Hamlet, According to Williamson William

Hamlet, According to Williamson

William Shakespeare's Hamlet has long been lauded as one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- work of literature in English or perhaps any other language. As such, it has also produced some of the most criticism, covering an incredibly wide range of views and opinions. The text can be interpreted as a typical revenge tragedy or a hugely forward-looking entrance into the world of psychological realism; it can be read with Hamlet as the hero or the anti-hero, with or without Oedipal overtones, even the identification of Claudius as the murderer is never entirely certain (though most productions make this decision)...the list of ambiguities goes on and on. For a critic to establish meaning in this text, then, one would assume that the first step of action would be to examine the play for clues as to what Shakespeare intended in each unclear instance.

Not, so, according to critic Claude C.H. Williamson, who believed that the multitude of critics who hotly debated each of these topics were the reason that "Hamlet is in process [sic] of becoming the tragedy of time wasted" (Williamson, 85). Though his essay on the play and its critical history first appeared in the International Journal of Ethics in 1922, its continuing relevance -- much like that of the play itself -- is striking. The arguments that Williamson seems to believe are nothing more than specious sophistry are still going on today, as each new production of Hamlet in a modern theatre is forced to address the questions of psychology and dramatic interpretation in a way that the actors of Shakespeare's company and other companies of the time wouldn't even have dreamed of.

Williamson begins in a slightly inflammatory style, and he keeps it up throughout his criticism of other critics; he is not insulting, merely radical in the simplicity and denial of his assertion that "qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticise [sic] it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art" (Williamson, 86). This is the crux of Williamson's argument; there is nothing in Hamlet that requires or even allows for interpretation, but rather the text should be looked at in the light of its external genesis and the historical context and legacy from which it springs.

Among the key features of this argument are what Williamson cites J.M. Robertson, as well as others, as having put forward but quickly lost sight of in the excitement or even frenzy of interpretation: "namely, that our royal Hamlet was not a Danish prince, but a dramatis persona, no more, no less" (Williamson, 86). This is certainly a valid observation; though there was a historic Hamlet -- or at least one of legend -- upon which the character and some of the plot points of Shakespeare's Hamlet are loosely based, the text in the main is not about that Hamlet, but about Shakespeare's concept and creation of the character. Historical fact was never a strong influence in Shakespeare's writing, and Williamson is correct in pointing out that it should not be looked for here. Yet he seems to err in his next conclusion, still following Robertson's train of thought, that "the essential fact is that Hamlet is an adaptation of an older play" (Williamson, 87). This must give us pause. If the historical -- or legendary, which was as close to historical as would have been available -- plot and character of Hamlet were deemed -- correctly, in my opinion -- to be inadequate and unnecessary tools of analysis, how then could the interim dramatic interpretations be "essential?"

For one thing, Williamson maintains, "the theme or legend or saga upon which it [Hamlet] was based, and upon which Shakespeare felt bound to work, was a tragic story of revenge. It was bound to finish as a tragedy -- " (Williamson, 87). This seems to counter his earlier position that the legendary saga that would have been -- and is -- the closest thing to an original version of the Hamlet story did not matter, however here Williamson is talking about the dramatic structure of the narrative, which Shakespeare, it is true, altered only slightly -- except for the ending. Williamson fails to note that the Hamlet or Amleth of Scandinavian legend was ultimately victorious and ascended to the throne to live through several more years of violence and court-based intrigue before dying in battle (Mackenzie, 239-43). The fact is, Willaimson's initial assertion that the history or legend behind Shakespeare's Hamlet does not matter; neither does the earlier tragedy upon which Shakespeare's play was based. Shakespeare had almost no original story lines; it was the way his characters reacted to the plot, what thy thought, and how they expressed themselves that made -- and make -- the plays so watchable and such towering testaments of the possibilities and endless varieties of language. It is Shakespeare's use of the word, not the plot device, that placed him at the head of the English literary canon, and it is really only the text of his version of the Hamlet story tat needs to be examined in a critical analysis of the work.

Eventually, Williamson comes back to this point, which he made and lost sight of as quickly as he accused others of at the start of his essay. On the structure of the play as Shakespeare wrote it, Williamson notes, "it may indeed be called the tragedy of thought, for there is as much reflection as action in it; but the reflection itself is made dramatic" (Williamson, 89). Though, like Williamson, I do not believe a fully and solely psychological analysis of this play and its title character, I also agree with him tat it is the processes of Hamlet's mind that make the play so dramatic. In this way, if in no other, Shakespeare definitively makes Hamlet his own work; the depth to which he explores the inner workings of guilt, jealousy, and revenge go far beyond the stuff of legend. It is also far beyond what was expected and delivered in the way of tragedy by the average playwright of Shakespeare's day; though no known copies of the play are still extant, Williamson cites evidence that "the earlier Hamlet was almost certainly a crude and bloody drama of the primitive Elizabethan kind -- chiefly madness, murder, and ghost" (Williamson, 91). This does not put it too far a cry away from the Scandinavian legend, either, although the madness was feigned (Mackenzie, 233). Shakespeare's play, then, must be taken and interpreted on its own terms; on the terms by which it was written and delivered to posterity, inaccurate though the final product of this process may be.