Elsinore Stands But Hamlet is In Ruins
1. A CHAPTER OF CHAPTER HEADINGS.
1. A chapter of chapter headings.
2. If the rest of this book is a café au lait, then this chapter is the froth on top.
3. Sentry duty.
4. Recipe for the contents of a sandwich.
5. The first time Hamlet speaks more than one line.
6. Before and after the Ghost’s second appearance.
7. This too too sallied flesh.
8. Slippage.
9. Tampering, or "How old is young Hamlet?"
10. A puppet show.
11. Cruces and conjectures after the puppet show.
12. "She is so concline to my life and soule."
13. Case in point:
a. Unnoted relevancies noted, and other things.
b. Niggly ors, or "Punctuation, and spelling, again."
14. Talking during the dumbshow.
15. take Armes against a sea of troubles.
16 A comprehensive bibliographical appendix
17. Milton’s defence of this book.
2. IF THE REST OF THIS BOOK IS A CAFÉ AU LAIT, THEN THIS CHAPTER IS THE FROTH ON TOP.
"Captain or colonel, or knight-at-arms," potential or actual readers of this! — Scholars and teachers of Hamlet! — and all who contribute to productions of it, or aspire to, on stage or off; and you, viewers and reviewers of performances of it; and you who read Hamlet for pleasure; or have been forced, for better or worse, into a greater acquaintance with it in the name of education and culture; or would withhold exposure to it because you don’t believe in its relevancy; and you too, corsair readers who grapple with whole libraries and bookshops for something different to read; and you others, Nimrods driven by curiosity, who have come this far in pursuit of your gratification, sublimely indifferent to your obligations!:
I had seen too much. I had seen production after production of Hamlet drag its wounded length across the stage; and had felt little of the proverbial relief and hope that sufferers expect after the post-traumatic passage of time, littered as that vista was by Hamlet-dramas distorted and diminished by the ripping of strips and substantial chunks from the body of the text, ostensibly in deference to inappreciative audiences and the Procrustean dictates of bottom-line box office but actually and usually through a lack of directorial ability and/or acting ability, and necessitating the conjurations of hype to resurrect the mutilated into a semblance of the walking dead. I had seen these same productions achieve sparseness of meaning and that sparseness credited to Shakespeare, and I had seen that the length and shape of every scene in these productions was "out of proportion" as art teachers used to say of limbs in student drawings of figure models. And beginning to wake up, I saw that what I had seen was the reflection in a mirror turned by nightmare toward reality. Then the "cup that runneth over" ran over. And indignation, and the hope of doing away with so much torture, goaded me to compare the foundational first three editions of Hamlet to each other and to later editions, and to the performances themselves.
Till then I had believed, with the unquestioning faith of a dog in its owner, that everything possible must have already been said about a text so ridden and reared on that the sun and moon were obscured by the dust of the hobby-horses and by the turrets of the sometimes interesting but more often merely grandiose Elsinores of influential critics, each of whose castles was fringed by the hovels that made up the villages of the lesser critics who till the ground next to them under their protection. But on inspection, the altered foundations of Hamlet’s abode, i.e., the texts that editors, directors, actors, and critics had made up amongst themselves, and always built on so confidently, turned out to be faulty; and my subsequent search for documentation of these faults (by building inspectors), found precious little of it.
Out of all this, this book (and a Hamlet with shape and snap), accrued bit by bit; offering optimum timings for bits of the play, and detailing the suppression and distortion of meaning at certain points in traditional and non-traditional performances and in the texts of scholarly and unscholarly editors; and to delight its readers, it unwraps and displays these lost meanings as fully as it can.
From another angle, it is a digressive commentary on a few passages of Hamlet, and contains the closest analyses ever done of them (till now), and favours the 1604 Second Quarto edition ninety-nine times out of a hundred over all other editions, and is jargonless but not an easy read, and sometimes highly speculative, self-contradictory, controversial, convoluted, repetitious and parodial, and at least ninety percent original, and has a hydra-headed dragon of a third chapter for the reader to battle, fearsome still, even though some of the heads and limbs have been amputated and relocated to other chapters (a moment’s inattention while wrestling with its convolutions, and lo, the reader’s reason vanishes and may never return), and it gives new answers to old problems and to the new ones only brought into the light during the incubiture of this book, and uncovers long-hidden facets in some of the characters that make them different and funnier or sadder than could have been imagined from the preceding interpretations of them, and it is often chock-a-block with other things, such as: the connection between stage speaking and stage action, and the inadequacies in the editing of Hamlet, and the greater meaning that is the offspring of the sound and sense of words, and so on, not quite ad infinitum.
Parallels (not gone into in this book) to what I have targeted exist in the rest of the theatre, and in other fields too, and will exist, no doubt, in the future. Good luck if you go hunting them.
Which makes me think that rather than exhibiting without warning a punctuation subtler than usual (for loosening the soil in which I hope to plant what I have to say about punctuation later on), the table of contents, or rather discontents, which precedes this preface will seem to some to heap into its space an undispellable confusion of several sorts of punctuational inconsistencies. Whoever finds this unbearable should take the advice which heralds several pages of segregated and assorted punctuation marks at the end of the second edition of a nineteenthcentury autobiography whose first edition had been derided by reviewers for having no punctuation whatsoever. That advice was, "Pepper and salt it as you like." But the subsequent changing and shortening of these chapter headings eradicated nearly all their punctuational differences too, and has left them looking only carelessly printed or poorly proof-read, so that what they exemplified must now be found spread out more thinly and cropping out only here and there throughout the book. Of course, in the end this change doesn’t matter, as the table of contents or, more accurately, of chapter headings, like a many-fingered signpost with no names on it, is a way of not saying that what is really in this book is an adventure, and that, as in most adventures, there are difficulties and expectations to overcome, and, that done, the rewards of understanding and of virtue to put up with.
Luckily for me, Dr. Lois Potter, the editor of The Two Noble Kinsmen in the third Arden edition of Shakespeare, and an exemplar of scholarly generosity, offered several corrections of fact, (which I incorporated), in an oral review of an earlier version of the manuscript. In return, a very inadequate but well-meaning genie, I granted only one of her several wishes by removing the appendices that clutteredup the end of the manuscript. Chapter 4 contains the means to reconstitute them. To have granted the rest of her wishes for the book, all good in themselves, would have meant ignoring my inability to do them justice and would have doubled its length without adding much content, so I have retained the original wilfulness of my exploration and the resulting proportions of this book; and left its lacunae and discoveries, for others to flesh out and exploit. If you finish this book, remember, reader, how much longer it could have been, and that contrary to custom, I have been merciful to you.
Waxing prophetic, I suppose this book will live (if it does not die at birth) as long as all its theories are not adopted. When they are, for sooner or later everything gets its turn in the sun in this world of ours (since ’’all stand on change like a midsummer rose" as medieval but always coeval Lydgate says in one of his wonderful lines, one of the ten greatest poetic lines in Eng. Lit. (and not because of the idea in it, but because of the embodiment of the ramifications-of-the-idea in the sound of the line relative to the lines which precede it)), then the innovators who will try to embody my ideas will be fought over till their embodiments are badly copied and watered-down and widely accepted. Then these poor and diluted copies will be dismissed by the next lot of young "vandals" in the name of some ism, and this old, polonial, white-bearded book, along with the copies, consigned to old fogiedom. Till then, au revoir.
3. SENTRY DUTY.
To those who only know 19th and 20th century editions (and the resulting performances) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play in its1604 Second Quarto version may seem as hard and distasteful as a green uncooked apple to someone expecting sweet apple sauce. But could it become an acquired taste eventually more satisfying and lasting than the "new and improved" sauce of any subsequent edition? And if we have any interest in Shakespeare, should we acquire it? And do the Second Quarto’s off-putting differences from current English accumulate enough meaning to merit preservation and cossetting and, finally, incorporation into performances? Will that need a new generation of directors and actors and editors? A glance down the beginning of this quarto, below, for its differences from any modernday counterpart and their possible significance, may catch your interest, but if it doesn’t, go to the end of the excerpt and read on. In the original, stage directions and people’s names are in italics.
Enter Barnardo, and Francisco, two Centinels.
Bar. Whose there?
Fran. Nay answere me. Stand and unfolde your selfe.
Bar. Long live the King,
Fran. Barnardo.
Bar. Hee.
Fran. You come most carefully vpon your houre,
Bar. Tis now strooke twelfe, get thee to bed Francisco,
Fran. For this reliefe much thanks, tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at hart.
Bar. Have you had quiet guard?
Fran. Not a mouse stirring.
Bar. Well, good night:
If you do meete Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivalls of my watch, bid them make hast.Enter Horatio, and Marcellus.
Fran. I thinke I heare them, stand ho, who is there?
Hora. Friends to this ground.
Mar. And Leedgemen to the Dane,
Fran. Give you good night.
Mar. O, farwell honest souldiers, who hath relieu’d you?
Fran. Barnardo hath my place; give you good night.Exit Fran.
Mar. Holla, Barnardo.
Bar. Say, what is Horatio there?
Hor A peece of him.
Bar. Welcome Horatio, welcome good Marcellus,
Hora. What, ha’s this thing appeard againe to night?
Bar. I haue seene nothing.
Mar. Horatio saies tis but our fantasie,
And will not let beliefe take holde of him,
Touching this dreaded sight twice seene of us,
Therefore I haue intreated him along,
With vs to watch the minuts of this night,
That if againe this apparision come,
He may approove our eyes and speake to it.
Hora. Tush, tush, twill not appeare.
Bar. Sit downe a while,
And let vs once againe assaile your eares,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we haue two nights seene.
Hora. Well, sit we downe,
And let us heare Barnardo speake of this.
Bar. Last night of all,
When yond same starre thats weastward from the pole,
Had made his course t’illume that part of heauen
Where now it burnes, Marcellus and my selfe
The bell then beating one.Enter ghost.
Mar. Peace, breake thee of, looke where it comes againe.
A word now to the knowledgable. Because I want the readers of this to have the use of the same material I have used, I am sure those who already know the content of, for instance, my next sentence but one, will forgive me for bringing oil to the Persian Gulf, though I expect they will find that what is offered, over and above the oil, harder to swallow. But any new publication on Shakespeare offers an Aunt Sally to be shied at.
The text used here, from the Second Quarto, was published in 1604/5 and is nowadays generally acknowledged to be on the whole more accurate and meaningful and nearer to what Shakespeare wrote than the texts of the First Quarto of 1603 and the Folio of 1623, which are our only other authorities for the text, as scholars have shown. But since over time the number of scholars who hold to a view waxes and wanes like the phases of the moon, dramatical reasons which stand on their own, as apart and solitary as Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, will be proffered later on for preferring the Second Quarto to the Folio for this part of the play. As to the First Quarto, it hardly qualifies as an authority, but for the sake of completeness, and having other uses for it here, you will find a relevant part of it, along with its First Folio counterpart, in the next chapter.
I hope this book will make it obvious that the parts of the Second Quarto quoted in it are intrinsically more meaningful than their counterparts in the Folio and also more meaningful than any Second Quarto adherent has till now proclaimed, and that then it will clearly be seen that Hamlet is a better play than it has been thought to be by other than its detractors; and people, who would not think so now, will later wonder how anyone could have thought otherwise. But this entails very close reading of the play and of some of what is here said about it, so that only so much should be read at one time as will not cause mental indigestion and non-comprehension. And to show that the Second Quarto is better I’ve had to illustrate the meaning of the words of the play with accompanying actions. They round off the verbal meaning or give the words a special meaning or sometimes contain almost all the meaning. And because we have no tradition for stage action as some of the Japanese drama has, I have had to plump for one action rather than another out of the many that appear at first sight possible (not all are equally valid), and of course a director or actor may come up with something better than what I have produced. But at least I will avoid the sillinesses and emptying of meaning of that frequent sort of Shakespearean production where a suitor says Here I kneel before you and remains standing up with no ironical or comic intent.
Let’s begin with the first line of the Second Quarto Hamlet: Enter Barnardo, and Francisco, two Centinels. and immediately we must ask "what should they do, and when should they speak?" Traditionally, till the ghost arrives they do sentry-like things: they patrol, they show apprehension, they salute each other, they exchange civilities and show apprehension again. It’s a serious business, and it’s done in the name of the playwright to build the proper atmosphere for the arrival of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and to show the fear generated by the uncertainty of an imminent attack, and there are those who heap-on more meaning still about how all this foreshadows other things in the play. And why not? even if this scene is seldom well performed because, as Gielgud wrote in 1937 in the book called John Gielgud’s Hamlet, to do it well requires mature and experienced actors who are not used for such small parts. But even when effective, it won’t do, because ... because ... O you, O accomplished reader, who have been given the accolade of your epithet for having come so far, you whose hunger for this knowledge has raised you in my estimation, and whose further companionship will be rewarded by the sight of an Arabian Nights’ transformation of a bit of a scene in a quotable play called Hamlet, both reason and road must now take us down Memory Lane to 1598 and 1599 in which years were published the First and Second Quartos respectively of Romeo and Juliet whose Prologue states that that play lasts two hours, and to 1623 when the Prologue to the Folio text of Henry the Eight, another play by Shakespeare, promises a length of two hours again; and now, O reader, let us go straight to the mathematical realm.
Henry the Eight and Romeo and Juliet take up about 27 pages each in the uniformly-printed Folio, and Hamlet about 30. Each full page has 132 lines, and each line ten syllables more or less. So a 2 hour and 10 minute performance of Hamlet, without a break, would average about 5 syllables per second. This is too fast for traditional acting and productions. Although some readers of this will find they can without any distortion say ten syllables of it in two seconds, to co-ordinate that with the necessities of the stage is another matter. (These days the pace of the occasional procession and fight is too slow and especially too prolonged). And since two years old can mean two years and ten months, maybe a two hour play can last two and three-quarter hours in actual performance, though I doubt it. But in this material world, two cannot be three (with the exception of alcoholic "happy hours"), though even an uncut three-hour Hamlet would be one of the fastest uncut Hamlets of this century, [faster than the uncut 3 hour and 35 minute one (not counting its interval), with which Bernard Shaw in 1926 castigated a John Barrymore version that was very long though cut], faster than the four hour uncut norm, and as fast (excluding the interval) as the one which that figuratively many-hatted man of the theatre, Dudley Knight, once saw at Haverford College long ago.
But what must one do to put on an uncut Hamlet in two hours and ten minutes, apart from getting material like a place to perform at, and good actors and a good director or, indeed, bad actors and a bad director?
If someone on stage is not already speaking, one’s words must start as soon as one makes an entrance so that time is not wasted moving about wordlessly, and necessary action must be done while talking unless the text indicates otherwise, and that unless will be dealt with later. The words must be said fast and naturally (so that Barnardo’s pronunciation of Horatio may sound like a two-syllable mathematical ratio with the aspirate as part of the ray); and will result in the unforced regularization into ten or eleven syllable lines of some seemingly longer lines up to now mislabeled irregular, or freer than others, and in speeches becoming more colloquial and less ’literary’, and in adjustments of portions of sound (and so of their meanings also) into those appropriate proportions which are the essence of poetry as of life in general. Perhaps this is why some of the characters’ names have an accordionlike ability to contract and expand. All this makes practical sense of Hamlet’s much-quoted but little-practiced speech to the visiting actors on how to speak in plays. (There’s more about this further on). And then, to save playing-time, there must be few pauses between phrases, and few between sentences, and seldom any between speakers: pauses being replaced by changes in physical and verbal expression, including volume, pitch, tone, and tune. This may keep the audience’s mind on its mental toes, even if it has been weakened by lengthy spells of inactivity in the overlong pauses after punchlines in TV sitcoms and stand-up comedy to give the slowest in the audience time to "get" a joke or at least get a second chance to laugh by enjoying the comedian’s body language during the pause. With exceptions, each line’s caesura, in the play, is not a pause but a change in the direction of the tune of the phrasing.
How does this affect Barnardo and Francisco?
They enter simultaneously from adjacent entrances. With their first visible step, each sees and at the same time recoils with fear from the other just far enough to take up defensive positions. Though this is funny, it is not to be played as comedy: they are brave men. Barnardo draws his weapon as he falls back while saying Whose there?, He then starts to reposition himself while Francisco (who knows that he is the sentry, and that Barnardo isn’t but has usurped his right of challenge by challenging him) indignantly says Nay answere me, jabbing his weapon at Bernardo on me, and adding Stand and unfolde your selfe. Stand should be said as if it meant Don’t move or Stay where you are, or Get up from your defensive crouching position.
Because it is bitterly cold (we hear that a few lines later), Barnardo’s clothing so completely covers him that he is visually unrecognizable; but though Francisco is also swathed into anonymity, Barnardo recognizes Francisco’s voice, and no longer wary, grasps the edge of his own hood and/or the edges of whatever he’s enveloped in, and to complete the effect he’s going for, says Long live in a disguised voice, and then much more loudly in his own voice, the King (as if he were Elvis Presley), as he flings off the hood or opens the front of his covering to become recognizable.
For the modern stage he has positioned himself to face Francisco and the audience as he does this. He can unfold himself in an additional way by saying each word in Long live the King to correspond to each stage in the unfolding of his limbs from the crouch he is in, throughout which his weapon is pointing at Francisco.
After Barnardo reveals himself, Francisco relaxes, saying Barnardo as one says I might have known it was you, and not any King, unless it be the king of jokers. There is also relief in his voice as he gasps out the B of Barnado. He has been holding his breath while trying to anticipate what the muffled-up figure would do. The comma after the word King, though it may be the misprint that all subsequent editions assert it is, is very appropriate, as the gasped B comes so close on King. (That comma could not be a compositor’s deliberate mistake but it could be an author’s natural one, in conformity with his intentions. The same can be said of Whose, whose position as the first spoken word makes it very likely to be an exact transcription (of the sound) from the manuscript, and deliberately not corrected by the very conscientious compositor: a view which, if I were swimming, would send mistaking critical hammerheads gliding towards me, for they prefer an always careless compositor. But now, in Milton’s words in Lycidas, my Oate proceeds. In acknowledgment of Francisco’s recognition of him, Barnardo lets go of his own outermost clothing, and exuberantly flings his arms out even more widely while announcing his Hee, meaning That’s right, it’s me. The doubled ee in Hee may mean that it’s stressed.
Now, the Folio version assumes that the dot, after the o of Barnardo. is a mistake and replaces it with a question mark. This nips the good-humoured and relaxing effect of Hee in the bud, destroys an essential link in a comic sequence, and imposes excessive doom and gloom and uncertainty, so that whoever is attracted to the comedic view aired here could easily think that by 1623, the year of the Folio’s publication and the seventh year after Shakespeare’s death, the acting tradition of Hamlet had already deteriorated, or was about to because of editorial revision.
This thought is supported by the integrity of a specific passage’s punctuation in Claudius’s first speech, (Act 1, scene 2, in the Hamlet Second Quarto, a passage which can rightly be accused of a sparsity of punctuation but not, so as to be believed by me, of committing mispunctuation. Editors have not only fabled and erred in rejecting its punctuation as obviously wronging the meaning of what it punctuates, but also in their understanding of the passage, and in their retouchings of both (and so herded its speakers along wrong paths). A look at their mispunctuation, and their explanations of the resultant meaning, when they had the wit to see the need for comment and the opportunity to do so, will make this clear. The Second Quarto goes
Now followes that you knowe Young Fortinbrasse,
Holding a weake supposall of our worth
Or thinking by our late deare brothers death
Our state to be disjoynt, and out of frame
Coleagued with this dreame of his advantage
He hath not failed to pestur vs with message
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father, with all bands of lawe
To our most valiant brother, so much for him:
The Folio Hamlet, the preference for which has misled so many, has the following punctuation, which can also stand for the minor variations on it by later editors:
Now followes, that you know young Fortinbras,
Holding a weake supposall of our worth;
Or thinking by our late deere Brothers death,
Our State to be disjoynt, and out of Frame,
Colleagued with the dreame of his Advantage;
He hath not fayl’d to pester vs with Message,
Importing the surrender of those Lands
Lost by his Father: with all Bonds of Law
To our most valiant Brother. So much for him.
One preliminary problem is to find the correct grammatical subject of Colleagued. Some have said Fortinbras; some supposall; and one, getting warmer but skirting by the grammar, has said the general idea contained in the second, third, and fourth lines. Who cares to — may ravel out why these aren’t exactly the solutions to this interwoven problem of grammar and meaning. The correct grammatical subject is the phrase out of frame, clearly connected to the predicative Coleagued in the Second Quarto version, and only identifiable as the subject in that. This forces me to introduce the subject of Jacobethan punctuation which I do not wish to enlarge on here, other than to say that the Jacobethans often used a punctuation mark to divide a group of words into its two most important subdivisions, and often leaving the subdivisions unpunctuated, or else punctuating them in the same way. This is exemplified in Francisco’s first line in the Second Quarto
Nay answere me. Stand and unfolde your selfe.
and in the Folio, which puts a colon after me. (Nowadays we would spell and punctuate: No, answer me. Stand, and unfold yourself.) Both the Folio and the Second Quarto adhere to this type of division, which needs a separate paper for a thorough delineation. The Folio’s division from Now to father has misled so many for centuries, whereas the Second Quarto’s main division of it, into two, occurs between disjoynt and its adjoining and, or at least allows one to think so, and enables Claudius, a master of long sentences, to make a beautifully natural complex sensible statement out of the whole section, bearing in mind that out of frame is a leapt-to consequence of disjoynt, and this dreame of his advantage substitutes for Holding a weake suposall of our worth, and that the or between thinking and holding is not an ultimatum that forces one to choose between them for ever but is non-exclusory like the or in the gardener who is always weeding or tendinq the garden in other ways. One understands this speech so much more easily when it is spoken with all this in mind than when it is, as it is here, of necessity, so laboriously explained. It also sounds better in the Second Quarto’s version than in the Folio’s. Catherine Fitzmaurice, that great teacher of actors who do or want to do Shakespeare, sometimes asks actors to ignore the punctuation of Shakespeare texts and work out their own based on the meaning (she is not alone in this but I mention her because her work, not in this field alone, should be better known). This is for all practical purposes a sine qua non as nearly all the texts an actor comes in contact with are edited, particularly with regard to punctuation, and so, often, misleading; though even the speaker of an ’unedited’ text can learn much from punctuating from scratch though the results may not coincide with mine. Am I in the wrong? Again? This is perhaps the place to mention Percy Simpson’s delightful florilegium of Elizabethan punctuation. So much for punctuation.
Now for an example of integrity in the Second Quarto that includes more than punctuation. It too occurs in Act 1, Scene 2, when Hamlet’s mother asks why, when all that lives must die, the death of his father seems so special to him, and he answers:
Seemes Maddam, nay it is, I know not seemes,
Tis not alone my incky cloake coold mother
I suppose the Folio editor misread the first line of this as I know not ’seems’ (instead of reading I know ’not seems’), and so could not make sense of the second line in which ’coold mother’ means ’could give birth to and nurture’, and which he then miscorrected into:
Seemes Madam? Nay, it is: I know not Seemes:
’Tis not alone my Inky Cloake (good Mother)
Which led to this, representative of modern times:
’Seemes’, madam? nay, it is; I know not ’seems’.
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
When we should have had, with modern punctuation:
’Seems’, madam? Nay, it is. I know ’not seems’.
’Tis ’not’, alone, my inky cloake could mother;
Paraphrased, the second line means, in part: It’s only ’what is’ that could produce my mourning cloak and create my melancholy. And since Shakespeare surely visualized enriching actions for his words, Hamlet’s mother may have affectionately, as mothers do, just adjusted a knot on Hamlet’s cloak whose black inky color is in keeping, or rather, punningly "in key," with the requirements of mourning. Besides, this second line retains the sound which the Folio version had impoverished. The rest of this speech of Hamlet’s has been so mangled by editors that it must be dealt with, but later, as the length of this excursus seems to have the extension of the Rift Valley across Africa.
"That strain I heard was of a higher mood":
"But now my Oate proceeds" to where we left Barnado saying: Hee, in confirmation that he was the Barnardo in question, which Francisco accepts, and follows up by stressing, in his turn,
the You of:
You come most carefully upon your houre,
The caesura comes after carefully, and not after come as I once heard it done for no good reason and to no good effect, the actor maintaining it didn’t matter either way, and that it was his choice anyway. But the right: You’ve really taken the trouble to be on the dot is not the same as the wrong: You’ve arrived exactly on the dot, (which Andre Gide also gets wrong in the same way in his version of Hamlet in French). Implying that neither coming most carefully and being exactly on time is like Barnardo, Francisco’s voice expresses his surprise not only on the first phrase but even more on the second.
