SHAKESPEARE: THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM
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1603 version of Hamlet First Quarto |
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Background: The
most influential writer in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born
in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker in
Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal
education proceeded no further. In 1582 he married an
older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as
an actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare
eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe
Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and James I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James
granted Shakespeare’s company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its
members the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to
Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the
time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries such as Ben Jonson hailed his works
as timeless. Shakespeare’s
works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death,
and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in
English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a
fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth of biographical information
has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some
people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by
someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular
candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the
theory is not taken seriously by many scholars. In the absence of credible
evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven
plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of
this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have
transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to profoundly
affect the course of Western literature and culture ever after. Written during the first
part of the seventeenth century (probably in 1600 or 1601), Hamlet was probably
first performed in July 1602. It was first published in
printed form in 1603 and appeared in an enlarged edition
in 1604. As was common practice during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier
literary works. He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources,
including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a
prose work by the French writer François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques. The raw material that
Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle
murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The prince
pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle
in revenge. Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a
philosophically-minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his
uncle’s crime is so uncertain. Shakespeare went far beyond making uncertainty a
personal quirk of Hamlet’s, introducing a number of important ambiguities into the
play that even the audience cannot resolve with certainty. For instance, whether
Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudius’s guilt; whether Hamlet continues
to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III; whether Ophelia’s death is suicide
or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt
Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking
revenge on his uncle. Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes riding on some of these
questions are enormous—the actions of these characters bring disaster upon an entire
kingdom. At the play’s end it is not even clear whether justice has been achieved. By modifying his source
materials in this way, Shakespeare was able to take an unremarkable revenge story and make
it resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance. The
Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that began in fifteenth-century Italy with the
recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to the Middle Ages. The
scholars who enthusiastically rediscovered these classical texts were motivated by an
educational and political ideal called (in Latin) humanitas—the idea that all of the
capabilities and virtues peculiar to human beings should be studied and developed to their
furthest extent. Renaissance humanism, as this movement is now called, generated a new
interest in human experience, and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of
human understanding. Hamlet’s famous speech in Act II, “What a piece of work is
a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of
the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297) is directly based upon one of the major texts of the
Italian humanists, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on
the Dignity of Man. For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to
lead to a better understanding of how to act, and their fondest hope was that the
coordination of action and understanding would lead to great benefits for society as a
whole. As the Renaissance spread
to other countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, a more skeptical
strain of humanism developed, stressing the limitations of human understanding. For
example, the sixteenth-century French humanist, Michel de Montaigne, was no less
interested in studying human experiences than the earlier humanists were, but he
maintained that the world of experience was a world of appearances, and that human beings
could never hope to see past those appearances into the “realities” that lie
behind them. This is the world in which Shakespeare places his characters. Hamlet is faced
with the difficult task of correcting an injustice that he can never have sufficient
knowledge of—a dilemma that is by no means unique, or even uncommon. And while Hamlet
is fond of pointing out questions that cannot be answered because they concern
supernatural and metaphysical matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the
difficulty of knowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence, their
motivations, their feelings, their relative states of sanity or insanity. The world of
other people is a world of appearances, and Hamlet
is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty of living in that world. |
PLOT
OF HAMLET |
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On
a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in Denmark.
Discovered first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar Horatio, the ghost resembles
the recently deceased King Hamlet whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne and
married the king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. When Horatio and the watchmen bring Prince
Hamlet, the son of Gertrude and the dead king, to see the ghost, it speaks to him,
declaring ominously that it is indeed his father’s spirit, and that he was murdered
by none other than Claudius. Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his
throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the dawn. Prince Hamlet devotes
himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative and
thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent
madness. Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behavior and attempt
to discover its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that
Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in
conversation with the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to
love Ophelia: he orders her to enter a nunnery and declares that he wishes to ban
marriages. A group of traveling
actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s guilt.
