Hamlet and Hamartia

At a time when the fashion in advanced literary circles is critical divination, and phonemes are consulted as anxiously as were entrails by the haruspices, the pairing of Hamlet and hamartia might seem chic enough to warn one off the subject, even if a daunting amount had not already been written on it. But what brings the essays in this collection together is hardly the memory of a man swayed by intellectual fashions or led to consider peripheral issues because of the popularity of central ones. The occasion, then, seems to welcome a perennial topic: the guilt, innocence, the errors—the hamartia—of what one critic has called “the only prince we can believe in.”

I

One must first say something about the use of the idea of hamartia in connection with the plays of Shakespeare. That he knew of Aristotle, through whom the idea has gained currency in literary discussion, there is no doubt. That he knew the Poetics, or indeed had read any of Aristotle, is another matter. Shakespeare mentions Aristotle twice: once in Troilus and Cressida, (II, ii, 165-67), and once in The Taming of the Shrew (I, i, 32). The Troilus allusion to a supposed warning (in Nicomachean Ethics I. 3?) that young men are too passionate to listen to reason, hardly indicates acquaintance with the text since the idea (and this supposed source for it) were a commonplace—and a commonplace depending on an error. Both Shakespeare and Bacon in The Advancement of Learning were probably influenced by Eras­mus’s mistranslations of the passage in his Colloquia.

The celebrated Aldine Aristotle of 1495-98 omitted the Poetics which was first translated into Latin by Valla in 1498. The only translations into the vernacular tongues before 1600 are the Italian versions by Segni (1549), Cas­telvetro (1570), and Piccolomini (1572, rev. 1576). Sir Philip Sidney had certainly conned his Aristotle from the Italians, but one wonders if most literary Elizabethans—Shakespeare among them—who had not read these transla­tions, were at all unlucky in being spared the rigidities introduced as Aristotelian doctrine by continental commentators.

Polonius, in a passage that has long delighted audiences and critics, praises the travelling actors and ticks off the genres in which they excel:

tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comi­cal-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited. (II,ii, 387-90)^[1]

do not know that this tells for or against the idea that Shakespeare knew the Poetics or was in agreement with Italian versions of its tenets. The passage seems a self-conscious and amused reference to the English tradition of mixed modes as against the Italianate neo-classicism of, say, a Sidney, who objected to the mingling of high and low and considered his own hankering for border ballads something of a breach of good taste. For his part, Shakespeare wrote “pastoral-comical” in As You Like It, “tragical-historical” in Richard II, and was to write “tragical-comical-historical-pas­toral” in Cymbeline, “scene individable” in The Tempest and “poem unlimited” in The Winter’s Tale. It is hardly likely that he wrote his plays as he did out of concern for the theory of drama or because of a determination to defy the notion of generic purity, though he may well have been amusing himself with the incongruous “unities” of The Tempest. A pedant (here Polonius), repeating by rote a laborious taxonomy developed by grammarians, is indeed amusing. Yet the amusement need not be exclusively at the expense of the taxonomy, which may be cumbersome only to be thorough, nor at the expense of the literary works it points to, which may be moving or sprightly for all the dull complication of the taxonomy. Hence, one can question Atkins’s comment that Polonius’s parade of adjectives is a “satire on the numerous subdivisions of contemporary drama.“^[2] If there is amusement directed at anything other than the pedantic manner of Polonius, it is directed at the necessary incongruity between the fluid mingling of kinds in actual Elizabethan drama and the brittleness of any system attempting to classify them. But this is humor, not satire, and not demonstrative of an objection—or even a relevance—to genre theory. There is, in any case, no hard evidence that Shakespeare concerned himself with literary theory or knew any of the writings of Aristotle directly, let alone the Poetics, although, of course, Aristotelian ideas were “in the air.”