How does Francisco know the time so exactly? Has a bell just struck the twelve strokes of midnight? It has, because to repudiate Francisco’s imputation that he has arrived earlier than usual with the assertion that he is on time and that it is Francisco that is remiss, Barnardo replies:
’Tis now strooke twelfe, get thee to bed Francisco,
But why does Barnardo say the first four words of that? Why not Tis twelfe or Twelfe’s now strooke? Why twelfe? Because, thinking the Ghost may soon arrive and wanting to be rid of Francisco before it comes, he wants to make light of his unwonted punctuality by pretending to listen to the chimes, and emphasizing at the twelfth chime that it’s time for him to take over.
How fast does that bell strike? Once per syllable is too fast: it would make Francisco start his You come most carefully upon your houre before he could know the time. But by having it strike after not quite every two syllables (with the last chime coinciding with the word twelve), and the first with the end of Barnardo’s word King, Barnardo, in doubt as to whether it is one o’clock, at which time the ghost of the King previously appeared, can give a quick wary look right and left to see if the Ghost is there while Francisco, not in the know, is relievedly saying Barnardo. And not seeing it but hearing the next chime, Barnardo says his Hee with relief, as well as with his natural exuberance, now tipped with artifice.
Barnardo says Tis now strooke twelfe as if counting the chimes, expressing suspense with now and with strooke, and exuberance with twelfe. And to hurry Francisco away and divert possible suspicion as to why, adds get thee to bed Francisco. Enamoured with the remembrance of his performance of his Hee, and to remind Francisco of it and repeat its success, Barnardo stresses the thee triumphantly.
But a question arises, and spreads out like a ripple in a pond. And it is: Why is Francisco named? His part in the play will soon be over. We don’t need to know his name. It makes the line longer. Barnardo could have said his say and left it out, putting in some Elizabethan phrase for pronto instead. Is it there so Bernardo can say to bed Francisco in a coaxing woman’s I have something for you voice, elongating the e of bed and the i of cis? He needs the length of the phrase to establish his joke, and the name to point it. Meanwhile Francisco has a satisfying swig from Barnardo’s bottle.
Traditionally, Francisco’s next words:
For this reliefe much thanks, tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at hart.
pause only after cold, making And I am sick at heart an afterthought limping some way behind, almost unattached, and just another unpleasantness like the cold; or both phrases are done as if having no relation to thanks; but an innovative pause after thanks supplies two following reasons for being thankful, and not just the "bitter" one. But alas, this is a mortal world, and that which has been perdurably established suddenly and unbelievably crumbles away, and so I would have cherubs cover their eyes at what comes next, for it may never have happened even in a Hamlet in (whisper the words), Sh! Sh! Shakespeare’s lifetime. For, once he has recognized Barnardo, Francisco has felt free to lower his guard somewhat, and so in the most natural way, so natural that it requires no comment from Barnardo, he has begun to pee, preferably into the abyss beyond the battlements, if there is one, and of course with his back to the audience as there are some effects that even good actors cannot be expected to produce, and nor should they if they could, for a play is only a reality that represents a reality, and is not the reality that is represented. So Francisco has begun to pee while beginning the line You come most carefully upon your houre, and the rest of the line, which is most of it, he says over his shoulder, and he muffles-up again during the much thanks of his next bit of speech, where the word relief refers naturally to his stint of duty and Barnardo’s alcohol. Only the audience will and should give relief an additional meaning.
But his ’tis bitter cold, with the stress on bitter, reflects not only his view of the weather but also the state of his recently exposed penis, as an appropriate movement of his buttocks can indicate. His And I am sick at hart stresses its am, and with a change in voice converts sick at hart into a modulated mockery of his imputedly love-struck condition already referred to by Barnardo, whose sense of humour it also pays a homage to, for Barnardo to notice. But Barnardo, though looking at himself in the mirror that Francisco has just become, does not see himself and does not catch on to the joke, and finds what Francisco is doing rather strange, so with the stress on quiet and only half-jokingly implying that something must have occurred during Francisco’s watch to make him act like that, asks him Have you had quiet guard? Francisco, now well into his new role of humorist, sticks out an arm, and dividing the phrase Not a mouse stirring into a triptych with a mouse at its center, makes his fingers scurry as he says stirring. In deciding to accept Francisco’s assurance that nothing has happened, Barnardo allays his own suspicion, which his own unease arouses in him, that Francisco may just possibly have had a supernatural experience just before Barnardo’s arrival. But still implying that Francisco is acting a little strangely, he refers back to his own to bed joke, and dismisses Francisco with a Well, good night: with a bawdy inflection on the good. The Folio’s unthinking regularization of good night to goodnight prevents this from even being thought of as possible (in the same way as your selfe in unfolde your selfe has been regularized by modern editors into Yourself, so nipping in the bud the possibility of the acting nuance of just show me who you are, and no funny business.
Barnardo continues:
If you doe meete Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivalls of my watch, bid them make hast.
Readers will be perhaps both surprised and pleased that I have nothing I wish to say about the first of these two lines. But of the word rivalls, and as to why Shakespeare chose and retained it when he could have used the not quite the same but more easily comprehensible partners which replaces it in the First Quarto, I say "ah," because in using rivalls Barnardo is carrying on his sexual joke, writhing his hips as he says it, splitting the word into writh and alls, and referring to Horatio and Marcellus as his equivalent to Barnardo’s female partner. Of course, this does not mean Barnardo is homosexual. By his lights, he is good-humouredly disparaging homosexuality, implying This is the best that I can do (and of course I won’t do it) and it’s no substitute for what you’re about to get. He’ll do anything for a laugh. Since all the lines that allow the possibility of conscious humour have been cut out of this section of the First Quarto, it has no reason to retain rivalls, and partners is the logical choice for a so-harshly-cut acting version; as is its upon your watch for the earlier Second Quarto phrase upon your hour whose supporting lines have also been cut out. The cutter must have been rather pleased with himself for not only cutting out all that stuff about the time, but for being able to insert information by substituting the one word watch for hour. This doesn’t mean I approve. But it does mean these changes were deliberate, and not due to the cutter’s faulty memory, as some have suggested. Going back to the Second Quarto version, couldn’t one entertain the idea (and be entertained by it in turn) that the phrase: The rivalls has the same relation to The arrivals as the play’s first word: Whose does to Who is?
Impatience stresses the e-less fast form of the word haste in the rivalls line.
The First Quarto and the Folio have no comma in the next stage direction:
Enter Horatio, and Marcellus.
What the comma indicates is that Marcellus is just behind Horatio, which is why Horatio is the first to answer Francisco’s challenge.
The ho in Francisco’s I thinke I heare them, stand ho, who is there? is only used to address someone a distance away, which is where Horatio and Marcellus should be. Though technically off-duty, Francisco, and not Barnardo, challenges Horatio and Marcellus because he is nearer them than Barnardo; and dramatically, a situation is coming up that requires Barnardo to be silent from now on. So Barnardo, doing his duty as sentry, is drawing away from Francisco when Francisco’s shouted whisper I thinke I heare them makes him stop to await the outcome. To give the impression that there is more space between the two than there actually is (Elizabethan stages were smaller than some of ours), the I heare them is louder than the I thinke because Barnardo has indicated he has difficulty hearing by putting his hand to his ear after thinke. Properly done, this exchange is funny and is a set-up for more fun.
A reprise. Francisco turns back to Horatio and Marcellus, stopping them with his still louder stand ho; and adds a who is there? that is full of suspicion as he peers and steps nearer them with an ostentatious caution which is meant to show them he is not to be fooled, or fooled with. When Horatio answers Friends to this ground, all Horatio says at first is Friends, but when Francisco follows this up with a fierce thrust of his weapon towards him, he sees it has been taken as referring to his relationship with Marcellus, and a trace of humour tinges his hastily added explanatory to this ground. And at Francisco’s immediately-following motion of his weapon towards Marcellus, to indicate it’s now his turn to answer, Marcellus answers And Leedgemen to the Dane, having to add the to the Dane when Francisco makes it clear with a further pedantic nudge of his weapon that just the word Leedgemen leaves it an open question who they are liegemen to. I think the capital L of Leedgemen enables us to assume this word may have been given great importance by Marcellus’ voice, as he must have mistakenly thought that it alone, on top of Horatio’s words, would have satisfied Francisco. Further away from them than Francisco, Barnardo does not hear or does not understand their replies,
Satisfied, Francisco says Give you as he turns away; and walking towards Barnardo, underlines his next two words, good, and night, with a couple of jocular backward jabs towards them with his weapon, to pleasantly remind them of his challenges, and their reactions. Marcellus, following Francisco more slowly and seeing the unrecognizably muffled-up Barnardo, takes him for a partner (of Francisco’s watch) who is waiting for Francisco so that they can leave together, and calls out; O, farwell honest souldiers, who hath reliev’d you? (The short far, not pronounced as far, means the vowel of well should be lengthened, which gives different acting possibilities than "farewell" would, and suggests the speaker is at a distance from the others). Francisco replies: Barnado hath my place; give you good night. The First quarto, having cut out the foundation for having the word souldier in the plural, very logically prints it in the singular. The editors of the Folio and all subsequent editions, not having seen how and why souldiers can and must be plural have singularized it, assuming that only Francisco was addressed and addressable. Indeed, to further justify the second ess of souldiers, pile the Ossa of Barnardo hath my place on top of the Pelion of souldiers: for if the question had been O, farwell honest Soldier, who hath reliev’d you? Francisco need only have said Barnardo, the hath my place would be otiose. But since, like all good writers, Shakespeare did not put in mere filling to complete a line but filled it out with further useful and necessary detail, hath my place shows Barnardo’s puzzlement at why souldiers was in the plural when he knows that he is the only one leaving, so he stresses the my of Barnardo hath my place, implying I don’t know what other soldiers you’re talking about (perhaps he was an ex-editor). And then like an exiting vaudeville actor who believes you can’t have too much of a good thing, he again says Give you good night, but in a higher and louder voice, extending and waving his armed arm along give you, and as if referring to a secret known only to them, repeats the jab on good and the jab on night of his previous Give you good night, a humorous shorthand economy that is like saying Joke number 7 to someone who knows the joke and its number. (This jabbing of course is interpreted as a sexual innuendo by Barnardo.)
By the time Francisco gets off stage, Marcellus and Horatio are near Barnardo who has his back to them, having watched Francisco go off. Marcellus assumes Barnardo is Francisco’s partner and not his relief, and that he has not yet left because he is adjusting his footwear. But when Marcellus tries to find Francisco’s replacement elsewhere by yelling Holla, Barnardo, startled, jumps up and round to face them, which makes his hood fall off, and lets Marcellus recognize him, call out Barnardo, and beckon to him.
Annoyed at being and appearing to be startled, Barnardo doesn’t budge. Instead, he asks Marcellus to speak, not shout, which is what Say means in his next line: Say, what is Horatio there? Marcellus beckons again. Still peeved and still requiring Marcellus to speak as a sign of giving in first, Barnardo adds what. (We would nowadays put a question mark after what.) Marcellus beckons again. Barnardo, weakening, asks is Horatio there? his tone implying that he, Barnardo, would approach if he were. Horatio, jocularly saying A peece of him, unmasks that piece of him that is his own face and shoulder and arm. Honour satisfied, not one to hold a grudge, in a good humour again, and wanting to make up for his previous obstinacy, Barnardo says Welcome Horatio, welcome good Marcellus, shaking Horatio’s hand during the first phrase, and embracing Marcellus (better known to him, and nearer in rank) during the second phrase, and pronouncing each word with such fervour that, pretending to think that Barnardo is so friendly to them because he needs reassurance from them after seeing the ghost again, Horatio says;
What, ha’s this thing appeard againe to night?
Nowadays, we might punctuate ’What? Has this thing appeared? Again? Tonight?
Taking him up on his joke and punning the I into Ay meaning Yes, Barnardo says I, then pauses, have seene nothing. He makes the slight pause after the I to give room for them to register their first reactions, before he goes on and stresses seene in a way that suggests something unseen may have been there. Or more probably, seene means seene and his eyebrows rise three times, once each at I (with a slight pause), at have seene (another slight pause), and at nothing. Perhaps he brings his brow closer to them in doing this, but he is clearly joking and not overbearing.
I have seene nothing is sandwiched-in by blocks of ten-syllable lines. Sandwiched short lines point to the presence of wordless actions which take up the time needed to lengthen the short line into a ten syllable line. So Horatio and Marcellus each have a total of five syllables’ worth of synchronic wordless time to divide, and go on reacting in, after I, after have seene, and after nothing.
But do bunches of short lines as close to each other as bananas on one stem, extrude additional wordless action? Obviously, the twenty syllables of the play’s first five spoken lines equal two ten-syllable lines, and don’t. But the four-line bunch depending from tis bitter cold may reward investigation, and the spoken six depending from to the Dane do need to be looked into. But the subject of "Wordless action" can be put off for now, (it needs a paper all to itself). The heavens are merciful!
And yet so much having been said about so little, the next speech, which consists of the comparative vastness of seven lines, may lead readers to expect a commentary resembling the Arabian roc whose outspread wings hid the vastness of the sky from sight. Not so. Its sense is plain. It divides into four parts which the actor, noting the grammar and punctuation, should preserve. They are: line 1, lines 2 and 3, lines 4 and 5, and lines 6 and 7. It is:
Horatio saies tis but our fantasie,
And will not let beliefe take holde of him,
Touching this dreaded sight twice seene of vs,
Therefore I haue intreated him along,
With vs to watch the minuts of this night,
That if againe this apparision come,
He may approoue our eyes and speake to it.
In this speech, without seeming to do so consciously, the actor can comment on metaphorical and unusual words, enrich their meanings, and make them more theatrical and not just metaphorical, as with the word rivalls and the word not, which were both more than mentioned earlier on. For example, let Marcellus already have a loaf of bread in one hand when he says take holde, and be slicing it before saying touching. Let him offer a slice before and after intreated him. Let him cut it into smaller bits before and while he says minute, and let Barnardo accept a piece before Marcellus says approoue. Will that work?
The next two lines:
Hora. Tush, tush, twill not appeare.
Bar. Sit downe a while,
contrast impatience with patience. Being equivalent to a ten-syllable line, these lines leave no time for additional wordless action. The actors don’t sit down yet, because Horatio is, in a way, still standing up for his opinion. What Barnardo says shows he has lost track of the time of the Ghost’s possible reappearance and it is only natural that we do too.
Barnardo continues:
And let us once againe assaile your eares,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we haue two nights seene.
At assaile and fortified perhaps Marcellus will rub his own ears against the cold and then appropriately fortify himself by eating the bread. But such things, if not done well, should not be done at all.
Two nights is stressed to give the meaning Two nights are no small potatoes, but the legato of the line should not be broken up (see smoothnesse in Hamlet’s speech to the actors). The awkward What we have two nights seene is not the completion of the compound sentence that starts Barnado’s speech, as editors would have it. It is the non-awkward beginning of a new explanatory sentence which does not get completed because Horatio, not wishing to hear a eulogy of a ghost he does not believe in, cuts in with his: Well, sit we downe. That short line joins Barnardo’s previous line to make ten syllables, so there’s no additional wordless action.
In that reluctant
Well, sit we downe,
And let vs heare Barnardo speake of this.
the Well is most probably a resigned There’s nothing else for it. And then Horatio points out something to sit on. His heare and speake are resigned and sceptical.— The above part of this paragraph, reminiscent of much low-yield commentary, are of little, it seems to me, interest in themselves. Then why leave them in? To bring out the value of the neighbouring comments by contrast, as a small person on a long hill shows the hill’s size in a landscape painting.
And now Barnardo says:
Last night of all,
When yond same starre thats weastward from the pole,
Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven
Where now it burnes, Marcellus and my selfe
The bell then beating one.
Barnardo begins Last night of all as he starts to sit down. Then he stops speaking. The spotlight is (metaphorically) on him, and he intends to make use of his opportunity, and he flicks a mote of dust from his seat after examining it critically from several angles, spreads himself out and makes himself comfortable, motions to see if the others are ready, and at their signal for him to proceed, says When yond ... Now it isn’t that he’s been inspired to make a two and a half line lyrical outburst, though I have heard it done so, touchingly, but out of character and, in a sense, out of the play. (For beautifully argued traditional views on the performance of the beginning, see the reference to Coleridge in the next chapter, as well as the anonymous 1847 commentator. Both base themselves on the Folio, and neither may have had the benefit of the Second Quarto.) No, Barnardo wants to get everything so absolutely right in his account of the Ghost, that he forgets it may soon appear. And here the Folio version is extraordinarily helpful in keeping a reader on the right track. Look at what it prints as his second line:
When yond same Starre that’s Westward from the Pole
The same words, but with that Folio innovation: the capitalization of words not usually capitalized (a subject central to my piece on the beginning of The Tempest). Why capitalize these particular words? Because each is an indicator of a change of some sort. Here they turn the line of the voice into three steps going down, the last two of the three being explanations, and the first explanation: that’s Westward limits the whereabouts of yond same Starre, and the second explanation: of the Pole narrows down the position of yond same Starre that’s Westward even further, helping Horatio find what Barnardo’s finger is pointing at. Had made its course and t’illume that part of Heaven and Where now it burnes, are a flight of three more explanatory steps. Heaven is pronounced almost like hen. Marcellus and myself is a two-step explanation, not one. The Folio’s capitalization of Bell in The Bell then beating one shows that line to be a two-step explanation too. Perhaps Barnardo puts his hand near his heart on one’. (Twelve strokes create suspense; one stroke, surprise.) Next comes the stage direction:
Enter Ghost.
and Marcello’s line:
Peace, breake thee of, looke where it comes againe.
But how can Barnardo break off when he’s already broken off, having apparently seen the Ghost?, the Folio editor must have asked this too, and solved the problem, logically and wrongly, by making the Ghost enter after Marcello asks Barnardo to break off (for a reason which could be embodied in stage business, such as having the bell strike one and having Barnardo be too engrossed in his narrative to hear it). But, in fact, what happens in the Second Quarto is that Barnardo breaks off at one because he sees Marcello, who has just seen the Ghost enter, put a warning finger to his lips to tell him to be quiet. Not having seen the Ghost, Barnardo opens his mouth to protest, and Marcello says Peace, meaning Shut up. Indignantly, Barnardo opens his mouth again, to ask why, and Marcello urgently says breake thee off. The Ghost is getting nearer. Finally Marcello, with suppressed anger at what appears to him Barnardo’s obstinate stupidity, takes Barnardo’s chin in one hand and points it at the Ghost, saying looke, and with the index finger of his other hand points at the oncoming Ghost with a conclusive where it comes. That where it comes is directed to Barnardo (who of course has looked in the wrong direction) and is separated by pitch from againe. which is addressed to Horatio. From here-on to the end of the scene, bits of humour flower here and there out of the action, and are only apparent to the audience, and not to the characters.
A fringe of assorted remnants, unrelated to each other, remains. If the names Francisco and Barnardo indicate they are foreign mercenaries, how does that modify their behaviour? Can what should be done, in this beginning bit of Hamlet, be done in 75 seconds, or even in 90 or 105 or 120? And do the commas that end some speeches, and that look as if left on the page to flaunt an attitude of So what, what’s a misprint or two? point only to speech after speech not completed because cut-off by the next speaker? And to restore some lines to Shakespeare, haven’t I been harsh to the editors of them, whose good points I have taken for granted and not even mentioned? And indeed even their unacceptable emendations and explanations pinpointed problem sites, and so I am indebted to them, and to my son Saul whose eagle-eyed mind fortunately looked this chapter over before anyone else saw it.
Return Alpheus. It may please you to know (if it is not already known to you) that these two words are from Milton’s Lycidas, O all-conquering reader, and it may please you even more that the next five words are: the dread voice is past.
4. RECIPE FOR THE CONTENTS OF A SANDWICH.
Montaigne mentions an author whose books consisted almost entirely of quotations from other authors. Indeed, some readers of this book may think that the names of the authors of this book would be more accurately subscribed as Kozubei and Shakespeare (putting the subsidiary author last) if that didn’t raise, or more accurately, jerk-up Kozubei beyond his deserts. Kozubei, by the way, is the pseudonym of the even more unknown John Coatsby, and so should be pronounced as three English-sounding syllables: "cot," "soo" as in "forsook," and "bay," but with the "t" starting the "soo" (like the "ts" in the English word "coats") and with the stress on "Ko." It is not Japanese.
It should boost sales of this book in Austria and from Anatolia to Alaska, wherever this storied name is known.
Still, it would no doubt be a good thing if the thick slabs of chapters of Kozubeian prose were for once parted by the insertion of a chapter, different, varied, and pertinent, made up of other authors in other styles. But the thought came that, if printed in full, its cuckoo-like bulkiness in this wren’s nest of a volume and the drudgery involved in obtaining the necessary permissions and copyright costs would be prohibitive. The inside of this sandwich would contain:
1. A facsimile of the beginning of the First Quarto. If the inferiority of this text, in every point where it differs from the Second Quarto and Folio beginnings, is not apparent after they are closely compared, then the mind of the reader of the three didn’t mesh with them. Or else became a faulty cog-wheel preventing its discriminatory faculty from working properly.
2. A facsimile of the beginning of the Second Quarto.
3. A facsimile of the beginning of the Folio.
Even the comparison of a few of the same lines from each of these facsimiles is very worthwhile.
4. Hamlet’s speech about acting. Any edition of Hamlet will render up the bones of the ideas of the speech (though its dramatic resurrection can be best achieved by using the flesh and bones of the Second Quarto version of it). Although it is familiar in these days as a critique of acting in Shakespeare’s time, and though only the "tripping" part is of immediate relevance to my third chapter, all the sins of acting mentioned in it still happen every day and can be caught condensed into just one well-thought-of degenerate professional performance if you are lucky. It’s a checklist for those whom presentday theatrical degeneracy can amuse while hoping for something better to turn up.
5. The pertinent excerpt from an anonymous article in The Quarterly Review, (London, England) Vol. LXX1X, December 1846-March1847, pages 310-335, entitled "Recent editions of Shakespeare." Good old Furness reprinted this excerpt in his Variorum but, appropriately for his purposes, without its preceding paragraph. I would, however, retain that for its consolatory truth. The whole article deserves to be reprinted in one of those potluck collations devoted to critical appraisals of some aspect of Shakespeare.
6. Another very worthwhile traditional view of the beginning, by S. T. Coleridge. The collected works. Vol 5: part 2. Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Princeton university Press (Bollingen Series LXXV). 1987. Pertinent are pages 294-295 from his notes for his third lecture on Shakespeare delivered in 1819, and pages 138-141 from his notes for his sixth lecture on European literature (1818). Less accurate versions of these notes can be found more easily in other editions. As he did with Johnson, Shakespeare brought out the best in Coleridge.
7. An excerpt on the "sallied flesh" soliloquy, from "The Hamlet of Edwin Booth," edited by Charles H. Shattuck. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A. 1969. Pages 127-130. This is Charles W. Clarke’s wonderful summation of 8 performances by Edwin Booth as Hamlet, as seen through the medium of Shattuck’s editing and annotation. Edwin Booth’s dates: 1833-1893.
8. An excerpt on the "sallied flesh" soliloquy, from "Edwin Booth’s Performances," subtitled "The Mary Isabella Stone Commentaries," edited and annotated by Daniel J. Watermeier. U.M.I. Research Press, Ann Arbor/ London. An Imprint of University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106, U.S.A. Pages 17-19.
I hope a widening knowledge of the Shattuck and Watermeier books will lead to an edition of Booth’s own notes on the plays. He works from the text. So far as I know, these two books constitute the fullest record, in print, of a great actor in the role of Hamlet.
5. THE FIRST TIME HAMLET SPEAKS MORE THAN ONE LINE.
In partial accord with the belief of the remarkable Gurdieff that we mortal humans have to be told something three times before our minds can take hold of it, a section of the third chapter of this book reappears in this chapter almost word for word, and apart from making it easier to present the rest of the argument of which it is a part, it gives a second airing, and a second chance to make headway, to the restoration of the younger Hamlet’s first two consecutive lines, a restoration which must seem at first a terrible dislocation of the familiar, as it did at first to me, and impossible to believe in despite the evidence, to anyone already familiar with the traditional version of it, and perhaps the more so the more familiar it seems.
