The vogue for Hamlet in the 1920s is, I think, of piece with the culture of the 1920s: the wounded modernity of it all, from the Jazz age drinkers in New York city speakeasies to the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, etc. World War I showed the great and unspeakable harm of yoking together advanced technology and the senile intellection of the ruling class. The 1920s were despised, later, by people like Wyndham Lewis and
reactionaries of all kinds partly due to its unstable mixture of deep mourning and sexual release.
Which was the perfect mood in which to read The Waste Land, or to compose it.
Eliot was producing a lot in the twenties, in order to supplement an income from the bank he worked at that would have been more than ample for another middle manager (500 pounds a year). But Tom and Viv pursued lifestyles that made more money a necessity. Besides, the Eliot of the time was overflowing with ideas. Which is why his essay on Hamlet, the one in which he deplored such mooks as Goethe for misunderstanding the whole failure of the thing, was, on the one hand, so outrageous, and on the other hand, was as close as his criticism came to his art. The Hamlet that he hammered at was all fragments and failure – Shakespeare’s Wasteland.
“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.3 The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most mis leading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on the play.”
What an astonishing last phrase! Eliot latter omitted this essay from some collection of his essays because it was so impertinent. Highhatting Goethe, Coleridge and Pater in one driveby is a display of sharp elbows that must have made the Edwardian sages, those still around, gasp.
The whole essay is full of other gasp-making passages. For instance, this one, on how clumsy Shakespeare bobbled his source, the (lost) Hamlet of Kyd, which was no doubt a real revenger play and no fooling around. “In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing.”
So much for those who think that the madness theme is all the more convincing for posing the question: what if a madman plays at being a madman, not realizing that he is truly mad? A question at the heart of early modern European literature – Hamlet, meet Don Quixote. This fold in the play made Hamlet a precursor of romanticism, and romanticism was something that the Eliot at this point, with his Maurrassian leanings, wanted rooted out – for reasons not unlike that of his old pal, Wyndham Lewis.
Lewis-like shock effects key passages like this one: “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.”
Sloppy Shakespeare, not able to cut and mend. Like, perhaps, Eliot in the midst of his first draft of the Wasteland? I love the “most certainly” of the artistic failure. There the teacher is, turning back the paper that little Will had worked so hard on. Alas, failure – and F!
“And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.”
Of course, the unconscious movement from dissing Pater – who thank God never wrote on Hamlet – to dissing Pater’s painting, his poem, the Mona Lisa – makes the essay all the more interesting as a good old St. Louis stomping. Behind the clerical fussiness there’s the riverside hustler. Eliot makes it clear that there are the cool people, who know what artistic success is, and the hoi polloi, who want the “interesting” – the crossword puzzle, the latest murder, Hamlet.
Eliot doesn’t mention Joyce. Lewis, who shared Eliot’s impersonality of the poet thesis at this time, would certainly have included some dig at J.J. – after all, the “character” of Hamlet figures as a major key in Ulysses. As Stephen might reply to Eliot’s irritated and irritating essay: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
It is in the Hamlet essay that Eliot lets loose upon the world (to his later dismay) the term “objective correlative.” Apparently he can’t find any in Hamlet. “The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”
