An East Wind behind it

Two actors​ enter to begin a play, in an assumed midnight darkness. Both are military men, sentinels. One, Barnardo, barks at the other, Francisco, the play’s first line: ‘Who’s there?’ This incisiveness turns out to be mistaken: the man challenged is the still functioning true guard, who corrects Barnardo: ‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.’

Why this strikingly odd opening to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s first great tragedy? Early editors and commentators ignored it. Since then, the occasional note has suggested that Barnardo has been driven into confusion by the appearance on the previous two nights of the Ghost. I want to suggest that there is something more than accident in this two-line ‘problem’, more than accident in either the character or playwright. If Barnardo is not out of order, more than fluster attends him. Darkness and dismay drive him, even with what seems a known and friendly colleague, to take, out of turn, the upper hand, the stance of power – to give the order (since the challenge is like all such questions an order).

Slight as it is, this opening fracas sets the tone for the whole play. Barnardo, however minor a character, has attempted to take power. Power is surely the greatest moral problem that human beings face, and is important above all in monarchical, courtly, political tragedies like Hamlet: this of course gives the play its mysterious third line, ‘Long live the king!’ At the end of long phases of fascism in the modern world, we think of power as corrupting, even absolutely corrupting, but a very great work of creation, such as Creation itself, can be, as it is revealed by God to Job, sublime, mysterious and good. In Elizabethan culture this articulated itself as the belief that power emanating from God could be an obvious good. And this emanation took monarchy as its primary passage. But ‘Under which king, Bezonian?’ as Pistol says – and Hamlet is, among other things, the magnificent emergence from a long line of histories. Once Francisco and Barnardo have uttered their all too hopeful ‘Long live the king!’ their dialogue can move into its curiously sweet and touching tone: ‘’Tis bitter cold,/And I am sick at heart.’ ‘Not a mouse stirring./Well, good night.’

Not a very good night, however. The Ghost of Hamlet senior will appear, soon to deliver the awful if complex fate of Hamlet junior – in their shared name the two are an embodiment of history’s inevitable recurrence. The walking of the Ghost, and its powerfully impressive elusiveness, together with Hamlet senior’s living history (‘in an angry parley/He smote’), are a signal part of the power the late king projects into the play. But, from Barnardo onwards, this is ungodly power, random power, power that courses everywhere through Hamlet like fog with an east wind behind it – even Osric, even the gravedigger, even the priest, have power, random power. And of course the power of Claudius is (in part under Hamlet’s enforcing) inevitable, growing, always becoming more precise and practical. Even Hamlet becomes more powerful, as somewhat dazedly we watch him work to kill two men – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – who appear to be two of his only three friends (the other being Horatio). It is fascinating that Shakespeare attributes the prince’s late rescue by pirates to sudden ‘thieves of mercy’, surely remembering the thieves on the cross comforted by Jesus, their characters human, ambiguous.

The paradoxical phrase ‘thieves of mercy’ comes to seem characteristically true through the later movement of the play. This is perhaps because Hamlet is not one play but many (it is understandable that Samuel Johnson gave it the special praise of possessing ‘variety’ and that so many critics have given different or even opposed readings; it is two or more plays fused into one). There is the revenge play, most originally conceived by Shakespeare in terms of apprehension not action, of spooks, madness, play-acting, of the wrong victims: ‘You must wear your rue with a difference,’ Ophelia says. But it would be folly to say that the play is not a play of action. I cannot remember, in a long lifetime, many moments when ‘the bell then beating one’ did not strike me as one of the most exciting things in literature, faintly repeated as it is much later by ‘A man’s life’s no more than to say “one”.’ Much in the play’s dramaturgy supports this edge and economy of action. Shakespeare knew what kind of tragedy this was going to be, this world of politics and randomness where all that had meaning was violent and inaccurate encounter (when Hamlet at I.v.4 feels for the Ghost, his dead father orders him to ‘Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing/To what I shall unfold’ – this is the serious Hamlet, the revenge play, the play of action).