In Scene 2 of Act 1, when Hamlet’s mother asks him why the death of his father seems so special to him since "all that lives must die," he answers:
Ham. Seemes Maddam, nay it is, I know not seemes,
Tis not alone my incky cloake coold mother
Nor customary suites of solembe blacke
Nor windie suspiration of forst breath
No, nor the fruitfull river in the eye,
Nor the dejected hauior of the visage
Together with all formes, moodes, chapes of grief
That can devote me truly, these indeede seeme
For they are actions that a man might play
But I have that within which passes showe
These but the trappings and the suites of woe.
King. Tis sweete and commendable in your nature Hamlet
To give these mourning duties to your father
Suppose the Folio editor misread the first line of this as "I know not seemes" instead of reading "I know not seemes," (which is another reason for believing the misreader of the detail of this bit of copy was a compositor and not someone who had acted in the play) and so he could not make sense of the second line, which he then miscorrected into:
Seemes Madam? nay, it is: I know not Seemes:
’Tis not alone my Inky Cloake (good Mother)
Which led to this, representative of modern editing:
"Seems," madam? nay, it is; I know not "seems."
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
when we should have had, with modern punctuation and spelling:
"Seems," madam? Nay, it is. I know "not seems."
’Tis "not," alone, my inky cloak could mother;
Paraphrased, the second line means, in part: "Only ’what is’ could create my black melancholy and cloak me in it." And since Shakespeare would have visualized enriching actions for his words, Hamlet’s mother may have affectionately, as mothers do, just adjusted a "knot" on Hamlet’s cloak whose black inky color is in keeping, or rather, punningly "in key," with the requirements of mourning.
Besides, this inky second line retains the sound whose impoverishment in the Folio version not only changes but reduces the meaning of the line. What is lost in the Folio but found in the Second Quarto is, for instance, the sound of the separated hammerblows of the first line’s "it is" and "not seems," becoming the non-stop one-twos of ’Tis "not" and "alone," hammering in the idea of the inadequacy of his mother’s mourning. Hamlet stresses "my" to point out the adequacy of his attitude and distinguish it from that implied inadequacy of his mother’s. This critique of his mother, that she has let him down, the younger Hamlet’s most important theme, and which is here first announced in almost his first words, becomes non-existent, at this point, in the Folio and its followers.
Of the lines in the Second Quarto, the next set seems to be:
Nor customary suites of solembe blacke
Nor windie suspiration of forst breath
No, nor the fruitfull riuer in the eye,
Nor the deiected hauior of the visage
Together with all formes, moodes, chapes of griefe
That can devote me truly,
And although alternative interpretations of them are, as always, possible, I prefer to think of these lines as complete in themselves. But this preference raises the problem of the word "that." Leave that out, and we have a very simple, understandable at once, and appropriate sentence. But that "that" is there, and I propose we treat it as an interjection whose punctuation was omitted (because interjections seem to have been seldom punctuated in those days), and which the actor uses to refer to an example of a chape of griefe: that knot and the adjustment of it by Hamlet’s mother which were brought into existence a little while ago, and which Hamlet now jabs a finger at or draws attention to by handling. A "chape" is a small exterior decoration and the word is perfectly appropriate where it appears in this sentence. Since we already have "formes" it is ridiculous for editors to change "chapes" into "shapes." The same thing goes for "devote me truely" meaning "truely make me believe in their genuineness." The Folio has "denote," and so do many subsequent editors, but what is gained? That point about superficialness, which they make with "denote," is not Shakespearean. Shaky (sic) makes the point quite clearly elsewhere in the speech, and he only repeats something when it is needed again, and no "again" is needed here.
The next grouping is (to my mind):
these indeede seeme,
For they are actions that a man might play
The final group is:
But I haue that within which passes showe
These but the trappings and the suites of woe.
The first of these last two groups needs only the comment that, in trying to find out what Shakespeare most probably wrote, one should resist the temptation to combine its last line with the first line of the final group as that results in one of those needless repetitions, and some unsatisfactory sound, such as I’ve already gone on about.
But the editing of these last two Hamlet lines, eek!
Oh ye editors who prefer "denote," you think to have your Will by endstopping the first of these lines, giving birth to a two-legged Frankensteinian monster of meaning and sound, an unnaturally stiff jingle or unLearlike jumbled-up jumbly, to contrast with what should have been a natural
But I have that within which passes — showe
These but the trappings and the suites of woe.
where "passes" means "occurs" or "surpasses," and does not mean "goes away," so that the two lines mean "Those things which are happening inside me show that these suites and suspirations, etc, are just the banal outer dressy dressing and pleasure-giving attenders and surroundings of "woe"; for "suites," punning on "sweets," does not mean "suits" here, for more "suits" are quite unneeded, especially here, and Shakespeare is our most frequent punner after the James Joyce of "Finnegans Wake" with perhaps Thomas Hood, in his poems, running third. Although the Oxford English Dictionary has no record of "suite" till much later in the 17th century, this does not mean it necessarily didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time and so wasn’t his to use. Why did its makers think he didn’t use it in this way?
The king who hasn’t been around for this speech of Hamlet’s, having veered away, let us suppose, after his earlier exchange with Hamlet, to swallow his first drinks of the day, for the play makes it obvious that he’s an alcoholic, now comes back to Hamlet and, catching his last words, mistakenly thinks he’s talking about the sweetnesses of sorrow, and so, wishing to show off a little under the impulse of drink, takes up and turns what he thinks are Hamlet’s words to his own purposes, (cleverly, he thinks) saying:
Tis sweet and commendable in your nature Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father
Well, there are thirteen syllables in his first line, and since by my fiat (though I think it is really Shakespeare’s too) we are only allowed ten or eleven per line in Hamlet, the king must have swallowed some syllables, as those in drink often do, and so the "a" in "commendable" is elided, and "in your" becomes "nyour," nyet?
Later. Alternatively (how time mellows one), or additionally, whichever is appropriate, what if my inky cloake could mother starts a new sentence that ends with chapes of grief? so that the That in That can devote me truly, refers to my inky cloake and the these of these indeede seeme refers to the suites, suspiration, river, hauior, formes, moodes, and chapes?
And, not to be omitted, passing (in the last line of the Queen’s previous speech) should have been acted in such a way that Hamlet’s passes can refer to it ironically.
6. BEFORE AND AFTER THE GHOST’S SECOND APPEARANCE
(You might want a drink with this chapter as it’s rather dry.)
This is where we left the text at the end of Chapter3.
Enter Ghost.
Mar. Peace, breake thee of, looke where it comes againe.
Bar. In the same figure like the King thats dead.
Mar.Thou art a scholler, speake to it Horatio.
Bar. Lookes a not like the King? marke it Horatio.
Hora. Most like, it horrowes me with feare and wonder.
Bar. It would be spoke to.
Mar. Speake to it Horatio.
Hora. What art thou that vsurpst this time of night,
Together with that faire and warlike forme,
In which the Maiestie of buried Denmarke
Did sometimes march, by heauen I charge thee speake.
Mar. It is offended.
Bar. See it staukes away.
Hora. Stay, speake, speake, I charge thee speake. Exit Ghost.
Mar. Tis gone and will not answere.
Bar. How now Horatio, you tremble and looke pale,
Is not this somthing more then phantasie?
What thinke you-ont?
Hora. Before my God I might not this belieue,
Without the sencible and true avouch
Of mine owne eies.
Mar. Is it not like the King?
Hora. As thou art to thy selfe.
Such was the very Armor he had on,
When he the ambitious Norway combated,
So frowned he once, when in an angry parle
He smot the sleaded pollax on the ice.
Tis strange.
Mar. Thus twice before, and iump at this dead houre,
With martiall stauke hath he gone by our watch.
Hora. In what particular thought, to worke I know not,
But in the grosse and scope of mine opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
Food goes with drink. So is this book developing into a sort of Middle Eastern kabob in which a set, made of a gobbet of meat, and a vegetable or two, such as a slice of tomato or onion, reiterates itself (with an occasional variation) on a skewer? If so, picking up from Marcello’s:
Peace, breake thee off, looke where it comes againe.
at the end of the third chapter, hear Barnardo comment that the Ghost is:
In the same figure like the King thats dead.
If the reader is fond of mental angling, there’s food for thought in the following: Why did Barnardo say more than a simple: Like the King thats dead or Jump like the dead King? (I chose the word jump, not because it makes up a sentence that looks like an order issued by a bully, but because of a Shakespearean use in which jump means exactly the same in every particular), and why does like the King thats dead precede In the same figure which seems (but of course isn’t) an otiose repetition of the meaning of like the King thats dead? And why did he write the King thats dead instead of the dead King? Apart from the loss these changes would have made, in the effect of the rhythm in particular, and in the meaning of the sound in general (a loss which could perhaps be remedied by more fiddling around, but which would be an unnecessary pyrotechnical and pyromaniacal Neroism since I am not rewriting Shakespeare but only trying to justify his ways to man in its old-fashioned sense whose meaning includes all women), change would also destroy a typical Shakespearean three-step explanation in a line usually wrongly spoken as if it were a four-word statement followed by a five-word comparison. In the same figure is marvellingly and informatively gasped out, like the King is added to make it clear whose figure is being referred to, and thats dead is added to make it clear which King is meant. Shakespeare builds and refines a meaning by accurately fitting phrase upon phrase to give information and create character, and here these clarifications are provided to individualize the Ghost and establish it further, beyond its mere visual presence, for us, the audience, as well as to express the dogged and perhaps comic way of being accurate of a concerned-for-the-truth Barnardo. Only if we believe how real and horrifying the Ghost is to the three witnesses, will we sympathetically laugh at Horatio’s initial reluctance to speak to it despite the frequent and comic (because serious and understandable) urging of speech on him by the other two: brave cowards, (like some of us), who would rather have him mess with the Ghost than do so themselves. That’s why Marcellus’s excuse to Horatio for not speaking to the Ghost is phrased as Thou art a scholler in an attempt to put the onus on Horatio (and has nothing to do with the scholarly concerns of commentators who say that Marcellus and Barnardo expect scholarly Horatio to exorcize the Ghost in Latin. All he is expected to do by the other two is, as a scholar, know how to communicate with it, and do so.) By the way, Barnardo’s Lookes a not like the King? is not just another reference to an already mentioned resemblance (Shakespeare is not given to beating dead horses). It is more: it cues the actor playing the Ghost to use his eyes and face and head and neck, and look as if he is looking, (the sort of looking he is to do will be characteristic of the dead king).
The a in Lookes a not is pronounced, but not separately: Lookes a not is run together. It marke it Horatio doesn’t just mean look at it, Horatio (for he’s already looking at the Ghost) but take especial note of what it’s doing and what it looks like, Horatio. (Barnardo’s: It would be spoke to brings all this to a head by letting us infer, as readers, and see, as spectators, that the Ghost is now near them and looking at them inquiringly, or also peremptorily (but not discourteously) and regally gesturing to them to say their say).
Horatio’s grim Most like and it horrowes me with feare and wonder are not two coequal statements unrelated to each other despite being next to each other and applied to the Ghost, for it is because the Ghost is so like the dead king that Horatio is so hor-rare-rified: he shivers on horrowes me. Does the shiver die down on me, flare up again and die on with feare, and start again on and wonder?
The horrowes of the Second Quarto’s it horrowes me is spelt horrors in the First Quarto and harrowes in the Folio and harrows by modern editors and may, of course, be a misprint. But couldn’t Horatio, under stress, have telescoped horrors and harrowes into the one word: horrowes, as people often do with other words in other stressful circumstances? Why should Lewis Carroll have the monopoly of portmanteau words? Editors should at least credit Shakespeare with this possibility in those preferable editions which list textual variants and comment on them, even though these usually detrimentally ignore the majority of what are so tellingly, and poorly, called accidentals, such as spelling and punctuation. To make this eleven syllable line into a ten syllable one, the with in with feare and wonder could perhaps be shortened to w and annexed to feare, or perhaps the three syllables of and wonder can be Africanized into a two syllable nwonda, or yes, perhaps both phrases compress and co-exist. But such a reduction is not at once both clear and natural, and the fact is that the verse in this play is written in ten syllable lines and eleven syllable lines. The eleven syllable lines are never accented on both the first and last syllables in the same line. If they seem to be, or if a line has fewer than ten syllables or more than eleven, it means there’s a problem to be investigated. The eleven syllable line is a very natural and easy line in English. Such versification is not a Shakespearean innovation. See, for example, this sonnet by Spenser (published 1595):
The merry Cuckow, messenger of Spring,
His trumpet shrill hath thrise already sounded:
that warnes al louers wayt vpon their king,
who now is comming forth with girland crouned.
With noyse whereof the quyre of Byrds resounded
their anthemes sweet devized of loves prayse,
that all the woods theyr ecchoes back rebounded,
as if they knew the meaning of their layes.
But mongst them all, which did Loues honor rayse
no word was heard of her that most it ought,
but she his precept proudly disobayes,
and doth his ydle message set at nought.
Therefore O love, vnlesse she turne to thee
ere Cuckow end, let her a rebell be.
(To go on) with feare and and wonder are separated, and not twinned, because Horatio is being exact. With feare is annexed to It horrowes me, and and wonder is an afterthought that rounds out the truth for the sake of accuracy and completes Horatio’s answer, and shows his fear predominates over his wonder though the wonder, having deserved and obtained mention, is not to be ignored. The two short lines, Barnardo’s: It would be spoke to and Marcellus’s Speake to it Horatio total eleven syllables, and so there is no wordless action. It would be spoke to is said with a straightforward look at Horatio modulated into a meaningful glance at Marcellus — a glance which urges Marcellus to urge Horatio to speak, and which Marcellus perceptibly, silently and reassuringly answers, glance for glance, in the time it takes to bat an eyelid. Glance and answer go unnoticed by Horatio whose eyes have obsessively returned to the Ghost. So Marcellus’s: Speake to it Horatio is a follow-up on the spoke in Barnardo’s line and not the result of a totally independent initiative by Marcellus. That is why he says Speake to it, and does not say Question it as the First Quarto and the Folio have it (the Folio following the First Quarto here). Marcellus is afraid the Ghost will go away unspoken to, and so there’s a hint of exasperation in his voice. And perhaps the Ghost is also showing impatience and signs of imminent departure. So Horatio has no recourse but to speak.
This interpretation can be appealed: Question it can be justified as a refinement of It would be spoke to, but heard as sound, Speake to it is more forceful and has more comic potential and so is more appropriate on both counts.
Horatio’s first Second Quarto speech to the Ghost is:
What art thou that vsurpst this time of night,
Together with that faire and warlike forme,
In which the Maiestie of buried Denmarke
Did sometimes march, by heaven I charge thee speake.
Conforming to that reasonableness already shown to be his in chapter three, it is very reasonable of the First Quarto cutter, and does not indicate a faulty memory on his part, that having replaced this time of night with the state, and having cut out Together with that faire and warlike forme, that he would replace march with Walke, since Walke is the more appropriate action for the cut speech.
Once the Ghost has entered, Horatio is dumb-struck till this speech. The Ghost has made him lose all or some of his faith in scepticism, for the moment at least, and particularly his belief in the non-existence of ghosts. Perhaps his voice trembles at the beginning of this speech. What art thou is asked as if he really wants to know. He does want to. His tone is somewhat condemnatory. It suggests that there is an underhandedness on the Ghost’s part for appearing at night, and particularly so for its appearing at that time of night. faire and warlike are not co-equal. They are capitalized in the Folio. There is a suggestion that, whatever it really is, the Ghost’s real appearance, undisguised as the King, would be less faire, less beautiful, even downright ugly and generally unpleasant, were it to show itself as it really is.
The way he says warlike hints that an unwarranted threat (perhaps also unsubstantiable and therefore not to be taken seriously) is being made by the Ghost. Maiestie is pronounced as if the Ghost had no right to it, especially since the King is buried and done with. I don’t see why sometimes can’t also have its (no oxymoron intended) still current meaning as well as that offering of the annotators: formerly. Since it is not an exclamation, there is no pause after heauen, which is one-syllabled, as always.
After so many slurs, plus the implication, in What art thou and by heauen I charge thee, that there is something demoniacal about the Ghost, along with the implication of vsurpst that it has no right to take on the fair and warlike form of the King or any other form of his or even to materialize at all, and with perhaps even a peremptoriness in Horatio’s tone, it is no wonder that the Ghost is offended, unless ghosts, like the living, construe meanings that have not been meant, and take offence at what has not been said. But for this they are singularly unnoted. (Though perhaps it did expect to be asked what it wanted).
When does the Ghost first show it is offended by Horatio’s speech? The possibilities raised by this question provide a wonderful opportunity for whoever acts the Ghost. Does he show us the taking of offence building up bit by bit in the Ghost during the time of Horatio’s speech, or does he show only the culmination of it: is it an eruption, or a slow assumption? Is it sudden, or stepped or smoothly gradual? And does it show up early in the speech or later, or at the end? How does all this affect Horatio (does his voice suddenly quaver?), especially after the Ghost does not answer his question immediately? What does all this do to Horatio’s by heauen I charge thee speake? Is thee and thou used when addressing superiors, equals, strangers, friends? Whatever the answers, the Ghost does not start to move away till after Marcellus’s It is offended. Is there a hint of a trace of blame thrown on Horatio in that sentence, apart from surprise at its lifelike reaction, and fear of the consequences of that? As there is much more than a trace of blame in the See of See it staukes away of Barnardo, a sort of See what you’ve done addressed to Horatio — not only a call for confirmation from the other two, of what Barnardo is seeing. The Ghost’s stalking walk as it goes off also shows it remains offended for some time after being spoken to.
Now, reacting to the other two as well as to the Ghost’s behaviour, desperation sounds in Horatio’s voice as he says: Stay, speake, speake, I charge thee speake. This apparently seven syllable line really contains eleven syllables if one includes, as one should, the pause after Stay, and the pauses after each beseeching speake. The pause after the third and final speake carries over into Marcellus’s next line (and that’s why its Tis gone and will not answere is a few syllables short as all three wait for a response) or, as one of my far-distant childhood’s long-gone mathematics teachers used to say, referring to the carrying of a number from one totalled-up column into the next: Dot and carry one, a saying, in this time of computers, now probably as obsolete as the dodo is extinct. Despair begins to grow in Horatio’s final speake after he has seen the Ghost receding further and further away during and despite his adjurations, and that despair visibly continues growing increasingly faster during the syllable-long silence that follows, and after that too,- like the tail of a squirrel, even longer than its body, and bushing out the more the further from the body it gets.
So that like an uncomplaining Chinese coolie bent double and almost hidden by the weight of the things piled high on his back, the complaining and disgusted ’Tis gone of Marcellus bears the added meanings of Don’t waste your time, Horatio and It’s your fault that it’s gone, Horatio, which the glance, momentarily resting on Horatio, and tone of the actor of Marcellus will bear up if he is good enough as an actor. And the words: will not in his and will not answere mean primarily stubbornly refuses to and is only incidentally and unimportantly a prophecy, one that need not have been mentioned had it been the only point in question, and so each of its syllables has an equally strong stress, and it is neither an iamb nor a trochee.
The next speech is Barnardo’s triumphant:
How now Horatio, you tremble and looke pale,
Is not this somthing more then phantasie?
What thinke you-ont?
Barnardo can’t resist getting his own back in this way, on Horatio, for the doubt Horatio had poured on the duo’s report on the Ghost. Barnardo takes it personally. His feelings are also compounded with disappointment at the Ghost’s continued silence which he attributes at least in part to poor performance by Horatio. (By the way, Horatio’s trembling should be visible to the audience, an argument for performing on smaller stages with smaller auditoriums, which the play was originally written for. No wonder the belief took hold at one time that Hamlet was dilatory in taking his promised revenge for the death of his father, and that there was therefore something wrong with Hamlet, when what mostly delayed him was the growing amount of stage space he had constantly to traverse and the lengthened time it took to speak the play. To return now to where I was before I interrupted myself: if possible the actor should have become pale, for bring to mind Hamlet’s remark on the actor who wanned (wand), in his famed O what a rogue and pesant slave am I speech. Perhaps they used less make-up in those days, so one could sometimes see a complexion change colour, though this is possibly but not conclusively countered by the wanning supposedly occurring not on a stage but in an extemporary performance offstage, with the wanned one so near to his audience that details are more visible). In the next line,
(Barnardo’s:
Is not this somthing more than phantasie?)
the ceasura comes before somthing, so that its line becomes a two stepper, and makes the word this function not as an adjective of the noun somthing, but as a pronoun for ghost. phantasie would nowadays be printed in quotation marks to show it is used both as a quotation and ironically. The resultant meaning of the line is: Doesn’t the Ghost exist? And doesn’t it exist in a prodigious way? And isn’t it remarkable? And isn’t it somewhat more than a product of the fantasy you dismissed it as, (a dismissal Marcellus reported in both our hearings, as I assume you remember)? And so the meaning of the line is not a mere Isn’t this a bit more than fantasy? Commentary on the third line: What thinke you-ont? depends on and must await the disposition of the next several lines. These are:
Hora. Before my God I might not this believe,
Without the sencible and true avouch
Of mine owne eies.
Mar. Is it not like the King?
Hora. As thou art to thy selfe,
Such was the very Armor he had on,
When he the ambitious Norway combated,
So frownd he once, when in an angry parle
He smot the sleaded pollax on the ice,
’Tis strange.
The problem presented by these lines, with the addition of the four previous lines, is whether our now old acquaintance, wordless action, occurs at all, in or at the end of these lines, and if it does, where? and in particular does it occur where the lines have fewer than ten syllables? There are no other problematic lines of this sort, after these, till after the second entrance of the Ghost, which is many, many lines away, so that the above bundle of lines can be dealt with in isolation, to move the play along as fast as we can without sacrificing any meaning.
For convenience’ sake, let’s start at the end, and if having no wordless action after ’Tis strange. doesn’t impair the meaning, we may assume that this bundle contains no short lines, contrary to appearances, and that to start with, ’Tis strange. belongs to the end of the line preceding it, even though the printing conventions of the time placed it after. This calls for more explanation, doesn’t it?
It can be explained if we re-arrange the lineation of the bundle, by means of a different and more modern convention, so that it looks like this:
Mar. Tis gone and will not answere.
Bar. How now
Horatio, you tremble and looke pale, is not
This somthing more than phantasie? What thinke
You-ont?
Hora. Before my God I might not this
Believe, without the sencible and true
Avouch of mine owne eies.
Mar. Is it not like
The King?
Hora. As thou art to thy selfe. Such was
The very Armor he had on, when he
The ambitious Norway combated, so frowned
He once, when in an angry parle he smot
The sleaded pollax on the ice. Tis strange.
This requires a few comments. You may remember there is one syllable length of silence after the third speake, a silence that begins the line: Tis gone and will not answere, so that with the How now we have a regular ten syllable line. In the next line, the splitting-up, between the next two lines, of What thinke You-ont? only appears awkward if we do it in the wrong natural way as one easy flow of sound instead of the natural (and perhaps comic) monosyllabic staccato of someone struggling at each syllable with a simultaneous action sufficiently difficult to impede the flow of words at every word, as can happen in a struggle to adjust some recalcitrant clothing, or with some other series of movements. Depending on the movements, the first two words can be faster or slower than the other two, a contrast that can result in drama and comedy. This staccato way of saying this sentence, along with the unmarked split in the middle of it, also explains the unusually hyphenated you-ont? which is therefore probably not the misprint it has automatically been assumed to be by those imperfect beings, editors, erring editors. Perhaps some other satisfactory rearrangement of the lines, or of some of them, is possible, and then one would have to balance increase in meaning against loss of time.
It will be easy to discern which of these comments remain valid even if the rearranged lineation is wrong, which it is. You are about to hear another commentary (one on the original lineation) in which most of the described effects could not even be thought of if one had only the rearrangement to work from. It uses the same principle that led to the rearrangement. So much for principle as a guide in such things.
For our convenience, allow me to repeat the relevant section of the Second Quarto and to intersperse it with comments:
Hora. Stay, speake, speake, I charge thee speake. Exit Ghost.
