeare’s language and style.

In this period, also, Shakespeare appears to be tired of writing comedy, which he could do almost too well – he was probably bored because of his facility in the genre. Comedy is limited in the violence of language and emotion it can present, although Shakespeare can include a remarkable amount of both in his comedies. But though he wants to get away from comedy, he doesn’t want to go back to the crude rhetoric of King John and Richard III or to the lyric and romantic rhetoric of Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. He doesn’t want a childish character, who doesn’t know what is going on, like Romeo and Richard II, nor a crude character like Brutus, who is a puppet in a plot of historical significance, where the incidents are more important than the characters. Finally, he doesn’t want a character of fat humour that the situation must be constructed to reveal. And having done Falstaff, he doesn’t want to go back to the crude character.

Shakespeare’s very success as a dramatic poet may have led him to a kind of dissatisfaction with his life that is reflected in Hamlet. A dramatic poet is the kind of person who can imagine what anyone can feel, and he begins to wonder, “What am I?” “What do I feel?” “Can I feel?” Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror – you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.

Shakespeare develops Hamlet from a number of earlier characters who are in differing ways proto-Hamlets. Richard II is a child, full of self-pity, who acts theatrically but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious of acting. Falstaff is like Hamlet, an intellectual character and the work of an artist who is becoming aware of his full powers, but he is not conscious of himself in the way Hamlet is. When Falstaff does become conscious of himself, he dies, almost suicidally. Brutus anticipates Hamlet by being, in a sense, his opposite. Hamlet is destroyed by his imagination. Brutus is destroyed by repressing his imagination, like the Stoic he is. He tries to exclude possibility. The nearest to Hamlet is Jaques, who remains unexplained and can take no part in the action.