He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet
imagines his uncle to have murdered his father, so that if Claudius is guilty, he will
surely react. When the moment of the murder arrives in the theater, Claudius leaps up and
leaves the room. Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill
Claudius but finds him praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer
would send Claudius’s soul to heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate
revenge and decides to wait. Claudius, now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing
for his own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent to England at once. Hamlet goes to confront
his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a tapestry. Hearing a noise
from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He draws his sword and
stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime, he is immediately dispatched
to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet
includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders
for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death. In the aftermath of her
father’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the river. Polonius’s
son, Laertes, who has been staying in France, returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius
convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. When
Horatio and the king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the prince has returned
to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship en route to England, Claudius concocts a plan
to use Laertes’ desire for revenge to secure Hamlet’s death. Laertes will fence
with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will poison Laertes’ blade so that if he
draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a backup plan, the king decides to poison a goblet, which
he will give Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or second hits of the match.
Hamlet returns to the vicinity of Elsinore just as Ophelia’s funeral is taking place.
Stricken with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had in fact always loved
Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio that he believes one must be prepared to
die, since death can come at any moment. A foolish courtier named Osric
arrives on Claudius’s orders to arrange the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes. The sword-fighting begins.
Hamlet scores the first hit, but declines to drink from the king’s proffered goblet.
Instead, Gertrude takes a drink from it and is swiftly killed by the poison. Laertes
succeeds in wounding Hamlet, though Hamlet does not die of the poison immediately. First,
Laertes is cut by his own sword’s blade, and, after revealing to Hamlet that Claudius
is responsible for the queen’s death, he dies from the blade’s poison. Hamlet
then stabs Claudius through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest
of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his
revenge. At this moment, a
Norwegian prince named Fortinbras,
who has led an army to Denmark and attacked Poland earlier in the play, enters with
ambassadors from England, who report that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Fortinbras is stunned by the gruesome sight of the entire royal family lying sprawled on
the floor dead. He moves to take power of the kingdom. Horatio, fulfilling Hamlet’s
last request, tells him Hamlet’s tragic story. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be
carried away in a manner befitting a fallen soldier. |
On
Shakespeare Murdoch (29) speaks of great writers possessing a
“calm merciful vision” because they accept difference in people and understand
why they are so. Tolerance is based on exercising the imagination, putting oneself into
centers of reality that are far from oneself. I
agree with Murdoch when she says that in Shakespeare and Homer we are bathed in an
intelligent concern, a generosity of spirit and tolerance that warms us each time we read. They seem to be saying to us that they so loved
the world and cared to such a degree about the people and their impossibly absurd and
bloody struggles within it, that they were willing to give of themselves to an equal
degree to convey their vision. There is no
need in great writers to remake the world in their image; often the artist is drawn to
what is “other” than himself. Murdoch (30) feels that this type of merciful
objectivity is similar to virtue. The canon
in literature today is frequently discredited for its sexist, racist or other biased
“norms”. Even Shakespeare has
not escaped; serious doubts about his choice of words at the ending of Taming of the
Shrew have been voiced. (Lyas 210). However, he is far from the worst. The result has been for many artists today to
mistrust any claim to authority by the “masters”. Because the classics in literature have been
labelled by centuries of experts as the “best”, they are seen as needing to be
torn down and exposed for embracing a flawed value system.