Whatsa goin on here? Three, or four one-syllabled silences? Is this a ten or eleven syllable line? Silence should only occur at punctuation marks. Punctuation is important. Unless it is a compositor/editor’s mistake, it shows the author’s intentions. I charge thee speake is not equivalent to I charge thee, speake. These pauses are there to give the Ghost the chance to speak. Horatio’s voice reflects an urgency increasing after every pause. So does his body with every silence.
Mar. Tis gone and will not answere.
Another three or four silent syllables, but how much of this wordlessness occurs before Tis because the other two defer to Horatio and are awaiting further action from him? And what’s he up to? Stunned? Holding onto something? To something in himself? What are his eyes looking at? Are they seeing? His hands, where are they and what are they doing? Has his cloak opened to the cold, and hasn’t he noticed that?
Bar. How now Horatio, you tremble and look pale,
Is not this somthing more then phantasie?
What thinke you-ont?
To those to whom associations are meaningful: the lock of Milton’s hair, the tress of Keats — to know that at this spot Shakespeare spelt something without an e (unless the compositor slipped up), and that this may have put a little more stress on thing, and that then for than is a clue to his pronunciation — Wowee! And because fantasie is spelled with an eff in Marcellus’s earlier line: Horatio saies tis but our fantasie, does Marcellus waft a fanlike hand dismissively through the air at that time? And now are there six syllable lengths of silence after You-ont? and why does Horatio delay his answer? And isn’t Browne’s and Tiberius’s What songs the sirens sang? a question of a different mould from these?
Hora. Before my God I might not this belieue,
Without the sencible and true avouch
Of mine owne eies.
That last line can be pronounced as of my known eyes, giving the eyes a history of reliability which justifies the retention of an otherwise otiose owne. Wordless action doesn’t occur after eies. That’s because the adding on of the next line, Marcellus’s
Is it not like the King?
gives a total of ten syllables.
The solemnity of Horatio’s emphatic:
Before my God I might not this believe,
Without the sencible and true avouch
Of mine owne eies.
is, I am certain, not to be be pronounced at an even and unexpressive pace. On the contrary, it is preferable to pitch my as high as fore and God, so that these three syllables make a long straight line, with their vowels about equal in length, whereas I might not continues this horizontal line at the same pitch but at a greatly accelerated speed so that it lasts about as long as Before (or preferably the I might not continues at a slightly lower pitch so that the line rises in freedom again after it, as if the word this had been raised up as a proffering, before believe returns the line more or less to the level of its beginning). So that the clipped vowels of I might not enact the squashed together containment of what is not permitted to exist in Horatio, and the long vowels of Before my God duplicate or rather are part of Horatio’s opening up of himself to his God, he, Horatio, being closed-up at the start in the scarcely-existing first e of before. No bad poet can do this sort of sound. It can mimic any of the myriad qualities of existence and define them exactly when related to the mere but necessary suggestions and pointings-at of the denotations and connotations of the words themselves, which by themselves cannot do so. Onomatopoeia is a well-known but minute specialized department of these possible effects. And just to broadly fill in some of the effects of the sound at the beginning of these three lines, one can say Before my God so that each of its first three syllables is open at the end (having made the r into a vowel so fore is stretched out like a body prostrated in submission) so that God stands firm and distinct in contrast, enclosed in its hard consonants. To fully use the r, somewhat in the fashion of a Scot, in an alternative and different way of reading Before, gives a respectful, self-respecting, unprostrated confrontation with God, and so on, for on this micro-level of reading and speaking, coupled with tone, and gesture, much is possible and the speaker can come into his own, naturally. Not that an actor should emulate the sound of this line as given here, but rather the processes that produce it.
I want to continue to grasp this line, already held onto for so long, with the relentlessness of a badger. And though it and the next line and a half can be scanned as consisting of iambics only, in practice there are all sorts of feet in them, and in this first line only before and believe are iambic. And I mention this because some teachers of drama, and now their students, in the name of poetry, are piously and inappropriately and quite wrongly, like unadaptable robots, scanning this type of line as if it were only iambic, instead of also scanning it as the complex and more meaningful thing it is, which requires the application of intuition and some intelligent thought to be spoken with optimum effect.
And now we come to the comma in:
Before my God I might not this believe,
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine owne eies.
Paraphrasing the meaning resulting from this comma, we get: "Even if this were to happen when I was loyally in the royal presence of God, I would not be able to believe it was really happening without the additional confirmation of seeing it with my already-tested-and-found-to-be-reliable eyes, and not through the eyes of someone else."
By leaving out the comma after believe and inserting it after God, the Folio makes Before my God into mere swearing. The Second Quarto has the deeper and more affective meaning. The First Quarto’s insertion of a comma in both places, is disproportionately over-dramatic, and misses the Second Quarto’s meaning by a kilometer.
Mar. Is it not like the King?
Hora. As thou art to thy selfe.
Such was the very Armor he had on,
When he the ambitious Norway combated,
So frownd he once, when in an angry parle
He smot the sleaded pollax on the ice.
Tis strange.
Mar. Thus twice before, and iump at this dead houre,
With martiall stauke hath he gone by our watch.
Mean smote for smot, sledded and sledgehammered for sleaded, and ax-headed poles and Poles (nationality) for pollax. Accept puns, O scholars, as puns, instead of arguing for the acceptance of one meaning over another.
How does one distribute the four or five syllables of silence belonging to As thou art to thy selfe?
After the Is it not like the King of Marcellus, Horatio looks at him. Pause. Suspense. Is he going to say Yes or No? We don’t know. Ah, now he speaks:
As thou art to thy selfe.
Ah. But now all three are silent. Two or three beats. Barnardo and Marcellus are looking expectantly at him, waiting for him to continue. But Horatio has gone back to thinking about this likeness. He’s reviewing it. Yes, there can be no doubt about the likeness: Such was, etcetera.
Again, what is the distribution of the eight or nine syllables of silence tagged on to ’Tis strange? He falls into a very short brown study after ice, surfaces with: ’Tis strange and is reimmersed again.
After patiently waiting for his next pronouncement on the Ghost, Marcellus prompts him with:
Thus twice before, and iump at this dead hour,
With martial stauke hath he gone by our watch.
There’s our word jump, and stauke is, of course, stalk.
All this wordless action is the more effective because there was so little before it.
Hora. In what perticular thought, to worke I know not,
But in the grosse and scope of mine opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption for our state.
The first line has twelve syllables. It has the peculiar effect of making the sound of the to in to worke dip, like a mole at work, as compared to the rest of the line, with the exception of the u in the ular of particular which dips in the same way. Both dips are lost if the line is regularized into an eleven syllable line by eliding the u of particular. This double dip makes it seem as if to worke could fit into, nest into, particular thought and makes them into a unit that acts in tandem.
Paraphrased, the three lines mean something like: I don’t know exactly what to think about this, but in general, so far as I can tell, it looks like some unusual trouble’s going to break out involving Denmark. If this is what they mean, more or less, why bother with the original, since the translation is much easier to understand despite the elaborate hoo-ha of a double dip? More on that later.
7. THIS TOO TOO SALLIED FLESH.
This chapter is about the Second Quarto version of Hamlet"s first major soliloquy, and about the lead-in to it by the king. The quarto type was set by the reputedly worser of the two compositors whom scholars have apportioned to the type-setting of Hamlet. The king is talking to Hamlet in the presence of the queen and his council.
King. Why tis a louing and a faire reply,
Be as our selfe in Denmarke, Madam come,
This gentle and vnforc’d accord of Hamlet
Sits smiling to my hart, in grace whereof,
No iocond health that Denmarke drinkes to day,
But the great Cannon to the cloudes shall tell.
And the Kings rowse the heaven shall brute againe
Respeaking earthly thunder; come away.
Florish.
Exeunt all, but Hamlet.
Ham. O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve it selfe into a dewe,
Or that the everlasting had not fixt
His cannon gainst selfe slaughter, O God, God,
How wary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seeme to me all the vses of this world?
Fie on’t, ah fie, tis an vnweeded garden
That growes to seede, things ranke and grose in nature,
Possesse it meerely that it should come thus
But two months dead, nay not so much, not two,
So excellent a King, that was to this
Hiperion to a satire, so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteeme the winds of heaven
Visite her face too roughly, heaven and earth
Must I remember, why she should hang on him
As if increase of appetite had growne
By what it fed on, and yet within a month,
Let me not thinke on’t; frailty thy name is woman
A little month or ere those shooes were old
With which she followed my poore fathers bodie
Like Niobe all teares, why she
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn’d longer, married with my Vncle,
My fathers brother, but no more like my father
Then I to Hercules, within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most vnrighteous teares,
Had left the flushing in her gauled eyes
She married, o most wicked speede; to post
With such dexteritie to incestuous sheets,
It is not, nor it cannot come to good,
But breake my hart, for I must hold my tongue.
The customary and invariable treatment of this soliloquy of Hamlet’s as if it had absolutely no connection to any part of the speech that the king made immediately before it, except in the vaguest and most general way as part of Hamlet’s situation, has resulted in dramatic loss and skewed our view of the character of Hamlet. It makes him less than he really is. So universal has this separation been, that what could be perhaps the greatest dramatic tour de force for the actor, in any play and of any piece at auditions, has become a lesser piece than it should be, though still a great one.
Here goes (the lines come first and are followed by a description of some of their meanings, and of parts of the spin that an actor could put on the meanings to bring them out and comment on them):
O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve it selfe into a dew,
The lack of a comma after the first "too," has misled editors into treating it as an intensive only, but that is "too" too much, unless it is allowed that its more important meaning of "also" refers to the crowd of people whose exit, just now, was a melting away.
Although "sullied" or "solid" could be meant by "sallied," and editors choose one of these two only, "sallied’ could mean "attacked" or "much-tried" (or "assailed," as suggested by Furnivall, that star in the great end-of-the-nineteenth-century constellation of editors and reprinters, whose massive editorial achievements, by making scarce early texts more available, dwarfed their editorial mistakes).
In these two lines, there are not three successive actions of melting and thawing and resolving, that some actors proffer like a string of equally spaced pearls, for that makes "thawing" an ineffective repetition of "melting." It is rather that "Thaw and resolve it selfe into a dewe" define what "melt" means to Hamlet. As for "sallied" as "assailed," Hamlet beats himself with his fist three times while speaking it as a rapid trisyllable. "a dewe" is a remarkable pun on "adieu," unnoticed till now, underlining Hamlet’s wish to really get away from those who have just exited. On "dewe," the fingers of the farewell gesture of his vertically raised hand scurry ironically up and down past each other like rapid running legs.
The next gestalt is:
Or that the euerlasting had not fixt
His cannon gainst seale slaughter,
Of course, this is not an anti-seal sentiment) and "seale" should be the "selfe" that editors substitute for it. But what they don’t point out is that Hamlet is referring to the king’s "Be as our selfe." To make this clear, when the king says "selfe" he could give Hamlet a clap on the shoulder at the same time, so that Hamlet can savagely parody him by clapping himself on the shoulder when saying "selfe slaughter," or else the king can underline that "selfe" with some other action that Hamlet’s mimicry will parody. And when editors change the spelling of ’cannon" to the "canon" it puns on, as they habitually do, this change obliterates a very useful visual similarity, for the context of Hamlet’s "cannon" really suggests that the "great Cannon," mentioned in the king’s speech, ought to be turned on the king’s self. So Hamlet is most probably not including himself in his savagely humorous "selfe slaughter," and the wish to "thaw and resolve into a dewe" is not a wish to commit suicide, and certainly nothing else in his soliloquy is. But he has an intense wish to be away from it all, and this wish is the more pressing because the king has expressly forbidden him to leave.
Next:
O God, God,
How wary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seeme to me all the vses of this world?
"O God, God" can be done in innumerable ways, but does the question mark at the end refer to the second "God"? — rather than to "how weary, etc" to which it is not appropriate, though the conventions of punctuation, even of today, put it there. Hamlet is not questioning the existence of God, but calling on God to witness the questionable and asking Him how He can put up with it.
Though the "weary" of the editors seems preferable to "wary," "wary" is not an impossible meaning; and by a gesture, "this world" could be limited to the court, and not extend to the planet, although this, along with the killing off of the belief in Hamlet’s propensity for suicide, will limit the weltsmertz that many want to indulge in through Hamlet himself.
Like the sound of someone’s tired steps on a row of stairs of different widths, the long vowels descend from the platform of "How" to the landing of "un," getting shorter the lower they get (try it in your mouth) and then the going gets much faster down the next flight of vowels, I mean the even shorter ones in "unprofitable," as if the profit were all squeezed out of it. Given this, how wrong "flat" in front of "stale" sounds, were one to try that position, in order to see why it is so right where it actually is. The vowels in "of this world" are short compared to those in "seeme to me all the uses," mirroring the niggardliness of that world compared to Hamlet and his point of view. Both "the uses of this world" and "and unprofitable" have six syllables and a stressed "u" in the second place, but the consonants in "the uses of this world" imprison the clipped vowels so that there is a final effect like crabs clambering over a stony shore, looking for sustenance that’s not there.
The next set of words should probably be just these:
Fie on’t, ah fie, tis an unweeded garden
That growes to seede, things rancke and grose in nature,
Possesse it meerely that it should come thus
But two months dead,
Perhaps the second "fie" is said in a tone of recognition and acceptance of shame, and of "thigh" as a sexual relative of shame, for this leads to the natural pronunciation of "an unweeded garden" as "a nun-weeded garden" in which "weeded" also has its other Elizabethan meaning of "clothed." So here we have a world that looks virtuous but is rank and gross. ’meerely’ refers to the clauses on each side of it and, along with its extended spelling, suggests it is stressed. As he says "thus," Hamlet imitates the exit of the king and queen smooching with each other at the end of the king"s speech.. The Folio’s emendation of what seemed an awkward unpunctuated "thus" to "to this:" is thus unnecessary, and done without regard to the possible action, or "doings" as my friend Eleanor Zee aptly calls it.
After "But two months dead" comes:
nay not so much, not two,
Perhaps Hamlet makes a knot in a kerchief as a pretended reminder of how long his father has been dead, punning on the first "not" and not on the second. "not two" contracts "But two months dead" into two syllables to accord with the contraction in time.
Next in line is:
So excellent a King, that was to this
Hyperion to a satire, so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteeme the winds of heaven
Visite her face too roughly, heaven and earth
Must I remember, why she should hang on him
As if increase of appetite had growne
By what it fed on, and yet within a month,
Let me not thinke on’t; frailty thy name is woman
The "this" refers, of course, to the current king and not to Hyperion. and perhaps so obvious and useless a statement as this is, to some, will nonetheless lay the groundwork necessary for a point to be made later on about the versification of the Hyperion line, and as a result, perhaps require fewer words there than these. Perhaps.
In an action pun on the "high" of "Hyperion," the sun-god, perhaps Hamlet for a moment spreads both soaring hands above his shoulders and then the hands swoop down through "to a" and freeze as he goes into the distorted crouch of a leering satyr on the word "satire."
Shakespeare must have recalled some of Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, as the concentration of classical references in this soliloquy and the peculiarly Goldingian word "beteeme" witness to. Shakespeare wrote to be understood immediately. So "beteeme" must have been an exception to this or have had a use additional to its little-used meaning, even in his time, of "permit," and a use beyond the "raised and dignified out of the ordinary" use that some editors have found in this word to reflect his father’s great regard for his wife. Perhaps he is punning on "beteam" meaning "to harness into a team," an idea that easily comes from the nearby word "Hyperion" who as the sun-god harnessed his horses every morning for his spin through the sky. And then what if ’of’ is a misprint for ’if’ so that he wouldn’t harness his team of winds if the weather was already too hard on her face. Or perhaps Aeolos, the god who commanded and harnessed the winds to do his bidding, or rough Boreas, the north wind, is lurking unseen nearby. By the way, the phrase,"let e’en," which nobody has suggested as yet, but which gives a straightforward and immediate meaning if "beteeme" is a misprint, which is doubtful, does not sound right. "Let" has the wrong vowel. The reasons for thinking so would be interesting to go into but aren’t appropriate here. So I set up my own skittles only to knock them down again. But they are parts of the exploration to ascertain the right way through this play.
"heauen and earth" is not just swearing. Hamlet is comparing his heavenlike father to his earthish mother, and also the "fall" and change of his idealized, heavenlike mother into a fallible idol of earth. "and earth" should be pronounced "an dearth" (but with no pause between the syllables). Someone might say, "So there’s a pun. So what? What good does it do? How does it help?" The melding of "earth" with "dearth" produces a withholding earth-mother and a resultingly deprived Hamlet, which means quite a bit more than mere "earth" does. As Hamlet’s face swings heavenward while saying "heaven" and swings back down saying "an dearth," the position of the pre-stress and stress in "an dearth" becomes the reverse of those in "heaven" so that the dactyl of "heaven" becomes the iamb of "an dearth," and the peardrop shape, of the sound of the word "heaven" plumped four-square on its "heave" and curving up-and-in toward heaven, becomes the returning teardrop of "an dearth," and so the meaning of the movement of the face is added to by the movement of the sound. Nor is it hogwash to say this, except to Gaderenes, and the cast-at with pearls. And contrary to what I wrote earlier on, it seems that "heaven" can be disyllabic sometimes. Though the dictates of the clock and of some of the verse may often make it contract into a syllable. Meanwhile we may have heard a roll of thunder and the loud sound of a cannon so that heaven and earth may refer back to Claudius’s preceding speech during which we may have already heard a thunderstorm brewing.
In this soliloquy, the "should" of "should hang" means "would."
Just as the wave of the queen’s affection for her first husband crests and then breaks, so does the sound of "and yet within a month" crest on "yet" and break into the fast trisyllable of "wi/thi/na" and sweep along, like a spent wave up a sandy beach, in the long syllable "month." Such mimicry in the sound of the words, of what the words" denote, is the equivalent of feelings giving body to ideas which often otherwise have no moorings and little validity, and exist like mere waverings of unstrung kites destined to crash soon or disappear into the air forever.
"and yet within a month" can also be said as a question that expresses Hamlet’s difficulty in accepting so big a change in hls mother in so short a time. Said that way, the sound of the phrase becomes different: "yet" and "month" become the crests of ongoing waves and we’re in a deeper sea of feeling. Either way, "Let me not think on’t" has its major stresses on the syllables "not/thin/ kon’t" in a counter-wave to damn up a sudden rising of hysteria. Weltering waves.
I don’t know that the pun "thine aim" on "thy name" adds much by converting "frailty" into an archer, but it should be remarked. Some nimble actor may be able to put it to good use.... But now I see that archer specializes.
And now we come to:
A little month or ere those shooes were old
With which she followed my poore fathers bodie
Like Niobe all teares, why she
O God, a beast that wants all discourse of reason
Would have mourn ’d longer, married with my Vncle,
My fathers brother, but no more like my father
Then I to Hercules,
The short fast syllables of "little" make the "month" pass swiftly by, give it a significance that makes it hardly worth counting.
Question. Why did Shakespeare make "followed" trisyllable? Wouldn’t it have been more natural and pleasantly shorter to have let it remain "follow’d," a mere two syllables?
Answer. Because Shakespeare always has a dramatic reason for doing something right with what may at first sight appear wrong, and the observant actor of Hamlet, knowing this, and noticing that "followed" is a trisyllable, will use it to walk three short mocking steps, one for each of its syllables, and then walk, to the line’s remaining syllables, as if Hamlet were caricaturing the walk of his mother in the funeral retinue. He continues to travesty her by pretending to cry when saying "Like Niobe all teares, why she," with two syllables of wordless crying to make up the verse. But the possible ways of addressing that line seem almost infinite. And yes, there may be a pun on "O be all teares," although this raises the questions of the Elizabethan pronunciation of "Niobe" and of how much distortion of sound is permissible in the making of a pun.
But after this walk, Hamlet drops all pretence. In a sudden outburst of passion, in his own voice, he cries out the next one and a half lines, with no pause between the end of the crying of the Niobe line, and the unweeping crying-out of "O God," just as the Second Quarto punctuation indicates.
The actions accompanying the sounds, sounds very fast in the fathers bodie line and broken up in the Niobe line, produce the most savage satire.
Why not the simpler "married my uncle" rather than the actual "married with my Vncle"? Because this gives him another prolongation of the chance to sneer, perhaps with the assumption of a falsetto for "married with," and a sickened voice for "my Vncle.
"My fathers brother" is an admission, not only a statement of fact.
Perhaps the "Her" of "Hercules" refers to his mother. Perhaps there is a more extended pun: "Her cool ease," which contrasts with Hamlet’s heated un-ease. "Her cool ease" is also the current king opposed and contrasted to his comparatively Herculean predecessor.
Finally, the finale:
within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most vnrighteous teares,
Had left the flushing in her gauled eyes
She married, O most wicked speed; to post
With such dexteritie to incestious sheets,
It is not, nor it cannot come to good,
But breake my hart, for I must hold my tongue.
"within a month" has a special effect if said in the same way that Hamlet said it before. Alternatively, it can be very effective as a question.
"the salt" is also "the assault," with the latter’s "e" elided. It could be used accordingly.
"Flushing" means reddened, brimming, overflowing, washingout, out-washings, residue.
The interesting spelling and disyllabization of "gauled" (another Goldingism) instead of the available and simpler monosyllable "galled" leads us to the pun: "gaw-led," meaning "controlled by gewgaws or by a person who is as worthless as a gew-gaw." And possibly to "gaul-led dyes," so we can even have the teares leave a residue of salt on the colours, associated with death, of her fashionably gallic mourning ensemble. More puns can be found. In such a scattershot of meanings, some will stick.
"married" is a hurrying trisyllable that corroborates the "most wicked speed" of the marriage.
O most wicked speede; to post
With such dexteritie to incestuous sheets,
also refers to the alacrity with which his mother, glad to consider the matter closed, left with Claudius after his "come away," whereas Claudius added the "away" because he thought her too slow.
"dexteritie" may have the second "e" elided, which shifts the accent to "dex," which, with the "tri/tie," mimics, in sound, deliberate manipulation and fast fiddling around.
"in cess," in "incestious," probably came into its meaning too late to have been invented by Shakespeare, but Hamlet can still move his feet as if he had stepped in it.
"It is not, and it cannot come to good," is a deliberate and deliberative slowing down, a countersound to the speed of the sound of the words in the preceding lines, and the actions they depict. Perhaps on the first "not," Hamlet looks at the knot he made in the kerchief, so that "It is not," gains the additional meaning of "It’s done, and can’t be changed." Well-done dramatic actions enhance the meanings of words.
And now we come to "But breake my hart." But first an excursus. You will remember that the king said Hamlet’s accord "Sits smiling to my hart." Why did he say that rather than "lies laughing in my heart" or some other variation? Would it not be because Hamlet’s accordant remark was addressed to a seated queen to whom it gave so much pleasure that she could not stop smiling back at Hamlet and the king? The king, who is astute and notices things of this sort, turns it to his use, which type of turning he is also given to. And so now, at the end of Hamlet’s soliloquy, isn’t Hamlet comparing his heart-feeling with the king’s? And to make the answer to that question a "yes," doesn’t Hamlet put his hand on his heart as he says "my heart," in the same way the king did when he said it? And be sure the audience sees this as a savage disparagement of the king. And is there a pun on "brake" and "hart" so that Hamlet is also telling his deerlike heart to take cover and hide its feelings, because they can no longer range freely in the open to be view-hallooed as foxes by Claudius if Hamlet didn’t rein-in his houndlike tongue? Tone and gesture as applied to ’hold’ demonstrate what ’hold’ means to Hamlet.
For the sake of comparison and illumination, chapter 4 of this book contains what is needed (in addition to the money and retailer or library addresses) to obtain two remarkable accounts of how the great 19th century American actor, Edwin Booth, did this soliloquy.
What about the versification of this soliloquy? Though it sounds right, it looks like a ragbag, bulging-out here, and collapsing-in there, with lines of 8, 10, 11, 12 and 15 syllables. Well, the 8 syllable Niobe line was regularized earlier on by adding 2 to 4 syllables of wordless action. And its my guess that the 15 syllable Hyperion line was originally a regular 11 syllable line with the phrase "to a satire" omitted, and that that phrase was an explanatory instruction, written beside the "to this" of the previous line, telling the actor to look like a satyr at "this" . So no meaning is lost by omitting it from the line (while retaining it as a stage direction), and the verse is stronger. So now only 10, 11and 12 syllable lines are left. As a new working hypothesis, let 10 be the standard, let 11 be allowed if the extra syllable at either end is unstressed, and 12 be allowed if both the first and last syllables are unstressed. So now the verse can stretch or contract as it needs to, like mortal flesh.