The concern with hamartia, however, need not be a concern only of the theorist; it is an inevitable concern of the dramatist. Whatever name he gives it, at whatever level of consciousness he is aware of it, hamartia, the guiltless error, the dreadful mistake made in good faith, or at least without a sinfulness or malice on the scale of its effects—this is inevitably on the agenda of tragic writing. In each of Shakespeare’s major tragedies there is some phrase or pas­ sage that seems to formulate the idea: Othello defining him­ self as “an honorable murderer,” Lear pleading that he is “more sinned against than sinning,” Hamlet, mortally wounded, suffering more in his “wounded name.” Once the idea of hamartia is brought to our attention, it is seen as an obvious necessity of tragic drama, for in viewing a tragedy we are meant to sympathize with those who murder or have carnal knowledge of parents and children, offending against the law and violating the taboos upon which society is articulated. This is the minimum instruction to the tragic dramatist: make us love the transgressor. It is no wonder that so many playwrights take the easier path of melodrama and allow us to hate him.

If there is hamartia operating within the individual tragedy, there is also hamartia possible in writing it: an aiming at tragedy but missing. Melodrama is one such failure to hit the mark. Plays of “poetic justice” in which a transgressor is justly punished; plays of fate or pathos in which the transgressors are mere victims—of society, of genetic inheritance, of bad luck—are other ways to miss the mark, though often enough they are spoken of loosely as tragedy. Yet the plays which constitute the central tradition of the genre exhibit not only hamartia but the corollaries of hamartia.

Perhaps the most surprising of these is the necessary presence of some actual guilt in the tragic protagonist, not simple guilt commensurate with or even related to the tragic deed, but guilt, nonetheless. Without it an audience would (on the Aristotelian model) experience, not pity and fear, but the shock of an “unlawfully” catastrophic or satanic universe. This necessary adjunct of defect and guilt is, I think, of two kinds. The first has to do with the particular nature of the tragic deed. Aristotle—like Freud—correctly saw the terrible in human life as the violation of the nearest: of parent, of child—yes—of self, or of their surrogates, the powerless and the sacred. No matter how dark the ignorance in which parricide and incest are committed, the taboo shadows the doer. To forgive such acts is neither to understand nor to forget, however the Areopagus (law) or carrying an oar inland (ritual) may help to dispel horror or punishment. Blind or dead, Oedipus is never other than the parricide and the husband-son. For the most part Shake­speare avoids tragic situations that are so difficult to miti­gate. When he employs them, as in Othello, he makes the protagonist almost at once his own executioner. Hamlet kills a prospective father-in-law, an uncle, friends; his mother he only reproaches and amazes.

A second kind of defect or guilt is present because tragic acts—like all acts—must have contexts. The most obvious is the character of the protagonist. If it does not cause the tragic deed, it impinges on it, imparting a particular coloration. It could not be otherwise. Were ignorance alone the context of the tragic offense, the play would not only be hopelessly abstract but might easily assume the pattern of catastrophe—unjust gods victimizing the perfectly good or the merely imbecile. To avoid such blasphemy, Aristotle advises, tragic protagonists are to be distinguished by greatness rather than goodness. They have not only the finiteness of common humanity—which the uncommonly good presumably “neutralize” to some extent by confining elective activity to the moral sphere—but they exercise talents and secular dispositions that circumstance brings into play. The tragic deed is not caused by such dispositions, and indeed the playwright may choose to suggest them only in passing.

But together with ignorance they define the tragic, the space between innocence and guilt that excludes catastrophe and poetic justice on either side.

Such corollary defects and guilt are relevant to prac­tical criticism and to the significance of tragic drama as a genre. On the side of practical criticism, the irascibility and pride of Oedipus, the naivety and the erratic emotionality and intellect of Hamlet have led to critical interpretations in which character has been mistaken for cause, giving us a fatalist Oedipus or an Oedipus merely illustrative of the sin of pride, or a Hamlet undone by neurosis or introspection, and so on. Such discussions are sometimes based on imperfect translations of hamartia in which the word “flaw” (common in school texts) is pushed in the direction of simple guilt, and on a neglect of the strategies necessary to avoid catastrophe.

Two further strategies of composition—displacement and plot-perspective—also shape the guilt and innocence of which it is compounded into hamartia. The character-style which the playwright might well have used as the “cause” of the tragic deed is displaced from an intent to commit the act and diffused in the personal style of the protagonist. Irascibility, stubbornness, pride, excessive passion in response—these become modes of personality that color all the protagonist’s actions. Such modes may even be used by the dramatist as actual causes of misdeeds other than the crucial tragic act itself. But the guilt that “should” attend the act is in part “neutralized” by this process of displace­ ment. Absorbed into a behavioral style, Hamlet’s passionate overreacting becomes another aspect of his fastidious moral sensitivity, as Oedipus’s irascible stubbornness becomes another aspect of his tenacity in searching out truth both for its own sake and for the sake of his people.

Guilt for the tragic act itself is further transformed by plot-perspective. Oedipus’s parricide and incest are pre­sented as revelations incidental to his search for the truth. The murder of Laius is set in the far past, and even then in the context of Oedipus’s attempt to avoid the predictions of the oracle. Both crimes are painful trophies of moral stead­ fastness: Oedipus is a governor seeking to lift the curse of plague from his people, whatever the price. Hamlet, simi­larly, commits crimes as a dutiful son fulfilling an obligation to the dead.

Irremediable ignorance, the displacement of guilt from intent to behavioral style, and plot-perspective are the most obvious means by which protagonists can, in effect, be “shielded” from their tragic deeds. There are, of course, numerous other devices—of style, of construction, of ide­ology—by which writers of tragedy deflect the condemnation that “should” otherwise attend tragic deeds. However, one could compile an anthology of exceptions not depending heavily on the three main strategies we have discussed. Despite such exceptions, the central tradition of tragic writing, and certainly Shakespeare’s Hamlet, depends on these three strategies of mitigation.

The strategies themselves, however different from one another in execution, are at bottom aspects of a single strategy of displacement. The innocence” of the tragic protagonist depends, finally, on displaced guilt. The special tension of tragedy arises from the consequent reassertion of guilt together with the assertion of innocence. Guilt as mere doer rather than as plotter or intender clings to the protag­onist despite his “cleansing” ignorance, the one reminding us of the other. This may explain Aristotle’s (to us) curious preference in Poetics, chapter XIV, for plays such as Iphigenia in Taurus in which timely recognition forestalls the tragic deed. Character-style- -in its energy, its secular dis­ positions, and its “greatness” (the scope for action)—is also a capacity for misdeed. Typically, the world of the Shake­spearean protagonist is a world that invites error: its “fair” is “foul” (Macbeth), its dark watches confuse the sentry (Hamlet), its societies are alien (Othello) or alienating (Coriolanus). As the chief actor in such scenes, his capaci­ties are peculiarly capacities for error. And though plot­ perspective functions as camouflage, the outlines of the tragic deed itself are never quite hidden. A taint hovers, like the idea of original sin, the shadowy but pervasive cir­cumstance of all other circumstances.

The protagonist of tragic drama is, in the Poetics, at once “greater than” and the “same as” ourselves—somehow “better,” yet of the “middling sort.” Whatever scholarly interpretation or philological clarifying is employed to prevent these phrases from seeming contradictory, the market­ place impression of jostling and paradox is instructive and answers to the fusing of innocence and guilt we have been discussing. Further, this sort of tragic protagonist—greater than, the same as; agent, undergoer—functions as a metaphor for the audience itself, “shielded” from the deed, since they need not act on its consequences, yet drawn into it. In this, too, the protagonist is “like ourselves.” This analogy, together with the illusion of inevitability typical of tragic plot construction, promotes an intellectual acceptance of the outcome as just—an acceptance upon which catharsis depends. More should be said, but it is time to turn to Hamlet.

II

Lloyd Gerson, who generously suggested that I write this essay, told me that John Crossett once remarked that self-delusion, specifically the sort of self-delusion that leads to a radical misinterpretation of experience, was essential to hamartia. This is indeed—if we apply it to Hamlet or Macbeth—a sophisticated and useful idea. To be thus deluded is to be one’s own victim, sharing pain and defeat with other victims of the action prompted by the self-delusion. Moreover, to be self-deluded is usually to be disappointed in an ideal, for typically people delude themselves into thin king that an evil is a good, rather than the reverse. Like Macbeth, they experience dismaying revelations as inherent moral significance breaks through delusion. Indeed, their perception of moral significance, though it is a kind of grace, testifies to the initial possession of an ideal, as does the need for self-delusion in the first place. Much could be made of this line of thought in an examination of Hamlet. Hamlet’s confused reactions to the Ghost, his contradictory interpretations of the Ghost’s injunctions (which support through parallel John Crossett’s observations on Oedipus’s interpretations of the oracle^[3]), can be explored to advantage. But I am content for the moment to assimilate the idea of self-delusion to the wider idea of intellectual error. Hamlet is, I am going to say in the following pages, not only the tragedy of an intellectual—of a Wittenburg student—but an intellectual tragedy, that is, a tragedy depending on false and unliveable ideas: not on ideas that are simply evil, but on ideas that, however noble their tendency, cannot be lived without intolerable consequences.