‘The bell then beating one’ is a phrase characterising a play of great power, economy and coldness. Its world is one where characters talk not to, but at each other – a style perfectly initiated in the new king’s emptily factual address to the court, followed by his gross flattery of Laertes. This is echoed when both Polonius and Laertes treat Ophelia as if she were non-existent, destroying her relation with Hamlet (quite unjustly, as Gertrude proves too late), as is dramatised in the scene where Hamlet, almost unrecognisably shabby, looks at Ophelia in silence, an effect put into action by her narration to Polonius. There may be a kind of echo of this late in the play in the fact that there is a character to report Ophelia’s death but none to save her life – a wholly original, perhaps accidental piece of dramaturgy that always leaves its own silence and chill.

Hamlet is and has been so much loved and admired as to have received an enormous amount of analysis and to need little more. Its moments of cold caution – Polonius’s bleating in death behind the arras, Claudius’s flight from the play, the confusion of the exchange of weapons in the court duel – are best left unanalysed and unexplained: in a word, random. What is important, as Claudius leaves the court, is that the king, like some character in Henry James, now knows that Hamlet knows, and is armed.

Perhaps more in need of notice are one or two elements that interfuse with dramaturgy, in the extraordinary brilliance of the work’s verbal style. The first occurs late in the play’s second scene. Earlier in it, Claudius has established his own rules for a mechanical style: economical, powerfully utile. He makes plain his entire preference for the energetic but conventional Laertes. This is done with extraordinary concision: ‘But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son.’ There is extraordinary hidden hostility in the monosyllable ‘But’. Strictly speaking, it is unanswerable, so Hamlet does not answer it. His ‘A little more than kin and less than kind’ is given as an aside by many modern editors, but wrongly so. Hamlet does not answer Claudius by ignoring the king, but by ignoring that he is there to be ignored – by, in short, the play’s first unforgettable wordplay (a partner, ‘Not so, my lord, I am too much i’ th’ sun,’ recognises an addressee, though merely negative). Hamlet’s response hangs in the air, unaddressed and unaddressable as the words on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast.

I am analysing this style because it seems to me that Hamlet is finding a new and vital form of speech and behaviour. For him, any kind of power is as random as the speech and action of the court. But something in him, the mere fact of his different generation in history, makes him wear his rue with a difference. His refusal of the harmfulness of the random throughout the tragedy becomes recognisable as ‘play’ (‘My lord, I am too much i’ th’ sun’). This surely led to things like Johnson feeling driven to give the work ‘the praise of variety’, that harmless epithet. In practice, ‘play’ covers an extraordinary range of things, from wordplay (in this work brilliant and incessant) to the beautiful and various madness of Hamlet and Ophelia, as cutting as the sword fight in its occasion. One might even include, as examples of word forms matching Hamlet’s ‘a little more than kin’, his equally unsociable, purely undirected soliloquies (we don’t, surely, believe that ‘O that this too, too solid flesh’ is in any sense addressed to ‘O God! God!’).

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most writerly and perhaps best-written play. There is (apart from the obvious wealth of textual riches) a curious small illustration of this which is rarely noticed. For many years, if asked about Hamlet’s poetic quality, I would have quoted not ‘To be, or not to be’ (which strikes me as grossly overrated in its importance), but Polonius’s casual words to the king: ‘You know sometimes he walks four hours together/Here in the lobby.’ What exquisite memories of the pure tedium of teenagers’ lives this brings back! It has nothing to do with action, with revenge, only with real abysses in the experience of playgoing and poetic reading remembered. And the play is dense with such poetic riches of simple experience. Everything translated from revenge into life: indeed into death.

One of the play’s lost short poems inhabits Hamlet’s last words, the unforgettable ‘The rest is silence.’ Hamlet breaks off from the political matter both of Fortinbras and of revenge to notice the unspeakable silence of death. The word rest in its most obvious colloquial form means ‘remainder’: we begin to leave the play, as the actor’s role is now at an end. Horatio caps this comfortingly: rest is peace and ease, something to be desired – ‘Good night, sweet prince,/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ – and means not only ‘remainder’ but ‘peaceful sleep’. But his slight nannyishness here, with the flights of angels lowing in the lullaby, gives the cue to a third and so far unheard meaning. ‘Rest’ is also a music term. I will quote a brief poem by Owen Feltham, ‘Upon a Rare Voice’, written (at a guess) near the mid-17th century:

When I but hear her sing, I fare
Like one that raised, holds his ear
To some bright star in the supremest round
Through which, besides the light that’s seen
Here may be heard from Heaven within
The rests of anthems, that the angels sound.

Feltham may even here be remembering Hamlet’s end.