David Tennant playing the title role in the 2009 RSC production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In a central episode in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the hero defines to a group of visiting actors the ‘purpose’ of drama:

‘…whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature’

This is the central theme of the play, which abounds in dualities (I count three in that sentence alone). Tony Tanner, in his introduction to the Everyman Library edition of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Amazon affiliate link), outlines some of these:

‘In a word, there seem to be two of everything. There are two kings (one dead, one alive); Hamlet has now two fathers (Claudius being now ‘uncle-father’); there are two sons who have to avenge murdered fathers (Hamlet and Laertes); Claudius sends two ambassadors to Norway – Cornelius and Voltimand; and there are his two tools, made almost comically indistinguishable – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The ghost appears to Hamlet twice; Laertes makes a double departure; Hamlet’s play to catch a king is performed twice; Hamlet abuses two women; after the play he goes and speaks daggers to his mother and then, when it seems he has finished, he does it again.’

The language and poetry throughout relentlessly reinforce this doubling. Tanner calls it a compulsive coupling of words and concepts, and he lists some examples among many:

These doublings are of two types: similarities (‘book and volume’) and differences (‘perfume and suppliance’). Words and concepts are continually put in either ‘apposition’ or ‘opposition’ with each other.

In this way the play’s central themes are soaked into the fabric of the drama, its words, its characters and its action.

Dualism as dilemma

Hamlet (the character) has a pressing dilemma and his response brings about a contrast between ‘thought’ and ‘action’. He knows he must revenge his father’s death but famously spends the entire play delaying action and instead ruminating on its causes and effects.

This dramatic dilemma is itself set in train by a chain of dualities; a man murders his brother and two apposites become opposites, as ‘Hyperion to a satyr’. But next comes the foulest coupling of all – his father’s ‘brother/murderer’ marries his mother. This is Hamlet’s most unsettling disruption, for as Tanner remarks, ‘murder and incest are the most graphic and violent or lustful ways of annihilating the differences and annulling the separations and distinctions on which any society depends.’

All of this points to Hamlet’s ‘dualistic’ predicament. It reaches its culmination in the dramatic twist which sees Hamlet mistakenly kill Polonius. When Polonius’s son Laertes learns of this he unhesitatingly takes on the role of revenger, a stark contrast (another opposite) to Hamlet’s reaction to his murdered father. And as Harold Jenkins points out in his introduction to the Arden edition of Hamlet(Amazon affiliate link):

‘The campaign of Laertes brings into the play a second revenge action in which the first revenger appears at the other end. The hero charged with a deed of vengeance now also incurs vengeance.’

This provides the final dramatic drive to the play’s conclusion.

The crisis of existence: To be or not to be

But why this constant harping on dualities? What is this dramatic dualism trying to express?

The answer lies in the way Hamlet responds to his predicament. The famous delay, between Hamlet’s learning of his need to revenge his father’s death and his taking action to do so, can be explained by the conflict that arises within him. As Harold Jenkins puts it:

‘As a revenger he must act, on behalf of outraged virtue, to restore a violated order, set right what is “out of joint”. But the act he is impelled to involves him in evil of the kind which he would punish.’

Hamlet is being asked to respond to murder with murder, and this throws his ‘humanist’ sensibility into crisis. Dramatically he becomes a man ‘at odds with his environment and with its reflection in himself’, and we see him swing between conflicting and opposite states, ‘from melancholy brooding to sudden acts of passion, from lofty contemplation to rage or scorn, or enigmatic thrusts of wit’.

This leads to Hamlet contemplating the intermingling of good and evil in everything. He sees the duality of all, from his own mother Gertrude (who gave him life but is now wife to his father’s killer) to his potential wife Ophelia (a symbol of purity but a potential ‘begetter of evil’), to life itself. This final thought leads to the most famous speech in the play (‘To be or not to be’), which confronts the ultimate duality; whether, knowing what he knows, it is better to live or die.

It is this condition that leads to his inability to act. As Harvey Granville Barker states in his Preface to Hamlet (Amazon affiliate link):

‘Hamlet is now at odds, not merely with the ills of this world, but within himself, and cannot but be impotent so.’

