by Harold Bloom
What is it Hamlet self-othersees as, skull by skull, the Gravedigger unearths past lives? Not so much a procession of all men and women whose lives forever are ended but, rather, the nihilistic emptiness of all our purposes past and present. To self-othersee in this chilled mode is to apprehend what is at once universal and the essence of one’s own being:
GRAVEDIGGER …Here’s a skull now hath lien you i’th’ earth three and twenty years.
HAMLET Whose was it?
GRAVEDIGGER A whoreson mad fellow’s it was. Whose do you think it was?
HAMLET Nay, I know not.
GRAVEDIGGER A pestilence on him for a mad rogue. A poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.
HAMLET This?
[Takes the skull.]
GRAVEDIGGER E’en that.
HAMLET Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now—how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen. Now get you to my lady’s table and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.
Of all plays I have ever read, Hamlet remains the most advanced and bewilderingly varied. If asked to choose its visionary center, I would perhaps seek elsewhere than the graveyard, but tradition from the late eighteenth century onward selected the image of Hamlet holding and contemplating the skull of Yorick as one of the prime emblems of the Western spirit. Shakespeare might have approved this choice. His most comprehensive protagonist, Hamlet might have joined in such an appreciation.
The magnificence of this scene fuses together a crucial foregrounding of Hamlet’s character with our chilled realization of how far beyond affect this hero of Western consciousness has journeyed as Act 5 opens. To hold in your hands the skull of the only person who seems to have cared for you in childhood—your true father, who carried you on his back a thousand times, and whose lips the young child kissed endlessly in the absence of an uxorious and warlike father, and a mother endlessly seeking sexual gratification—and to feel only caustic revulsion is to be a personage from whom we should feel alienated. Many do react in that way to Hamlet, but not most of us, perhaps because, as William Hazlitt said, “It is we who are Hamlet.”
We prefer the Gravedigger’s raucous sense of Yorick: “a mad rogue” who “poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.” To the Gravedigger, Yorick remains a live presence, as he does for us, while for Hamlet this once-beloved figure has died a second time. But so, for Hamlet, has even the mightiest of historical conquerors:
HAMLET …Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
HORATIO What’s that, my lord?
HAMLET Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’ earth?
HORATIO E’en so.
HAMLET And smelt so? Pah!
HORATIO E’en so, my lord.
HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole?
HORATIO ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.
HAMLET No, faith, not a jot. But to follow him thither with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it. Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returned to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’expel the water’s flaw.
Hamlet challenges us to trace also the noble dust of William Shakespeare or Harold Bloom or you the reader until, at last, our imaginations find our remnants serving as stoppers for a beer barrel. Perhaps Horatio’s finest line is: “ ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.” That exemplary caution is the antithesis of Hamlet’s spirit and helps explain why Horatio so loves Hamlet that he attempts not to survive him. And yet we go with Hamlet, whose Yorick-like gusto jauntily traces Alexander’s progress after death, to Julius Caesar’s similar destiny.
Self-otherseeing attains here its most persuasive mode, in which Hamlet anticipates his own passivity awaiting death, his death:
HAMLET Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ’tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
Act 5, Scene 2
Self-otherseeing could scarcely be more intricate. There are textual complications. The First Folio emphasizes possession rather than knowledge. The Second Quarto gives: “The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be.” Here I prefer the composite text of Harold Jenkins, quoted above. As Jenkins implies, I interpret this as saying that, since nobody knows anything about anyone else, why does it matter when we depart? You can generalize this to knowledge of all life, but for Hamlet the central sorrow is the inability of language to manifest feeling without distortion and destruction both of the self and others. Nietzsche, with Hamlet in mind, tells us in Twilight of the Idols: “That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”
Something in most of us wants to dispute Hamlet and Nietzsche, since not much is being left for the possibility of expressing love. Hamlet does not love anyone, including himself, though he protests that he loved Ophelia, whom he drives to madness and suicide. The exception was Yorick, and we have just otherseen the death in Hamlet’s heart of any memory of the mutual love that once sustained both the child-prince and his father’s jester. As for any love between the Hamlets, putative father and neglected son, though the Prince proclaims it, we can be skeptical. That leaves Gertrude, the prop of Freud’s attempt to change Hamlet into Oedipus. When the dying Queen cries out, “O my dear Hamlet,” the Prince’s response is “Wretched Queen, adieu.” So much for supposed Oedipal sentiments.
