Provocations
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Love poetry of the 20th century is the most varied and sexually explicit since Classical literature. T. S. Eliot diagnoses the sexual sterility or passivity of modern man. Yet Neruda writes searing odes to physical passion, boiling with ecstatic elemental imagery. D. H. Lawrence similarly roots the sex impulse in the seasonal cycles of the animal world. Recalling long-ago, one-night pickups of handsome, athletic youths, Cavafy declares sex the creative source of his poetry. For Yeats, woman’s haunting beauty is the heart of life’s mystery; in “Leda and the Swan,” rape is the metaphor for cataclysmic historical change. Rilke contemplates the philosophical dilemma of love, the pressure upon identity, the tension between fate and freedom. Valéry makes language erotic: the poet is Narcissus and, in La Jeune Parque, the oracle raped by her own inner god. Éluard sees woman erotically metamorphosing through the world, permeating him with her supernatural force. Lorca imagines operatic scenes of heterosexual seduction, rape, or mutilation, and in “Ode to Walt Whitman” denounces urban “pansies” for a visionary homosexuality grounded in living nature. Fascinated but repelled by strippers and whores, Hart Crane records squalid homosexual encounters in subway urinals. Amy Lowell vividly charts the works and days of a settled, sustaining lesbian relationship, while H. D. projects lesbian feeling into Greek personae, often male. Edna St. Vincent Millay is the first woman poet to claim a man’s sexual freedom: her sassy, cynical lyrics of Jazz Age promiscuity with anonymous men are balanced by melancholy love poems to women. Auden blurred the genders in major poems to conceal their homosexual inspiration; his private verse is maliciously bawdy. William Carlos Williams is rare among modern poets in extolling married love and kitchen-centered domestic bliss.
For Dylan Thomas, youth’s sexual energies drive upward from moldering, evergreen earth. Theodore Roethke presents woman as unknowable Muse, ruling nature’s ghostly breezes and oozy sexual matrix. Delmore Schwartz hails Marilyn Monroe as a new Venus, blessing and redeeming “a nation haunted by Puritanism.” The free-living Beat poets, emulating black hipster talk, broke poetic decorum about sex. Adopting Whitman’s chanting form and pansexual theme, Allen Ginsberg playfully celebrates sodomy and master-slave scenarios. In “Marriage,” Gregory Corso imagines the whole universe wedding and propagating while he ages, destitute and alone. The Confessional poets weave sex into autobiography. Robert Lowell lies on his marriage bed paralyzed, sedated, unmanned. Anne Sexton aggressively breaks the age-old taboo upon female speech by graphically exploring her own body in adultery and masturbation. Sylvia Plath launched contemporary feminist poetry with her sizzling accounts of modern marriage as hell. With its grisly mix of Nazi fantasy and Freudian family romance, “Daddy,” after Yeats’ “Leda,” may be the love poem of the century. John Berryman’s Sonnets records a passionate, adulterous affair with a new Laura, her platinum hair lit by the dashboard as they copulate in a car, the modern version of Dido’s dark “cave.” Love and Fame reviews Berryman’s career as a “sexual athlete” specializing in quickie encounters. The sexual revolution of the 1960s heightened the new candor. Hippie poetry invoked Buddhist avatars for love’s ecstasies. Denise Levertov and Carol Bergé reverse tradition by salaciously detailing the hairy, muscular male body. Diane di Prima finds sharp, fierce imagery for the violent carnality of sex. Charles Bukowski writes of eroticism without illusions in a tough, gritty world of scrappy women, drunks, rooming houses, and racetracks. Mark Strand mythically sees man helplessly passed from mother to wife to daughter: “I am the toy of women.”
The 1960s also freed gay poetry from both underground and coterie. James Merrill, remembering mature love or youthful crisis, makes precise, discreet notations of dramatic place and time. Paul Goodman, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, Thom Gunn, Harold Norse, and Mutsuo Takahashi intricately document the mechanics of homosexual contact for the first time since Imperial Rome: cruising, hustlers, sailors, bodybuilders, bikers, leather bars, bus terminals, toilets, glory holes. Gay male poetry is about energy, adventure, quest, danger; beauty and pleasure amid secrecy, shame, and pain. Lesbian poetry, in contrast, prefers tender, committed relationships and often burdens itself with moralistic political messages. Adrienne Rich and Judy Grahn describe intimate lesbian sex and express solidarity with victimized women of all social classes; Audre Lorde invokes African myths to enlarge female identity. Olga Broumas, linking dreamy sensation to Greek sun and sea, has produced the most artistically erotic lesbian lyrics. Eleanor Lerman’s Armed Love, with its intellectual force and hallucinatory sexual ambiguities, remains the leading achievement of modern lesbian poetry, recapitulating the tormented history of Western love from Sappho and Catullus to Baudelaire.
* [From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (1993).]
