Critical Responses to Hamlet 1600-1900: Volume 3, 1839-1854 (review)

Critical Responses to Hamlet 1600-1900: Volume 3, 1839-1854, edited by David Farley- Hills; pp. xlv + 309. New York: AMS Press, 1999, $97.50.

Here we have the third of four volumes excerpting three hundred years of critical response to Hamlet. The quartet follows two earlier volumes, one of recent essays, and another on Hamlet and Japan (1995). This time, the editor David Farley-Hills concentrates on the high Victorian era, with fifteen selections from not only British but also American, French, and German sources, as well as an extensive and informative Introduction by the editor himself. Almost all his contributors bear now-forgotten names, with the interesting exceptions of John Quincy Adams, Edgar Allan Poe (a very brief excerpt), and, perhaps, François Guizot. (Fans of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience [1881] will recall the Colonel's catalogue of "all the remarkable people in history: "Tupper and Tennyson, Daniel Defoe / Anthony Trollope and Mr. Guizot"-- who, it turns out, was both a French Foreign Minister and a translator of Shakespeare into French.)

This is a fascinating volume, which I read with delight--fascinating for two different reasons. It makes one realize why Hamlet was the most important play in the nineteenth century. And it also makes quite clear that Hamlet doesn't matter any more, and why.

Like many others, I spent most of Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet listening to the impeccable line readings with eyes wide shut. At the time, I took this to be a reaction to Branagh's incorrigible insensitivity to film as something visual and rhythmic. It was that, for sure. But after reading Farley-Hills's compendium, I also see that Branagh's treatment signaled that there is nothing now left in Hamlet that we need to see. Hamlet just doesn't matter any more.

For the Victorians, however, nothing mattered more than Hamlet. As one might expect, they obsessively reminded one another that Hamlet is about action paralyzed by thought, thought that can come to no resolve. They had been told so by their elders and betters, the great Romantic readers of the play, Goethe and Schlegel and Coleridge, and it was a wisdom they were happy to pass on. But the value of this volume is that, even as these conventional claims are rehearsed, something else emerges, something quite at odds with the Romantic Hamlet, something that is quintessentially Victorian.

After pro forma nods to the action/thought split, all of these readers hunker down to what really grabs them, the puzzles of performance. Not the failure of Hamlet to act, but the plethora of his performance choices, controversial, contradictory, distracting, and perverse: "In [his] multitude of changes," H. N. Hudson claims in 1848, Hamlet "seems more real for the very reason that we cannot understand him" (209). Nor, of course, can he understand himself, or anyone else in the play; neither can they understand him, or themselves. Hamlet may not be all action, but it is all acting, all the time. And that's the clue to its Victorian cachet. The Victorians delighted in, and despaired over, Hamlet as the arch-play of the crux, infinitely interpretable, infinitely mysterious, a drama, Guizot insisted in 1852, that could not possibly have mirrored Shakespeare's own time, or indeed any time earlier than Guizot's own. In Hamlet, "we feel and see our own selves," Georg Gottfried Gervinus proclaims in 1849 (270). And to readers like him, and Hudson, and Guizot, those selves lived lives not of secrets and lies but, as Freud the greatest of Victorians knew, of secrets and performance, the tantalizing, symptom-badged interchange of "that which is manifest and that which is hidden" (Guizot again, 281).

As these essays interrogate detail after detail of the performances in Hamlet (rarely performances of Hamlet), we sense the texture of the Victorians' own intellectual and moral experience. And their formidable skill at close reading. In this line...