To raise such matters as self-delusion, intellectual self-destructiveness, even hamartia—a word so tame and far from condemnation—meets with stubborn and immediate resistance when one is discussing Hamlet. “The only prince we can believe in” is a phrase suggesting that here is man at the top of his bent, the capacities wide, the mind acute, the will to good strong—but not merely the philosopher-king, for kings and philosophers are old. The title of ‘Prince’ has about it a freshness untainted by habit or the compromises of long office. A prince stands on the threshold. Remark­ably, after the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the killing of Polonius, and much else, the impression of Hamlet’s wholly untainted innocence persists for a large number of readers and critics.

Hamlet is a play of unusually thorough mitigations. Even its “villain” is eloquent and knowing, a loving hus­band, a sound ruler, courageous, tranquil, honest with him­ self. With Hamlet Shakespeare is unstintingly generous. He goes to daring lengths to make Hamlet seem youth on the threshold. The learned commentary on Hamlet’s age takes up about three pages of small type in the condensed accounts of the Variorum of 1877. One shudders to think of how much has been written since. Whatever the justice of deductions from V, i, 153 and 163, the Hamlet of the play as a whole is a very young man: naive in his idealization of his father, despite the Ghost’s apparent purgatorial suffering for crimes done in his “days of nature”; naive in his thinking garden­ variety hypocrisy worthy of his “tables” or commonplace book. Early in the play Shakespeare allows Hamlet a “born yesterday” quality that seems at several points almost to belie high intelligence and force of character. Apparently, Shakespeare is willing to take considerable risk to provide the mitigation of youth. Balancing this naivety with flashes of sarcasm and cynicism completes the portrait of the tragic hero as a young man.

The list of Hamlet’s virtues is long. Ophelia puts it most memorably:

The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’ observed of all observers
( III , i, 152-55)

—this is Hamlet’s “blown [blooming] youth.” One could add to Ophelia’s catalogue a precision and shrewdness of mind in Hamlet’s questioning of Horatio’s account of the Ghost; responsibility (if not grace and gentleness) in his painful giving up of Ophelia; a decency in his reception of the players (contrast this with the amusement of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the caste-bound primness of Polonius); an enlightened decorum (no generation-jumper he, unlike Fortinbras and the “little eyasses,” despite his twitting of Polonius in II, ii). One could go on. But enough has been said to detail the obvious: Shakespeare has given us a paragon. Indeed, he almost cancels out what we have referred to earlier as “secular dispositions”—the ambitions, loves, longing for honor, the pride so common in the Cids, Macbeths, Othellos of tragedy, and so potent in exposing them to mis- chance. In II, ii, it is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who attribute ambition to Hamlet, but the attribution is wide of the mark, as Hamlet’s responses in ii. 251-64 show. When at V, ii, 65 Hamlet tells Horatio that Claudius has “Popped in between th’ election and my hopes,” we are not persuaded, because the idea is taken up nowhere else. Hamlet seems only to be making out a formal list of accusations preparatory to a public execution. A scholar—halfway then to a religious—he wanted to return to Wittenburg at the outset of the play, and the image persists. The idea of an ambitious Hamlet is incongruous. He is more like a young Prospero demanding silence near his study (how offensive he finds the noise of Claudius’s court!), while some surrogate Antonio­ Claudius entertains sycophants in the presence-room preparatory to stealing the crown, a bored Ophelia, and the royal spoons. One could go on to examine the aborted hints of other secular dispositions. There is, for example, caste­ pride in the soliloquies, in the denigrating comparisons with “peasant” and “scullion” (I take here the Folio reading at II, ii, 547 and 585) and Hamlet’s condescension to clerkly orthography at V, ii, 33-36. But there is nothing of this in Hamlet’s behavior toward the players or the gravediggers, despite the comment at V, i, 138-39. Contrast this with the case of Prince Hal (later Henry V), a figure often urged as a prototype of Hamlet. Hal’s remarks on hogsheads and blockheads in II, iv of I Henry IV, his attitudes toward Williams in IV, viii of Henry V, and toward his subjects in the great soliloquy on the eve of Agincourt are far from the Hamlet manner of using every man after one’s own honor and dignity. Almost wherever one looks, one comes up against a modesty and selflessness that set Hamlet apart from most protagonists in tragic drama. What seems to expose him to tragic circumstances is merely being a certain age, ripe to inherit quarrels he did not begin, and obligations—save for the obligation of being a son—which he did not incur. Yet this is the perennial situation of youth, and Hamlet, so much the singular individual, is in this respect representative.