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“STAY, ILLUSION”:
AMBIGUITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET*
Hamlet begins with a question: “Who’s there?” It’s midnight on the high, cold battlements of Elsinore, the Danish royal castle, and the guard is changing. The relief sentinel, the officer Barnardo, solicitously urges his fellow soldier, Francisco, to get to bed, but their first exchange is a hostile military challenge. The play’s opening bristles with tension, uncertainty, and fear.
“Who’s there?” could stand as an epigraph to Hamlet. Barnardo’s question might be applied to many moments in the play—such as the traumatic scene in the queen’s bed chamber where prince Hamlet stabs a bulging curtain and accidentally kills Polonius, the Lord Chamberlain, or the grisly scene set in a graveyard where Hamlet stares into the hollow eyes of Yorick’s skull. “Who’s there?” is also the theme of Hamlet’s soliloquies, where he questions his own identity and mortality. And finally, “Who’s there?” can possibly be understood as addressed to the audience itself—challenging our openness to the artist, whose work unfolds before us, and asking if and how we know ourselves.
The doubt and distrust on the dark battlements pervade the entire play, so that even small, enclosed spaces feel chill and gusty. Ambiguity blurs or qualifies every theme and character in Hamlet. No major work in literary history has been so contested in meaning or subjected to such a mass of alternative interpretations. Criticism has buried the play in questions, while stage and film productions continue to experiment with an astounding variety of readings and settings. No final answers are possible, because the text is embedded with contradictory material. The play seems to have changed every time we come back to it—a mysterious effect that intensifies as we ourselves age. Like Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Hamlet reflects back to us our hard-won experience of the great fundamentals of life, which are glimpsed but never fully grasped in youth.
The nagging, teeming questions of Hamlet include the following: Why does Hamlet delay and procrastinate in avenging his father the king’s murder? Was queen Gertrude a co-conspirator in her husband’s murder? Did she commit adultery with her brother-in-law Claudius before her husband’s death? Why is Hamlet depressed at the start of the play? Why does he contemplate suicide? Is he mad or only feigning madness? If both, when is he faking, and when is he genuinely out of control?
What was Hamlet’s relationship with his father? Is the king’s ghost real? Is it a demon? Does Hamlet believe in God? If he is a Christian, is he Catholic or Protestant? Should Hamlet be king? Exactly how old is he? If he is 30, as the gravedigger claims, why is he still a student? Does he love Ophelia, and did he ever intend to marry her? Why does Hamlet mistrust and abuse women? Why does Ophelia choose her father and brother over Hamlet? What happened to Ophelia’s mother? Why does Ophelia go mad? Is her death a suicide or an accident? Do Hamlet’s friends—the intellectual Horatio and the sycophantish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—have a sex life? If so, what is it? What are the Norwegian prince Fortinbras’ motives and goals? Why does king Claudius permit the Norwegian army to cross through Denmark? What is the future of Denmark as a sovereign nation?
&n
bsp; I will classify the ambiguities in Hamlet into three groups—philosophical, political, and psychological. To the philosophical category, I also assign questions of religious belief as well as language; to the political, matters of law and procedure; and to the psychological, issues of identity, emotion, and sexuality.
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For a century, scholarship has connected the philosophical explorations in Hamlet to the play’s position at a crucial juncture in the evolution of Western thought and science. A contemporary of Bacon, Shakespeare was writing between Montaigne and Descartes and between Copernicus and Galileo. Hamlet is a student at the University of Wittenburg, a center of the Protestant Reformation. It was in 1517 in Wittenburg that, according to popular legend, the dissident priest, Martin Luther, nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral door, a challenge to authority that dramatized the new, free, inquiring mind. Hamlet’s questions go beyond organized religion and its residual medieval dogma to the very existence of God. Holy Scripture is not in his thoughts—at least not in the way that Bible study would become central to evangelical Protestantism from the seventeenth century on. Rather, the codes and assumptions of Christianity seem to be receding and dissolving.
In the immediate intellectual background of Hamlet (which is Shakespeare’s adaptation of a medieval Scandinavian saga), the bold, questing individualism inspired by the Reformation was intensified by the skeptical spirit of Montaigne, who showed that a new literary genre—the essay—could be a vehicle of philosophical thought. The autobiographical candor and improvisational, associative form of Montaigne’s essays can perhaps be felt in Hamlet’s soliloquies, although scholars have debated how much Montaigne could or did directly affect Shakespeare. Insofar as Shakespeare belonged to an artistic London milieu that overlapped cultivated court circles, it seems quite possible that he was at least generally familiar with Montaigne’s ideas—above all his first principle, “What do I know?,” but also his relentless questioning of the traditional underpinnings of certainty and truth.