The pivot of Hamlet’s extreme version of self-overseeing comes directly before the duel with Laertes, in what is one of the Prince’s finest moments:
HAMLET Give me your pardon, sir. I’ve done you wrong;
But pardon’t as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows, and you must needs have heard,
How I am punish’d with a sore distraction.
What I have done
That might your nature, honour, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purpos’d evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts
That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house
And hurt my brother.
Act 5, Scene 2
This is the First Folio text, which I prefer to the Second Quarto, though I employ the Second Quarto’s “brother” rather than “mother,” which is printed in the First
Folio text. As I continue to remark, Hamlet only rarely means what he says and says what he means, so constant is his irony. Surely he is guilty here of equivocation, since we doubt his “antic disposition,” which by his own earlier admission was a stratagem. There is no way to reconcile the Prince’s eloquent “I am but mad north-north-west” with his current dissimulation. And yet how winning he is! He persuades himself and us that he has self-otherseen his actions in murdering Polonius and in his hideous hounding of Ophelia into her authentic madness and subsequent suicide. Not Hamlet but another of his own obscurer selves mocks the gentle Ophelia and thrusts a sword blindly through the arras, uncaring as to who is on the other side of it.
So capacious is Hamlet’s consciousness that he both realizes his own evasiveness and yet, in his mind’s eye, beholds quite another Hamlet, so pungently sadistic. Neither he nor his auditor either believes or disbelieves his defense. The crucial passage that establishes what Emily Dickinson might call “nimble believing and disbelieving” magnificently ensues when Laertes leaps up from his sister’s burial plot to grapple with the Prince:
HAMLET [Comes forward.] What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand’ring stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
LAERTES [grappling with him.]
The devil take thy soul!
HAMLET Thou pray’st not well.
I prithee take thy fingers from my throat,
For though I am not splenative and rash,
Yet have I in me something dangerous,
Which let thy wiseness fear. Hold off thy hand.
Act 5, Scene 1
It is not Laertes but Hamlet whose phrases are so sublime that indeed the wandering stars are conjured and made to stand like wonder-wounded hearers. My students and I invariably are transported by the proud declaration “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane.” When the Prince goes on to deny his palpable rashness, we ought to be skeptical, and yet we realize that we, as much as Laertes, are addressed in “Yet have I in me something dangerous, / Which let thy wiseness fear.”
* * *
—
As an adventure in self-otherseeing, this Hamlet at Ophelia’s graveside unsettles the Prince himself as much as it does us. His powers of parody, exercised earlier against poor Polonius, yield now a grotesque harvest in hyperbolical descent from the sublime to the ridiculous:
HAMLET ’Swounds, show me what thou’t do.
Woo’t weep, woo’t fight, woo’t tear thyself,
Woo’t drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.
And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart. Nay, an thou’lt mouth,
I’ll rant as well as thou.
Act 5, Scene 1
To rant so splendidly is itself a dangerous gift. Hamlet is the master of an extraordinary range of styles, high and low, and this invective is deliciously low. Extravagance, a wandering beyond limits, is one mark of the Prince’s sensibility. If he reproves the histrionics of Laertes, he is also aware of his dark principle that to unpack one’s heart with words is to be a whore. Yet so excessive is this graveside rant that we do well to look at it more closely. Endless ironist, and self-questioner, Hamlet implies his own awareness of the waning of all sense of others in his heart, which for him means consciousness. To yield up all self-otherseeing is akin to the Prince’s metamorphoses in act 5, where his high theatricalism is replaced by what could well be described as a highly original nihilism:
HAMLET . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I am dead, Horatio. Wretched Queen, adieu.
