100.

HAMLET AND THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

IN these days Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, and, apparently, while
engaged on this great drama, produced for the pleasure of the failing
Queen The Merry Wives of Windsor. The folly of Essex and his beheadal
left the forces of 'progression' demoralized, and the Court for the rest of
the Queen's reign in deepest depression.
The story of the Danish prince, who feigned madness in revenging his
father's death on an uncle who had murdered him, seized his throne,
and married his queen, was known in England when Shakespeare was a
boy. 2 It was dramatized about the time Shakespeare began his career
as a player by a second-rate writer, Thomas Kyd, who added to the story
the character of Horatio, the visitation of the Ghost, the play-scene, and
the introspective, wavering workings of the hero's mind. The play is
lost, but we know it was the tragedy of a youthful prince who fumed
passionately and impotently in a difficult and bloody situation. 3
Shakespeare knew it, possibly had acted in it, 4 and he made it the
basis of his matchless study of decadence of culture, disillusion, and
paralysis. His treatment of the 'bookish' leader we have seen in
successive portraits of Navarre, Henry the Sixth, Richard the second,
and Brutus. In Hamlet it is fullest and most finished. He is the
overgrown student, who would return to Wittenberg and its academic
seclusion, to books, foils, and plays, when his presence is called for, and
sternly demanded, on the field of public affairs. With almost every
conceivable spur to action, he can only reflect and comment, as in a
note-book, on the scene and task before him. He sees clearly, is
conscious of every feature, every detail, but is unable, as Lady Macbeth
would say (that little incarnation of volition), to 'screw his courage to
the sticking-place'. 1 His thought has been trained at the expense of
his will. And it results not merely in 'smoky ineffectuality' 2 but in
deeper difficulty. Seven times we see Hamlet in monologue-that is,
thinking. The fine language and feeling of all this brainwork must not
conceal its worse than futility. Instead of furthering his purpose, it
defeats it. His feigned madness, and deception of Ophelia (in order to
deceive others), and his chef d'uvre, the Play, are his undoing. They
betray him. So also the schemes of his enemies recoil invariably on the
contrivers' heads--the 'windlasses and essays of bias' (II. i. 65) of
Corambus 3 ( Polonius), Guildenstern, and Rosencrantz bring all three
to their death, while the elaborate piece of treachery by Laertes and the
King, with poisoned cup and foil, carries them both off, together with
the Queen. Unpremeditated action, on the other hand, does Hamlet
yeoman service. His effective doings are on the impulse. He follows the
Ghost, he reads the dispatches and leaps to the deck of the pirate, he
lays aside the drink and exchanges the foils, without thinking, and
'praised be rashness for it'. 4
A worse malady, however, than artifice or 'bookishness' remains.
Hamlet has noble qualities--fine moral sensitiveness, generosity, hatred
of hypocrisy. He almost worships his father, is devoted to his friend,
loves Ophelia for her simplicity and sweetness. He has a pure, 5
reverent nature--'this goodly frame the earth, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire'; 1 and 'What a piece of work is man! how noble
in reason . . . in apprehension how like a God!' 2 He speaks of 'sweet

Religion', 3 sees 'Providence in the fall of a sparrow', 4 the hand of God

'shaping our ends, rough-hew them as we may'. 5 And because he has a
noble nature, disillusion is the more cruel--his father's murder, his
mother's 'incestuous' marriage (for so it was regarded) with the
murderer (a despicable creature, 'a king of shreds and patches'), the
state of Denmark under such a ruler (drunken, and on the verge of
revolution), and Ophelia's petty lying. His culture fails him, his manly
strength, his popularity, and, chiefly, his good cheer.
He confesses to a 'bestial oblivion', 6 a morbid apathy which asks, 'Is
there any good in all our labour under the sun?' It is Albrecht Drer
"'Melancolia'", the disease which threatened through all the
Renaissance, the gloom not of occupation unworthy the faculty, nor of
opportunity too limited for the power (ars longa vita brevis), nor of evil
greater than the forces of good, but of good not worth the while.
Hamlet says in a vital moment, 'Thou would'st not think how ill all's here
about my heart; but it is no matter.' 7 And again, 'Since no man has
aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be!' 8 Here is
the root cause of his forgetfulness, procrastination, secretiveness,
moodiness, brooding on suicide and death, and those wild outbursts
more worthy of a lunatic than a sane man.
The malady was as out of place in Arden as the cynicism of Jaques.
Shakespeare studied it in the quiet of New Place, in consultation,
perhaps, with his neighbour and future son-inlaw, Doctor John Hall. It. is
as much a 'case', and the subject of a medical 'observation', as the
peculiar mental breakdown of
transparent honesty, in matters of sex as in everything else, and his
occasional licence of speech (in III. ii. 119-29, for example). The theory
that he had seduced Ophelia is worthy only of our sentimentalists. His
love and reverence for her are very real (III. i. 89 f.; v. i. 292-4). His
outburst, 'Get thee to a nunnery!', is for the benefit of Polonius, whose
hiding he has detected behind the arras ('Ha, ha! are you honest?').
Ophelia, wherein also the Poet may have had the advantage of
conference with his medicus peritissimus.
Stratford Calvinism was as strenuous and optimistic as Hamlet's
philosophy was fatalistic. Sturley writes in a dark hour to his friend
( 1598):
Brother Quyney, judge what I say. If the matter be compassed with
difficulties and impossibilities now, which before seemed open, easy,
possible and plain, know that the Lord of lords hath met with you. 1 He
seeth sufficient matter of your unworthiness both in you and us; but if
all this be worse reported and taken than indeed it is, and your
possibilities do stand as before, let this be a spur to stir you up more
courageously, a caveat to add, if it may be, more circumspection and
diligence. Ply Sir Edward night and day, weary him, howsoever he may
seem to be weary of your importunity 2 yet stick to him, that in the
night he may dream of you and waking may bethink him how he may be
rid of you: 3 which should be no way but by endeavouring to help and
farther you. 4

Stratford yeomen, mercers, glovers, wooldrivers, weavers had no

inclination, even when their houses were burned out and the lord of the
manor threatened their commons and liberties, to bewail the weariness
and unprofitableness of 'the uses of the world', 5 nor leisure in their
idlest moments to speculate 'how the dust of Alexander may stop a
bunghole'. 6
Queen and Court were sick with melancholy. Outwardly, on occasion,
she would make a show of vigour and even sprightliness, but to her
intimates she was a despondent, broken old woman. Sir John Harington,
writing to Sir Hugh Portman from Kelston on 9 October, gives a pitiable
picture of her condition in the spring:
For six weeks I left my oxen and sheep and ventured to Court
[apparently at Whitehall, before she went to Greenwich in May]. I feared
her Majesty more than Tyrone, and wished I had never received my Lord
of Essex's honour of knighthood [in Ireland]. 7 She is quite disfavoured
and unattired, and these troubles waste her much. She disregardeth
every costly cover, and taketh little but manchet and succory pottage.
Every new message from the City doth disturb her, and she frowns on all
the ladies. I had a sharp message from her, brought by my Lord
Buckhurst [Lord Burghley's successor as Lord Treasurer, the last of her
old Councillors] namely thus: