very like a whale: the problem

"Very Like a Whale": The Problem of Knowledge in HamletAuthor(s): Don Parry NorfordReviewed work(s):Source: ELH, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter, 1979), pp. 559-576Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872479 .

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"VERY LIKE A WHALE": THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE IN HAMLET

BY DON PARRY NORFORD

How can we hope that through the eye and ear This dying sparkle in this cloudy place Can re-collect these beams of knowledge clear Which were infused in the first minds by grace?

Sir John Davies, "Nosce Teipsum"

The eyes, said Heraclitus, are more exact witnesses than the ears (Fr. 101a). In his Metaphysics Aristotle concurs, asserting that men prefer seeing to other sensations because, "Cof all the sensations, seeing makes us know in the highest degree and makes clear many differences in things."'1 Hans Jonas, in an interesting essay on the phenomenology of the senses, points out that since the days of Greek philosophy sight has been hailed as the most excellent of the senses and that the noblest activity of mind, theoria, is described in metaphors mostly taken from the visual sphere, Plato and later Western philosophy speaking of the "eye of the soul" and "light of reason."2 In his The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare says that sight moves an audience more fully than sound:

To see sad sights moves more than hear them told, For then the eye interprets to the ear The heavy motion that it doth behold When every part a part of woe doth bear. 'Tis but a part of sorrow that we hear. Deep sounds make lesser noise than shallow fords, And sorrow ebbs, being blown with wind of words.3

On the other side, we might note that curious addition to The Spanish Tragedy in which Hieronimo, mourning the death of his son, asks a painter "Canst paint me a tear, or a wound, a groan, or a sigh?"-going on to make increasingly impossible demands upon the painter's art: "Let the clouds scowl, make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the winds blowing, the bells tolling, the owl shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock striking twelve."4 The aural imagery here suggests the inadequacy of painting, and by implication the mere eye, in the depiction and experience of tragedy; and indeed, Hieronimo beats the painter

559

ELH 46 (1979) 559-576 0013-8304/79/0464-559 $01 00 ? 1979 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



offstage. The play concludes with a play-within-the-play, a tragedy in which Hieronimo enacts his revenge and which seems to affirm the superiority among the genres of the "speaking picture of poesy." As Sidney argued, the poet, "with that same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth."5

I do not wish, however, to get into Renaissance debates about the relative merits of painting and poetry. My concern here is with the eye and ear as organs of knowledge in Hamlet, in which Shake- speare seems to be undertaking a phenomenological evaluation of these senses much like that of Jonas in his essay. Jonas considers sight incomplete by itself. It not only requires the cooperation of other senses, but its highest virtues are also its essential insuf- ficiencies (pp. 135-36). In sight there is a distancing between observer and the observed, subject and object, in which neither in- vades the sphere of the other, the observer remaining entirely free from causal involvement in the things to be perceived (p. 148). Sight, more than any other sense, neutralizes the dynamic impact of reality, withholding the experience of causality, not only between object and subject, but among objects themselves (p. 31). Vision thus stands back from the aggressiveness of the world, opening a "horizon for elective attention. But it does so at the price of offering a becalmed abstract of reality denuded of its raw power" (p. 148):

From the onrush and impact of reality, out of the insistent clamor of its proximity, the distance of appearance (phenomenon) is won: image, in the place of effect, can be looked at and com- pared, in memory retained and recalled, in imagination varied and freely composed. This separation of contained appearance from intrusive reality, the original feat of perception, gives rise to the separableness of essence from existence that underlies the higher freedoms of theory. It is but the basic freedom of vision, and the element of abstraction inherent in image, which are car- ried further in conceptual thought ...