Soliloquies. The drama critic, James Agate, recorded in "Ego," the delightful first volume of his autobiography, that an actor of Hamlet told him that that very night Hamlet was going to act as if fearing the possible reappearance of the Ghost while saying "To be or not to be"’s line "the bourne from which no traveller returns." It is a good example of the enhancement of meaning by connecting something outside of a soliloquy to the soliloquy itself. I think this happened in the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties. And scholarship, which should read widely, has let this sink undetected, or obtusely ignored it. Good drama reviewers are very worthwhile.
8. SLIPPAGE.
Hamlet’s "O that this too too sallied flesh would melt" soliliqoy (see preceding chapter) is followed by:
Enter Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo.
Hora. Haile to your Lordship.
Ham. I am glad to see you well; Horatio, or I do forget my selfe.
Hora. The same my Lord, and your poore servant ever.
Ham. Sir my good friend, Ile change that name with you.
And what make you from Wittenberg Horatio?
Marcellus.
Mar. My good Lord.
Ham. I am very glad to see you, (good even sir)
But what in faith make you from Wittenberg?
Hor. A truant disposition good my Lord.
Who is the "you" in "I am glad to see you well," and why raise this question?
Well, it is a bit strange that Hamlet is apparently glad to see Horatio well — before he recognizes Horatio as Horatio. Or is this a dyspeptic "I’m feeling lousy but I’m glad somebody is well, though your being well does me no good," accompanied by the implication in "Horatio, or I do forget my selfe," of "You being Horatio is no great news to me, and doesn’t make me feel any better, either," and does Hamlet begin to cheer up after that? Or should we assume the punctuation is wrong, and the line should read "I’m glad to see you well, Horatio; or I do forget my selfe," and that it means "I’m really glad to see you well, or else I don’t know my own feelings." I shall dismiss all these possibilities soon with a wave of my hand or a "pah."
Or is "1 am glad to see you well" directed to Marcellus and/or Bernardo? But it can’t be. Marcellus is first acknowledged in the one word "Marcellus" a little later on, a word followed by an acknowledging wordless action, such as a bow (for all this passage is in verse as we shall see, despite the prosy length of: "I am glad to see you well; Horatio, or I do forget my selfe"). And Bernardo is first acknowledged in Hamlet’s parenthetical "(good even sir)" which comes soon after the "Marcellus."
No, none of the above. This is what I go for: Horatio says "Haile to your Lordship" and continues "I am glad to see you well." [I assume the compositor made a wrong decision about these words (perhaps an added afterthought) which must have been positioned, in the manuscript he was working on, in a way that gave him the possibility of choosing his version (which slipped them down a line) rather than the preferable one he ignored]. Giving the words to Horatio makes for an uncomplicated irony since they come just after Hamlet has given vent to his pain and feelings of malaise in his soliliqoy. It also allows the whole passage to fall into regular verse. Now, Hamlet’s "Horatio, or I do forget myself." means "It’s you, Horatio, what a pleasant surprise; or if you’re not Horatio, I don’t know who I am — and I know I am Hamlet!"
Why is the version I prefer — better than the ones I dismiss? Isn’t it on the whole more dramatic, simpler, and more poetical? And more meaningful?
Such is the web of this chapter, made by the spider of my thought.
P.S. Edwin Booth (1833-1893) did what he could with this passage of the old text till, without consulting me, in 1878 he too gave "I am glad to see you well" to Horatio.
Such is the web of this chapter, made by the spider of my thought.
9. TAMPERING, OR "HOW OLD IS YOUNG HAMLET?"
THE PROBLEM.
Why does Shakespeare contradict himself about Hamlet’s age?WHAT THE GRAVEDIGGER SAYS ABOUT IT.
Condensing the dialogue, between Hamlet and the gravedigger, to make it bear on Hamlet’s age only, we have:
Ham. How long hast thou been Grave-maker?
Clow. ...I came too’t... that very day that young Hamlet was borne.
................I haue been Sexten heere man and boy thirty yeeres.
................heer’s a scull now hath lyen you i’th earth 23. yeeres.
Ham. Whose was it? Clow. ... this same skull sir, was sir Yoricks skull, the Kings Iester.
Ham. Hee hath bore me on his backe a thousand times...
So we have to conclude that Hamlet is thirty years old, and was seven when Yorick died.
WHAT OTHERS SAY.
King. for your intent In going backe to schoole in Wittenberg
He says this to Hamlet in their first onstage appearance together. Students entered universities (Wittenberg was one) much earlier in those days, often at fourteen, and left earlier. So Hamlet can’t be thirty.
Laertes. For nature cressant does not grow alone
In thewes and bulkes
Laertes says this about Hamlet, to Ophelia, in his first dialogue with her. So Hamlet is still a growing lad, certainly not thirty.
Polonius. for Lord Hamlet,
Belieue so much in him that he is young
He says this to Ophelia in his first dialogue with her. He means that Hamlet is young, not that he is youthful for a man of thirty.
Ophelia. That vnmatcht forme, and stature of blowne youth Blasted with extacie
She says this, solus, immediately after her first meeting (on stage) with Hamlet. "stature of blowne youth" means "in the full flower of youth," and that’s certainly not thirty.
Though more examples could be paraded, these are enough. But nothing has ever been found that supports the gravedigger’s assertions.
OTHER EVIDENCE.
Hamlet’s behaviour, throughout the play, is that of an adolescent. He is already sulking in and at the presence of the king before the ghost gives him an objective reason for doing so. He’s still an idealist judging others by his own ideals and feelings, so the other mourners for his father seem hypocritical, and he thinks his experience as a mourner unique. Had Hamlet been thirty, the king would have told him to act his age when lecturing him on his attitude to his father’s death. In fact, no one ever tells him to act his age, not even he himself, who is always bursting out with unsparing descriptions and criticisms of himself, like many a teenager. The hatred for his stepfather, and the vehemence of it, is a barely controllable teenage jealousy for the loss of his mother to another man (to go no deeper into it), no matter what the rationalizations and later justifications for it. His veneration for his dead father is teenage idolatry (to go no deeper into that), and his rage at his mother who does not quite understand him but loves him all the same is that same old teenage incestuous jealousy that, like ole man river, keeps on endlessly rolling through generation after generation of teenagers. His outburts of bravado, as in his first encounter with the ghost, and at Ophelia’s grave, are teenage braggadocio. And if he were thirty, surely someone would have mentioned at some of several appropriate moments some previous attraction to a woman or girl; or if there hadn’t been anyone before Ophelia, how unusual his attraction to her was. Well, I could go on and on, but there’s no need to: how many nails need one put in to close the coffin on thirty years?
WHY IS THE GRAVEDIGGER LYING?
This unequivocal going out of the way to establish Hamlet’s age cannot be mere carelessness on Shakespeare’s part, and it serves no dramatic purpose, and contradicts the tenor of the play (not that it is an opera). No, it can only be that the 30 and the 23 are alterations of the original figures, which were changed to fit an older replacement for a younger actor, moreover one who, no matter what his abilities, could not get away without raising an audience’s disbelief and ridicule at the comparison forced on him by the original figures. (Was Burbage who played young Hamlet and was over thirty at the time, the only one to do so? Did someone still older also play Hamlet?) Other tamperings with the Second Quarto undoubtedly occurred, like the omission of the "Denmark is a prison" section, which is to be found in the Folio, so this loss to the play’s virginity should come as no surprise.
SO, SHERLOCK KOZUBEI, HOW OLD IS HE?
Well, if he went to Wittenberg when he was 14 or 15, and then was away for a time as his comment to his fellow-student, "Horatio, or I do forget my selfe" suggests, he could be 15 or 16. Given his behaviour, 14 or 17 seem to be stretching it a bit much.
One can assume that the re-numberer, on the evidence, respected the play and only minimumly changed what he felt he had to, so that Yorick’s death when Hamlet was 7 may still be a valid date. And since, in that graveyard, a corpse lasts 8 or 9 years before it rots (according to the gravedigger’s testimony which seems perfectly sound except as regards Hamlet’s age), and Yorick’s head is now only a skull, 8 or 9 years must have passed, and that makes Hamlet at least 15 or 16. Now where did I put my pipe?
"On such ifs and buts are structures
Of conjecture built (that live or die,
Like bubbles in the air, almost
As long as human bubbles do)."
10. A PUPPET SHOW.
The sixth chapter ended with some comments on Horatio’s: "This bodes some strange eruption to the state." What comes next in the play includes a speech, also Horatio’s, which leaves no room for doubt, so badly written it is and in such a way, that it is a deliberate and unabashed flaunting of an exemplary piece of poor writing. If it doesn’t come off as the most boring and uninspired speech in all the play, it isn’t the play’s fault. It comes after Marcellus says:
Good now sit downe, and tell me he that knowes,
Why this same strikt and most observant watch
So nightly toiles the subject of the land,
And with such dayly cost of brazon Cannon
And forraine marte, for implements of warre,
Why such impresse of ship-writes, whose sore taske
Does not deuide the Sunday from the weeke,
What might be toward that this sweaty hast
Doth make the night ioynt labourer with the day,
Who ist that can inform mee?
Hor. That can I.
At least the whisper goes so; our last King,
Whose image euen but now appear’d to vs,
Was as you knowe by Fortinbrasse of Norway,
Thereto prickt on by a most emulate pride
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet,
(For so this side of our knowne world esteemd him)
Did slay this Fortinbrasse, who by a seald compact
Well ratified by lawe and heraldy
Did forfait (with his life) all these his lands
Which he stood seaz’d of, to the conquerour.
Against the which a moitie competent
Was gaged by our King, which had returne
To the inheritance of Fortinbrasse,
Had he bin vanquisher; as by the same comart,
And carriage of the article desseigne,
His fell to Hamlet; now Sir, young Fortinbrass
Of vnimprooved mettle, hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway heere and there
Sharkt vp a list of lawelesse resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomacke in’t, which is no other
As it doth well appeare vnto our state
But to recover of vs by strong hand
And tearmes compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost; and this I take it,
Is the maine motive of our preparations
The source of this our watch, and the chiefe head
Of this post hast and Romadge in the land.
Bar. I thinke it be no other, but enso;
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch so like the King
That was and is the question of these warres.
Hurrying to get to Horatio, I shan’t say much about Marcellus’ speech. Its first line means "Would you two be so good as to sit down (as M. may have already done), and whichever one of you knows — tell me...." Marcellus may be genuinely trying to find out about something else that mystifies him, other than the Ghost, or he may want to know Horatio’s view of these other occurrences even if he already has his own answers to the questions he is about to ask. If we are to believe Hamlet, and we should, that Horatio "is not passions slave," then Horatio almost instantly recovered from his ghost-caused shock and Marcellus is not using the questions to divert his attention from the ghost to make him feel better. But, in an interaction unnoticed by Horatio, it is Barnardo, who everytime he opens his mouth to answer each of Marcellus’ first three questions, is motioned each time to keep quiet by Marcellus and does so. At the end of the fourth question, Barnardo triumphantly refrains from answering, having figured out that Marcellus wants him to wait till he has finished speaking, but he is surprised and chagrined when Horatio, stressing the "That," answers with: "That can I," which means "At least I can answer that one, even if I can’t tell you about the ghost."
After Marcellus’ speech, packed with the virtues of concision, rhetoric, and expressiveness, we come to Horatio’s speech: that inflated, ugly, dreary, failed parody of legal gobbledygook and political commentary that bogs the action of the play down into a quicksand. What it says, which is its only virtue, if it is one, can be condensed into a few lines if we strip off most of the not quite infinite length of its padding, viz.: "...our last King... by Fortinbrasse of Norway...Dared to the combat; ... Did slay this Fortinbrasse, who... Did forfeit ... his lands ... to the conquerour. ........now... young Fortinbrasse... hath... sharkt up... resolutes ... to recover those... lands........ and this... Is the main motive of our preparations and... watch." Even this could be shortened by replacing "did slay" with "slew," and so on. The Ghost’s own words should be turned against Shakespeare: "O Hamlet, what a falling off was there." With that, the prosecution rests.
The counsel for the defence now rises, hooks his thumbs into his waistcoat, a sure sign that he will talk at length, and agrees with the prosecution! No matter, he says, how you manoeuvre Horatio about the stage during his speech, and no matter how you make the other two react to him, the ratio of humour to the amount of effort is very low, and then where is the greatness of Shakespeare? and where is it if you do what appears unthinkable only to me, who am no expert: I mean, if you do what is usually done to Shakespeare plays as a matter of course, that is, cut, or introduce extraneous humorous material when what there is doesn’t seem to work. To do this is really a hidden way of criticizing Shakespeare, unless the doer of it were to say quite openly "I’ve not been given enough time to do the play justice" or "I don’t know how to make such and such a bit as meaningful as it really is," or "I don’t know what it means." Have we ever heard such a confession? And yet it is extremely doubtful if even in Shakespeare’s time anyone except lawyers would have understood all the legal terms, and I believe my learned friend (and he indicates the prosecutor) omitted to mention that even they might not have understood the word "comart," whether they would admit to it or not, since it is a word which does not exist anywhere else in or out of Shakespeare, and which the Folio emended to "covenant." Well, yes, it can be argued that the idea of that part of the speech is only to give us a feel of legalese, you don’t have to know that "compact" means "agreement," that "moitie competent" means "equivalent amount," that "gaged" means "staked," that "carriage of the article desseigne" means something like "putting into effect of the relevant proviso," and as for "comart"! — well, that dry as dust but nevertheless great 18th century editor, Malone, suggested "joint bargain" might be meant; but now, and this is positively its first appearance ever, another explanation of it, perhaps the rediscovered original meaning, is offered here as the result of giving "mart," which was an alternative form of the word "marque" in Shakespeare’s time, the meaning of "reprisal," which is what "marque" sometimes meant then, as for example in the learned John Selden’s book of 1602, called "Titles of honor," in which he has the phrase "The lawes of Marque, or Reprisales." Nowadays a hyphen between "co" and "mart" would make it clear that it means "accompanying reprisal." But of course this explanation does not justify any part of the alleged heinous dramatic crime that, we have just been told, is at the heart of the dispute that is now under consideration. I refer, of course, to the serious lack of humor in a so-called humorous speech. (Applause).
As counseI for the defence, I have only one exhibit to produce. It is that embodiment of the comic, that arm with hand attached, that memorable arm that Horatio himself produced earlier on when he answered Bernardo, who had asked if he was there, with the witty statement that "A piece of him" was. May we see it? You will notice that both arm and hand are very mobile and quick to react. Thank you. You may take it back. It will come in handy later on.
Since Horatio’s words are so clearly, except perhaps for the last 3 lines, dramatically inadequate as mere words,that part of Shakespeare’s reputation which is on trial here can only be saved by actions whose strengths can compensate for the excessive listlessness of the words they accompany and that can put flesh and flash on their lustreless bones, and I hope you will see some actions today which will do the trick. May I have the arm again? Thank you. I’ll go straight to the speech and the not-really-whispered "whisper" which is, as you can see, spoken as if picked out by inverted commas. [Reader, from here on through page 82 drive slowly. Bends ahead.]
At least the whisper goes so; our last King,
Whose image euen but now appear’d to vs,
But I should tell you first how Horatio communicates the progress of this rumour to his audiences.
Horatio, slowly and evenly swinging his face from Marcellus to Barnardo, addresses (with no break between the constituent phrases of "At least the whisper goes so") its "at least" to Marcellus, and "the whisper" to the air between the two, and "goes so" to Barnardo who is watching intently along with Marcellus.
Then Horatio eyes his own right arm, now upright above the elbow, and introduces it as "our last King"; and even while adding "Whose image," bends his left arm, and that becomes the Ghost (and lookalike image) of the arm and hand that serve as King Hamlet. After which, Horatio’s face suddenly frowns and becomes the Ghost’s face swinging angrily and eeriely, from Marcellus to Barnardo on the "euen but now," and back to Marcellus during the "appeared to us"; or "to vs" sets Horatio’s head rearing back with fear of the Ghost, or ...
Leaving that, we start again at:
our last King,
Whose image euen but now appear ’d to vs,
Was as you knowe by Fortinbrasse of Norway,
Thereto prickt on by a most emulate pride
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet,
(For so this side of our knowne world esteemd him)
Did slay this Fortinbrasse,
After the excursion of the eyes and the Ghost arm in the company of "even but now appear’d to us," "our last King...Was" requires Horatio’s eyes to swing back to the Hamlet arm. Next, a nod from Horatio acknowledges his two listeners as the you of "as you knowe." And then King Hamlet’s index finger jabs the other arm to identify it as the Fortinbrasse in "by Fortinbrasse" and to free it of its Ghost identity, after which a gesture of the King’s arm outlines the territory "of Norway" that surrounds Fortinbrasse on the Fortinbrasse side of Horatio’s body. "Thereto prickt on" brings with it two jabs from the King’s middle finger at the Fortinbrasse arm, and "by a most emulate pride" has Fortinbrasse swaying in the air like a half-risen cobra with a cresting head, and reminding some of us of the pride of ’that serpent, Satan’. During "Dared," an assistant hand, a hand that is temporarily no longer taking-on the role of King Hamlet, seems to strip the glove off the Fortinbrasse hand; and during "to the combat," the imaginary glove seems to be thrown to the ground by Fortinbrasse as a challenge to the King. In the combat "in which our valiant Hamlet...did slay this Fortinbrasse," Fortinbrasse gets in a poke at the King during "in which" and the King replies with two pokes at Fortinbrasse during "our valiant Hamlet." Then a gesture by the Fortinbrasse arm illustrates the whereabouts and largeness of the extent of "this side" of "this side of our known world," by indicating a part of Horatio’s body that includes the arm that represents the King; and "our known world" is indicated by an even bigger gesture which includes Norway. And with "Did slay" the King once more attacks Fortinbras, whose representative arm falls down in death during "this Fortinbrasse." And in answer to my learned colleague, "Did slay" is preferred to the conciser "slew" to give time for these actions to occur (as is the case with all the other circumlocutions in Horatio’s speech) which, among other things, points up the futility of the tyrannous and much-touted modern rule that often results in boring and inaccurate writing and which states that the concision of the active verb is better than the longer passive. Appropriateness is all.
Going on with the text:
who by a seald compact
Well ratified by lawe and heraldy
Did forfait (with his life) all these his lands
Which he stood seaz’d of, to the conquerour.
To seal the compact, Fortinbrasse’s fist hits the flat of the King’s horizontal hand, on "by" and on "seald"; and the King’s fist finalizes the word "compact" by impacting more heavily on the flat of Fortinbrasse’s hand. During the saying of "well," the King’s hand subscribes his signature to the compact; and Fortinbrasse’s subscribes his, during "ratified." (To write the name, "Hamlet," requires less time than to write "Fortinbrasse" and so is written during "well," that being shorter than "ratified"). But if this is too hurried to be done well, just one hand will do. Next, a finger slides sideways as if along a legal parchment that is being checked ("by lawe"), and then the fists shape a trumpet at Horatio’s mouth for "and heraldy," or do nothing. During "Did forfeit (with his life)" the four fingers on the hand of Fortinbrasse’s re-erected arm crumple and then the arm itself drops. Then the King’s hand points to "all these his lands," a part of the Greater Norway it had already indicated once before. Nowadays we’d comma off "his lands," but the Jacobethans obviously spoke it as if it were commaed off. The "stood" of "Which he stood seaz’d of" indicates that Fortinbrasse is again erect. Then his hand closes itself, punning on "seaz’d of." And then the King disdainfully knocks Fortinbrasse down again with the greatest of ease during Horatio’s pronunciation of "to the conquerour."
The next bit of the text is:
Against the which a moitie competent
Was gaged by our King, which had returne
To the inheritance of Fortinbrasse,
Had he bin vanquisher; as by the same comart,
And carriage of the article desseigne,
His fell to Hamlet;
After every two syllables of "Against the which a moitie competent," the King’s hand jumps along a frontier strip on the Denmark side of Horatio’s body, as if over an opponent’s pieces on a draughtsboard. "Was gaged by our King" has the King’s hand sweep back to collect the pieces and plonk them down as his stake. Then "which had returne" has the King’s hand sweep this imaginary pile towards Norway, which it outlines (as it did once before) while saying "the inheritance of Fortinbrasse," during which the always-rising-again Fortinbrasse resurrects. The comparative shortness of "Had he bin vanquisher" makes Fortinbrasse’s hand go faster along the Danish frontier strip as he repeats the five jumps which the King’s hand had more time for, having had more syllables to encompass it in. During "as by the same comart," Fortinbrasse’s hand repeats the five jumps, and then, during "And carriage of the article desseigne" both hands carry a large, weighty and invisible book which they put down and open so that one finger can trace "The article desseigne." I prefer the last "e" in "desseigne" to be accented (to arrive at ten syllables for the line) as if it were a descendant of an Anglo-French legal term of the 300 years from 1066 when French was the official language of England. And the need to mention that Samuel Johnson gave "desseigne" the meaning of "drawn up" also serves as my chance to recommend his "Preface to Shakespeare" as one of the noblest pieces of prose in English. To continue, during "His fell to Hamlet" the King’s hand again jumps five times, but this time along the Norwegian frontier strip, while Fortinbrasse falls down once more.
It may be that up to this point in the speech Horatio’s legs have not moved even once, and even his audience may have forgotten to move in their fascination with this strange sort of puppet show and dance of the hands and arms which add more meaning to the voice and its words.
Or instead of his arms, maybe Horatio uses his two auditors as puppets all the time, or only after "now Sir." Or did he use fingers instead of arms and hands?
Let me also say, before we go too far from the next quotation, that for the second time in this book a previously stated conclusion about the versification must be modified. What I said about twelve syllable lines in this play is proven to be quite wrong by the first word of the line:
"Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet"
and so now I prefer to say a twelve syllable line contains five stressed syllables and seven unstressed ones in any position, and maybe that will do. Ten and eleven syllable lines also have five and six unstressed syllables respectively, and in any order. (The ordering of stressed and unstressed syllables refines the connotative and denotative meanings and immediately affects an unblocked hearer who knows English by passing on information which would take too long for the analytical faculty (which the ordering bypasses) to furnish. This is true of the analysis of connotative and denotative meanings also. Analysis may bring out omitted and distorted meanings, but there should only be time for that before and after a performance).
But on with Horatio’s speech:
now Sir, young Fortinbrasse
Of vnimprooued mettle, hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway heere and there
Sharkt vp a list of lawelesse resolutes
For foode and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomacke in’t,
It seems as if the lawyer, released from the tight restraint of the meticulousness of his recital of the law, is now free to display the full stature of his personality. But who does he address his "now Sir" with such choplicking unction to, and with such evident and expansive enjoyment at laying down the law? Perhaps to Barnardo rather than Marcellus who’s just been given a full share of legalese. (Or perhaps the other way round if we can laugh at Barnardo’s reactions). From here on, his speaking of the speech is more oratorical and broadly gestural, just as the matter is less specialized than before. The arm that stood in for Fortinbrasse now stands in for "young Fortinbrasse." Perhaps "skirts" gets a skittering of the fingers of one hand in the direction of the hem of Horatio’s mantle; just as, to suggest the idea of number, "list" gives them a chance to rapidly uncurl, one after another, starting with the index. The phrase "for foode and diet" should not be thought of as containing useless repetition. The Elizabethans probably thought nobody would be daft enough to read it like that, but they didn’t know some editors and actors. To prevent that reading, we would nowadays put a comma after food. The "laweless resolutes" are food for Fortinbrasse and also will fight for him in return for food. They are in turn the diet to be eaten up by the "enterprise That hath a stomacke in’t" (meaning an operation that requires courage and casualties). The swallowing up of the "i" in "in’t" hints at the capability of the stomach. "Sharks up" (a one-time Shakespeare coinage) means "bolted down indiscriminatingly," but in this complex context it may also contain its opposite: "spewed out what it bolted down," the latter being an entirely conjectural meaning on my part which may one day turn out to not be manufactured entirely out of whole cloth.
some enterprise
That hath a stomacke in’t, which is no other
As it doth well appeare vnto our state
But to recouer of vs by strong hand
And tearmes compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost;
I have ignored till now the gross product of a never quite explicit parallel of the rape of women with rapine of the land, in the post-legal part of Horatio’s speech, where "foresaid lands" are also "forced lands"; and going back a little, young Fortinbrasse’s "unimprooued mettle, hot and full" (under one category of the meanings of "full," the Oxford English Dictionary, which is not given to lewdness, gives "having a rounded outline; large, swelling, round, protuberant") within the "skirts" of Norway (skirts being the edges of places and the lower parts of some of the male and female clothing of those days — but also another name for women, then as now, as a singular use of it in "The Seven Sages"in 1560 attests) like a shark slanting upwards "sharks up a list" with the resolve of the lawlessness "of lawless resolutes" (as "hot and full" as Fortinbrasse) to be fulfilled and make the stomach swell in the resulting pregnancy or product of the ’recovering’ (a sexual term) and re-abduction (if carried out) of the raped and abducted lands which it is going to try to get back by force from Denmark. This passage is not mentioned in Eric Partridge’s pioneering "Shakespeare’s Bawdy." Nor in any aftercomers.
