Gabriel Josipovici's 'Hamlet: Fold on Fold'

The critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici has a wide and consistently interesting output. In 2016 he turned his attention to Hamlet, with a book subtitled Fold on Fold. ‘Folding’ is central to Josipovici’s understanding of this confusing and often contradictory drama, and how he unfolds his own ideas is absorbing.

For a start, with rare excursions, his analysis is focussed scene by scene on the details of the play in clear prose that avoids obfuscating academic jargon (the play is in itself unclear enough). Or rather, that focus is ‘fold by fold’. As he points out, the division into Acts of Shakespeare’s plays was not his own (the Acts cannot be discerned on stage, unlike the scenes). Instead, Josipovici divides the play into folds, some short and some long, almost like musical cadences. His introduction emphasises how slippery this work is, how much less open to obvious ‘meaning’ than King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. In fact, that elusiveness is its own meaning:

The play has so many mirrors, so many internal echoes, that it is difficult to get a grip on what is going on and in precisely what order … although the play is extremely difficult to reconstruct after the event, it is brilliantly constructed moment by moment to convey a sense of a hopeless stasis, of endless talk and nothing decisive happening, and of a machine hurtling helplessly towards a conclusion at once longed for and fought against. p.8

So, 

As the play unfolds, each moment seems to carry vertically on top of it all the other moments in the play … any attempts to talk about it must be alert to both this and to the way it unfolds.

This of course starts in the very opening lines, apparently unimportant but full of significance, when the man coming on watch, Barnardo, prematurely asks ‘Who’s there?’ (the key question of the play is there already - who are you?). Francisco rebukes him:

Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

Josipovici identifies 15 ‘folds’, and here are some notes - just things that struck me, rather than a review. The initial numbers are for the Folds:

•  1.3. ‘Never departing from the most down-to-earth realism (except perhaps in Horatio’s Julius Caesar-like speech), Shakespeare has, in a mere 180 lines, both set the scene and touched on most of the major themes of the entire play.’ p.24.

• 2.1. By contrast, the new King’s opening speech in the second scene ‘strikes us as a rhetorical exercise. It immediately conveys Claudius’s character, a character he himself no doubts conceives as “statesmanlike”, but which we experience as hollow, smug and self-serving.’ p.38.

• 2.2. The second soliloquy: ‘Where the first was polished and rhetorical, this is … like all Hamlet’s soliloquies, groping and meditative … now he is using language to try to get at something he feels but cannot quite express.’ p.46

• 2.2. More on that speech: ‘What we feel as we listen to this is that Hamlet has encountered what I would call a knot: a dense unlocking web of feelings where his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to her brother-in-law unleash all sorts of emotions - sorrow, horror, and a sudden awareness of the physical nature of his mother’s relations with these two men - which is too painful to cope with.’ p.49

• 4.3. ‘It is a striking feature of this play that, for all its great speeches, some as many as thirty or forty lines long, the key moments are always breathtaking in their brevity and utter simplicity.’ p.62.

• 4.3. Josipovici cites the critic Stanley Cavell, who points out that Old Hamlet gives his son a ‘double burden’ - the understandable task of revenge for his murder, but an unfair one to do with the ‘royal bed’, which is hardly Young Hamlet’s duty and certainly a ‘problematic legacy’. It should not be the ‘job’ of a son to ‘revenge’ what the previous husband sees as a sexual betrayal.

• 6.3. On Polonius’s language, specifically this ‘Brevity of the soul of wit’ speech: ‘Polonius’s inability to advance is comic; it is also an instance of what is endemic to this play, the way time seems to be suspended (‘the time is out of joint’), in the first instance for Hamlet but increasingly, as the play unfolds, for the other characters and for the audience as well.’ p.83.

• 6.5. ‘This is a play in which events tumble over themselves at dizzying speed and yet nothing much happens.’ p.92

• 6.7. (re the Pyrrhus-Priam narrative). ‘In contrast to the mess and confusion of Hamlet’s own life (and ours), in which nothing is certain, nothing is clear, here is a story that, if terrible, is also riveting, and where people are wholly bad (Pyrrhus) and wholly good (Priam and Hecuba.’ p.111.

• 7.1. ‘Shakespeare has shown us, in Hamlet’s soliloquies, that the self is not a machine but rather a seething and confused mass of contradictory impulses, which can only be imperfectly understood, and then only by talking or acting, not by mechanical investigation.’ p.119.

• 7.3. ‘But we should not stop at the mother’s sexuality as though it were the answer to everything. Behind that, it seems to me, lies another issue: bringing the parents’ sexuality into the open, as a remarriage inevitably does, brings with it the painful recognition that the child was necessary but contingent, that we are all the products of chance couplings. This is difficult, indeed almost impossible to take in and it leads, in Hamlet’s case, to a desire never to have been: “It were better my mother had never borne me.’’ p.127

• 8.1. ‘What we have in Hamlet is the strange but extraordinarily powerful effect Shakespeare creates by having the tragic hero and the clown figure merge.’ p.136

• 8.8. ‘At every moment the forward thrust of the dialogue, which in most plays is transparent, yielding information which will drive the plot, is stopped in its tracks, or briefly re-routed on to a different track.’ ‘One of the reasons we warm to Hamlet, as to the Marx Brothers, is that by constantly arresting the normal flow of thoughts they set us both laughing and thinking.’ p.157

• 9.2. On the Claudius soliloquy, the connections between him and Hamlet - the chief source of spying is being spied upon. And Hamlet is like Pyrrhus, pausing and hesitating above the ‘innocent’ victim. Claudius’s final words in the scene both close and do not close (as so often with Hamlet). pp. 164-7.

• 14.1. (the letter brought by the sailors). ‘Again, a letter of Hamlet’s is read out loud and we are reminded of all the scenes within scenes in this play, all the letters read out, the apparitions, the plays performed, or partly performed. The life of this play is thick with ghostly presences.’ p. 198.

• 14.1 (on the name of the Frenchman, Lamord, who reported on Laertes’s fencing expertise. Some commentators suggest La Mort). ‘This is what this play does to you: everything starts to seem both meaningful and, at the same time, quite meaningless.’ p.201.

• 15.2. ‘Everybody in this play is acting, but only Hamlet appears aware of it, and of course he does it better and in more varied ways than anyone else.’ p.215.

• 16.2. ‘Shakespeare creates for Hamlet an atmosphere in which at one and the same time nothing happens and everything happens, in which the protagonist feels himself to be drowning in a sea of words… yet being pulled inexorably towards a conclusion he both desires and does not believe in. And we warm to him in great part because that seems also to be our common experience of life: we are bombarded with information and with reading matter but know obscurely that regardless of how we react to this a common fate awaits us all. Underneath all the stories we may tell ourselves, “something is taking its course”, as Beckett’s most Hamlet-like hero, Hamm, reflects.’

That is a good note on which to end, but there is so much more in the book that is consistently interesting in Josipovici’s analysis of this extraordinary play, which folds and unfolds, and never ends in our understanding.

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