The Arden Hamlet and other stories

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop had a copy of the Arden Hamlet whereas I had no such free-standing edition of this play of all plays and so now I have.

Even William Empson, the great footnoter, would envy Harold Jenkins whose 574-page book devotes 260 to the play, where half of each is taken up with small print below, the Introduction being 160 pages and the Longer Notes amounting to 153. And for the most part it is 'more matter with less art'. I thought I knew plenty about Hamlet having once counted about 30 productions of it but some of the greatness of some great things lies in their bottomless quality.

The potential for scholarship is helped in no small part by the need to establish which text we are reading and why with the First Quarto being understood to be made of partially remembered parts taken from actors, the second from the 'foul papers' in which Shakespeare might have blotted lines but copyists, compositors and editors are more usually made culpable and the Folio being what those editors decided to go with. The murky world of the supernatural, the feigned madness, the nocturnal action and all the uncertainties of a 400-year old text are only made more elusive by not having an autograph manuscript certified by the author as his finalised version but in due course we have an artwork to scrutinize.

It had come to my notice already that the revenge theme is not only doubled by Laertes being set up to take revenge on Hamlet for the unwitting murder of his father, Polonius, but is trebled by the whole play being framed by the revenge of Fortinbras on Denmark for the defeat of his father by King Hamlet thirty years earlier. However, in a play constructed so much around 'doublings', Reynaldo is sent to France to spy on Laertes in the same way as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are employed to fathom what Hamlet is up to, which only augments the atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and counter-espionage that government in any age is, perhaps necessarily, obsessed with.

That thirty year gap specifically puts Hamlet's age at thirty which is compatible with a dilettante prince with not much more to do than wile away time at university and read 'words, words, words'. That it doesn't seem entirely consistent with one referred to as 'young', Harold Jenkins links in any such possible inconsistencies with the early characterisation of Fortinbras as hot-headed compared to the dignified commander he is presented as in the end as,

a kind of consistency Shakespeare hadn't bothered to supply, 

which looks like the sort of thing one can be excused if you are Shakespeare but wouldn't be in most others.

Jenkins is persuasive in interpreting,

that it is Hamlet that rejects Ophelia's love and not she his,

which is entirely consistent with Hamlet's disgust at the ways of the world, the 'contagion', the 'sterile promontory' he sees it as and, in one of the more important-looking sources, the melancholy of Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy (1586) in which the world, like Denmark, is perceived as a prison. The disgust at procreation, Gertrude's lustful 'incest' with Claudius and all the Get thee to a nunnery diatribe might even, for some biographers, be a clue to Shakespeare's own misogyny. It could be tempting to associate one who was so gifted with words to have a compensating downside in some sort of personality disorder, as could have been the case with Mozart's and Beethoven's inordinate capacities for music but social misfit tendencies. However, if Hamlet is seen as prevaricating, lacking purpose and prone to moodiness, 

the contrast with Laertes is not one by which Hamlet is disparaged,

mostly because,

both meet their deaths because Hamlet is too magnanimous to 'peruse the foils', Laertes mean enough to take advantage of it.

It is in the Murder of Gonzago that poison poured into the ear is where the unlikely murder method comes from but the real life precedent was rumoured to be the murder of the Duke of Urbino in 1538. 

If Shakespeare always found wonderful names for even such minor characters as Moth, Bushy, Bagot, Tybalt and Bottom, the various sources and significances of those in Hamlet are all covered here and most of what one needs to know for a much fuller appreciation than that most of us had to be awarded an 'Advanced Level' qualification many, many years ago. 

Maybe it's too big for 'A' level, as Ulysses or Ezra Pound might also be. Of all the essential lines learnt in order to cite in the exam, to show we'd read it, I don't remember 'Hyperion to a satyr' being one of them but that might be more pertinent to what Hamlet means, more than 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark'. By now it seems that humanity was still a bit too ready to flatter itself that it lay halfway between gods and animal instincts.

But, in the end, presented with so much chapter and verse, I feel retrospectively a bit robbed. It was possibly at my unsuccessful interview to do English at Exeter University that I was asked what Hamlet was about, then. 

Harold Jenkins, given the monumental responsibility of editing the Arden Hamlet, concludes that it is,

the intermingling of good and evil in all life.

That's not far from what I said but it wasn't good enough for Exeter and I had to take the long hike to Lancaster which wasn't at the time credited with the high achievement it has been in recent years. Week 1 was given over to 'how to write a sentence' or some such given thing, such were their doubts about their intake. But that train has long gone. I'd like to think that the Chichester Oxfam shop continues to fill in some bits I missed. 

They didn't have a Don Quixote last week but that is an Autumn project, now ordered from the Library in the hope I can do 800 pages before it needs renewing. And also, The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the story of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth's most eminent murder victim. It does begin to look as though one drawback of being privileged is that people will try to kill you and sometimes succeed.