Hamlet’s resolution

Jenkins demonstrates that in the final act we see a change in Hamlet. In the skulls thrown up by the grave digger he confronts the common fate of man, and we see the powerful symbol of a living head mirrored by a dead one (see image above). As he meditates on death in the churchyard he finally comes to perceive a mysterious design. He accepts life and death, with all its apparent conflict of good and evil, in ‘a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will’.

This reconciliation of Hamlet’s duality is dramatised in the final scene through his acceptance of a new ‘brotherhood’ with Laertes, one that makes amends for his Father’s and Uncle’s broken brotherhood:

‘In the final contrast between them, two sons avenging their fathers, yet each tainted with the evil he would destroy, punish one another, yet die forgiving one another. With evil itself in the person of the King there is of course no reconciliation. The avenger who kills him when he has himself received his own death-wound at last fulfils his dual role.’

Hamlet, in dying, is finally reconciled with himself and able to transcend the dualities that have threatened to tear him apart. This is his tragedy, and he is sent on his way with those beautiful words of Horatio’s:

‘Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’.

Hamlet and his father's Ghost, (1780-1785, ink and pencil on cardboard), by Henry Fuseli

It’s not so long since we last did a work by William Shakespeare (we did Shakespeare’s Sonnets back at the beginning of the year), but you can never have enough Shakespeare, right?

We’re back at him, and this time it’s Hamlet, one of his best known works for the theatre and the single most highly discussed work in literary history.

As there’s so much to study and talk about in the play (Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest drama, at 4,024 lines), we’re looking at just one other work, a comedy which describes the action of Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters:

• Hamlet – William Shakespeare (play)
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard (play)

I have to say I can’t wait to study Hamlet in detail. It’s probably my favourite Shakespeare play (along with Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest – alright, one of my favourite Shakespeare plays).

I will contribute my thoughts here on the Culture Club blog, although it’s daunting putting forward ideas on a work that has received so much attention from literary critics.

I would love to read your insights on either Hamlet or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, so please leave ideas, thoughts and discussion points in the comments below.

In her excellent book Reading Chekhov – A Critical Journey, Janet Malcolm discusses Chekhov’s attitude to romantic love and beauty. She refutes Gary Saul Morson’s view, as expressed in his essay ‘Prosaic Chekhov: Metadrama, the Intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya’, which reads the play as the apotheosis of the prosaic. Morson understands Chekhov to be faulting Astrov for rejecting the estimable, plain Sonya and pursuing the useless, beautiful Yelena: ‘Chekhov, like Tolstoy, usually regards love based on passion or romance with deep suspicion.’

Janet Malcolm disagrees fundamentally with this approach to Chekhov’s play:

Yes, Chekhov adopts the Tolstoyan position in [his short story] The Duel, but in Uncle Vanya he swerves sharply from it. In his own life, far from regarding romantic love with suspicion, Chekhov considered it the sine qua non of marriage. He could not have put the matter more plainly than he did in a letter of 1898 to his younger brother Michael (who had been urging him to marry):

To marry is interesting only for love. To marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at the bazaar solely because it is of good quality. The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon however cleverly we make our calculations. So the point is not in the girl’s being nice but in her being loved.

Indeed, in Uncle Vanya, far from faulting Astrov for rejecting Sonya and pursuing Yelena, Chekhov suggests that Astrov can do nothing else. It isn’t a matter of choosing between a good course of action and a bad one. In these matters, one has no choice. ‘Alas, I shall never be Tolstoyan! In women, what I like above all is beauty,’ Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in 1891. The words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ echo throughout the play. Far from celebrating prosaic virtue, Vanya mourns its pitiful insufficiency. The action of the play is like the throwing of a stone into a still pond. The ‘beautiful people’ – Yelena and Serebryakov – disturb the life of the stagnant household of Voinitsky and Sonya, stir up the depressed and exhausted Astrov, and then abruptly depart. The waters close over the stone and are still again. Uncle Vanya is a kind of absurdist Midsummer Night’s Dream. Strange events take place, but nothing comes of them. Visions of happiness appear and dissolve. Everything is as it were before. In the heartbreaking speech with which the play ends, Sonya speaks to Vanya of her faith in a ‘bright, lovely, beautiful’ afterlife. Real life remains lustreless, uninteresting, unbeautiful.

