'Related But Detached'

I’ve seen Hamlet on the stage only once, in 1971. The prince was played by Dame Judith Anderson, unconvincing in her early seventies. Wrong sex, wrong age, wrong play – a stillborn theatrical stunt. My reaction was perhaps the worst that staged Shakespeare can inspire – boredom periodically interrupted by giggling. 

Just two years earlier, in senior A.P. English in high school, a friend had written an analysis of Hamlet based on the mock-hypothesis that the prince’s motivating problem was obesity. In a word, he was fat: “We fat ourselves,” “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,” etc. Of Shakespeare’s major plays, Hamlet is easily my least favorite, largely because of the title character. He is insufferable. Hamlet is touchy, pretentious, utterly self-centered – an adolescent brat, a template for the modern intellectual. It’s difficult to take his drama-queen emotional state seriously. My sympathies go out to Polonius and, of course, Ophelia. They and others are merely toyed with by Hamlet, never respected as individuals.

 

Historically, Hamlet has been the subject of enormously varying understandings. It’s a Rorschach test. W.H. Auden delivered his lecture on the play at the New School for Social Research on this date, February 12, in 1947. “Hamlet is intensely self-absorbed,” Auden writes, “and that self-interest continues to the very last minute.” He seems incapable of empathy, of imaginatively projecting himself into others, even his mother. As Auden phrases it, “Aversion keeps one related but detached.” He puts the play into the context of Shakespeare’s career: “In this period, Shakespeare appears to be tired of writing comedy, which he could do almost too well – he was probably bored because of his facility in the genre.” True, but the comic spirit lingers. His next play was likely The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare succeeds in “transcending” comedy only later with his finest plays -- Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus.

  

Later in his lecture, before closing with Kierkegaard and after saying, “Hamlet should be played by an actor brought in off the street . . .,” Auden includes a seemingly unrelated digression:

 

“It is no longer possible for people to believe in something because a lot of other people do. [A rare lapse in Auden’s understanding of human nature.] To believe in something is not now a naïve act. The normal reaction is to try not to go forward, but rather to retreat from desire and will back to passion, where one can act. The cost, however, is the sacrifice of one’s reason, and you have to invent a terrific kind of technique to arouse such a passion in reflective people. The opposite of a passionate leap into fate is a gratuitous leap into activity, like Iago’s.”  

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]