Hamlet, one has to remind oneself, is not a saint. He is self-dramatizing (apparently a rhetorical necessity in all Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists); he has an unplea­santly sharp wit; he can be needlessly brutal both to Ophelia and to his mother; he can be impulsive and erratically emo­tional, and he can be both elaborately and simply mistaken.

All this and the mayhem that Hamlet brings about have pro­voked a useful if wrong-headed corrective to Hamlet-worship from G. Wilson Knight, whose ‘Embassy of Death’ in The Wheel of Fire gives us Hamlet as a thoroughly inhuman cynic who “has walked and held converse with Death.”^[4] The neg­ative aspects of Hamlet’s behavior do have a common denomi­nator, though it is hardly so dramatic or vague as “converse with Death.” In order to arrive at it properly, we must begin by looking at the question of ignorance, always associated with hamartia, and then at questions of negation and guilt.

A condition of drama is that it presents a story which cannot be told by one person, hence a story that no one in it fully knows. The form traffics in ignorance, employing the differential release of information as a dominant feature of construction. But in Hamlet ignorance is made a theme as well as a condition of construction. Let us take three incidents: Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius in the “chapel” scene, the killing of Polonius, and the prospective deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Each is based on an erroneous assumption: that Claudius is praying, that the King is hiding in the Queen’s chamber, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not only aiding the King but guiltily in league with him. Oedipus’s parricide and incest are also based on erroneous assumptions: that the offender at the crossroads is not his father, that the royal widow is not his mother. But such assumptions are remote and tacit, not—as in Shakespeare—brought to the fore and shown rapidly to be wanting. The strategies and emphases of the two dramatists differ. Sophocles gives us a bizarre celebration of human problem-solving, of reason disastrously triumphant; for this the riddle of the Sphinx is both prologue and synecdoche. In Hamlet these functions are performed by the Ghost, whose riddle neither the Prince nor the critics can solve. He remains as he is in the play: anguished wanderer from a Catholic Purgatory, initiator of destruction from a Protestant Hell, skeptic’s figment—and above all the paradoxical father who deplores murder and demands revenge. Interpretation cannot reduce him to a single formula. In Oedipus Rex ignorance is ignorance of persons, ignorance of fact tout court, with no implication that the mechanisms of thought and passion are in any way disordered in the protagonist. In Hamlet ignorance is only secondarily an ignorance of fact, since fact is pre-empted by assumption, and our attention is directed to disorders of thought and feeling which the assumptions represent. In Oedipus the unknown appears in the context of the knowable: riddles can be solved, evidence sifted for the truth. In Hamlet the unknown exists in the context of the unknowable: indirections find out only illusory directions, despite the cleverness of a Polonius or a Hamlet; the “divinity that shapes our ends” seems to manifest itself further in human impulse (the sea-voyage) or in the rebuke of inadequacy (the “chapel” scene), and to appear as an ironist more playful and improvising than Apollo. Shakespeare offers us a sphere of action more problematic and open than does Sophocles. Within it, ignorance seems at once more tractable because it depends on specific wrong-headedness rather than, as in Sophocles, bizarre mis­ chance; and less tractable since varieties of wrong-headed­ ness seem so much the common lot. It is useful to recall that Hamlet was first drafted not long after Julius Caesar, a play centering on the proclivity of men to “construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (I, iii, 33-34).

