The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm

by Alberto Manguel

  As the bodies pile up and the tragedy approaches its close, before renouncing forever the power of speech, the mortally wounded Hamlet addresses his friend Horatio and begs of him:

  Left: Gustav Gründgens as Hamlet (1936). Courtesy the German Federal Archives. Right: John Gielgud as Hamlet (1934). Courtesy the Getty Collection.

  If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

  Absent thee from felicity awhile,

  And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

  To tell my story.²⁴

  Hamlet’s dying wish is twofold: that Horatio recount all that has taken place, and that he do this in studious isolation, giving up both his previous carefree existence and his present state of classic despair, drawing his inspiration (or “breath”) from the “harsh world” itself. Both actions demand that Horatio return to the past: to go over the events the audience has just witnessed (thus obliging Horatio to become, as it were, the declared author of the play); and, in order to do so, to dwell in the sorrowful moment in which the tragedy concludes. In effect, Hamlet asks Horatio to postpone the moment of his own death (Horatio has only just declared that he is “more an antique Roman than a Dane,” that is, that he will commit suicide) and to concentrate instead on intellectual labors that will honor Hamlet’s own life.

  A. C. Bradley, one of the most perceptive of Shakespearean critics, compared Hamlet to Brutus and noted that they “are both highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic.”²⁵ For Bradley, however, what defines Hamlet are not the external circumstances of the plot or the conscious workings of the prince’s mind. The calculating consideration that “cripples the power of acting” of the “thought-sick” prince does not explain to Bradley’s satisfaction Hamlet’s irresolution. Hamlet’s intellectual power is not that of a trained philosopher or artist. Though his learning, however haphazard, comes from his reading, his mind is unrestricted by scholasticism; he is a questioner, a free-thinking critic. According to Bradley, Hamlet “was for ever unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths. There were no old truths for Hamlet.”²⁶

  Hamlet’s character can be seen from at least two perspectives: his own, that is to say, through his own realization of the manifestations of his melancholic thoughts and doubts and questions; and through the eyes of those around him, friends and foes. From within, Hamlet is an amateur intellectual, a man who is both bewildered and fascinated by the experience of the world but who, instead of performing like a man in the world (according to the Elizabethan notions of masculinity), responds to the world in a womanly fashion, feeling that he “must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words / And fall acursing like a very drab, / A scullion!”²⁷ From without, he is a man aloof (in spite of all his physical demonstrations of action confronting his mother, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, even his fellow students, the “tedious old fools”), for reasons of scorn, or madness, or both. Ophelia fears him, Polonius judges him lovesick, Gertrude suspects his mood to stem from her own behavior or from his father’s death, Claudius will not allow himself to give a reason for his “distemper.” Ophelia sums him up as “a noble mind” and “the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,” thus combining fine manners, bravery, and intellect “here o’erthrown.”²⁸ Of these three qualities, it is Hamlet’s intellect that, from the point of view of his audience, rules him and is at the same time most violently disturbed.

  Like Hamlet, Horatio too is a young intellectual (a word that acquires its modern meaning in Shakespeare’s time), a student at the University of Wittenberg who, in spite of confessing to a “truant disposition,” is undoubtedly a scholar—“friends, scholars and soldiers”²⁹ Hamlet calls him and Marcellus. Recalling a 1929 production of the play, John Gielgud observed that, in the “moving and convincing” opening scene, the sentinels on the tower, “old and bearded veterans” terrified at the ghost of their old master, showed innocent trust “in the wisdom of the young student Horatio.” Horatio “was cleverer than they and would interpret their fears.”³⁰

  Such trust in intellectual power was, in Shakespeare’s time as in all ages, not unqualified, and scholars were regarded with a mixture of awe and suspicion. A scholar like Hamlet had no real knowledge of life and yet clung adamantly to his philosophy. Hamlet knows not “seems”;³¹ “’Sblood,” he says of the murky affair, “there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.”³² The “if” is rhetorical; Hamlet is convinced that philosophy (or at least, his own philosophical inquiries) can find it out.

  But in the world of the Danish court, both soldiers and courtiers think of Hamlet as a bookish fop, mouthing the wisdom of his books. Hamlet (like Prospero) is supposed to “know things” only because of his books, and if deprived of these magic amulets, he would lack his vaunted superhuman powers. “Remember,” says Caliban to the sailors, trying to convince them to murder the scholarly Prospero, “First to possess his books, for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am.”³³

  Shakespeare’s world was not kind to intellectuals. Though we may like to imagine Shakespeare on the side of Prospero against the brutish Caliban, as we like to imagine him siding with the Prince of Denmark against his murderous uncle, Shakespeare was not an absolute defender of the cloistered reader. True, an Elizabethan playwright was assumed to possess a certain scholarly learning: Nashe ridiculed the “rude upstart” (probably Thomas Kyd) “who never attended university but still had the impudence to set himself up as a playwright.”³⁴ Intellectual pursuits for their own sake are praised ironically in Shakespeare’s plays, from the pompous shallows of Jaques’s rhetoric or from the heights of Sir Nathaniel’s dismissive haughtiness when criticizing poor Dull to the pedant Holofernes: “Sir, he hath never fed on the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.”³⁵

