Emma Smith on 'Hamlet'

Another in a series of notes on chapters in Emma Smith’s book This is Shakespeare. See also Macbeth and Othello.

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Like Gabriel Josipovici, whose 2016 book Hamlet Fold on Fold I commented on recently, Emma Smith sees Shakespeare’s play as one in which forward movement is stymied, and of course this is seen primarily though the central character:

Hamlet’s actions tends towards undoing and negation rather than doing or progress: he breaks off his relationship with Ophelia; he does not return to university; he wants the players to perform an old fashioned speech ’if it live in your memory’; his primary attachments are to the dead not the living. The play’s iconic visual moment - Hamlet facing the skull of the jester Yorick - epitomises a drama, and a psychology, in thrall to the past.

She recognises that seeing the play as being preoccupied by the past might seem ‘perverse’, given the tendency to regard it as ‘Shakespeare as his most modern’, and that this makes it ‘hard for us to register the ways it is deeply retrospective in tone’. This is seen even in the choice Shakespeare makes to double the names of both Hamlet and Fortinbras, with both younger men tied by their naming to their fathers (Young Hamlet being unable to ‘form an autonomous identity for himself’). Right at the start Marcellus asks if the ‘thing’ has appeared ‘again’:

That word ‘again’ tells us the ghost is double reiterative, symbolising the recurrent past.

When the Ghost does speak, he ‘pulls Hamlet away from the future and into the past’.

Emma Smith points out that the charge of this play written about 1600 must partly have been the issue of succession, as the childless Elizabeth I approached 70. To some extent this concern about succession makes Hamlet aligned with the history plays, which

Interweave patrilineal and fraternal rivalries within the family and state, marginalizing women and rehearsing versions of regime change.

Fortinbras’s succession to the throne of Denmark at the end is hardly a triumphantly promising indicator for the future. Instead,

As an image of late Elizabethan political anxieties, it’s a bleak ending.

She considers the issue of religion to be connected to this backward-looking tendency in the play, including of course the question of the ghost (is Hamlet, as Stephen Greenblatt suggests, ‘a Protestant son haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father'?). Another component in that strain is theatrical, in its relationship to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and to the pre-history of London theatres, as seen in the dumbshow in Act 3 which precedes the Murder of Gonzago:

The play then repeats this mimed action, this time verbally. This dramaturgical split between saying and doing is rather apt for the whole play… in which the relationship between speech and action is so famously fraught.

She also addresses the extraordinary face, much commented-on (including by Freud), that Shakespeare chose for his central character(s) a name so close to his own son’s, Hamnet, who died tragically 4 years before the play was written (Maggie O’Farrell explored this with the licence of a novelist in Hamnet):

So can authorial biography help with ‘Hamlet’? Clearly this is a play preoccupied by grief and by mourning, a play that looks backwards to something painfully unrecoverable.

In summary, Emma Smith believes that the the ‘cumulative nostalgia’ driving the play 

Helps us to see ‘Hamlet’ as a symptom of its own historical moment rather than, as is more usual, thinking about it solipsistically as the anticipation of ours. 

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