Richard Gilman has written a very good introduction to the Penguin edition of Chekhov’s plays. I always read introductions after I’ve got myself thoroughly familiar with the works in question, and I found the following passage illuminated some of the issues I was grappling with around the two Chekhov plays we’re looking at (The Seagull and Uncle Vanya):

Many ways exist for getting Chekhov wrong, so herewith a short guide to avoiding them. Don’t look for ‘realism’ in these plays; don’t expect conventional endings, happy or otherwise; be aware of how Chekhov often has one character subvert another’s point of view, when it threatens to harden into ideology or melt into sentimentality; keep alert to the hints and nuances in speeches, along with the literal words; don’t look for answers, to your problems or life’s dilemmas; throw away any idea you might have that drama is always about ‘conflict’, or, rather remember that in these plays conflict is more often internal – within characters – than between them; keep in mind that no single character in any play speaks wholly for Chekhov, the most unbiased and democratic of authors; don’t ever regard, admiringly or not, a Chekhov play as an exercise in ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ – they’re solid works of imagination, not emotional vapours. Here is Virginia Woolf writing in 1920: ‘It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself, or to trouble himself, that he speaks of atmosphere.’ Don’t forget that Chekhov is often very funny, so feel free to laugh, aloud if the impulse strikes you.

As an aside, I wish I’d had that Woolf quote (on ‘atmosphere’) to hand at the last meeting, when some of our esteemed Culture Club members were content to look on Bob Dylan’s song Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts as an exercise in creating atmosphere, and in itself devoid of any meaning.

When we read drama we’re really only getting half the experience, and to fully appreciate a play one must see it performed. Having two children, one only two weeks old, has meant that my time is heavily restricted at the moment. So I’ve unhappily not been able to see the highly rated production of The Seagull that’s currently playing at the Royal Court in London, with Kristin Scott Thomas as Madame Arkadina and Mackenzie Crooks as Konstantin. I’m even finding it hard to get time to sit down and watch television, so there’s no point in me buying the DVDs of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya on sale at Amazon right now.

Given my time-poverty, I took a chance and downloaded Blackstone Audiobooks’ Seven Classic Plays on iTunes for my iPod, as it includes an unabridged production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, as well as Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People, Shaw’s Arms And Man, Euripides’ Medea and Shakespeare’s The Tempest and more. It cost me £21.95, but it was worth it, as I’ve been able to listen to a surprisingly good production of the play while I’m on the move, with excellent acting and atmospheric audio effects. Obviously this is not as good as getting to the theatre, or seeing a filmed version, but it’s a big step beyond the printed page, and has really helped to bring this wonderful play to life for me. (I’m hoping to offset the cost further by suggesting we tackle one or more of the other plays included in the download in later Culture Club sessions.)

I’m afraid I can’t say the same for the audiobook version of The Seagull that’s on sale through iTunes. It’s not a fully staged dramatisation, but a reading narrated by one actor, and even though one gets used to the clunkiness this invokes (eg the announcement of each character’s name before every chunk of dialogue), the format prevents it from rising to the level of true drama.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is surely the most musical of Shakespeare’s plays. In its verse, its rhythm and even its structure, it is never far from musical forms of expression. One of history’s greatest Shakespearean interpreters and critics, Harley Granville Barker said of this piece, ‘it is less a play… than a musical symphony’, and that the verse in it has ‘the virtues of chamber music.’

It is almost as if the structural principles of a symphony are at work in the play’s plot – which is what, I think, Enid Welsford meant, in her book The Court Masque (1927), when she called it ‘a pattern, rather than a series of events occassioned by human character and action’. Note also Harold F Brooks’s reference to the plot’s ‘rhythmic design’ in his introduction to the Arden edition.