Much of the evidence for the foregoing remarks appears in III, iii and iv, the last scenes of the pivotal act of the play. In the first of these, the co-called “chapel” scene, Hamlet finds Claudius alone, kneeling, apparently in prayer. The King’s soliloquy of confession is, by the way, the first incontrovertible evidence we have had that he is guilty of murder. Hamlet evades the obvious opportunity to kill the King. Execution now, he reasons, would be “hire and salary, not revenge.11TheKing must be taken, not at prayer settling his accounts with heaven, but rather “When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage” or “about some act/That has no relish of salvation in it” (III, iii, 89, 91-91). After this blasphemous resolution to force God’s hand and kill the King only when he can be sent assuredly to Hell, Hamlet leaves. The King rises, remarking “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below/Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (III, iii, 97-98).

The two main lines of interpretation of this scene stern from Johnson and Coleridge.^[5] Coleridge sees Hamlet’s refusal to act as yet another rationalization of his dilatoriness throughout the play. For Johnson the issue is the moral one: Hamlet’s desire for absolute revenge that pursues its object to the next world is to be taken at face value and condemned. I shall not argue the issue, although I think Johnson more nearly correct. Important for our purposes is, first, that Hamlet is mistaken about what is going on before him, and second, that Shakespeare is at pains to point out Hamlet’s error, underlining it with biting irony. Claudius’s final couplet is a double rebuke—not only a revelation of Hamlet’s ignorance of the situation but a thwarting of his resolution to preempt the role of divine judgment. Ignorance here is bound up with a curiously ready acceptance of incomplete evidence (hence, I think, Coleridge’s view) and an unwarranted ethical position.

One says “curiously ready” because, although the Hamlet we first see—the ironist of “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (I, ii, 65) and of the first soliloquy—is full of passion, he is not intellectually inconsequential. From the homely specificity of “ere yet those shoes were old” to the classical evocation of “Niobe all tears” requires a leap that defines not only Hamlet’s intellectual range but its two coordinates: a precise empirical eye, and a context of moral narrative within which to judge what the eye sees. Later in that scene Hamlet conducts what is in effect a cross-examination of those who witnessed the appearance of the Ghost. It is most acute, and presents Hamlet as remarkably obser­vant, and clever in teasing out evidence and possible contradiction in detail.

The appearance of a Ghost is, one needn’t say, upset­ ting, and I, v contrasts usefully with I, ii, giving us at first a Hamlet who appears to accept the Ghost as “honest,” his story as true. Hamlet accepts these intuitively, as in “O my prophetic soul!/My uncle?” (I, v, 40-41). Later, despite his telling Horatio that “It is an honest ghost,” Hamlet has enough doubt to try to avoid requiring an oath directly over (i.e., “swearing on”) the Ghost in the cellarage. The consequence is an irregular balletic movement -over the stage by Hamlet and his friends, a choreographing of doubt and mental reservation. We are presented then with two intellectual modes: Hamlet as skeptical empiricist, and Hamlet as intuitive moralist. By the time we reach 11, ii, we are prepared to attend carefully to Hamlet’s observa­tion to Rosencrantz that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so (II, ii 248-49), a formula that underlines the second mode.

All this would be interesting enough as a cautionary prelude to the events of the third act, but Shakespeare does even more to alert us to his theme. Laertes absent from Act 11 is almost of more moment than Laertes present in Act I. Act II, Scene i is a model discourse on observation and dis­covery. In the first half of the scene Polonius asks Rey­naldo to slander Laertes—mildly, of course—in order to elicit opinions of his behavior in Paris.

See you now—
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth,
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.
II, i , 62 – 65)

In the second half of the scene Polonius interrogates his daughter and reaches the conclusion that Hamlet’s erratic behavior is “the very ecstasy of love.” Polonius has the good grace to regret his earlier instructions to Ophelia which, he thinks, have provoked Hamlet’s “madness,” but, as he observes, it is “proper to our [old] age/ To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions.” Act II is a little epis­temological comedy that might be called, “What’s Wrong with the Younger Generation?” Polonius’s indirect method with Laertes is both distasteful and likely to produce only rumor. His interrogation of Ophelia comes up with precisely the wrong answer. Much the same is true of another epistemological comedy, “Is It an Honest Ghost?” Neither scholarship nor criticism produces an answer because the Ghost is terminally ambiguous. Nor does Hamlet’s “mousetrap” really close. The presence of both dumbshow and spoken skit, with the latter’s emphasis on a nephew-murderer, make Claudius’s sudden rising not necessarily a case of guilty fright at “false fire,” but even more plausibly a deliberate public demonstration of the need to exile a dangerous courtier.