(pp. 31-32)

Sight is therefore the freest and at the same time the least "realistic" of the senses because it insulates one from active physical dealings with the environment. Jonas considers that reality is primarily evidenced in resistance or impact, which we have, for example, in touch and hearing. Hearing gives dynamic, not static, reality. Unlike the eyes, the ears cannot wander over a field of possible percepts, already present as material for attention, but must wait for a sound to strike them. Sounds are "dynamic events,

560 The Problem of Knowledge in Hamlet



not just static qualities, and thus trespassers by nature" (p. 139). In contrast, the eye takes in all at once an extended "present" of (apparently) enduring objects, thus giving rise to the distinction between change and the unchanging and therefore between becoming and being (pp. 144-45). All senses but sight, to put it in Platonic terms, are senses of becoming. Hearing, therefore, "is related to event and not to existence, to becoming and not to being." Thus hearing falls short of sight in the freedom it confers upon its posses- sor (p. 139). Sight, no doubt, is king of the senses; yet as Jonas says, "A king with no subjects to rule over ceases to be a king. The evidence of sight does not falsify reality when supplemented by that of the underlying strata of experience . . .: when arrogantly rejecting it sight becomes barren of truth" (p. 149).

Hieronimo found the play superior to painting in the expression of tragedy. Hamlet has inherited his preoccupation with acting his revenge, for he too wants to "amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears" (II.ii.549-50), yet "can say nothing" (IJ.ii.554). Here speech-the word-is associated with acting, both on stage and in reality-that is, in accomplishing his revenge, in translating a purpose into action. It has been observed that Hamlet seems to con- ceive of life as a play in which he is compelled to play the role of revenger, a part for which he is not suited.6 Thus for Hamlet to act is to play a part, that is to speak. And as a revenger it seems he must rant: "Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge (III.ii.243-44), "bellow" here reminding us of Hamlet's advice to the players about suiting the word to the action and his criticism of those who strut and bellow in an abominable imitation of humanity (III.ii.27-33). As Rose remarks, Hamlet cannnot find a satisfactory shape for his revenge because of his aesthetic dislike for passionate rhetoric and moral dislike for undignified action (p. 138). We might add that he cannot even find an appropriate expression for his grief at his father's death: none of the "forms, moods, shapes of grief, / ... can denote me truly":

These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passeth show ...

(I.ii.83-85)

We therefore find in Hamlet, as Erich Heller has so wittily described, a breakdown of communication between the inner and outer worlds: "every action is an act untrue to the order or the chaos

Don Parry Norford 561



within-an idiot's act, a mad-man's act, or an actor's act: 'And all for nothing!' 'For Hecuba!' "7

Hamlet is fascinated by the stage because this disjunction between inner and outer, reality and appearance, is most perplexing there: the player forces his soul to his own conceit in a fiction, a dream of passion-through mere words: here the shapes of grief are genuine, yet correspond to no true inward reality. One thinks of Othello's remark to Jago that "It is not words that shakes me thus" (IV.i.41-42) when this is precisely the case-there is no reality behind Jago's words. It is natural, then, that Hamlet distrust words- "Nay, an thou'lt mouth, / I'll rant as well as thou" (V.i.270-71)-for equivocation plays with truth: "in Hamlet's world (and indeed in Shakespeare's) equivocation is not a trick of language, it is the language of that world-a world in which the relations between within and without, between the truth and the sign, the meaning and the word, have suffered a formidable disturbance" (Heller, p. 143).8 When Polonius asks Hamlet what he is reading, he replies "Words, words, words" (II.ii.191), as if to express their futility.

The play is filled with examples of the unreliability of words, for instance when the king asks Laertes what he would do "To show yourself your father's son in deed / More than in words" (IV.vii.123-25); and when Hamlet is deceived by the king's appearance of piety ("My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go" [Ill.iii.97-98]). Hol- land has pointed out that there seem to be two waves of action in Hamlet, the first consisting of words, the second, actions. And so also Hamlet himself is a man of words and actions; yet he is unable to bring them together: "He can talk beautifully, and he can act on impulse, but he seems unable to formulate a verbal plan and then bring it into being by action" (p. 161). Like the actor, Hamlet's plan-his script or part-issues in no real action, only words: "The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" (II.ii.590-91). "And indeed, he does catch the king's conscience and send him off to his prayers, but his conscience is all he catches; the play-within-the-play leads to no real action, no real revenge, only a verbal revenge" (Holland, pp. 165-66).