Music itself plays a huge part in the play. Song, dance, lullaby, instrumental and folk music are all part of the action, and no mere distraction. Titania’s fairies dance and sing to protect her. Titania falls asleep to a lullaby and is awakened by Bottom singing. The dance of Oberon and Titania symbolises their recovered amity. The winding of the horns announcing the hunt is symphonic, Shakespeare’s musical picture of the sunrise.

And then there is the verse, which constitutes 80% of the play. There is no greater variety of verse form in all Shakespeare; the court speaks in Shakespeare’s favoured iambic pentameter, but the fairies often use shorter song-like verse forms, such as broken couplets and trochaic tetrameters.

PUCK. Fairy king, attend, and mark;
I do hear the morning lark.
OBERON. Then, my queen, in silence sad,
Trip we after the night’s shade:
We the globe can compass soon,
Swifter than the wand’ring moon.
TITANIA. Come, my lord: and in our flight,
Tell me how it came this night,
That I sleeping here was found
With these mortals, on the ground.

As Brooks says, ‘When the spoken verse is so various in its forms, and so often lyrical in tone, the distance from dialogue to song is not great.’ There are many other examples of a musical approach to the verse – just look at Lysander and Hermia’s antiphonal duet in Act 1:

LYSANDER. The course of true love never did run smooth;
But either it was different in blood-
HERMIA. O cross! too high to be entrall’d to low.
LYSANDER. Or else misgraffed in respect of years-
HERMIA. O spite! too old to be engag’d to young-
LYSANDER. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends-
HERMIA. O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.

As a producer and director, Granville Barker was concerned primarily with the proper performance of the play, and his guiding principle for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the musical quality of the verse, as he explains in his celebrated Prefaces to Shakespeare:

In fine, Shakespeare has a theme, which only poetry can fully illuminate, and he trusts to poetry.

His describes the first scene as an ensemble piece between ‘a musical range of voices’, and brilliantly illuminates the strucutre of tone between them:

It is remarkable how much sheer sound, in quality, contrast, change, is made to contribute. Make as much of the stark meaning of it as you will; if the scene is sung to the wrong tunes (the comparison is, for once, irresistable), if the time is not adjusted, if the discords and the harmonies are not valued, its essential character will be obscured and lost. This must be to some extent true of any play: in the interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream it is the dominating truth.

One final example from Granville Barker makes the point beautifully – Puck’s lullaby chant of appeasement:

On the ground
Sleep sound:
I’ll apply
To your eye,
Gentle lover, remedy.
When thou wak’st
Thou tak’st
True delight
In the sight
Of thy former lady’s eye:
And the country proverb known,
That every man should take his own,
In your waking shall be shown:
Jack shall have Jill;
Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

Commenting on this passage, Granville Barker says:

No one, understanding the plain meaning of English and having any ear at all, can possibly go wrong over the speaking of that. It is as surely set to its own essential music as if it were barred and scored.

When we picked the works for this month’s Culture Club, we chose them based on the concept of the supernatural, and the idea of ‘moving between different worlds’. But I’ve discovered another common theme among the major works we’re discussing (Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death) that has nothing to do with the supernatural, and yet is perhaps central to them all. This theme is: the argument between law and love.

I first came across this idea in connection with Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and its antinomian stance (antinomian in the sense that the gospel of Christ is in direct antagonism to the ‘moral law’ of the old testament), which I outlined in an earlier post. To summarise, in his book Witness Against the Beast EP Thompson makes the following case:

The signature of antinomian sensibility will be found, not at two or three points only in Blake’s work, but along the whole length of his work, at least from 1790 until his death. They are manifest in the Songs [of Innocence and Experience]. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an antinomian squib thrown among Swedenborgians. In the early prophecies, Urizen is the author of the Moral Law; in the major prophetic books the argument between law and love, repression and regeneration, is intrinsic to their structure.

