Hamlet opens with a question: ‘Who’s there?’ – which appears to invite various answers: a nervous sentry? A ghost? God? Or nobody and nothing, a universe empty of meaning? And moves on to the most famous question of all time: ‘To be or not to be’. And it’s not even clear what Hamlet himself means by that question; murder? revenge? suicide? playing a part? acting out a role on the stage of life? Unlike the empty universe, it’s a crowded stage, especially in Hamlet.
In a very different play – another time, another place – Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, Captain Boyle reminisces to the chorus of his old buddy Joxer Daly: ‘An’ as it blowed an’ blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky, an’ assed meself the question – what is the stars, what is the stars?’ And Joxer drawls on: ‘Aw, ‘tis a darlin question, a daarlin question’. But neither of the two provides an answer to it.
Hamlet does. In a play crammed with questions without answers, he tells us exactly what the stars are: ‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’. But that of course is only how he sees them in his weakened state of mental depression, or as they called it then, his melancholia. And as he happens to be talking to a couple of spies pretending to be friends, what he says may not reflect what he really feels but is part of his antic disposition. Alternatively his whole mad act may not be an act at all but the real thing, and the entire case breaks wide open.
So: what then are his real feelings for Ophelia? Does he have any? For his mother? For his father? Did Oedipus or Orestes get in the way? Or did he simply resent this warrior father who spent his time on campaigns, and who was known to have a temper? Horatio recalls how it showed itself when he broke up a summit meeting, got out his axe instead and started splitting skulls. ‘He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’. Horatio saw it coming when he saw the frown.
What sort of a father was he really? Interestingly young Hamlet had no siblings – unusual in an age when kings bred prodigiously as well as scattering their maker’s image through the land – and the lone son was hardly cast in the same heroic mould. There’s fear there, not just love, and he imagines the king as more of an icon than a parent of flesh and blood, and a ghost-father rather than a real one. Maybe he was always more of a ghost than a loved and loving dad.
Love. Hamlet comes close to saying that he loves his friend Horatio – but the truth is that the most loving words he utters are spoken to the skull of a dead jester. ‘He hath borne me on his back a thousand times’. No piggy-backs from dad, then? Instead, ‘here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft’. The lips of the court comedian. He made him laugh. But there’s never a hint of laughter in the old king’s repertoire. He wasn’t a fun dad. I said in my first blog that I’d had a difficult relationship with my own father, sometimes an absent father, mostly too close for comfort. It started me thinking about Hamlet’s filial feelings, and about whether he ever really loved anybody. He doesn’t even appear to love himself. The play may not offer answers but it does open up avenues for us into the questions of our relationships with our own parents.
Questions. The critic Harry Levin wrote a book entitled The Question of Hamlet. It was actually published in 1959, the year of my Shakespeare epiphany, when I first saw the film of Hamlet. Soon afterwards as an undergraduate I read Jacob Bronowski’s The Identity of Man, and although it’s not about Hamlet it has for me a huge bearing on it. Literature, Bronowski points out, is full of questions. Not answers – questions. O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms? Who is Sylvia? What is she? O wha will shoe my bonny foot? Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? And far from knowing the answers, we can’t even be sure of the meaning of the questions. What’s up exactly with this wandering knight? What’s the Sylvia mystery? What sort of cobbler does this naked-footed woman need? And how can a doctor cure mental illness?
The whole point of it is that the questions of literature are not so much rhetorical as unanswerable. They are perpetually open questions because the human dilemma is perpetually unresolved. Sometimes it’s not the form of the question that’s a surprise but its being a question at all. To be or not to be. Oh – never thought about it, at least not quite in that way. And yet it was Albert Camus who said that it was the most philosophical question of them all: to be or not to be. In other words, if you care to place that interpretation on it, is life worth living? By and even before the end of the play, Hamlet has decided no.
So what does Hamlet offer us then? What does literature offer us if not answers? What we are offered instead is an experience, at the end of which we don’t consider that one line of action has been proved right and another wrong. There is simply the eternal dilemma, in which we learn to be more human by identifying ourselves with others and finding their dilemmas in our own, and ours in theirs. What we may take away from Hamlet, for example, may be a little more self-knowledge, or at least self-awareness. That makes us more human. And this would be my definition of literature, indeed of all art. It provides us with an experience which makes us more human than we were before: before we read the book, heard the music, saw the painting or the play.
And what about the question of Ophelia? When I was a schoolboy and into Hamlet, I read a critic who described her as ‘a doll without intellect’. Even sixty years ago I resented that male-slanted simplistic slur. It made me think of all the women of past ages who were also supposedly dolls without intellect because that is what their lovers or husbands or parents or cultures wanted them to be. And the more I studied Hamlet, the more I thought: that’s what he wanted her to be, and that’s all he wanted her to be – it’s how he saw her. To him she wasn’t a real person, she was either a nun-figure or a whore-figure – he calls her both. He wasn’t much interested in the human reality that lay in between – or even in between her legs, in spite of his talk of ‘cuntrie matters’. Why? Because ultimately he was only really interested in himself. Even when the players came in he had to take over, give a big speech, tell them off for how they were acting, show them how it should be done.
A little harsh? Come on, I can hear you say, you’ve banged on about the human dilemma, and this poor guy was plunged into one hell of a dilemma. Right you are. Even so, I’d begun to doubt if Hamlet ever really loved her. So I thought: well, I’m going to make somebody love her, and it’s going to be Horatio, the one man in the play with no axe to grind – talking of axe-grinding ghosts, and sons who are haunted by them.
And I also thought that finally I’m going to make her see through everybody, and give her the words to express it, because in comparison with many other of Shakespeare’ spirited females, she’s been badly let down. Compare her with Juliet, Beatrice, Portia, Jessica, Hermia, Helena, Hippolyta, Rosalind, Viola, Olivia, Desdemona, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Goneril, Regan, and Katherine the Shrew. They all say what they think, and they let their fathers, husbands, lovers and friends know about it. Ophelia is a nonentity by comparison, and only comes into her own when she goes out of her mind and all the usual social restraints on her are relaxed, or dissolved, and then to an extent she is allowed to speak her mind about men, for example, and how they behave towards women. And about sex. Anyway, I decided I wanted to give Ophelia a voice, and I’ve done it, letting, I would argue, the real Ophelia come out on stage. The hidden Ophelia comes out into the open, the repressed Ophelia emerges – and sings about bedstuff and cock, and lectures everybody on the symbolic meanings of herbs and flowers, - including, in her death-scene, long purples, phallic-shaped flowers complete with testicles, the purple orchid whose roots bear some resemblance to the most secretive part of the male anatomy – except perhaps on ‘Naked Attraction’.
Enough for now. And enough from me. In my next blog I’ll let the real Bard have his say about Hamlet – which he does in my 2007 Shakespearean novel, WILL.
Christopher Rush