This is only an incomplete approximation to the strand of murky sexuality in that part of Horatio’s speech which it deals with. That sexuality will color this part of the speech if the actor of Horatio is aware of it. A tendency towards sexual innuendo may be more in the character of the lawyer that Horatio is impersonating than in Horatio.
To wind up his speech, Horatio drops his persona and in his own person, satisfied at the way he has just steered his own performance to success, triumphantly sums up in this masterly peroratory reference to the Marcellinian questions that led to it all:
and this I take it,
Is the maine motive of our preparations
The source of this our watch, and the chiefe head
Of this post hast and Romadge of the land.
At "I take it" he probably flings a loose edge of his mantle more tightly around himself. Perhaps "maine motive" also means "motive which has to do with the sea," and "source" puns on "sauce," and "head" means both "fountainhead" and "aim." And "post hast and Romadge in the land" are what they are (plus a pun on roam) but also a summarizing reference to impatient male rummagings in the skirts of the land.
What about Barnardo’s follow up to this? His two cents’ worth that he has been determined and is determined to get in. It is:
I thinke it be no other, but enso;
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch so like the King
That was and is the question of these warres.
Perhaps a paraphrase will suffice: "It seems to me too that it just can’t be anything else, and has got to be what you’ve said it is. So that it really could be that this awe-inspiring ghost, suggestive of things to come and making its appearances in the shape of the former king during our sentry duty and looking as if it were ready to fight in another war for the same things it warred for before, fits right in, with all that you mentioned, like a round peg in a round hole." Barnardo’s speech is characteristic of his care for accuracy, as for example in the (in my view) not-to-be-scoffed-at pedantry of his "was and is," though it may also be a laughworthy reminder of Horatio’s parody of the law and of the parody’s influence.
By the way, only a really good actor could get away with the puppet show and then dump it another night and carry through Horatio’s speech successfully by speaking all or some of it seriously. The fun then lies in the accompanying reactions of Marcellus and Barnardo, and Barnardo’s follow-up speech.
11. CRUCES AND CONJECTURES AFTER THE PUPPET SHOW.
Continuing from where Barnado left off, this is the Second Quarto text:
Hor. A moth it is to trouble the mindes eye:
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Iulius fell
The graves stood tennatlesse, and the sheeted dead
Did squeake and gibber in the Roman streets
As starres with traines of fier, and dewes of blood
Disasters in the sunne; and the moist starre,
Vpon whose influence Neptunes Empier stands,
Was sicke almost to doomesday with eclipse,
And euen the like precurse of feare events
As harbindgers preceading still the fates
And prologue to the Omen comming on
Have heauen and earth together demonstrated
Vnto our Climatures and countrymen.
Enter Ghost.
But soft, behold, loe where it comes againe
Ile crosse it though it blast mee:
Editors have been of insufficient help with this.
Whoever punctuated this speech, or added to a pre-existing but very light punctuation of it, believed the first "As" meant "while"; and that "disasters" and "events" were verbs (as both sometimes were in those days); and that "events" meant "occurs"; and that the harbingers and prologue forecast a portentous admixture of heaven and earth to the Danish climatures and countrymen. So the assumption of a hurrying or slovenly Carelessness putting in or leaving out punctuation in readying the speech for printing is an editorial slander. Then why is the punctuation inadequate, and what should it be?
The transitional first line: "A moth it is to trouble the mindes eye:" means "You’re right about this being something to worry about. It’s fascinating. But (now we go on to the next lines) compared to what happened in Roman times, it is ’nuffin’." "Moth" should be "mote," as noted by editors, although an actor, reacting as if a moth were bothering him, might reinstate it. It’s a long shot. (The "You’re right" of the paraphrase is understood from the tone of voice in which Horatio says "it is," and refers to the views about the Ghost in the preceding Barnardo speech. It is not necessarily a simple acceptance and gives the actor ample scope for a variety of possible attitudes both to Barnardo’s speech and Barnardo. By which I do not mean them to be spoken with arbitrary attitudes and emotions attached.)
And to have more meaning than can be derived from the original punctuation and subsequent editorial botching and commentary, select "flourishing" and "triumphant" from the Oxford English Dictionary as the two co-reigning meanings of "palmy" and have Horatio show us (and the other two) the symbolic and saluting palm of his hand raised high above his head as he says "palmy" and apply "most" to "palmy" and not just to "high," to have "In the most high and palmy state of Rome" mean "During the time when the condition of Rome was at its peak, and the polity of Rome was at its most flourishing, and constantly conquering everything around it."
The next line’s "squeake and gibber" can be given special vocal treatment by the actor (special does not mean stupid). They can, for instance, be spoken (with appropriate gestures) in ways that will elicit an intended laugh or a chill on each of the three words, a possibility which will startle some to whom this speech has always been wholly serious.
All emending editors, except the worst, quite rightly enclose the next line and a half in semicolons, and put a comma after "dewes of blood." But then their problems begin, and their proposed solutions cause even more problems. Their conclusions, lumped together, are that
As starres with traines of fier, and dewes of blood
Disasters in the sunne;
is missing a line, is corrupt, is badly written, or has been displaced (together with the episode of the "moist starre") from its real home at the end of the speech. All are wrong. A semicolon before "As" (and a comma after "blood") let’s this section make up the second of three detailed examples of abnormal events, the first of which consists of details on ghosts and the third of the details of an eclipse, and then this wreathed-with-difficulties, editor-wrecking line-and-a-half makes sense as long as one doesn’t also assume, as apparently one must to qualify as an editor, that it says the "dewes of blood" are inside or end up inside the sun rather like sunspots (a retrospective discovery limited only to editors, who however, even while giving it this meaning, knew this could not be the meaning as sunspots were still unknown and undiscovered by western science when Hamlet was written, as were dews of blood crashing into the sun or already in it) so that they were left struggling to find some other significance by changing the text. What "in the sun" really means is "in broad daylight" (and it is again used in this sense by Hamlet himself in the next scene); so that with the insertion of a second comma, the words
As starres with traines of fier, and dewes of blood,
Disasters in the sunne;
mean "Omens that forecast disaster appeared in broad daylight, such as: fiery-tailed comets, and dews that consisted of blood." Given this meaning, that line-and-a-half in its context in the Second Quarto does not require a spoken verb nor is it awkward, a requirement and an awkwardness some commentators have ascribed to it in their ignorance of its meaning and its grammatical structure and the interaction of both of these with the rest of the speech.
The third example of abnormality is
and the moist starre,
Vpon whose influence Neptunes Empier stands,
Was sicke almost to doomesday with eclipse.
The last line of this means the moon "was eclipsed so fully and for so long that it seemed it would never light up again, as if it were already a lightless component of the final destruction forecast in holy writ." And it takes all of the preceding line and a half to turn this "moist starre" into our familiar moon. But why wasn’t just the one word "moon" used instead? Is there less poetry in the word "moon," or in the mere moon itself, than in the magnified details brought into focus by this stretching and lengthening? No, it must be that the lengthening must provide room for some event to happen in: Horatio must be doing something that needs two-and-a-half lines to be completed in. But what can it be? Is he being funny again? Does he wipe a non-existent tear away from under an eye while saying "moist starre"? and so on? And is the dramatic intention to divert everyone from the idea of this particular ghost by focusing attention on both Horatio’s virtuosity as an entertainer and on his stories of eerie omens so that the return of the ghost will shock us at least as much as it did the first time? And having had the Ghost laughed out of mind, does he again build an eerie but ghostless atmosphere in the next five lines? which are:
And euen the like precurse of feare events
As harbindgers preceading still the fates
And prologue to the Omen comming on
Haue heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our Climatures and countrymen.
To make sense of these, editors usually change "feare" into "fierce" or "fear"d," and end lines one and three with a comma. But since minimum disturbance of the original text along with the maximum of sense is desirable in good editing of good writing, "feare" could be kept unchanged and a comma inserted after it, so that "events" becomes a noun in apposition to "the like precurse of feare." Usually, editors would do better to change the punctuation where such changes produce sense, rather than the words, since manuscripts of that time are underpunctuated compared to both our practices and to their contemporaneous printed versions. In the manuscript of the play of "Sir Thomas More," that part of it that scholars think is in the only known example of Shakespeare’s handwriting, seems underpunctuated too. The punctuation of the Second Quarto Hamlet gave greater scope for the making of mistakes to a painstaking compositor than did its words, as all the known deviations from the authorial wording appear to be unintentional, but departures from the manuscribal punctuation, through the misreading of pieces of puzzling syntax when trying to make explicit an implicit but expected punctuation, must have given rise to more deviations in punctuation...
But it seems to me that a still less intrusive reading of the text will accept that "events" means "occurs" and is a verb which is preceded by an elided relative pronoun (which would be "which" or "that," nowadays), a grammatical construction sometimes used by Shakespeare.
And now let’s look at some editorial dulling of these five lines, additional to "events." Firstly, there is the continued and exclusive interpretation of two other words as nouns, the result of unthinking reading, when notes should at least offer them as possible verbs, in which role they are more effective. One verb is "still" in the sense of "proceed to satisfy" or "calm down," and the other verb is "prologue." Secondly, there is an unawareness of puns: as in not having "precurse of feare" mean at least that "curse which consists of fear engendered beforehand" while retaining the restricted editorial meaning of "that which precedes and forecasts fear"; and "preceading" meaning "sowing the seeds in advance" because if it doesn’t mean that too, then the proffering on its punless own of its other meaning of "going beforehand" renders "preceading" unnecessary since it is implied in "harbindgers," and only Shakespeare’s "insistence on punning" (to paraphrase Sam Johnson), validates its existence in this piece of good writing.
So now we should be able to read the Second Quarto’s "Have heaven and earth together demonstrated" as simultaneously meaning both "have demonstrated heaven and earth together" and "heaven and earth together have demonstrated," and so at one stroke know from these six words both the identity of the instrumentalities of fear, and that they have trespassed on each other’s territories. The events in the first three lines carry out the demonstration and are what’s demonstrated. Not entirely different is a type of Japanese poem in which two apparently unrelated meanings run concurrently throughout the poem. Their juxtaposition produces an unstated meaning whose complexity includes what is in each of its two components and the result of their juxtaposition.
Denmark, being bigger in Shakespeare’s time, had more regional climates than it has now, and "our climatures" means "the climatical regions of Denmark, as opposed to those of ancient Rome." I should think climatures is brought in, rather than some word standing for region alone, because the harbingers and omens seemed to have climatic connections and repercussions.
Stripped of its first line, the whole speech up to this point has the feel of Shakespeare’s fountain of creativity caught as it bursts into view (as one feels also in some of the sonnets of his contemporary, William Alabaster), whereas usually there is a slightly less dense quality in his writing as if the jet is being viewed as it broadens out at a slightly greater distance from the nozzle.
And now the Ghost enters, and Horatio says:
But soft, behold, loe where it comes againe
Ile crosse it though it blast mee:
Are the audience at first the only ones who see the Ghost as it passes Horatio who from where he is standing sees it after they think he has missed it, and who points it out to the other two, who from where they are sitting, still can’t see it after he says "behold" because a bit of scenery cuts off their view when they have turned their eyes from Horatio to look for the Ghost, so that he has to say "loe" and pull them upright so they can see it too? Whether so or not, a reader of edited versions will be forced to exclude some of the meaning (which accompanies and follows a sequence-of-events more or less like this) because of the almost exclusive availability of editions edited by editors who put a period (a full stop) after "behold" and another after "againe" (where the original doesn’t have anything), and are so sure of themselves that even the better editors don’t mention they have done so. Its omission in the Second Quarto appears to them so obviously unquestionably in error as to merit only silent correction by them. But there is no need for any correction. Both his audiences know Horatio is referring to a Ghost that has already appeared once before. So why stress it even more with a period? Periodless and unstopped, the above sequence of seeing and not seeing has Horatio pointing out the Ghost to the other two on "soft," that one word used here for "move and speak very quietly and cautiously so as not to alarm what’s out there," and pulling them up to see the Ghost on "behold" — whereas
loe where it comes againe
Ile crosse it though it blast mee:
is a forecast of what he will do with the Ghost, and has a swagger of desperation in it, and means at least "watch me accost it in the same place where I accosted it the first time." It is a boast and a dare. After all, Horatio is young. Specifically, their versions omit a place where Horatio will "crosse" the Ghost, his daring to do it again, and his asking to be watched as he dares to do so. And with this omission, the contrast between the choppy sound of "But soft, behold," and the unstoppable flow of
loe where it comes againe
Ile crosse it though it blast mee:
is lost. These lines in edited versions of the Second Quarto, such as
But soft, behold, loe where it comes againe.
Ile crosse it though it blast mee: stay illusion,
are choppy from beginning to end. Editors tend to change subtlety and variety into uniformity. They ignore the meaning of sound. They ignore the fact that words in the theatre must ride tandem with actions in order to get anywhere. They prefer blunted meanings. Several hundred per play is their ideal. Add to that the directors’ hundreds, and the thespians’ hundreds, and the influential scholars’ prepossessions, and the audiences’ ignorance of the existence and meaning of most of this cornucopia of errors — and what we see and hear in the theatre in the name of Hamlet is an eroded hulk encrusted with Shakespeare quotations.
12. "SHE IS SO CONCLINE TO MY LIFE AND SOULE"
The conjectures in the previous chapter have brought back to me a later passage in the Second Quarto, in which Claudius explains to Laertes about Hamlet that:
...the Queene his mother
Lives almost for his lookes, and for my selfe,
My vertue or my plague, be it eyther which,
She is so concliue to my life and soule.
That as the starre mooues not but in his sphere
I could not but by her,...
The Folio replaces "concliue" with "conjunctive." This is ingenious, but the sounds in "conjunctive" disrupt and oppose the meaning of the line it is in, and could only be justified if irony were intended. But none was intended.
The right-feeling sound comes from the slight reconstructive sleight involved in turning a "u" into an "n." The righting of an upside-down printed "n" is an occasionally needed editorial procedure in the Second Quarto, and in this case results in the retrieval and triumphant first-time-only appearance of "concline": an admirable Shakespeare coinage, consisting of "con" meaning "mutually" and of "cline" meaning "bent," and giving the line its true required meaning of "She is so accordant with my life and soul."
And oh yes, in the phrase be it eyther which, the caesura may occur after eyther, rather than after it. So there may even be a background pun on witch. This gives the actor the possibilities of an unfinished sentence under the stress of emotion, rather than having the phrase as part of a sentence and having which mean one.
13. CASE IN POINT:
1. UNNOTED RELEVANCIES, AND OTHER THINGS.
At first, I thought this would be a one-page chapter about the function of the word "bitter" in one of the excerpts below, but I had no sooner started to write it when up popped a new problem. It came out of one wing of the text I had left on each side of "bitter" to situate its bitterness adequately. This wing had to be extended to show what the new problem was rooted in. But this extension was found to harbor an even newer problem which required another extension, and so on. And in fact that chain-reaction of problem and problem-habitat went on and on like the house that Jack built, till I promised myself flat out to put a stop to it (and then I did so, like some good old ex-machina out of the past) because it had become even more apparent than before that the text of the play was thronged with problems, and that rather than present my reader with each and every problem and some solutions to them, no more was needed than to give examples of each species of problem (and their corresponding solutions where possible), as many were but variations on the same theme, and the themes were far fewer than the problems. Many of these problems were unacknowledged or unknown to the commentators, and often their solutions to the known ones were "less than satisfactory." This came out particularly in the contrast between the Second Quarto text and Harold Jenkins’ honest culprit Arden edition, first published in 1982, which is to-date (2000) unrevised and still of great use to anyone doing Hamlet, and more so than any other edition in print, because of its copious notes, its exemplary scrupulous adherence to the best of current scholarly procedures, and because its textual notes enable one to see what textual choices he made within the limitations of those procedures; and what he didn’t note, the relevancies outside of those limitations, could be seen by closely comparing the Second Quarto text to his.
Mixed in with other matters, some of these hitherto unnoted relevancies are put on display in parts of the commentary after each of the Second Quarto excerpts quoted below. The first excerpt has Hamlet ending a speech with:
... call me what instrument you wil, though you fret me not, you cannot play upon me. God bless you sir.
Enter Polonius.
Pol. My Lord, the Queene would speake with you, & presently.
Ham. Do you see yonder clowd that’s almost in shape of a Camel?
Pol. By’th masse and tis, like a Camell indeed.
Ham. Mee thinks it is like a Wezell.
Pol. It is backt like a Wezell.
Ham. Or like a Whale.
Pol. Very like a Whale.
This stuff about the camel, the weasel,and the whale does not mean that the cloud has rapidly changed, nor that, though it’s stayed the same, Hamlet has changed his mind about what it is like. It means rather that the cloud is all three at once ("You see that cloud that’s like a camel? I think it is like a weasel or a whale"). This is not meaningless (else we couldn’t know it meant that) but it is impossible. (The irreconcilable differences are in their shapes and perhaps in their sizes too). He gets Polonius to agree to the impossible. Trying to accommodate, Polonius stresses the "is" (otherwise "It is" would be "Tis") The fun in this passage is in watching Polonius’ contortions and the expressions of his face, when he is trying to swallow these impossibilities, before and during and after his concession of each analogy. His expression should make it clear to the audience that, even from the beginning, the cloud is nothing like a camel. Hamlet"s line could have been shorter (for example, as in "Yon cloud is like a camel"), so why isn’t it shorter? Partly because, having got Polonius to focus on a particular cloud by pointing it out with his finger, he draws the outline of, say, an o with the same finger while saying "cloud" and then draws a very contradictory shape on "almost" (which justifies the existence of "almost" in the sentence) and of course both of these are very different from the shape of a camel — the word for which, by the way, he speaks as if coming on the word at random like someone drawing a lottery number out of a hat. (Polonius can repeat that effect when he says "Camell," as Hamlet does with "Wezell" and a diphthongized "Whale," which latter Polonius wails out as a rhyming disyllable "way-ale").
Of course, their can be further fun at Polonius’ expense if Hamlet, by a gesture seen each time by R and G and Horatio, but not by P, also makes "Camel" refer to the male private parts, and "Wezell" to the penis, and "Whale" to that bulge which was so fashionable in some contemporary male breeches. Then "Camell," "Wezell," and "Whale" rhymed, and then the "ell" in them may be an extravagance for a lengthy penis, and so on (and so the spellings "Camell" and "Wezell" become an argument against the Arden and the other current editions’ modernization of the spelling, just as their unnoted modernization of "Mee" to "Me" diminishes the possibility of seeing that the former may be a stressed form of the latter and may be equivalent to the stressed "I" in the argumentative modern "Well,I"); or have I crossed an invisible watershed and is this sexual innuendo just a handful of barren sand that I have heaped up, only to find I have flung it into the top one of the two unstoppered ends of the hourglass that is the world, from whose lower end it will seep out for the wind of oblivion to deservedly and tracelessly disperse sooner rather than later, into the blankness of the darkness of that past which is itself no longer distinguishable and in which what was distinguishable is extinguished forever?
Whatever the result of that, Polonius’s admonitory "and presently" has a self-righteousness in it to make up for his having been detected hiding, and presumably spying as usual, when a sneeze which he made gave him away and called forth Hamlet’s "God bless you sir" which brings Polonius out flourishing a handkerchief which he uses to cover his embarrassment at being discovered. Jenkins, not seeing the dramatic logic in Polonius being spoken to just before he enters (whether as now presented by me or in some other possible way such as Hamlet acting as if seeing Polonius approaching along a passageway the audience cannot see into), uses non-dramatic logic in assuming that Polonius cannot be spoken to before he enters and so his text has Polonius entering before "God bless you, sir," and leaves the question of why Hamlet used that particular phrase unanswered. And this leads me to another objection: Jenkins’ commaed "God bless you, sir." may be the modern equivalent of the uncommaed 1604/5 "God blesse you sir.," as the omission of the comma in such a phrase was customary at the time; but that inserted comma could suggest a pause that is very probably unwarranted here because it destroys the possibility of the existence of equidistance of length in the sound (in Hamlet’s preceding speech) of "you fret me not" and "play upon me" and the culminating "God blesse you sir" (and the various meanings inherent in it, including a farcical culmination) and the possibility for the existence of certain necessary intonations appropriate to them, and destroys the conclusionary placement of these phrases as desirably concluding hammerblows to what I have quoted so far of that Hamlet speech. In addition, the sardonic exasperation that very likely is felt by Hamlet on recognizing the hidden presence of Polonius or on seeing him approach and that could be added to Hamlet’s voice as he says that uncommaed "God blesse you sir" becomes impossible unless it is introduced at some cost in some theatrically uneconomical way. As for:
call me what instrument you wil, though you fret me not,
you cannot play upon me.
in which "fret me" means both "annoy me" and "correctly position cross ridges for fingering as if I were a stringed instrument," and in which "though you fret me not" is a recognized crux because it impoverishes the meaning: the resettling of the first comma one word further to the right solves that crux. As explained in chapter 8, such a solution is more economical and likelier to be right than one in which words are changed or omitted. The Arden edition has "though you fret me, you cannot play upon me." This, and the differing Polonius-like contortions of the text by other editors are instructive and may amuse someone who takes the trouble of looking into them. The next lot of lines in the text is:
Then I will come to my mother by and by,
They foole me to the top of my bent, I will come by & by,
Leave me friends.
I will, say so. By and by is easily said,
Tis now the very witching time of night,
When Churchyards yawn, and hell it selfe breakes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drinke hote blood,
And doe such busines as the bitter day
Would quake to looke on:
The first of these lines belongs to the previous group and is the delayed response to P’s first line. "By and by" probably means "soon" in contrast to the "now" of "presently." Hamlet’s intonation of "by and by" may mimic P’s intonation of "presently"; and to enable an audience to catch this mimicry with ease, the exchange between Hamlet and Polonius should be quick. Perhaps "will" echoes Polonius’s "way-ale," a silliness in keeping with the previous lines. The line is addressed to R and G and P, and with a different meaning to Horatio if he is still around (the text has not dismissed him), and perhaps each person is acknowledged separately in the course of the line (which would account for and make use of the length of it) rather than contained in a comprehensive address from some distance away, a distance whose attainment may use up valuable moments of unnecessary silent action. A good carpenter does not use more nails than he needs.
"They foole me to the top of my bent" is described as an aside in Jenkins’ text though he acknowledges a reading that gives it as being addressed to Horatio. My point is that such alternatives and preferences should all be relegated to notes and that the reader should be given the plain unvarnished text. After the editor’s presentation (and weighing) of all the evidence, let the reader and those responsible for putting the play on in the theatre decide what is best. Sometimes I wish there were a law requiring Shakespeare texts to have a label stating by how many hundreds of changes the purity of the text has been diluted and that this constitutes a danger to the true understanding of it.
Who is contained in "They"? Probably only R and G and P. And why does Hamlet mention them at this point? Because what has been going on has given him this convenient opportunity for showing Horatio how Hamlet scorns them and sees through them, and "to the top of my bent" is a reassurance to Horatio that all is going as planned.
The "by and by" of "I will come by and by" is (in my version) addressed to Polonius with a dismissive wave of the hand on the last "by." The huddling up of so many syllables into one line may be a compositor"s mistake, but more likely Hamlet is explaining for the benefit of R and G and P that the "They foole me to the top of my bent" which he has just whispered to Horatio, a whispering noticed but not overheard by them, was really "I will come by and by." It also leaves room for the wordless action of Hamlet’s farewell handshakes with R and G and Horatio after "Leave me friends.." The possibility that "Leave me friends" can mean "Let’s remain friends" and is addressed only to R and G (with a meaning look at Horatio) is completely lost by ardenizing it to "Leave me, friends." although that too is of course a possible meaning.