Now look at A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play opens with Theseus and Hippolyta preparing for their nutpials, but the action begins when Egeus enters and holds up the threat of Athenian law against his daughter (death or banishment to a nunnery). He does this in order to stop her marrying Lysander, whom she loves, and to ensure that she marries his own favourite suitor, Demetrius. In the introduction to the Arden Shakespeare edition, Harold F. Brooks says:

As is usual in Shakespeare, the romance in the comedy springs partly from threat: here the initial threat is brought by Egeus. As a ‘heavy father’ thwarting his daughter’s choice in love, he is the successor of the Duke in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and perhaps of Capulet. North mentions Theseus’ responsibility for ‘preservation of the laws’; and like Duke Solinus at the start of The Comedy of Errors, in the Dream he affirms his inability to extenuate or mitigate them: like him, despite reluctance, he can do no better than pass a superended and conditional sentence. Still like Solinus, eventually he does what he had declared impossible, but in changed circumstances when no sensible and magnanimous ruler could have done otherwise.

In a footnote Brooks quotes Alexander Leggatt, from his book Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love: ‘it is the law itself, and not the prince’s will, which constitutes the threat.’ And what is threatened by this law is ‘true’ love. Brooks concludes, ‘In the Dream, it is only after supernatural intervention that Theseus’s reason and goodwill can decide the outcome and assure the lovers’ happiness.’

The film A Matter of Life and Death provides the most bald statement of this theme. The last act of the film is a trial in heaven, in which Carter has to prove that he loves June in order to circumvent the natural law that demands his life. This is clear enough, but the final line of the film seals it:

The law may be the strongest thing in the universe, but on Earth nothing is stronger than love.

More posts on William Blake at Culture Club:

• William Blake, the Ghost of a Flea
• William Blake and the Romantic Conception of the Individual
• William Wordsworth and William Blake: Nature and Anti Nature
• William Blake Invents Free Verse in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• G.K. Chesterton on William Blake and Mysticism
• Was William Blake Mad?
• William Blake and the Tradition of Antinomianism
• Terry Eagleton on William Blake: Sex, Art and Transformation

Two of my favourite artists, The Beatles and William Shakespeare, combined in an unexpcted way. Here’s the full clip of the fab four performing the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on one of the many television shows they did in the early days of Beatlemania (I’m not sure which one). It’s a bit of fun, but also interesting to note that a popular band would do such a thing on TV back in the ’60s. Can we assume from this that a large part of the young audience were familiar with the play back then? I can’t imagine a pop band of today doing anything like this, at any rate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stephen Fry, in his book The Ode Less Travelled, discusses meter in some detail, and provides this interesting angle on the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ segment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Nabokov, in his Notes on Prosody, suggests that the hexameter [i.e a six-stress line] is a limit ‘beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks in two’. Heptameters, seven-stress lines, are possible, and certainly do tend to ‘break in two’. They are known in the trade as ‘fourteeners’, referring to the usual syllable count. Here’s a line from Hardy’s ‘The Lacking Sense’.

Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may

As you can see, it is perfectly iambic (though one could suggest demoting the fourth foot to a pyrrhic):

Assist | her where | thy creat | urely | depend | ence can | or may

Actually, fourteeners were very popular in the sixteenth century, although Shakespeare disdained their use, a fact which has been adduced by some to damn the claims of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the Shakespearean canon, for Oxford loved them:

My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways,
My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days.

This preposterously over-alliterated couplet hardly seems Shakespearean – in fact, Shakespeare mocked precisely such bombastic nonsense in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the other unlettered ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, having great fun at the expense of Oxfordian fourteeners and their vulgar alliterations:

But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here?
Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear.

You may notice that Hardy’s example is a ‘true’ heptameter, whereas Oxford’s lines (and Shakespeare’s parody of them) are in effect so broken by the caesuras after the fourth foot that they could be written thus:

My life through lingering long is lodged,
In lair of loathsome ways,
My death delayed to keep from life,
The harm of hapless days.

But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight,
What dreadful dole is here?
Eyes, do you see? How can it be?
O dainty duck, O dear.

Google Book Search now enables you to download PDF versions of out-of-copyright books and print them out for yourself. Examples of books available include:

• Ferriar’s The Bibliomania
• A futurist from 1881′s 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
• Aesop’s Fables
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• Abbott’s Flatland
• Hugo’s Marion De Lorme
• Dunant’s Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
• Bolívar’s Proclamas
• Dante’s Inferno