Hamlet as Allegory

HAMLET AS ALLEGORY WILLIAM ROBBINS I T h", been said that to read all the books about Shakespeare would leave no time to read Shakespeare. It might almost be said that to read all that has been written on Hamlet, or on Hamlet, would leave no time to read the play. Bishop Blougram's "two points in Hamlet 's soul unseized by the Germans yet" have long since been the inverted apexes of critical reputations, and the inevitable swing from the romantic obsession with soul to the realistic preoccupation with dramatic values and historical context has produced its own formidable library of scholarship and criticism insisting that "the play's the thing." Such being the case, the time for taking Hamlet's last words to heart seem. at hand, if not long overdue, especially when a majority of the essays and studies probably deserve the satirical thrust in the famous verse about Shakespeare failing badly because he hadn't read Professor Bradley. Yet silence, before the unique and challenging complexity of Hamlet, is too much to ask of human nature. Everyone who has studied the play, lectured upon it, however inadequately, and known that freshn= of discovery which makes every return an exciting experience, feels impelled at some time to cry "Eureka '" For if it is tritely true that every man is his own Hamlet, it is equally true that the play challenges every reader to pluck the heart out of its mystery. Mystery, I hasten to say, is too apocalyptic a word, too suggestive of Delphos or Rome, to apply to the pedestrian humanistic interpretation here offered. The "true" meaning of the play may lie in the realm of supernature, of some undiscovered country where God and the soul are the alpha and omega. Or it may lie in the restricted area of dramatic convention and exacting material, of theatrical expediency and contemporary reference. Yet there is a broad middle ground where Hamlet is neither merely a play that holds the boards nor, on the other hand, a groping for eternal non-human verities, a ground on which parable and allegory can be convenient terms to express a meaning perceived on the basis of one's own reading and thinking and experience . To say that this meaning is not Shakespeare's is an obvious but irrelevant criticism, where no such claim is made. For surely any personal interpretation of a work of art, without necessarily being whimsical or eccentric, involves the assumption that meaning implicit in the materials used is not made explicit, perhaps would even be rejected, by the artist. The mirror held up reflects a nature in which the critic 217 Vol. XXI, no. 3, April, 1952 218 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY is, with conscious or unconscious egoism, the self-appointed interpreter of a passing show of which he forms a part. One way of viewing Hamlet as an allegory of human nature and human existence, a revealing commentary on the men we are and the life we know, is to place the emphasis upon six of the characters, and to balance them three against three. On the one side are the Ghost, the King, and Hamlet; on the other the Queen, Ophelia, and Horatio. In the former three we have human nature obsessed, distorted, fanatical, embodying the dynamism which, whatever its motives, is destructive of peaceful equilibrium. In the latter three we have human nature tolerant, acquiescent, rational, by its limitations as much as by its virtues preservative of harmony and stability. 'Nor is this selection indefensible on other grounds, since the most significant psychological tensions and dramatic relations are usually expressed in terms of these half-dozen characters. One may, without simplifying the pattern unreasonably , regard Polonius as a stock elderly wiseacre, a pleasantly pompous old bore; Laertes as an unpleasantly pompous chip off the old block; and Fortinbras as an equally stock man of action, fortuitous and peripheral. And the rest are nowhere. In Hamlet as a tragedy of revenge, the main motivation for the action of the play is, naturally, the demand of the Ghost for vengeance upon Claudius. And the most dramatically obvious disturber of the peace in the relations of...