"I will, say so" could be aimed at R and G, or at Polonius to get rid of him when, after a few reluctant parting steps after the last "by" of "I will come by and by," he turns to look back for reassurance that Hamlet is indeed going to come. Jenkins changes the meaning to a tame "I will say so" and ascribes it even more tamely to Polonius! Why he does so will be divulged a bit further on. Of course, "I will, say so" means "I will come. Tell her so." Karl Kraus, who forecast so much of what is now history from a newspaper headline which read "Germans arise" instead of "Germans, arise," must have chuckled in his grave when Jenkins deleted that comma.
But you, O neverdying Horror, have you not through many men already perpetrated sufficient desecrations upon Hamlet but that you now must, through the agency of the hARDENed and ARDENt Jenkins, commit yet another. O angels of mercy, forfend. Leave not your wings so together, as if each pair were held so but in prayer, but spread them out and beat them upon the enemy. Vain hope, and even vainer the utterer of it, though Jenkins’ ear alone and of itself were sufficient to start a war* as a "bitter business" will attest.
(* The reference is to a period in English history which culminated in what was called "The war of Jenkins’ ear," in which the mere cutting off of Jenkins’ ear, a British subject, was a cause of the 1739 war against the country of the foreigners who were alleged to have done it in 1732.)
But for now let us turn a deaf ear to this, for now Jenkins’ text does a somersault, and makes:
Leave me friends.
I will, say so. By and by is easily said,
end up as:
Pol. I will say so.
Ham. "By and by" is easily said.—Leave me, friends.
Why, O servant of Horror? (And yet an honourable man.) Was the Second Quarto text beyond understanding, or is your version more meaningful? Surely the "By and by" of "By and by is easily said" begins Hamlet’s soliloquy and is being contrasted with the "now" in the next line, the one in:
Tis now the very witching time of night,
When Churchyards yawne and hell it selfe breakes out Contagion to this world:
(But, servile servant, your constant resource will be divulged pretty soon). And did the sense made with "contagion" make you breathe the second line as:
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
when the awkwardness that required a change could, as so often elsewhere in this text, and preferably, be repaired by changing the punctuation rather than the wording? What my note (and parallel text) would show (if I were the notemaker) is:
By and by is easily said,
Tis now the very witching time of night,
When Churchyards yawn and hell it selfe. Breakes out
Contagion to this world:
(A "doth yawn" or "yawns" is implied after "hell.") The explosiveness of the sound of each b in these and the next few lines is very important. The actor should so manage his vocalization that the ineffectiveness in the huff and puff of the plosives in "By and by" will be contrasted to the irresistible power of the B in "Breakes out." The bees, along with dees and tees and hard cees, continue to detonate in:
now could I drinke hote blood,
And doe such bisines as the bitter day
Would quake to looke on:
Jenkins says that night and day are being contrasted and implies that that detracts from Charney’s suggestion that "the bitter day" is Doomsday. I take all that to my bosom as if it were mine own. But when Jenkins transfers "bitter," away from day, and plonks it in front of "busines," the protest is forced from me that "bitter day" refers to an extremely-felt coldness of the weather in the daytime, and since extreme coldness congeals the feelings and other things into a form of hardness and immovability, for the day to be moved to quake despite this, with fear or some other feeling, is a big deal. "bitter day" rather than "bitter night," even though the night might be colder; because in the day the "busines" can be seen and reacted to and the day is itself a witness. And finally, for those for whom these two interpretations of mine are merely airy flibbertigibbets, there is a third, that says that when the "busines’ is horrid enough, it attracts the belief that its "unnaturalness" causes omens and portents such as earthquakes.
But more importantly, Jenkins’ transfer destroys the sound: "bitter business" repeats the configuration of the effete bees in "By and by" and so it is trivialized by association, unlike "bitter day" which sounds right, and indeed the tip of the tongue seems to quake in saying it (and not, interestingly enough, when pronouncing "bitter business").
And now it is time to tell all. In this chapter, those stage directions I criticized are taken by Jenkins from other editors and credited to them, and that is no crime and yet the play is wronged; and the originality of the emendations of the "fret" and "bless" phrases is commendable, and still the play is wronged again. But doesn’t the bulk of what I balked at in this part of Jenkins’ text derive from the authority of the Folio, and isn’t that authority one he honourably acknowledges whenever he produces it? But don’t these Folio derivatives wrong the play: and that they are authorized on authority, by an authority, doesn’t that wrong the play the more? In the end, the openness of eclecticism, the originality of solutions, and the preferences of authority are beside the point. Meaning is all.
2. "NIGGLY ORS" OR "MORE PUNCTUATION. AND A FEW LITTLE BITS OF SPELLING."
"Can I interest you in a little punctuation?" said the spider to the fly.
"Come in, and park your little wings, and I will make you cry.
Such melancholy commas! so deserving of a sigh!
And the periods try so hard so hard, they are sure to make you cry."
Dear reader (and if you have got so far without skipping, dear indeed), big eyes deserve a voluminous handkerchief.
And since all of one particular Second Quarto speech was left out of the previous section, except for its ending, here now is the whole speech, with ending in situ, and tendrils of punctuation that will lead us to the unexpected:
Ham. Why looke you now how vnwoorthy a thing you make of me, you would play upon mee, you would seeme to know my stops, you would plucke out the hart of my mistery, you would sound mee from my lowest note to my compasse, and there is much musique excellent voyce in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak, s’bloud do you think I am easier to be plaid on then a pipe, call mee what instrument you wil, though you fret me not, you cannot play upon me. God blesse you sir.
From the time this speech was published in this form, till now, editors have religiously and without compunction slaughtered many of the particulars of its punctuation as a propitiation to the unbridled idol of stylistic conformity that happened to be hogging the worship of the punctuationists of their times. They demanded and still demand that the past and the future be given over to this Juggernaut and that whatever meaning is maimed or obliterated in this regard be regarded as meaningless. As if the current idol were alone eternal and could change the unchangeable and be sole inheritor of the past and the future, and as if other ways of punctuating were insignificantly mortal and hopelessly null, and forever and forever void. When the meaning of the text they produced out of adherence to the idol’s precepts differed from that in the unamended text, they passed it off, and still pass it off, as if it were at one and the same time Shakespeare’s meaning and yet (by a supreme paradox) easier to understand and therefore more desirable, and this seemed alright to them and to those blinded by the rays of the enlightenment this provided, because it satisfied, and satisfies, the desire for ease provided by a readymade road across an area containing an insufficiently-regarded Second Quarto more interesting but more difficult of access than any hamlet their road gives access to. And invariably each of their emendations continues to cut out one or more alternative readings and leaves no sign of having done that (so how could one know enough, from the emended text, to even imagine that there are possibly better readings?). And editors do this because editors have invariably arrogated to themselves the authority to make such changes as if it were their divine and unquestionable right to do as they wish without accountability and without explanation, as cats do with mice; and as I have said, often without even an indication of what, as editors, they have done, like thieves who leave no fingerprints at the scene of a theft in which nothing appears to be missing at first because they have substituted an ad hoc fake which only an expert could evaluate and denounce on the spot, but which non-experts are immediately more comfortable with because it seems more familiar to them because the differences from the original are contemporaneous with them; although some editors, like the sporting crook in some countryhouse mysteries, make a preliminary announcement of their intentions on the family heirlooms, in a short note to the intended victims of their depredations, who of course blithely ignore it as of little importance but, after the event, can’t tell what is missing (if anything), having no inventory like the Second Quarto to hand, and not being able to decipher the strange old writing of the inventory half as well as "The Sport" had made it his business to (for so he subscribes himself in his preliminary note, or is the signature on the note after all that of the blurred-out girl in the photo, whose hat has a becoming twist in its brim?), and when that wonderfully detailed inventory gets returned to the owners, (and to where it had formerly been, in the safe with all the other heirlooms), they can hardly even then read the bit of it they glance at, and understand even less than they read, because they have never bothered to look at it before, and don’t think they need to now, now that the investigation has done its job, and the stuff is back in the safe and doesn’t have to be bothered with any more. But perhaps their knowledgable butler will find a way of teaching it to them.
And yet the Second Quarto punctuation is obviously not all authorial in this speech. It plays safe, indicating with commas what it thinks are the divisions between the phrases, but avoiding stronger marks of punctuation which, if wrongly inserted, would have effects far worse than those arising from commas, as we shall see. This avoidance is retrospectively justified by the mistaken and obviously non-authorial comma before "though you fret me not." And the period just before "God blesse you sir" seems to also justify the avoidance, because that first period is the fulcrum of the whole speech, in the Second Quarto, and yet at first one cannot be sure whose doing it is, author’s or compositor’s, nor if their punctuation would coincide there. As it stands, perhaps all the speech, though with a momentary pause before "God blesse you sir," is said fast but in one unhurried breath, with the rise and fall of the intonation marking off its major divisions. "God blesse you sir" then marks the greatest change in the direction of the thinking and emotion in it. And even that assumes that the voicing should reflect the thinking. It needn’t. Obviously the actor must make a choice, but he should be aware of what he can choose from. Lets look at some alternatives and a pseudo-alternative or two.
Jenkins has "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me." Because the Second Quarto punctuation does not prohibit this, such an interpretation is possible, making the "now" apply only to "look you"; but it is an impoverishment of the text and of Shakespeare.
If one must punctuate the unpunctuated text to indicate a preferred meaning, would it not be better if it were punctuated as "Why, looke you, now how unwoorthy a thing you make of me," so that the "now" emphasizes G’s placing of a new grievance onto a pile already brought into being by him for Hamlet to put up with?
Difficult choices! For while we are inserting punctuation at will, what if, rather than have Guyldensterne "look" (in the sense of "pay attention") as I have made him do till now, we only insert one comma, at the end of "Why look you now," as the Folio does, so that the phrase can take on the meaning of "You may well stare now!" or "Why are you staring so?." And by fitting these latter meanings snugly together with a hint from the Folio’s "yet cannot you make it" (the Folio omits "speak"), why not dumbfound Guyldensterne and make "and there is much musique excellent voyce in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak, s’bloud do you think I am easier to be plaid on then a pipe," into "and there is much musique, excellent voyce, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it. Speak. S’bloud, do you think I am easier to be plaid on then a pipe?" Possibilities! And there are more. But to exhaustively materialize them and marry them to this page would be exhausting and more than is needed to alert the reader to their existence for better or worse.
But having brought in the Folio up there, I may as well hook onto it here and complain about Jenkins’ and everybody else’s preferring the wordier emendation (for emendation is what I think it is) in the Folio "you would sound mee from my lowest Note, to the top of my Compasse" to the unemended Second Quarto "you would sound mee from my lowest note to my compasse." If Shakespeare had meant "from my lowest note to the top of my compass" wouldn’t he have written "from my lowest note to my highest"? It’s as clear and more economical, unless "to the top of my compass" relates to some coincident stage business beyond my compassing. So it seems more economical to emend (if one must) "lowest note" to "least note" and let "my compasse" mean "the fullest extent of the range of my notes sounding at one and the same time."
And just because it comes to mind at this point, I would point out that the "you" of "God blesse you sir." equates Polonius with the activities of the "you"s in the three clauses that precede it, and so degrades him.
Now, for the purposes of demonstration I shall re-decorate this speech with rhetorical punctuation, etc.:
Why looke you now how unwoorthy a thing you make of me: you would play vpon mee, you would seeme to know my stops, you would plucke out the hart of my mistery, you would sound mee from my least note to my compasse:- and there is much, musique excellent, voyce, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it, speak: s’bloud, do you think I am easier to be plaid on then a pipe? call me what instrument you wil though, you fret me not, you cannot play upon me. God blesse you sir.
There! Certainly, the punctuation is still unsatisfactory: it does not do everything one would have it do. One would have to invent an improved punctuation to do justice to this speech which has as its most important structural feature an unbroken arc from beginning to end that a good actor will reproduce in spite of everything. But what my punctuation lets me do, and that is its main purpose, is point out how the otherwise on the whole very intelligent punctuation of the same speech by Jenkins completely obscures this arc and even breaks it down here and there so that its ruins don’t look like the original arc at all, and if at the same time the ruins were also a peculiar sort of hose then the pressure of emotion in the hose is not maintained, and the emotion does not spurt out in a steadily pushing stream as it should from start to end but falters every now and then, so that if it had been water, rather than emotion, the fire it is directed at would spring up anew each time.
What Jenkins does is put a period wherever I have a colon, and a semicolon for my colon-dash. (As to commas, he has added four. They appear in "Why, look you now," and "much music, excellent voice,"). That semicolon of his, by the way, acts as a hinge between the two main divisions of the Jenkins’ sentence it is in, and which the periods on either side bracket off from his other sentences. The excellent reading this provides is very clear and certainly more explicit than the attempt at it by my colon-dash, if mine provides it at all; but for now I forgo his solution as it would make too big a break in the line of colons acting here as supporting pillars between the main sections of the original arc. In print, keeping the outline of the whole curve of the arc must take precedence over the correct depiction of its parts if the two can’t march abreast. In contrast, the greater resources of speech can produce the arc, and any part of it in all its correctness, without having only one survive at the expense of the other.
What Jenkins’ periods, and Jenkins’ question mark which functions as a period since he makes it precede a capitalized C, do, and do without his "God bless you, sir" which I hope you remember as having become quite detached from the rest of the speech in his version, is make it impossible to have that arc. Instead they offer the possibility of several shorter arcs identical with each sentence or combination of contiguous sentences, and at best one arc with the fulcrum at "’Sblood" or "Call" and ending with "you cannot play upon me." In any case, none are as dramatically fulfilling as the Second Quarto’s arc which ends in "sir" and which its punctuation, however sketchy, does preserve.
And as a small dessert to this punctuation, here come some oldtime spellings and the fireworks that do not blaze up from them when modernized by Jenkins et al.
What follows is a fantasia based on mere hints for of course spelling was in fact in a transitional phase with, for example, the "e" at the end of certain printed words silenced but not yet discarded, and yet certain writers have at times exploited a spelling visually, as in the still brightly burning "Tyger" of William Blake with its stripy T and y, or to indicate sound, as perhaps William Shakespeare sometimes did. The reasoning behind this next bit of commentary will probably become apparent at some point as we go along. So here goes. Lengthen the sound of the "oo" in "looke" and in "unwoorthy" so that they resemble the longer and fuller rural dialect vowels of the South of England (a more available mutation is probably to be found nowadays in certain delightful West Indian dialects), stress "me" when it doubles its "e," lengthen the vowel sound of "seeme," stress "plucke" (accompanying it with a hand-movement that plucks at the heart), don’t stress the short "hart" nor the "mi" of "mistery," stress "passe" rather than "com," put on a French accent for "musique excellent voyce" (pronounce "voyce" as "voici," which means "here" in French). Hamlet must speak this French phrase loudly if it is to be heard as the compliment it is by the "player" it is meant for, the one who passed the recorder to him, since he is no longer near at hand once Hamlet has walked aside with Guyldensterne. Hamlet is showing his command of the situation by permitting himself this unforced and complimentary aside on the fine quality of the sounds made by the recorder which he has just teasingly and dramatically and momentarily played to drive home what he meant by "least note" and "compasse." And so on. This should lead to some interesting effects. What Jenkins gains of course is comprehendible comformity accompanied with the loss of all of the above. Which sounds like a disease or a funeral.
So variations in spelling may in fact be accurate spelling. And in fact, doubling a consonant and adding a final "e" to "shop" is still used as a code by some modernday "shoppes" to indicate they are not just any shop but have worthwhile cakes or antiques and are desirably quaint and delightfully expensive in an inexpensive way and (may I add?) "rather picky in a mildly snobbish way."
But the insertion of the above paragraph into this chapter has been in vain! It has only slightly delayed my destined encounter with the dreaded A. L. Rowse, or rather with his 1984 edition of Hamlet, the one that goes a huge step further than Jenkins. It frequently substitutes modern words and grammar for the words and grammar designated as "obsolete according to Rowse," a phrase which I coined, and admit to so that it won’t be laid at Rowse’s door as a self-seeking pomposity of his own.
He does this, it seems, out of a wish to decrease the amount of education necessary to value and understand Shakespeare in his unretouched full glory. And he wants to do this by decreasing the amount of Shakespeare in Shakespeare and so leave less to be understood and valued. Of course, he denies that less is left, and merely claims he has made him easier to understand by accepting some editorial changes and adding some of his own. However, unless he were another Shakespeare, (and he never claims to be that) how could his changes fail to deface the plays (since Shakespeare is a great artist even in, and because of, his smallest details) unless he were to remove some other editor’s botches masquerading as retouchings? which he doesn’t, not even accidentally.
His substitutions dilute the meaning in the play by so much more than Jenkins, it makes Jenkins look like a conservative troglodyte afraid to venture out of the safety of his familiar cave; or even makes him look like a tortoise, even perhaps the one who races the hare in the proverb. In all fairness to three-monkeyed Rowse, he of course sees no dilution, smells no dilution, and hears none. He means well. I’d rather have his Hamlet than none at alI. But while there is a choice..!
Rather than crawl laboriously through the play, pointing at this and at that, and pointing out how in Rowse (but not in Jenkins and the Second Quarto, etc), I was going to use Rowse’s it-gives-me-great-pride-to-be-here introductory examples of the range of his modest improvements of some of the other plays in the Shakespeare canon, and end with a little of his Hamlet; but finding myself at this moment unexpectedly without access to the necessary books and glad to avoid the drudgery thoroughness would have entailed, I’ll limit myself to the noxious effects of the first two actual Rowsian unhamletisings of Hamlet which he achieves through two words, harmless (in themselves) and (seemingly) so insignificant and desirable and innocuous. They are "you" and "has," and they replace "thee" and "hath" in:
Tis now strooke twelfe, get thee to bed Francisco.
and:
O, farwell honest souldiers, who hath relieu’d you?
Prepare.
But first this. When good writers have to choose one word rather than another, they do not assign one word to one side of a coin, and the other to the other, and then toss the coin in the air and say "Heads, this wins; and tails, that." and then accept whatever word comes up. No, they always have a preference, whether they give themselves reasons for it or not. But there is always a more or less expressible reason for preferring and retaining one word over the other. In the case of the greatest writers when one suspects they made the wrong choice or an indifferent one because one cannot find a sufficient reason for their choice they should be given the benefit of the doubt, and their word be left unmolested. Their reason may not be apparent. Also, the explanations I am about to give on behalf of Shakespeare for his two choices may have left out some or most of his real reasons.
By the way, Shakespeare could have chosen the Rowsian alternatives over his own. They were all available. He had often used them, so why did he choose the ones he did?
Lets look at the "thee" line (already partly dealt with in the third chapter) and the preceding line:
Fran. You come most carefully vpon your houre,
Bar. Tis now strooke twelfe, get thee to bed Francisco,
Look at the vowels in each line. No "i"s or "e"s in the first line. The sounded "e" vowels cluster together in the second, and were interpreted in Chapter Three as identified with part of Barnardo’s imitation of an awaiting paramour saying: "get thee to bed Francisco." We can now add "twelfe" to that imitation. The "f" in "twelfe" may be a misprint, but more likely it fits in as a correct transcription of a cousin of the lisp, the woman lover’s meant-to-be-fetcbing babytalk as rendered by Barnardo. "e"s and "i"s are pitched higher, as women’s voices usually are, than "a"s and "o"s and "u"s. So now we can add "Tis" to the imitation and adjust the sound of the non-imitative "now Strooke" accordingly. In the rest of the line, the vowel of "to" becomes very short or even indefinite. The vowel-sound in "Fran" sounds as if it has risen part of the way towards the "e" in "get," and is said reprimandingly. The "cis" is pleading. The "o" in "co" slightly prolonged with longing. Of course, while saying this, Barnardo cups his hands caressingly, several inches in front of his own breasts, to clarify his meaning.
To replace the "thee" with a "you" would destroy the yolk of the clustering "i"s and "e"s, diminish their effects, and create a distractive and inappropriate rhyme with "to." It would also abort the harkening-back and thematic re-occurrence of the "i"s and "e’s in "this reliefe" of Francisco’s answer in the next line’s "For this reliefe much thanks, tis bitter cold," which not only refers to relief from sentry duty but to comic relief too. And the girlish tremulous "tis bitter cold," of Francisco’s attempt to keep the ball of sexual humour rolling (with a maladroitly prolonged "co" as a reference to Bernardo’s "co") would be aborted too, along with his affected pronunciation of "sick," which also purports to be girlish, in his concluding "And I am sick at hart."
As to the nearby:
O, farwell honest souldiers, who hath reliev’d you?
in which "hath" is replaced by Rowse’s "has," the effect of the replacement is the very opposite of his replacement of ’thee’ which caused a configuration of vowels to be broken up. Here a configuration of consonants is created whose effect calls attention to itself for no good purpose. Added alliteration is not automatically a poetical enhancement and can be a disfigurement, and is out of place here. And it is not in fact desired by its Rowsean sire who is however unaroused by it because of course he is deaf to "souldiers, who has" (in which a zee and an aitch are both echoed) because he uses a modernized text which prints "soldier. Who has," three words which would give thin poetical pickings even to that species of vulture that eats only bones. Small things, all of these, but important.
It is my thought that I could have more thoroughly wiped the floor with Mr. Rowse had I had at hand the relevant facsimiles of the 16th and 17th century original editions instead of the modernized introductory examples which he introduces as if they were the century-old originals that were to be modernized; and even so I cannot resist using a few of his examples, which I do have at hand, to wipe the floor with him a little bit, just for fun.
Giving them without their contexts, as he does, as he evidently thinks the contexts make no difference, lets look at:
’Is Bushy, Green and the earl of Wiltshire dead?’
He brings it up-to-date by correcting the grammar of "is" to "are." "Any objection," he asks. And answers, "Certainly not." But alas, there is one. What if it isn’t a matter of wrong grammar at all but of dramatic effect? i.e., an unfinished grammatical first question "Is Bushy ?" followed by a grammatical verbless ejaculation: "Green and the earl of Wiltshire dead!"
That is his first example and can now be discarded. His second is:
These high wild hills and rough uneven ways
Draws out our miles and makes them wearisome
which he miscorrects to "draw" and "make" in the name of modern grammar. What is lost is the fourth "zee" sound out of five, and the first "ess" out of two, and the spacing between them is altered. When left in, these discarded sounds draw out their words and are part of the general drawing out that the lines call attention to. What probably happens is that having said the first line, the speaker includes all the hills and ways in one gesture which functions as the grammatically singular subject of the next line; or else he pauses meditatively between the two lines, which does the same trick. People still speak like that. It’s the so-called grammatical rules that are ungrammatical, when they can’t accommodate meaningful speech. Late Elizabethan punctuation (which is what the originals would have in essence) wasn’t up to indicating the Bushy sort of thing, giving Rowse and others the chance to trip up. Of course, if I were given the already mentioned facsimiles with the lines in question, and their contexts, (from Richard the Second, 3.2. and 2.3), my argument might have to be adjusted to fit them.
I now have them, and no adustment is needed.
Another of his modernized introductory examples is from Hamlet’s "To be or not to be" speech:
...When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear...
Rowse replaces "quietus" with "acquittance" (itself no common word) and "fardels" with "burdens."
He does this to a Shakespeare who loves punning, and who loses, through him, the "quiet" and peace of his "quietas" which comes after a many-lined dark-vowelled litany of wrongs. The prevention of that loss is in itself enough reason for retaining "quietas" (which is the Second Quarto spelling of "quietus," and possibly a clue to the pronunciation of its last syllable and another pun). If he hadn’t wanted this pun on "quiet," Shakespeare could have written something simpler. "When he himselfe might his quietas make" is actually more than a way of saying "When he himself might easily kill himself" In addition to the meanings of the pun and the O.E.D. meanings of "quietus," the unobstructed change of "ui" into the long "e" of "quietas" in this light-vowelled line (so many "i"s and "e"s may indicate an opportunity to horse around) suggest an illustrative accompanying smooth withdrawal of Hamlet’s dagger from its scabbard followed by a playful make-believe stab at himself on "make."