In other words, some artists feel the moral universe of these works no
longer applies to modern life. Murdoch (236)
adds to this by saying “traditional art is seen as far too grand, and is then
seen as a half-truth”. Quality art, however, constantly recreates itself
through returning to plain speech, unpretentious truths and ordinary life. Art tells the truth by including the absurd and
the simple. The best art is its own internal
critic, recognizing and celebrating the absurd complexity and the incompleteness of its
form. And here we find the great paradox
– the best tragedy is anti-tragic. King
Lear wants to embody the hyperbolic, histrionic drama of his position. Shakespeare forces him to enact the true tragic,
the absurd and incompleteness of being a flawed human being. (Murdoch 240). There is no easy way out with good literature. In life as in fiction, there is the affront of
death, its “intractable constancy”, as Steiner (140) calls it. The fact of death is resistant to reason. It is in literature that we rehearse for our
meetings with death. And through the metaphor
of the resurrection, the literary means of overcoming death, we find something beyond it. In the lucid intensity of meeting death, the
aesthetic form pushes back and generates a response which says, there is still life, a
vitality, a perseverance that counters the fact of it all by pointing out that one life
may have ended, but somewhere, somehow, life goes on. (141). Let me summarize what the challenge of literature is
then. When faced with our unqualified
aloneness we feel compelled to reach out to the “other”. There is irony here; while recognizing the
strangeness of others, literature invites us to withhold judgment until we have discerned
the separate and qualitative uniqueness of the other.
After we have opened ourselves up, we have a chance to see ourselves in
them. As we take something from the otherness
in characters, we also give to real people. It
is one way of transcending death, by becoming part of the larger realm of life. Murdoch repeats that literature commands us to
conquer self-absorption, and one way to do this is through beauty, which in a
disinterested state of mind, allows us to perceive beyond ourselves. “Then the ‘otherness’ which enters
into us makes us ‘other’”. (Steiner
188). The challenge is to let go ourselves in
order to become something better. Art, and especially literature, are the most practically
important things for our survival and salvation, Murdoch (241) claims. Words that are refined and exact represent the
most vibrant texture and “stuff” of our moral being. They are the most universally used and understood
way we express ourselves into existence. Words
alone make distinctions, and with words, great literature stands up and declares that some
things are worth believing in. The level of a
civilization is ultimately measured by its ability to use words, and through words reveal
the truth. Literature enlarges our ability to
exist through words, and in the battle for higher civilization, with its freedom and
justice, our best weapons against alienating scientific jargon, mainstreaming journalism
and tyrannical mystification are truth and clarity. (242). I would like to look more closely now at the best we have. If we try to tear away the mysterious veils of writing, what exactly makes Shakespeare so extraordinary? How did he bring the concept of what it is to be human into a more deeply understood existence? For one thing, there is his command of language, the dazzling metaphors, newly invented expressions, and his usage of language. For Shakespeare, the meaning of a word is always another word, and words can be like persons. Each of Shakespeare’s characters speaks in his or her own voice. Bloom (64) states, “his uncanny ability to present consistent and different actual-seeming voices of imaginary beings stems in part from the most abundant sense of reality ever to invade literature.” Another example is in the stories themselves. Much has been said about Shakespeare’s free borrowing from historical texts (i.e., Pliny) and existing medieval plays, but the fact remains that what he took, he took much further. It is his ability to absorb and redeploy that is striking. What seems like a paradox of imitation resulted in a profound originality. (Bantock/Abbs 148). Another reason for the unusual superiority of Shakespeare is in “his power of representation of human personalities and their mutabilities.” (Bloom, 63). As we have said, with Hamlet, Shakespeare for the first time in literature has a character overhear himself as he speaks and he is able to learn from himself. Hegel remarked that Hamlet and the great villains, Iago and Edmund, are artists of the self, or free artists of themselves, able to go on creating more and more dimensions of themselves. (64). The difficulty of interpreting Hamlet, the most fecund of characters, is partly due to limitations within ourselves. Shakespeare is able to supply more contexts for explaining us than we are capable of supplying for his characters. When we write we must tunnel into our consciousness to locate the proper word, phrase or inference that connects memory and sense with the universal. The equilibrium between precision of image and multiple meanings is the secret of making those important associations. If we note when this is successful in literature, we recognize that it is the words that resonate within ourselves, which are intimate and feel like deja vu or identification. (Steiner 184). We return to the books that reach the deepest parts of ourselves. There is no way to defend a personal canon; it just eventually becomes who we are. As our writing progresses a literary image of ourselves sharpens. The more we write, the more clearly patterns emerge. We are drawn to those defining moments in literature that correspond most closely to our own lives, ones that we are able to write about most strongly. These become the themes or subjects that exert the greatest hold over our imaginations. F. Scott Fitzgerald admitted he was writing the same story over and over; trying each time to get it down just right, go a little deeper so it might be possible to understand it better. Hughes (Winter Pollen 106) claims that even Shakespeare wrote out of a single idea that doggedly tracked down a certain sexual dilemma that was rooted in his concept of good and evil, power and weakness. In his case, it was hardly limiting; the singleness of that idea was all-inclusive and affected nearly all of his best works. It was the way his imagination unraveled the mystery of himself to himself. Depending on how well we’ve ingested
our reading, we may be able to ascribe certain attitudes we hold to those found in
literature. In fact, it may no longer be
possible to remember which came first, our real life experience or that which occurred in
something we read. According to the level of
our familiarity with novels, we may conceive of love in the manner of Jack and Jill, Romeo
and Juliet, or Natasha. Our jealousies
may imitate Othello’s; Lear becomes a model when our children repay us with silence
or retribution. (Steiner 194).