Words do seem to be associated with mere appearance in the play: they can be a substitute for action, as when Hamlet in a passionate outburst "Must like a whore unpack my heart with words" (II.ii.571). Xhen he finds that his father has been murdered and that "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain" (I.v. 108), he writes this




discovery in a tablet, then vows to revenge his father: "Now to my word" (I.v.110). Hamlet says that he will erase all other words from the "book and volume" of his brain and hold there only the com- mandment of the ghost. The word, as we know from the sonnets, can preserve experience from oblivion: "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rime" (Sonnet 55). Here the words are less powerful ("Adieu, remember me"), and there may be some ironic recognition of the disparity between the banality and poverty of words ("one may smile, and smile, and be a villain") and the horror of their truth.9 Nevertheless, Hamlet evidently feels that something has been achieved by the putting of truth into words, however inadequate.

One might argue that, from the very beginning, Hamlet seems more preoccupied with words than deeds. Yet if deeds, as we have seen, are untrue to the reality within, then action is false and fruit- less. In fact, the very point of the play seems to be that the phenomenal world lacks that stability that would make it "Creal": "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" (Il.ii.246-47). In a world of shifting and illusory phenomena, in which Alexander winds up stopping a beer barrel, a man might well pause to con- sider where reality or truth can be found. If "truth" is subjectively determined, then the mind becomes the place where the mystery must be confronted. And if this is so, then words may be more important than deeds in the quest for meaning. In fact, words themselves can be acts that penetrate and reveal the soul:

I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions. For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.

(II.ii.575-80)

A speaking picture may make the king speak. In his Lucrece Shakespeare asserted that to see sad sights moves more than to hear them told, so that one might think that it would be the sight of his own crime that strikes Claudius to the soul. Yet he does not react to the dumb-show. Rather than contrive explanations, such as that he was not watching, it seems more cogent to recognize that only when he hears as well as sees the play-within-the-play does he react. Something similar happens when Hamlet holds up to his mother the two pictures of his father and Claudius, asking her "Have you




eyes?" and questioning her judgment. Evidently her eyes were not sufficient guides, for it is Hamlet's words that turn her eyes into her very soul (IJJ.iv.90), driving home to her heart the significance of what her eyes see. Perhaps, then, the eye is insufficient without the ear, so that in Hamlet Shakespeare reverses his judgment in Lu- crece: here the ear and word count for more than the eye, as we see in the player being moved to tears by his Hecuba speech-by mere words.

While wanting to make the king speak by playing upon him with a play, Hamlet at the same time taunts Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern with their inability to play upon him, to make him speak (IJJ.ii.349ff.). Hamlet does not want to be "a pipe for Fortune's finger / To sound what stop she please" (III.ii.67-68). It seems that the heart of the mystery is associated with the ear, sound, and words: Hamlet's two "friends" try to sound him with words, words which they hope will cause him to speak, thereby revealing his inmost thought. To "sound" is to plumb the depths. The word may evoke the truth, as when Polonius advises Reynaldo to speak falsely about Laertes in order to get a true report about his activities in Paris. One can "By indirections find directions out" (II.i.66). The word may be false, mere appearance; yet lies can get at the truth, appearance tease out reality. To play (as upon a musical instrument) is to sound, and this sort of playing carries overtones, perhaps, of playing a part, assuming disguises, playing with appearances. Thus we arrive at the paradox that to play a part is to sound the depths.

Words, then, despite their unreliability and association with appearance, are related to depth: they have penetrative power. In fact, their effect upon the ear is usually dynamic in the imagery of the play. Hamlet, in his letter to Horatio, says that "I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb" (IV.vi.24-25). The queen begs Hamlet not to speak: "These words like daggers enter in mine ears" (III.iv.96). Stung by a remark of Polonius, Claudius says "How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!" (III.i.50). And the ghost tells Hamlet that "I could a tale unfold whose light- est word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood" (I.v.15-16). The tale may be true or fictitious, as when in a dream of passion the player "Could force his soul so to his own conceit / That from her working all his visage wanned" (II.ii.537-38). Whichever it be, the word penetrates to the soul and brings about a transformation of the entire being. It does not matter whether the words express a true story: they contain a "truth" per se. Fiction may move




us more than fact. The word has a dynamic power that transcends distinctions between truth and falsehood, reality and appearance.