As to "fardels," why would he use so rare a word rather than the commoner and available "burdens"? Apparently he didn’t want a two-syllabled word, whose stressed first syllable started with a "b," just where it would be in a line already bee-aged and dee-afied. He didn’t want to link "fardels beare" to "bare bodkin," as the alliteration of "burdens bear" would have done and does, because of course there is no link but only proximity. "Fardels," split into "far" and "dels" lends itself more readily and naturally than "burdens" to the weighty and steady plod of three almost equal syllables in "fardels beare"
One last thing. I’ve not devoted a chapter to the women in Hamlet, because their words seemed relatively less problematic. However, Rowse says he retained some words only because they rhymed, and that reminded me of a rhyme (whose existence could not be deduced from Rowse’s version) addressed to Hamlet by Hamlet’s mother:
If it be
Why seemes it so perticuler with thee.
referring to the commonness of the death of fathers. The spelling of "perticuler" drew my attention, stressing, as it does, "ticul." It struck me as a pun on "tickle," and I imagine his mother tried to lighten up Hamlet by tickling him suddenly and playfully as she says it, and again on the "thee." (It is her way of linking her "i"s with her "e"s.) Of course this scandalizes Hamlet, and sets him off on his "Seemes Maddam, nay it is, I know not seemes" speech dealt with in my Chapter Five. He probably makes "Maddam" into a quick spondee: "Mad dam," with "dam" meaning "mother." The point is that this tickling, very early on in the play, directly shows her as unreservedly enjoying the pleasures of this world, and cues the actress playing her on how to relate her to Hamlet and Claudius the King (and everyone else, within the constraints imposed by rank).
Performances of Shakespeare’s Hamlet should be more meaningful, faster, funnier, and their sadnesses more sad than has ever been imagined by human owls and editors.
But I don’t want to throw the babies away with the bathwater. In fact, to compare any other edition with the Hamlet Second Quarto is very useful, and can bring out things unlikely to be even imagined when reading either on its own. And, as I have already said, many of the Jenkins annotations are very useful.
In comparing editions of Hamlet, use the Second Quarto as a yardstick. Compare spelling, punctuation, wording, and where words are placed relative to each other, and compare the effect of these on each character’s movements, thoughts, emotions, and ways of speaking, and then compare how the same character in different editions regards and reacts to these characteristics in their own character. Could be boring.
This seems like the right sort of exam question to torture people with. But I would sooner erase the above paragraph than have it set as one. Unless there were no time-limit, the consulting of books and people was allowed, and the viewing of performances, and even participation in them ... as in life.
14. TALKING DURING THE DUMBSHOW.
In British theatres not many years ago, during intermissions when ads and announcements were screened on the safety curtain, the audience would chat away, and in U.S.A. cinemas where these are screened before the show, audiences still do unless a soundtrack demands complete attention. How much more must this be so at the Hamlet dumbshow where the audience that is a part of the play consists of high-ranking personages whose surroundings do not awe them into not commenting at will on the show as it unfolds, nor from saying their say on anything else. A similar audience at the play within the play, in A Midsommers Nights Dream, witnesses to this too. Besides, to have them talk during the dumb-show keeps the real audience from talking during it, and from having to be hushed when the talking resumes afterwards in the play itself. Good dramatic technique. But according to the printed stage directions in the Second Quarto, and in all subsequent editions and productions, this doesn’t happen in Hamlet. The Danish court audience talks, the dumbshow follows in audible silence, and then the audience talks again. But what if the stage directions at this point in the Second Quarto are not where they should be? and part of the court audience actually does talk aloud during the dumbshow? and those misplaced stage directions should be put where they would shorten the play by having the dumbshow and a section of the dialogue occur simultaneously and not follow each other as they do in all the existing editions? This would certainly save time, always a consideration with Hamlet, and perhaps show some of the talking to be much more meaningful than it has been till now. Is it worthwhile? Let’s see.
For the purposes of demonstration I shall place conversation on the left of the page, and dumbshow on the right, and split both into sections, and pair off each left-hand section with its opposite on the right, and assume the two parts of each pair occur at the same time. Below each of the seven pairs will be some commentary. In performance, there would of course be no gaps between the sections.
Here goes:
1.
Ham. Be the Players readie?
Ros. I my Lord, they stay vpon your patience.
Ger. Come hether my deere Hamlet, sit by me.
Ham. No good mother, heere’s mettle more attractive.
Poll. O ho, doe you marke that.The Trumpets sounds. Dumbe show follows. Enter a King and a Queene, the Queene embracing him.
Recto H (the name of one particular page in the Second Quarto) has "Enter" as its catchword in its bottom right-hand corner, to notify its readers that "Enter" is the first word on the next page so if they have accidentally turned two or more pages they will realize it rightaway or know if a page is missing or have no trouble with the continuity of their reading. But this "Enter" is a compositor’s mistake, since it starts the second line of the next page, not the first, and "The" is the first word of its first line; but it may also point to the site of a bigger mistake, one in which the first line The Trumpet sounds. Dumbe show follows. is a last minute insertion from a manuscript line whose appropriate place in the manuscript was not clear to the compositor who, however, saw that he could not logically postpone the printing of it beyond the point of its existing Second Quarto position.
After Rosencraus has said "I my Lord, they stay vpon your patience," someone must signal to the trumpets to play the fanfare that announces that the show is about to begin. (This signaling is implied in the play although the Second Quarto doesn’t say when or by whom). Let the signaller be Hamlet; so that we hear, at his signal, the sounds of trumpets (from which it follows that "Trumpets" in "Trumpets sounds" is grammatically a possessive noun and "sounds" is neither the ungrammatical verb nor the indisputable misprint that editors have assumed it to be). But if Hamlet signals to the trumpets just after "I my Lord," then the witty sentence Rosencraus says next, which can be roughly paraphrased as "they’re patiently waiting for your patience to expire so that you’ll give the go-ahead," becomes a rather lame joke because its timing is too late since Hamlet has already given the go-ahead, though to deliberately proffer it in all its lameness as if it were a really funny joke could make it really funny because of the ludicrous contrast between its actual lameness and a Rosencraus beaming with expectancy in the belief that it will immensely amuse an appreciative Hamlet. Rosencraus’s resulting visible disappointment at its effect, quickly followed by his discomfort under Hamlet’s subsequent speculative glance at him would also get a laugh. But whether all this would work on the stage without disrupting the flow of the play, I don’t know — though some actors and directors sometimes amaze and gratify at the same time by showing the impossible to be possible.
Gertrude, seeing the play is about to start and having cast a watchful eye every now and then on her son during the preliminary mingling, now wants him near her for the main business, as mothers do. Hamlet may not, as modern editions make him do by inserting a comma after "No" in "No good mother," be saying that she’s a good mother or necessarily implying that it’s good of his mother to ask him to sit by her. "No good" may carry the meaning of "that won’t do it" or "It’s no good."
From "Enter a King and a Queene, the Queene embracing him, and he her," one can deduce that the King and Queen enter separately from different entrances, recognize each other, and then embrace, rather than coming on already in an embrace which could have been written more briefly as "Enter a King and Queene embracing."
Throughout the dumbshow, with only an occasional glance at it, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Rosencraus, and the others, go on talking, but we can no longer hear them. They must remain subdued so as not to direct our main attention away from the dumbshow, or Hamlet and Ophelia. Only when Hamlet directs our attention to them should they have that attention.
2.
Ham. Lady shall I lie in your lap
Ophe. No my lord.
Ham. Do you thinke I meant country matters?
Oph. I thinke nothing my Lord.
Ham. That’s a fayre thought to lye betweene maydes legs.
Oph. What is my Lord?and he her, he takes her vp, and declines his head vpon her necke, he lies down vp-pon a banke of flowers, she seeing him asleepe, leaves him:
Here the dumbshow King embraces his Queen, picks her up and holds her in his arms, tenderly puts his head on her neck, lies down (with her head on his lap) and falls asleep. Her bit by bit discovery that he’s asleep is tender and funny. She then shakes her head in pity tinged with mirth, makes sure he’s comfortable, and leaves. The Folio’s version of the dumbshow (like mine, an interpretation of the second Quarto’s) differs from the Second Quarto mainly by stressing how much the queen swears that she loves the king so that he trusts her emotionally, to make her quick yielding to the poisoner make her look bad, as if her swearing was hypocritical lying. The Second Quarto makes her look bad by showing how greatly the king loved her, and she him, so that her quick yielding to the poisoner makes it look like a betrayal of his love as well as hers. Which is better?
For his remark about lying in Ophelia’s lap, Hamlet takes his cue from the dumbshow king-and-queen’s behaviour. "country" contains a pun, and Ophelia’s reply to that is at least disapproving. To soothe her, Hamlet overlays a show of reasonableness even while carrying on his sexual idea and even perhaps referring to the color of her pubic hair. Now in the public eye and trying to follow her father’s command that she see and speak with Hamlet as little as possible, Ophelia gives an appearance of maintaining her distance from him by ending her every reply with "my Lord," no matter how different the inflexion of each "my Lord" is. But does Ophelia pun on her "I"? Is it a yes, an "Ay"? Are all her replies double entendres, one way or another? Is she making fun of Hamlet? If she is, how aware of this is he? Can she be played here as an interesting non-innocent rather than the bland nunlike-innocent invariably portrayed on the stage? Probably not, and yet... The possibility is there, in her words as replies. But can all that fit in with the rest of her appearances on stage and off, as it must if it is not to be an inappropriate tour de force even if done well? Something to explore. Even if it ends in a dead-end, the exploration will throw light on her character, and on what interpretations are appropriate and what makes them so. When interpretations seem absolutely right, nobody questione them, and so no light is thrown on these questions.
3.
Ham. Nothing.
Oph. You are merry my Lord.
Ham. Who I?
Oph. I my Lord.anon comes in an other man, takes off his crown, kisses it, pours poyson in the sleepers eares, and leaves him:
Hamlet is seated in such a way that he can pay attention to Ophelia, and see the dumbshow and the reactions to it of Claudius the King and his mother at the same time. His distracted and solitary "Nothing" is not only a reply to Ophelia’s question, but an evaluatory comment to himself on the effect on Claudius of the stage re-enactment of Claudius’s poisoning of Hamlet’s father. We must assume Claudius does not react because, at the time the re-enactment begins, he has just turned his head away from the stage to better hear a remark by someone behind him, a remark which makes Claudius laugh so hugely (but of course we don’t hear it) that his shoulders rise and fall during the poisoning scene, which he only turns back to as the poisoner begins to leave.
4.
Ham. O God your onely Iigge-maker,
what should a man do but be merry,
for looke you how cheerefully my
mother lookes, and my father died
within’s two howres.the Queene returnes, finds the King dead, makes passionate action,
Ophelia takes the "Iigge-maker" to refer to Hamlet as if he is ironically calling himself the best fabricator of the type of comic dance or sideshow called a jig. Hamlet, however, is also saying (if only to himself) that Claudius is a jigmaker because Claudius’s heaving laughter seems to be amusing Hamlet’s mother and the rise and fall of the Claudian shoulders reminds him both of the dance and of sexual intercourse. The capitalization of the "I" of "Iigge-maker" probably means that he moves his own shoulders in a parody of Claudius when he says "Iigge-maker."
In a switch typical of him during the dumbshow, though Hamlet refers to the visible cheerfulness of his real mother, he points an explanatory finger at the stage-corpse as if it were his own father he is talking about when he says "and my father died within’s two howres." That "two howres" is a plausible amount of fictional stage time to have passed before the dumbshow Queen returns to the King and finds him dead, even if in real time the death of the dumbshow King has only just been enacted.
5.
Oph. Nay, tis twice two months my Lord.
Ham. So long, nay then let the deale weare blacke, for Ile haue a sute of sables; o heauens, die two months agoe, and not forgotten yet,the poysner with some three or foure come in againe, seeme to condole with her, the dead body is carried away,
Ophelia (maybe because she is looking at Hamlet at this point and not at the dumbshow) does not understand the complexity of Hamlet’s answer, and so expostulatingly corrects him as to when his real father died.
Gesturing towards the dumbshow poisoner with his thumb, Hamlet shows Ophelia that the "deule" (devil) in question is the poisoner who is naturally not yet wearing mourning since the dumbshow Queen has only just raised the alarm over the King’s death, but Hamlet insists the poisoner should be wearing it if Ophelia is right and twice two months have elapsed since the death in the dumbshow. As for "a sute of sables," this would consist of expensive matching clothes of mourning colours to match (suit) those worn by Claudius and Gertrude, to which Hamlet refers Ophelia to with another gesture. To show here how this new interpretation of "let the deale weare blacke, for Ile have a sute of sables," is so much better than the other ones I’ve come across, would expose the producers of those to too much shame. But the curious can decide on the truth of this by looking them up in Jenkins, where the most important of them can be found, or in Furness’s Variorum.
As for "two months agoe," that is Hamlet’s jocular concession to Ophelia, made by splitting the difference between his "two howres" and her "twice two months." Another gesture refers "and not forgotten yet" to the condolences now occurring in the dumbshow. The "yet" is slightly separated and sarcastic and implies that once the dumbshow body that is being carried away is out of sight, the King it once was will be forgotten.
This scene alone is enough to scotch the characterization of Hamlet as the epitome of melancholy.
6.
then there’s hope a great mans memorie may outlive his life halfe a yeere, but ber Lady a must build Churches then, or els shall a suffer not thinking on, with the Hobby-horse, whose Epitaph is, for o, for o, the hobby horse is forgot.
the poysner wooes the Queene with gifts, shee seemes harsh awhile, but in the end acceptes love.
Hamlet, who has been looking at the dumbshow Queen’s harshness to the poisoner-suitor concludes from it that "then there’s hope a great mans memorie may out-live his life halfe a yeare." By manipulating double references (his usual method of being "mad," or of making himself appear to be mad to those whom he addresses) Hamlet is generalizing about great men, including his father among them, but also referring to his father exclusively.
The phrase "but ber Lady" contains a pun based on "but by our Lady" and is expostulatingly pronounced as "but buy a Lady" and characterizes what the suitor is doing with his gifts. The capital "L" of "Lady" indicates not only that the Virgin Mary is being referred to, but that "Lady" should be stressed. "Lady" refers to his mother too. And the dumbshow Queen’s refusal to be moved by the gifts makes Hamlet conclude (referring now to the contrastingly quicker consolation his mother found) that someone will have to build churches in memory of the newly-dead great man as a way of preserving his memory beyond the maximum of the six months already generously alloted for this preservation by Hamlet [just as it is (or rather, was) the way in the world at large for people to have churches built to atone for their sins and for the greater glory of God so that the records of their munificence would preserve the memory of their selves. Whereas all that is preserved is a memorial name without meaning to most of those who see it, for that too is the way of the world. But this is beside the point]. To return, the capitalization of the "C" in "Churches" should indicate to the actor of Hamlet an opportunity to place his palms together as if in prayer, not on his breast, but as if they were a church spire coming out of his groin, a necessary reminder of what is appropropiate for the buyer of a lady if he is not to be forgotten by her.
The second "a" in "or els shall a suffer" is pronounced as if "a suffer" were "asuffer," like the "a" in "asleep" or "asunder." Pronounce the "a" in "a must" in the same way. Grammatically, the "a" in "a must" avoids the definiteness that would derive from saying either the "he" or "she" it stands for, and so promotes the ambiguity favoured by Hamlet. That "a" can be the dumbshow Queen, or can refer to just any great man (for Ophelia to take it as). But for Hamlet "a" also refers to Hamlet’s father (and the poisoner) because Hamlet refuses to not speak out his treasonable thoughts though he has to simultaneously offer non-treasonable meanings so as not to be punished and to "normalize" relationships. The "a" of "a suffer" then becomes necessary, to stand in the place of a more definite and too limiting pronoun, and to harmonize with whatever pronouns Ophelia or Hamlet or we the audience choose the "a" of "a must" to represent. If the Oxford English Dictionary is right in saying that "a" could only mean "she" and "he" in western and southern English dialects by the time Hamlet was written, then it would not be amiss for Hamlet to sound as if he has dropped into pseudo-dialect when saying "a must build Churches then" and "a suffer not thinking on," just like an educated Londoner nowadays sometimes drops a bit of pseudoCockney into his speech to get a laugh. In fact, dialect would more effective.
Now it is the turn of the hobbyhorse. The explanations hitherto available have been considered unsatisfactory by commentators, quite rightly. What is needed in the meantime is a plausible meaning (and a way of using it that is dramatically effective) for "or els shall a suffer not thinking on, with the Hobby-horse, whose Epitaph is, for o, for o, the hobby-horse is forgot." Well, if a hobby-horse is ridden to death, and yet nothing is got by it and it is forgotten,it could well have an epitaph which says: "for o, for o, the hobby-horse is forgot," in which "for o, for o" could be pronounced "for nothing, for nought." And if the actor of Hamlet moves his face and hands in the right way from "or els" on, he will raise a laugh by conveying a sense of the obviousness of what he is saying even if what it is being applied to is not known. But nearer the nub perhaps is to have Hamlet run the fingers of his hand down Ophelia’s arm on "Hobby-horse, and further down on "Epitaph," then have them jump to the centre of her lap on the first o, and hover there for a fraction of a moment, and then rise swiftly on the second o to point at his mother and Claudius, so that Hamlet’s father becomes the discarded hobby-horse by implication. The "H" of the first "Hobby-horse" is capitalized to indicate that an action is associated with it, whereas none is indicated by the small "h" of the following "hobby-horse." And if the pronunciation of o as "nothing" and "naught" makes you uneasy, as it does me, let it be pronounced "oh" and let the first finger and thumb of Hamlet’s hand form an "o" and let the second finger point at the centre of Ophelia’s lap on the first o and at his mother and Claudius on the second. But these are rather enactments than explanations.
The best explanation of all may be, that Hobby could be a pun on Hautboy (precursor of the modern oboe), and that Hamlet is saying that shmaltsy music is missing, and that horse is a pun on whores. Plenty that an actor can do with that.
7.
Oph. What meanes this my Lord?
Ham. Marry this munching Mallico, it meanes mischiefe.
Oph. Belike this show imports the argument of the play.
Well, the dumbshow is over in all other versions, and in them these three lines are commentary after the fact. But in my version the dumbshow Queen and the poisoner exit at the end of the first two of these three lines, with the Queen still accepting the passionate kisses of the poisoner’s lips that open and close like a goldfish’s mouth as they move over her body with different pressures and at different speeds. A satirist seeing this incessant, and unceasingly voracious, sort of kissing and with no feeling for its hot and inflammatory nature might be reminded of the ceaseless grazing of cows and call it "munching." The Folio, not understanding this, changed "munching" to "miching," having found "miching" in the First Quarto and knowing what that meant. It meant and means "lurking." What a load of M’lurkey. Ever since then editors have trotted it out unthinkingly in their editions, trustingly following each other, as sheep do. (But I like sheep). Waiting on the sidelines and doing nothing is innate in lurking. How much waiting in the background and doing nothing does the poisoner do throughout the dumbshow?
So back to Ophelia’s "What means this my Lord?," which expresses both surprise at Hamlet’s handiwork (the handiwork at the end of section 6), and curiosity about the implications of the acceptance of love by the dumbshow Queen. (Only her next line: "Belike this show imports the argument of the play," which she speaks just after the show is over, refers to the meaning of the whole dumbshow. Rather than being a dogged repetition of the question "What meanes this my Lord?" in another form, it shows both spirit and thoughtfulness, and charms us with the independence of her thinking, putting an end to the seemingly unending vista of "my Lord"s with which she has, till now, concluded each utterance of hers during the dumbshow. There is a fragrance of innocence about that "Belike this show imports the argument of the play" which renders the part of Ophelia unsuitable to those actresses whose ambition and attack gets them the part but whose accompanying hardness of character remains unsubmergible).
Naturally, to Hamlet, given his view of what has happened between his mother and Claudius, the answer to "What meanes this my Lord?" is as clear as the air (a simile once clearer in the time before the existence of smog). But the one-liner he comes out with can be spoken in several ways, depending on how he punctuates and inflects his voice, and can have several related meanings. The most fruitful one, made by making a triptych of the sound of "Marry this munching Mallico" with "this munching" as its centre, seems to me to be "I’ll tell you what this munching means. It means she will marry that malicious shit of a munching Malaguenian mischief-maker whose only happiness would be to have his slightest glance shrivel up whatever and whomever he can expose to it, and that means trouble, in the past and on the way and coming soon." Perhaps the kissing that is going-on in the dumbshow has inspired Claudius to kiss Gertrude, which Hamlet’s watchful eye, ever ready to notice anything derogatory to Claudius, uses to further increase Hamlet’s banked-up rage, so that the "mischief" of "it meanes mischief" may also be a threat by Hamlet.
Since, soon after, Hamlet says that the story, which was the basis of the play to which the dumbshow is a prelude, is extant in the choicest Italian, I have taken that hint, and allowed "Mallico" to draw together some of the implications derived from "malicious one" and .’mal occhi" (one who has the evil eye) and a prejudice about a Spaniard from Malaga, which the poisoner may have been. As for the narrowest meaning of "Mallico," a puzzler for editors, perhaps the answer is under their noses: it means "mischief."
By the way, names and stage directions are italicized in the Second Quarto. I have not usually italicized them in my quotations to avoid having anyone think I was trying to make some point by picking something out in italics. I have also not used the long-disused long ess that looks so like an eff, and that is because I could not, since my current word-processor does not have one. However, perhaps mistakenly, I don’t think anything dealt with in this book hinged on a possible consufion of an ess with an eff, do you?
And cannot the jigsaw picture of the many-petalled chrysanthemum of meaning that Shakespeare created by interlocking words with actions flower more fully in minds which the crude magnifying glass of this demonstration has directed towards pieces that fit together where nothing fitted before?
15. TAKE ARMES AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES.
What is now needed is an annotated edition of the Second Quarto with a profusion of compact notes based on the best of those in the Variorum Hamlet and the Arden and the less nourishing editions. Add to these, notes on how great actors did particular bits, and add notes on any other thing to the point, such as the accidentals of the earlier 17th century editions. Stir, so that those with the ability can do a better Hamlet. That is not so limited a thing as some may think, for to put on a play for genius to inhabit is to present an example to the world, and the deeply affected by it see the world as it is and this result gives us hope for humanity. But this job is for someone else. For myself, "To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new."
16. A COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX.
Cervantes in his prologue to Don Quixote published his satirical bibliographical rules for those who wished to be included in the community of the learned. A little ingenuity can adapt them to modern times, e. g. Derrida instead of Aristotle, and so on.
But to save even more of the reader’s valuable time, I have limited myself to a mere 3000 bibliographical constituents consisting of:
1000 times abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.
1000 times ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
1000 times , . / ; ’ [ ] \ ` — = ? : "{ } | ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ +.
From these, those in the know can construct and insert both the indispensibles, and references with or without the slightest penumbra of relevancy, and indeed can comply with the current scholarly fashion, of referring to analogues of their opinions as if the analogues were Baptists heralding the coming of the Messiah, and spoil perfectly good books and articles with these appendages in the body of their works and in their bibliographies.
For myself, I have been content to put references in the body of my work, as was done by Rabelais and other great referrers, both before and after him. Nor do I think others should not publish bibliographies which exhaustively show how little they have read. This page will end this book rather than a bibliography of the many books which I fruitlessly consulted.
The prevailing imposition of a more or less single bibliographical style on scholarship and scholarly publishing leads to the non-publication of worthwhile simplicity that does not need it and creative originality that needs something else, and its use often ensures publication of what should never, for however short a time, be snatched from oblivion, and compels teachers to impose it year in, year out, on the "hungry generations" who "are not fed."
Conformity: a sine qua non of sameness required for academic publication. Not in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.
"But the blind are blind, the deaf deaf, the world the world, the exception rare."
17. MILTON’S DEFENCE OF THIS BOOK.
Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless dores may sease,
If deed of honour did thee ever please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms,
He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
That call Fame on such gentle acts as these,
And he can spred thy Name o’re Lands and Seas,
What ever clime the Suns bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against the Muses Bowre,
The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when Temple and Towre
Went to the ground: And the repeated air
Of sad Electra’s Poet had the power
To save th’Athenian Walls from ruine bare.
THE END.
© David Kozubei 1993. 1995. 1997.
dkozubei@nyc.rr.com | dkozubei.com