Hamlet scrutinizes virtually every aspect of human existence—from personal relationships and social organization to the fundamental nature of matter and being. The prince’s most famous soliloquy begins, “To be, or not to be: that is the question” (III.i.56).1 When Horatio calls out to the ghost stalking the battlements, “Stay, illusion”—that is, “Stop!”—he is also summarizing a major argument in Western philosophy (I.i.127). Is reality nothing but flickering illusions—the shadows projected on the wall of Plato’s cave of prisoners—or does some stable substratum remain, however it is transformed over time? Hamlet frequently describes life with metaphors of “dream” and “shadow” (II.ii.260–69). Though a supernatural visitation, the ghost or “apparition” embodies the delusion of earthly appearances (I.i.28). “Stay, illusion” also expresses the longing of the creative artist—Shakespeare as well as the producer/director Hamlet who co-writes the self-reflexive play-within-a-play—to linger in the realm of imagination, which Hamlet calls “a fiction” and “a dream of passion” (II.ii.562). Through art, life is seen not with scientific or philosophical clarity but with deeper truth.
As attested by his soliloquies, Hamlet is an agnostic about theological issues such as the existence of a hell where sinners are punished and from which demons masquerading as ghosts may fly. At one point, he acknowledges a transcendent being called “the Everlasting” who has published a “canon” of interdictions, including a law against suicide—the “self-slaughter” that Hamlet weighs at his darkest moment (I.ii.131–32). At times, he seems to envision a universe of godless blankness, like the modernist waste land. Elsewhere, he suggests there is an occult power that cannot be explained in secular terms: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (I.v.166–67). By the end, Hamlet feels “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” a fate inexplicably at work in human lives (V.ii.10). Is that force Christian or pagan or impersonally astrological? Its nature and operations are left ambiguous, even if its effects are felt in a play whose plot seems to lag and surge, then sweep from scene to scene in a way that never ceases to surprise us.
Pondering the link between soul and body, Hamlet wonders whether consciousness survives death. “What dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”: the body, entwining or strangling the soul, is shed like a snake skin at death (III.i.66–67). Hamlet strives to reconcile humanity’s divided nature—“how noble in reason,…in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god”—with our gross materiality, “this quintessence of dust” (II.ii.312–17). “What is a man?” he asks elsewhere—simply a “beast” who is content “to sleep and feed”? (IV.iv.33–35.) If simply driven by material needs, we are slaves to the flesh and its impermanence. One of Hamlet’s obtrusive patterns is its morbid imagery of squalid decay—a common motif of seventeenth-century literature and Mannerist painting. The ubiquity and certainty of decay (one of the few certainties possible in this play) press on Hamlet amid the general implosion of events. In a world of “garbage,” foul smells, and decay, objects and identities are continually fracturing—a slow disintegration where the opposite and fertile extreme in the regenerative cycle is either unperceived or undervalued (I.v.57).
Hamlet’s theme of universal decay—often flagged by the word “rank,” with its implication of putrid dampness—also affects the state of language. Words are Hamlet’s vital instruments, his primary medium of engagement with life. This most brilliantly intelligent of all characters in world literature is shown walking onstage while reading a book. But words always betray him, either by dragging him down to despair or luring him outward, as on Elsinore’s battlements, into dizzying doubts. (Horatio: “These are but wild and whirling words, my lord” [I.v.133].) Words in Hamlet are unreliable, slippery. And in the ethically compromised world of Denmark, they are corrupted by lies—the “forgeries” of Claudius and Polonius or the calculating flattery of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the unctuous courtier, Osric, which debase language and worsen Hamlet’s sense of nausea (II.i.20).
Hamlet wants language to be an escape from subjectivity, but as he ostentatiously puns and quibbles, words seem to multiply on their own and cloud his mind. “Words, words, words,” he says satirically of his reading (II.ii.194). As the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge may have been the first to argue, Hamlet’s mental activity disables him from acting as required in the real world: “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (III.i.84–85). That is, action stimulates the blood, while reading and thinking drain it. When he tries to goad himself into resolution by seeking absolute proof of Claudius’ guilt, Hamlet becomes enmeshed in contradiction: he is already convinced of the relativity of perception—illustrated when he contemptuously forces the busybody Polonius to see animal shapes in the mobile clouds (an image that Shakespeare’s Mark Antony uses to describe his own search for coherent identity). Hamlet is trapped in a median realm of floating ambiguity and conflicting impulses—impelled by duty toward action while unable to renounce the alluring, infinite qualifications of ever-shifting language.
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Now for the political ambiguities in Hamlet. As the play opens, there are undercurrents of political instability as well as popular unrest and anxiety in Denmark. Horatio almost immediately notes the political implications of the walking of the late king’s ghost: “This bodes some strange eruption to our state”—an image suggesting both ulceration and the tell-tale unearthing of a corpse (I.i.69). On the battlements, the officer Marcellus questions Horatio about the recent frenzy of activity in Denmark portending war or fear of invasion—arms and ship manufacturing going on day and night, seven days a week. The common people are unsettled by these projects, whose purpose is unknown. Political decisions at the top, which have life-and-death consequences for the masses, are concealed. In a pre-media age, inform
ation must come distorted and secondhand via rumor and the grapevine. Hence Marcellus’ interrogation of Horatio has a paranoid insistence: there are five questions in nine lines—“why,” “why,” “why,” “what,” and “who” (I.i.71–79).