ABSTRACT
Hamlet's immediate reaction to the Ghost's revelations is, following his university training, to write something down— not only in the "table of his memory" ("the book and volume of my brain"), but literally in his "tables". But he seizes them in vain, since the real problem is impossible to formulate, and he can only arrive at the platitudinous precept that "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain". He finds that telling a story requires aesthetic correlatives, not merely the instinctive urge to spill it out. Throughout the play, he is then plagued by the sense that everyone else wants to write his story, play upon his stops, pluck out his mystery, before he can even envisage himself: "Ere I could make a prologue to my brains, / They had begun the play". His antic disposition protects him in one way but exposes him in another, as an object of curiosity whose "very cause of lunacy" may by some process of detective riddle-solving be ferreted out and explained: "by indirections find directions out". The idea of "playing" therefore becomes a byword for manipulation, rather than for discovery-through-art; in Hamlet, all types of acting arid action tend to be false moves rather than fictions about revelation; they are all "actions that a man might play". Instead, playing is contrasted with the idea of "holding", the capacity to observe without interpreting, which comes to focus substantially on Hamlet's relationship with Horatio: as in, "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart..." or in Hamlet's declaration of 236love immediately before the play-within-a-play begins, standing out in contrast to its anti-revelatory nature: blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee. And although Hamlet speaks here as if Horatio had always held this significance for him, our impression is on the contrary, that the context of events and of Horatio's reaction to them, make the idea of Horatio more meaningful and eventually indispensable to Hamlet; thus on his first appearance, Hamlet appeared barely to recognize Horatio, did not travel from Wittenberg with him, and was unaware that he had been present at Elsinore throughout the funeral, marriage and coronation. Horatio's integrity as an observer is also stressed by the small detail that even Claudius employs him at one point to keep an eye on Ophelia (a post in which, since he can never affect the active course of events, he might seem to fail dismally—except that by some obscure means, the drowning of Ophelia shortly comes to the Queen's notice). He complements Hamlet's function as misfit or Fool through also being an outsider, always on the fringes of the court yet never receiving nor requiring "advancement", so remaining "poor"; and "why should the poor be flattered?" Despite or rather because of his passivity, Horatio comes to provide a vital aesthetic dimension to the story of the Mind of Denmark. Where everyone else is engaged in action, he is one who "in suffering all, suffers nothing"—that is, though seeing and feeling all that is done, he does not disintegrate or allow his self to become denatured. Without Hamlet's depths of exploration, he is not of princely or heroic calibre, but neither does he slip into defensive omnipotence (like Claudius and Polonius) in the face of phenomena he does not understand. And although he has few words to speak, his presence in the play is strongly felt. At the end, when Fortinbras the simple soldier-prince (an outsider in the sense of being uncontaminated by ideas) receives the election of the state, bequeathed with Hamlet's "dying voice", Horatio receives the legacy of Hamlet's "story". He is still there to hold together the facts of the story, just as he was there at the beginning to introduce Hamlet and us to the Ghost, though he is no more a protagonist than are we ourselves. So in terms of the spatial quality of Hamlet as a whole, the Horatio dimension, which is defined gradually and almost imperceptibly, is essential to the reader's grasp of 237Hamlet's "act"—the drama of dreams which is taking place between the lines, and which, unlike the linear plot, does not end definitively in a dying voice.
