Hamlet

Surely the real problem of Hamlet lies in certain facts briefly reported by Waldock, ¹ that up to the year 1736 no critic seems to have found any great difficulty in the play, but since that date one interpretation after another has been proposed and rejected. In 1736 Sir Thomas Hanmer, enquiring why Hamlet does not kill Claudius at once, explained that if he had done, the play would have ended somewhere in Act II; and that Shakespeare, anxious to avoid this disaster, did not manage to make Hamlet's delay dramatically convincing. As we have seen, there is a strong family likeness between this reasoning and what the Scholiast said about the Ajax, that Sophocles, wishing to prolong the play, made a mess of it. But let us not laugh too soon at Hanmer: our own day has produced critics willing to make his necessary assumption, namely that Hamlet is incompetently constructed. There are critics of the ‘historical’ school who have persuaded themselves—or at least have sought to persuade others—that the play contains chunks of earlier material which Shakespeare could not or did not assimilate, like some ostrich with tin-cans inside him. Critics of a psychological turn have woven fantasies around the play so tightly that it has become quite unable to move, with the natural result that Mr Eliot has written it off as a failure, since ‘nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him’. Hamlet has been professionally psychoanalysed. What the Baker Street Irregulars do for fun certain Stratford Irregulars have tried to do in earnest: to treat Hamlet as a real person, having an existence outside the play. The irreverent outsider is tempted to say that the great triumph of Mr Michael Innes’ The Mysterious Affair at Elsinore is that it succeeds in being even funnier than some of the serious books about the play.