What we have been looking at is the thematizing of epistemological questions, not simply at instances of indi­vidual inadequacy. Polonius’s mental equipment may be rusty, but Hamlet’s isn’t. It is difficult to uncover the truth, not because—as in Richard II—political expediency has made it inaccessible, but because thought can overbear observation. Ignorance in Hamlet is not merely that side of hamartia which becomes in theology irreducible or invincible ignorance, but a possibly remediable limitation reflected in the premises on which we sort out what we see. Only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—poor fellows—behave like good scholars and refuse to allow theories to becloud the evidence, but little good it does them. There is only one char­ acter who can answer the questions about the Ghost’s honesty (if only in part) and the reason for Hamlet’s upset. What Claudius knows, however, is his own guilt.

Failing to kill Claudius in the chapel, actually killing Polonius in his mother’s chamber, have in common two fea­tures. First, they depend on errors. In the chapel Hamlet depends on the evidence of his eyes; in the chamber on the evidence of his ears—a voice behind the arras. Restriction to evidence from one sense is, I think, deliberate and meant to underline its incompleteness. The consequent unreliability of the evidence is further underlined in the chamber scene by the differences between the voice of Polonius (usually acted in a geriatric high pitch) and the bass-baritone of Claudius that Hamlet would seem to have expected. Immediately after the sword-thrust, Hamlet asks his mother, “Is it the King?” When he sees the body and recognizes Polonius, he says, “I took thee for thy better.” Apparently, Hamlet both knew and did not know that Claudius was behind the arras.

The second common feature of the scenes is implicit in the first. In both scenes the unreliability of the evidence, which “should” have made so acute an observer as Hamlet refrain from conclusion or action, apparently counted for little and was overborne by the “thinking” that makes things good or bad. The killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern presents that thinking most clearly and thus illuminates the earlier incidents. In III, iv, Hamlet declares that he will trust his two schoolfellows “like adders fanged,” and that the documents they bear will help “marshal me to knavery” and to some obscure, unspecified plot (III, iv, 203-11). When in V, ii, Hamlet tells Horatio the tale of his voyage, he surprisingly labels his covert reading of the documents “rashness”—not prudence—and his forging of the letters that will lead his schoolmates to their deaths an act that cannot trouble his conscience (V, ii, 6-62). There is, in fact, no more evidence that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were in guilty collusion with the King than there was evidence of Claudius’s prayers or of his hiding behind the arras. Friendship and concern alone could have induced friends to help parents fathom the distress of an apparently disturbed son. Obsequiousness among scholars is neither unusual nor a capital crime, and the two might have known nothing of the murderous document since the commission was sealed. But Hamlet can see only absolute guilt. In the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Shakespeare brings together the insistence on appropriate, “perfect” punishment that prompts Hamlet’s error in the chapel scene, and his insistence on absolute guilt that prompts his error in Gertrude’s chamber. If Hamlet is to have absolute punishment, he must assume that Claudius is at prayer; he cannot, like Laertes, be indifferent and cut a man’s throat in the church. The tricky question of what Claudius is actually doing is some­ thing he cannot consider to any purpose. Requiring absolute guilt, Hamlet cannot risk exploring the possible implications of Claudius’s praying—implications for his innocence—though he must assume that Claudius actually is praying. If Hamlet is to have a Claudius absolutely guilty, the guilt must be seen to extend from the deed of murder to all deeds—drinking, incest, opportunism, subornation, spying behind the arras. A longing for the absolute, the incontrovertible, pre-empts observation, even though it encourages thinking “imprecisely” on the event.