If this is so, then it seems that the ear, the medium of sound, is a better avenue to the soul than the eye, which is associated with the division between the subject and object-with surface, superficiality, appearance. The king says that the "distracted multitude" "like not in their judgment, but their eyes" (IV.iii.4-5); Ophelia is "'di- vided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts" (IV.v.85-86); and the king taunts Laertes: "was your father dear to you? / Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?" (IV.vii. 106-08). A painting is a kind of still-life without depth. In the player's speech about Pyr- rhus, the hideous crash of Ilium falling "Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear" (II.ii.465), causing his sword to stick in the air: "So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood, / And like a neutral to his will and matter / Did nothing" (11. 468-70). Violent sound paralyzes the soul, turning Pyrrhus into the picture of a man:

But as we often see, against some storm, A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, The bold winds speechless, and the orb below As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder Doth rend the region, so after Pyrrhus' pause, Aroused vengeance sets him new a work, ...

(11. 471-76)

Here inaction is equated to silence, action to noise or speech.10 At first violent sound stuns, immobilizes, but then becomes associated with action that stuns or rends. The "dreadful thunder" harks back to the bellowing that so offends Hamlet. Nevertheless it is effec- tive: sound or speech is active, dynamic, penetrative, whereas a picture is inactive, static, without depth.

A glance at Ficino may help us here. In his writings, according to D. P. Walker, we find a theory that "visual impressions had a less powerful effect on the spirit than auditive ones-less powerful, though not necessarily lower in the hierarchy of the senses; indeed, it is precisely because hearing is not the highest, most intellectual sense that it affects more strongly the whole of man."" The reasons for this are two. First, Ficino believed that the sense-organ is of the same substance as what is sensed. Thus the eye contains something luminous, whereas the ear contains air, set deep within it. This air Ficino identifies with the spirit of man, the corporeal vapor cen- tered in the brain and flowing through the nervous system, with the




natural, vital, and animal spirits that are the link between body and soul. Thus the peculiar power of sound may be attributed to the "similarity between the material medium in which it is transmitted, air, and the human spirit, to the fact that both are living kinds of air ... and that both . . . can carry an intellectual content" (p. 6). Second, sound affects the spirit more strongly "because it transmits movement and is itself moving; whereas sight is conceived as transmitting only static images" (p. 8). All this is nicely summarized in Ficino's commentary on the Timaeus:

But musical sound by the movement of the air moves the body: by purified air it excites the aerial spirit which is the bond of body and soul: by emotion it affects the senses and at the same time the soul: by meaning it works on the mind: finally, by the very movement of the subtle air it penetrates strongly: by its contemplation it flows smoothly ... by its nature, both spiritual and material, it at once seizes, and claims as its own, man in his entirety.

(P. 9)

As Shakespeare says in his 24th sonnet, "Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art; / They draw but what they see, know not the heart" (11. 13-14). And his Cressida remarks bitterly, "O, then con- clude / Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude"' (Tro, V.ii. 107-08).

Perhaps, then, the eye in Hamlet is less capable of grasping reality than the ear. Jonas agrees with Ficino that hearing is related to event, not to existence, to becoming rather than being. The sense of being the eye gives us, however, is illusory. In reality nothing is fixed or stable: as the player king says, "This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange / That even our loves should with our fortunes change" (IJJ.ii.192-93). Like the shifting clouds, things are what you make of them:

HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel. POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel. HAMLET Or like a whale. POLONIUS Very like a whale.

(III.ii.364-67)

