'The very cunning of the scene': Claudius and the mousetrap

'The very cunning of the scene': Claudius and the mousetrap In his Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, Dr Johnson observes that his plots, whether historical or fabulous, are always crouded with incidents, by which the attention of the rude people was more easily caught than by sentiment or argumentation; and such is the power of the marvellous even over those who despise it, that every man finds his mind more strongly seized by the tragedies of Shakespeare than of any other writer; others please us by particular speeches, but he always makes us anxious for the event, and has perhaps exceeded all but Homer in seeing the first purpose of a writer, by exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that reads his work to read it through.1 It is a testimonial to D r Johnson's perspicacity that one of the 'events' which continues to excite our 'restless and unquenchable curiosity' has no speeches, particular or otherwise, at all—the dumb-show in Hamlet. In 1807, Henry James Pye noted an apparent and serious inconsistency in this famous incident that has troubled commentators ever since: the dumb-show, he observes, appears to contain every circumstance of the murder of Hamlet's father. N o w there is no apparent reason why the Usurper should not be as much affected by this mute representation of his crimes as he is afterwards when the same action is accompanied by words.2 Unlike most commentators of the time, Pye does not simply pose a textual or thematic question, but is engaging in performance criticism—how is the scene to be acted, either in a literal sense or in the imagination of the reader? In this essay I will attempt, after a brief discussion of approaches to the problem taken in the past, to discover how this apparent inconsistency might be resolved in a manner which takes audiences more deeply into the text while enriching both the theatrical power and thematic significance of The Murder ofGonzago, as performed by the 'tragedians of the city'. 1 Preface reprinted in Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1963, pp. 104-50: 124. All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans, Boston, 1974. 2 H. H. Furness, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Hamlet, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1877, 1, p. 241. P A R E R G O N ns 12.1 (July, 1994) 16 C. Edelman One of the most commonly accepted options wasfirstoffered by Tieck in 1824—the King does not react to the dumb-show because he does not see it: While waiting for the play to commence, the King is friendly towards Hamlet; he jests with the Queen or with other ladies and persons of the court; he is so absorbed in merry talk that he does not observe the dumb show by which, after the fashion of the old English theatre, the plot is foretold; Hamlet's repeated hints and the accents of Hamlet's voice at last arrest the King's notice. As Hamlet is no longer able to control himself, the King must needs become aware that something peculiar, something concerning himself, is going on. Then when the poisoner appears and murders the sleeper, as Claudius had murdered his brother, the King observes it, and is forced at last to perceive that his sin is no longer a secret; his conscience breaks through all his hypocrisy; he retreats, horror-struck, as before a ghost.3 As Harold Jenkins notes,4 Tieck's suggestion proved most attractive to Dover Wilson, whose edition of Hamlet has these stage directions accompanying the dumb-show: [the Queen turns away and whispers with the King and Polonius (3.2.125.SD) [the curtains are closed Hamlet seems troubled and casts glances at the King and Queen as the show goes forward; they continue in talk with Polonius throughout (3.2.134.SD) The inherent fallacy in staging the scene in this manner is obvious. As W . W . Robson writes, 'the only coherent argument against the King's having seen the dumb-show is the negative one from which the...