Shakespeare
and Education
In an ideal world, students come to school hungry for knowledge, eager to improve their minds. In reality, they ask, why should I study Shakespeare? Only 25% will go on to higher education, fewer still will go into the arts or even attend cultural events. An underlying problem for education today is that there are too many distractions, too many easy entertainments. Young people are able to access a wealth of pop culture outside of class but where will they get “high” culture if not in school? If we take, for example, teaching Shakespeare, the concern in modern education is that there has been a shift from the bard’s mass appeal to the elite, or that his plays have moved from the Dionysian camp into Apollo’s. (Aspin/Abbs 254). Instead of an audience comprised of the groundlings up to the royal boxes, today there is a growing belief in the inaccessibility of Shakespeare, the language being too difficult, too archaic, or a fear of pupils not understanding. Shakespeare has come to be associated with high culture, snobbery and an aesthetic initiation that many people believe they do not possess. But now more than ever we must introduce students to Shakespeare because it is in his work that students can tap deep springs of feeling and human drama. They will find to their delight that their encounter is intense and exciting. (Gibson/Abbs 60). When students are asked to take “feelings” as a subject of study, they are initiated into the refinement and control of emotions, and again, with Aristotle, we can say that Shakespeare’s plays allow for their safe exercise and release. We think of how our view of the suffering of others is altered once we have felt the “storm upon our heads”, sympathetically entering into the experience of the “other”, and avoiding what Gloucester describes as the indifferent and comfortable man, “who will not see because he does not feel” (King Lear, IV, 1/Knights/Abbs 62). Shakespeare invites us to try on fictional personalities in particular situations and learn through our moral imagination. Another argument in education today is the
idea of letting students bring what is most “relevant” to their lives into the
classroom; if that happens to be “Sponge Bob” or “Survivor”, then so
be it. But I would strongly argue for
supplying the challenges needed to develop more complex thinkers, if only to begin to
discern the intentions of propaganda and sort out thorny moral questions. This effort may not be viewed as worthwhile to the
students at this point in their lives, being perhaps due to a lack of maturity or
sophistication, but if it can be seen as an investment in their intellectual future, it is
likely to pay off later. For there often
comes a time a few years ahead when the older student will want to know how Uncle
Tom’s Cabin sparked the war that ended slavery or why Hamlet may be
the best piece of literature ever written. It
is a seed that must be planted while there is still a chance for the student to be guided
and familiarized with difficult material. One
day she will be more willing to return to it, because it is not cold to her, not entirely
unknown, but she has an idea of how to proceed. She
has been here before. “The readiness is
all.” It is one more step that can be
taken to improve life and her understanding of it when she chooses. (excerpt from
Barber, The Immediacy of Writing.) |
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Meanwhile, back on the Continent, the Renaissance was flowering.... |
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Mona Lisa |
The Proportions of the Human Figure |
| Leonardo da Vinci | (from: http:// WebMuseum: Leonardo da Vinci ) |