The eye cannot grasp essence. Perhaps the separableness of essence from existence that sight gives rise to is also an illusory distinction. At any rate, Hamlet himself has that within that passes show; and Fortinbras' Polish war is "th'impostume of much wealth and peace, / That inward breaks, and shows no cause without / Why




the man dies" (IV.iv.27-29). The eye cannot penetrate appearance or grasp causality. As in Jonas's treatment, the eye in Hamlet seems to be the basis for the division between the inner and outer worlds, subject and object, whereas the ear provides a channel between them because it is the medium of the word, which is the logos, the expression of the mind. In Jonas's view the abstractiveness of vision gives rise to conceptual thought; Shakespeare, however, like Ficino, appears to relate thought to hearing and sound. Hamlet distinguishes man from beast by his power of "large discourse" (IV.iv.36), which can mean the reasoning power or speech. In not speaking he allows "That capability and godlike reason / To fust in us unused" (IV.iv.38-39). Thus the ear more than eye is the organ of knowledge. As the king tells Laertes, "you have heard, and with a knowing ear" (IV.vii.3). And Horatio (whose name, Holland notes [p. 164] seems related to the Latin oratio, speech) asks to "speak to th'yet unknowing world" (V.ii.368) about Hamlet's life and death. The ear and word constantly appear in connection with knowing. Horatio and the guards see the ghost in the beginning of the play, but it will not speak to them. Only when it speaks to Hamlet does the meaning of its appearance become known.

The association of eye and ear in Hamlet and in Ficino's music- spirit theory are remarkably akin to Nietzsche's conceptions of the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy, in which Apollo is associated with the plastic arts, the "pure contemplation of images," whereas Dionysus is associated with music. "The Dionysian musician is, without any images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial re-echoing."'12 The Apollonian impulse takes joy in the contemplation of images, of beautiful illusions. Trusting in the principium individuationis, it contemplates the veil of maya, rest- ing upon the surface of life, ignoring the primordial depths. Plastic art overcomes the suffering of the individual "by the radiant glorifi- cation of the eternity of the phenomenon: here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is obliterated by lies from the features of nature" (p. 104). The Dionysian impulse, on the other hand, seeks joy, "not in phenomena, but behind them" (p. 104): at the triumphant cry of Dionysus "the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things" (pp. 99-100). The veil of maya is rent, revealing the "truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory" (p. 45). We have here, of course, Nietzsche's re- working of Schopenhauer's world as will and representation; what




is interesting for our purposes is the association of will with sound, with music, the Dionysian cry of ecstasy. Nietzsche traces the root of Greek tragedy to the Dionysian chorus of satyrs, "which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images" (pp. 64-65). He stresses that sound, particularly music, can touch and express the longing of the soul in a way that plastic art cannot: "the chorus is the only 'reality' and generates the vision, speaking of it with the entire symbolism of dance, tone, and words" (p. 65). Thus tragedy is simply "the visible symbolizing of music" (p. 92). One thinks of the Pythagorean notion that the cosmos was generated out of number, which is the essence of music.

In short, Apollo is associated with the eye and appearance, Dionysus with the ear or sound and reality. The Dionysian man penetrates to the eternal core of existence "which abides through the perpetual destruction of appearances' (p. 62). It is in this con- text that Nietzsche compares his Dionysian man to Hamlet:

both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things.... Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.

(p. 60)

Hamlet is not a romantic dreamer-no, he has insight into "the horrible truth" (p. 60). As Wolfgang Clemen remarks, he is a man "gifted with greater powers of observation than the others. He is capable of scanning reality with a keener eye and of penetrating the veil of semblance even to the very core of things. 'I know not seems. "13 Clemen shows how Hamlet's images are "designed to unmask men; they are meant to strip them of their fine appearances and to show them up in their true nature" (p. 109).

Now words, we have seen, are related to Dionysian depth: they have penetrative power. Word and ear, therefore, are closely associated with "the horrible truth" of existence, the eternally suffering and contradictory "core of things." This may help us to better understand a major image in the play, the pouring of poison into the ears of Hamlet's father (I.v.60ff.). As the player's speech works its way into his soul, then causes a transformation in appearance, "'his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit" (II.ii.540-4 1), so the poison "courses through / The natural gates and alleys of the body," curdles the blood, so that "a most instant tetter barked about / Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth




body" (I.v.66-73). The ghost says he could tell a tale "whose light- est word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood" (I.v.15-16); though he is forbidden to tell the secrets of his prison- house, what he does tell Hamlet has the same effect: poison was poured into his ear, and he in turn pours it into his son's. Again one recalls Iago: "I'll pour this pestilence into his ear" (Othello, II.iii.339). And like Hamlet, "The Moor already changes with my poison:

Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur.