We began by suggesting the thoroughness with which Shakespeare had cleared the way for an “intellectual” hamartia by eliminating what we called “secular dispositions.” We then examined ignorance in the play as following not only from an inherent human limitation but from a particular inadequacy, here Hamlet’s need to discover absolute guilt, absolute innocence, and to wreak absolute punishment. Such moral absolutism is the hamartia of this intellectual tragedy. It is, further, congenial to the characteristics of youth— idealistic, extreme, uncharitable—and congenial also in that its idealism throws a sympathetic moral coloration over actions that would otherwise seem merely reprehensible. In short, it permits “moral errors”—the paradoxical coupling of innocence and guilt that is the first requirement of tragedy.

Evidence of Hamlet’s polarizing, absolutist outlook is everywhere: in the extreme statement, in passionate over­ reaction that leaps from one purple attitude to another, in formulations that contrast “Hyperion to a satyr,” that give men only such alternatives as “to be” or “not to be” when the actual alternatives are a spectrum of possibilities. None of this answers to a world in which ghosts seem reasonably honest, purgatorial, and dangerously vague in their demands; in which mothers are loving, unperceptive, and enigmatic; young women not strong enough for the loyalties they deeply feel; friends decent in intention but shall one say of the “mighty opposites”—a murderer-king who is a loving husband and a good administrator, and a tragic hero who is acutely intelligent and who high-mindedly goes his way to mayhem? Hamlet’s language is an anthology of binary oppositions too simple for Elsinore. Nothing seems to alter this habit of mind, not the frustration of his plots, not the lucky sea-voyage, not even his apparent resignation and quietism in Act V. “ls’t not perfect conscience,” he asks Horatio just before the fencing match is proposed, “to quit him [kill Claudius] with this arm? And is’t not to be damned/To let this canker of our nature come/To further evil?” (V, ii, 67-70). The answer to both questions, as Hamlet somewhere at the bottom of all his scruples might be expected to know, is no. It is not perfect conscience to kill, nor simply damnation to forebear. Hamlet is not Laertes, and the nature of his position is such that the moral sensitivity that led him to black-and-white extremes must in the end have logically led him to deny them as he discovered the world’s native hue of grayness.

Measure for Measure, written not too long after Hamlet, is another play that gives us rigid premises that result in confusion. It ends as a comedy because almost everyone manages to muddle through the play’s moral dilemmas, how­ ever awkwardly the characters give up their brittle high­ mindedness or find their low-mindedness restrained. But Hamlet is a tragedy, and though his giving Fortinbras his “dying voice” may suggest that the Prince has learned an ironic acceptance of the imperfect, it seems to me that the resignation he expresses so eloquently before the duel is a sign of frustration rather than of intellectual development or insight into his self-destructiveness. Providence there may indeed be in the fall of God’s sparrows, but the moral abso­luteness that has prevented Hamlet from acting before is only hiding behind the posture of resignation. He has not come to acceptance by way of the mature perception of the flawed, the imperfect, the contradictory—and the equally flawed and imperfect means by which 01en cope with them. Why, one asks, does Hamlet not quite see what he is about?

In Hamlet’s soliloquy in IV, iv, after viewing Fortin­bras’s army marching toward Poland, Hamlet voices the obli­gatory question. He answers it with

—I do not know
Why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do,’
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.
(IV, iv, 43-46)

Why indeed? We are perhaps distrustful of his claim to “will” as we are of his offering “oblivion” or cowardice as reasons for not acting. If, as I have argued above, the reason for inaction is Hamlet’s demand for “perfect” proof and “perfect” justice, and consequently for his own “perfect” innocence, then the reasons can only be hinted at; they must remain shadowy to Hamlet himself. Once brought fully into consciousness, that knowledge on Hamlet’s part would have to turn the play radically in some other direction than that of tragedy—possibly in one of the ironic directions taken by the “problem plays.” Unlike his problematic, actual Elsinore, Hamlet’s perceptual world is the world of the Players’ tale of Dido and Aeneas, a world of suffering queens, horrid villains, reverend fathers—a world of the theatrically pure and heroic. Hamlet thinks like an old recitation. His is the tragedy of a kind of immaturity that promises great­ ness, indeed half achieves it in the eloquence and high aspiration of its errors. It is, however, an immaturity curiously tainted, at once noble and blasphemous in its aspiring to be “at one” with divinity.