  Arden is all well and good, and Rosalind and Orlando can play their games there, but it is in Duke Frederick’s court that true power is held and the course of things determined. Prospero is master of dreams and spirits on his island, protected and guided by his reading, but the reality is that he’s a deposed governor, leading an imaginary life in exile. And Hamlet, the studious prince, is the outsider in the tangled web of Denmark’s politics, whom King Claudius (for whatever private reasons) wants to force into action, to break his passive disposition and “expel / This something-settled matter in his heart.” In fact, Hamlet and his college friends either act wrongly or do not act at all. The example of getting down to business is given by Claudius, or Gertrude, or by the King’s ghost, or even by the pompous Polonius, while Hamlet and his comrades are, in the less noble sense, men of words.

  Laertes is another matter. He stands somewhere between, neither an active character in any full sense (for all his jumping into graves and unsheathing of swords) nor a dithering literary gentleman (for all his outraged rhetoric). Laertes serves, on the one hand, as a board on which his father Polonius can sound his advice for getting on in the world, for being a man of proper action. On the other hand, Laertes is a mirror for Hamlet and his doubts. “Show me what thou’lt do!”³⁶ Hamlet shouts at him, although (as Northrop Frye pointed out) “there is nothing appropriate for Laertes to do at this point except kill Hamlet.”³⁷ Laertes is a man of little action and few words.

  In the High Middle Ages, the man of words (meaning the scholar of Scripture) was praised as a man of virtue. Thomas Aquinas noted that “according to Augustine in On Christian Doctrine 4:12, one skilled in words should so speak as to teach, to delight and to change; that is, to teach the ignorant, to delight the bored and to change the lazy.”³⁸ Augustine had argued that words offered us the possibility of higher understanding by means of what memory could cull from the texts that had been studied. Reading, abov
e all other activities, allowed for a space in which the mind could detach itself from its quotidian surroundings and dwell on loftier matters, not consciously decoding the text on the page but rather allowing the text to transport the reader on an inward journey. Though Augustine believed that only with the resurrection of the body could a state of ultimate bliss be achieved, something like that state was possible for the earthly traveler, a moment of illumination granted by the act of reading. For Augustine, reading and writing were divine gifts or obligations imposed upon Adam and Eve for their first disobedience. Before the Fall, they communicated without language, from soul to soul, and after the last trumpet, when language once again would be no longer necessary, reading and writing would vanish from the earth.³⁹ But while we are of this world, words remain our only, necessary and humble, inheritance.

  Therefore, according to Augustine, positive action in this world could be effected through reading, through the passing from the words on the page to thought and to the realm beyond thought, to understanding the evidence of things unseen. The meditative life was the better life, as Christ himself had pointed out to Mary and Martha. To his fellow students Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet argues that only thought defines the world, lending it understanding. For Hamlet, being in Denmark stifles his ability to think freely; not so for Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, who enjoy their status as guests of the crown. “Why, then ’tis none to you,” Hamlet answers, “for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”⁴⁰ Such nihilism, to use an anachronistic term, was scorned by Shakespeare, for whom the world, as his writing shows, is of unimpeachable reality not dependent on the whims of philosophical lucubration. Things may seem (do seem) one way or another, but blood and stone and human passions and the world itself have a solid existence that (to follow Augustine’s story) we have been condemned to translate into words, in a pathetic attempt to apprehend them.

  It was Coleridge who began the tradition of seeing Hamlet as a man “paralyzed by excess of thought.” According to Coleridge, in the student prince, Shakespeare

  seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds,—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet, this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment: Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve.⁴¹

  Hamlet has been warned of the consequences of allowing thought to override action. His father’s ghost (which Jacques Derrida cannily defined as “this non-present present, this being-there of an absent which defies semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy”) is the paradoxical reminder that “there are more things in heaven and earth”⁴² than are dreamed in both Horatio’s and Hamlet’s philosophy. The ghost is the incarnation of unreal reality, of that which lies beyond the margins of Hamlet’s books. To experience it (the ghost is referred to as a thing, not a person), Hamlet must pass from the concreteness of printed words to the evanescent evidence offered by the world. Were Hamlet not to act, the ghost tells him, he’d be duller “than the fat weed / That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.” Lethe, the river of Hades that offers oblivion, was for the ancients a necessary passage for the souls before their reincarnation.⁴³ In order for him to act in the world, Lethe must cleanse Hamlet of his intellectual impediments. To learn something new—decisive action—something old must be forgotten, the earlier philosophy must be purged. This is something that Augustine, attempting to reconcile Scripture with his old love of the pagan classics, would have understood well. It is not that Hamlet decides not to act: it is that, stuffed with academic teaching, he will not allow himself to unlearn his university catechism and learn again from the factual experience of what has suddenly broken into his consciousness; that is, the appearance of the ghost that is more than just a nightmarish prodigy in Hamlet’s life. As Shakespeare makes clear, it is the beginning of the undermining of Hamlet’s entire intellectual universe, of his ethical and moral learning, of his confidence in the reality of what is told in books. As a student, his library was his universe, his entire experience of the world, the world as library which he later sees as a prison. And this may be one of the meanings of his famous utterance:

  I could be bounded in a nutshell,

  And count myself a king of infinite space,

  Were it not that I have bad dreams.⁴⁴

  For Hamlet, bounded in his nutshell library, the real world, the world outside books, is an imprisoning nightmare. In this sense, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears as a terrifying liberation. The ghost implicitly demands that Hamlet close his books, step out of the confining space of words and face the painful facts, which, like that of his “too, too solid flesh,” refuse to melt. Hamlet (the ghost tells him) must remember his father, the murdered king, and not the “baser matter” written in his books. Thus Hamlet is brutally confronted with a reality (or rather with an “unreality” that is more real than real) that replaces the “trivial fond records” he has chosen to copy down, a worldly reality that overrides the wordy lessons of his books and “tables.” These “tables” were habitually kept by students in Shakespeare’s time, commonplace books in which they were supposed to copy out inspiring examples and moral teachings from the classics. These must now be replaced by the bloody teachings of his father’s ghost. “Remember thee?” Hamlet asks in response to the ghost’s injunction,

  Yea, from the table of my memory

  I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

  All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

  That youth and observation copied there,

  And thy commandment all alone shall live

  Within the book and volume of my brain,

  Unmixed with baser matter.⁴⁵

  Faced with the ghost and its explicit revelations, Hamlet realizes that he must descend from his ivory tower and act. But how should he act? Why is his behavior so puzzling to the other members of the court, each interpreting the Prince’s actions according to his or her gullible or guilty eye? Tom Stoppard, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, has one of his clowns sum up the situation: “Your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back and find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?”⁴⁶

  In fact, as the audience impatiently realizes, Hamlet is not “behaving” at all. Perhaps Coleridge’s accusation of willful procrastination is too strong, but the fact remains that after five long acts and many terrible events, Hamlet still has not relinquished words for action, he has not left his ivory tower for the public forum. He dies, but even that is not a wordless event. At the end of the play, the rest is certainly not silence.

  Recently, the critic Stephen Greenblatt summarized the play as “the story of the long interval between the first motion . . . and the acting of the dreadful thing.”⁴⁷ Reflection presented as action, philosophical doubts considered events, a plot that evolves along that which is not done: these are the characteristics of the intellectual act that allow outsiders to judge the thinker, the scholar, the reader as inefficient and abstracted. Though the play can show the active side of inaction (or rather, of mental action) the actor himself is seen in the negative light of what lies in expectation. Jorge
Luis Borges once described the aesthetic fact as “the imminence of a revelation that does not take place.” That imminence, that promised revelation, turns the ivory tower into a waiting room, and is, for most of us, unbearable.

  The reverse notion, that of the ivory tower as a positive place, is the ideal that the historian Jacques Le Goff saw developing earlier, in the Middle Ages. This was the ideal of Thomas Aquinas, which led to the foundation of universities and libraries as centers for study, in order, not to escape from the world, but better to reflect upon it. According to Le Goff, when the medieval intellectual began to relinquish the closed-in circles of reading and prayer, and entered the spaces of empirical science and political life outside the university and monastery walls, another group of readers took on the role of secluded scholars. “The humanist is an aristocrat,” wrote Le Goff of the new intellectuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “At once, the humanist takes on the wit, the spirit as his ensign, even as he languishes over his textbooks and his eloquence smells of the midnight oil. He writes only for initiates. When Erasmus publishes his Adages, his friends tell him ‘You reveal our mysteries!’”

  This intellectual world is that of the student Hamlet and of his friends: the closed academy of mysteries that are not revealed to the uninitiated, the privileged world of grammar and the gown. In Oxford, for example, students and masters claimed the privileges of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the chancellor ensured for the university such a position of independence that it was said that “the burghers lived in their own town almost as helots or subjects of a conquering people.”⁴⁸ (In France things were different, Le Goff notes, since the centers of study never achieved a similar degree of separation from the town, so that when the humanists reached Paris, they taught not at the university but in an elitist institution, the College of Royal Readers, the future Collège de France.) Everywhere in Europe, the humanists worked in silence, hiding the fact that they worked at all and boasting of their leisure, the otium of the ancient Romans. “Do not be ashamed of this illustrious and glorious idleness which great souls have always enjoyed,” wrote the fifteenth-century theologian Nicolas de Clamanges to the scholar Jean de Montreuil, praising something akin to melancholy, acedia, sloth. Hamlet believes that this leisure will allow him to be a better man, to reign perhaps one day as king of Denmark, but he finds that the world is nothing like the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden of his library. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” he says, “Seem to me all the uses of this world! / Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely.”⁴⁹