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead.
Thou livest. Report me and my causes aright
To the unsatisfied.
Act 5, Scene 2
“Let it be” beats like a refrain of “let be” earlier in this scene of Hamlet’s farewell. Wallace Stevens acutely filled these out as: “Let be be finale of seem.” Abandoning life as if it were mere phantasmagoria, the Prince of Denmark pays a final tribute to being as a presence that may exist beyond the world of appearances.
* * *
—
Hamlet dies with the unforgettable words “The rest is silence,” where “rest” is more peace than remainder. The largest consciousness ever created by Shakespeare or by anyone else concludes its quest with a farewell to each of us, “mutes or audience to this act,” that dismisses all that might be meaningful in our lives. Yet we are also “the unsatisfied” and do not accept the hero’s nihilistic self-surrender. Most readers and theatergoers decline to see Hamlet as a hero-villain, the fashion now among some scholarly critics. Since something in all of us is Hamlet, we rebel against the imputation. And yet our dissent is uneasy and makes us question our own waning powers of self-otherseeing.
Coleridge remarked that Hamlet thought too much. Nietzsche’s apt reply always stays with me: “Hamlet thinks not too much but much too well and therefore thinks his way through to the truth.” Yet the truth is that from which we perish.
Hamlet’s self-otherseeing is so large that, like his irony, it is sometimes difficult to recognize. I have followed earlier lovers of Shakespeare in observing that Hamlet is his own Falstaff. And yet he is also his own Iago and even his own Macbeth.
I am fond of repeating the charming fantasy of Orson Welles that Hamlet goes to England and helps stage the beheading of those pathetic time-servers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, after which the Prince of Denmark settles down at the Globe Theatre, grows fat, and becomes Sir John Falstaff. He would thus avoid the slaughterhouse of the final scene at Elsinore and could shrug off the continued amours of his mother, Gertrude, and his possible father, Claudius. Shakespeare will not tell us how far back the adulterous affair of Gertrude and Claudius goes, yet it seems not unlikely that she sought solace while the senior Hamlet chopped up Polacks on the ice and performed a landgrab at the expense of the King of Norway. A plump Jack Falstaff version of Hamlet certainly would not have cared.
Doubtless I jest, yet in the spirit of Yorick, a benign influence on his playfellow the child Hamlet. There is no end to Hamlet’s possibilities, as befits a consciousness so enormous that it contains all of human self-otherseeing.
Iago and Othello: Point-Counterpoint
IAGO Virtue? a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Our bodies are gardens, to which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this, that you call love, to be a sect or scion.
RODERIGO It cannot be.
IAGO It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man! drown thyself? drown cats and blind puppies. I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdura
ble toughness. I could never better stead thee than now. Put money in thy purse, follow thou the wars, defeat thy favour with an usurped beard; I say, put money in thy purse. It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor—put money in thy purse—nor he his to her. It was a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration—put but money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable in their wills—fill thy purse with money. The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as acerb as coloquintida. She must change for youth; when she is sated with his body she will find the error of her choice; she must have change, she must. Therefore, put money in thy purse. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than drowning—make all the money thou canst. If sanctimony, and a frail vow betwixt an erring Barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian, be not too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her—therefore make money. A pox of drowning thyself, it is clean out of the way: seek thou rather to be hanged in compassing thy joy than to be drowned and go without her.
Act 1, Scene 3
The dark wisdom of Iago is his most attractive quality. That and his zest make him so dangerous. He takes priority over the entire panoply of Shakespearean villains. Even the brilliant Edmund in King Lear is not quite of Iago’s bad eminence. Iago is a grand theatrical improviser. He shifts his tactics as he goes along. He has at first no design for destroying Othello, but his inventive gusto leaps from one intoxicating surmise to another as he explores enormous resources previously undivulged to him.
He cheerfully observes:
O villainous! I have looked upon the world for four times seven years, and since I could distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury I never found a man that knew how to love himself. Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen I would change my humanity with a baboon.