(Othello, IJI.iii.326-29)

Hamlet in turn passes the poison on in his harsh words to Ophelia, his mother ("These words like daggers enter in mine ears"), and in the lines he adds to the play-within-the-play to catch the conscience of the king. As G. Wilson Knight argues, the revelation of the ghost turns Hamlet into a "spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and misery, without faith in himself or anyone else, mur- dering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity, taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing his mother's heart, a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court."'14 According to Knight, Hamlet is the ambassador of death, the consciousness of death not only growing in his mind, but spreading throughout the court until at the end "the stage is filled with corpses" (p. 32).

Knight whitewashes Claudius and exaggerates the "healthy bustle of the court"; nevertheless, there is some justice in what he says. Hamlet, in fact, resembles lago: both distrust appearances, try to unmask others. Hamlet has that within that passes show, and Jago does not wear his heart upon his sleeve: "I am not what I am" (J.i.65). Both desire revenge and go about it by playing with appearances, arranging a scene or play to entrap another. Jago hates the Moor; and Hamlet, holding up the two pictures to his mother, asks: "Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, / And batten on this moor?" (III.iv.67-68). And finally, both are hostile to women; both are spirits of penetrating intellect and cynicism and as such seem demonic. Othello looks down to see whether lago has cloven feet, and Hamlet wonders whether the spirit that he has seen might be the devil. Knight says it was: Hamlet is possessed by the devil of knowledge (p. 39).

In this connection it is interesting that Hamlet calls the ghost




"Cold mole" (I.v.162), which some have associated with Satan. Whether or not there is sufficient evidence for this, it is clear that old Hamlet can be related to the "vicious mole of nature" in men that burrows within,' "Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason" (I.iv.28), undermining healthy substance: "The dram of evil / Doth all the noble substance of a doubt, / To his own scandal" (I.iv.36-38). One might argue that Hamlet becomes transformed by his father's poison, himself becoming a mole: "But I will delve one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon" (IJl.iv.209-10). The mole thus seems related to the imagery of disease, the dram of evil, the "ulcerous place" where "rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen" (III.iv.148-50). The mole, of course, was thought to be blind; yet, most significantly, keen hearing was attributed to it:

These Moles have no eares, and yet they heare in the earth more nimble and perfectly then men can above the same, for at every step or small noise and almost breathing, they are terrified and run away, & therefore (Pliny saith) that they understand all speaches spoken of theselves, & they hear much better under the earth then being above & out of the earth ...15

Thus hearing, the medium of the word, is associated with moles and mining within-the inner truth. Yet this truth is diseased, so that, by association, that which reveals it is also diseased. Old Hamlet says that "the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged process of my death / Rankly abused" (I.v.36-38), which suggests that the ear, the organ of truth, is abused by lies. Yet Claudius fears that talk of Polonius' death will reach Laertes: "And wants not buzzers to infect his ear / With pestilent speeches of his father's death" (IV.v.90-91). Here words of truth infect. Of course it is Claudius speaking, to whom the truth is deadly. Yet perhaps the truth is deadly to all. Old Hamlet speaks of "foul crimes done in my days of nature" (I.v.12); and young Hamlet tells Ophelia that he is "very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in.... We are arrant knaves all"' (III.i.124-29). The ghost's revelation has awakened Hamlet to the knowledge of original sin: "virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it" (III.i.117-18). Like Iago, Hamlet is ob- sessed by the "blood and baseness of our natures," evidently be- lieving love to be "merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will" (Othello, I.iii.328-333). The difference between the two plays is that in Hamlet there seems to be some basis for this belief: "frailty,




thy name is woman" (I.ii.146). Gertrude and Ophelia are passive, compliant-easy prey to evil.

The world of Hamlet does seem to be an "unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (J.ii. 135-37). Very few in the play seem free from some sort of"occulted guilt" (IJJ.ii.77), or at least complicity in evil. Perhaps this is the reason for the prevalence of disease imagery associated with truth and its medium the ear and word.16 Nearly all have been corrupted by the mole of nature. Something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark. Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that "my wit's diseased" (IJ.ii.308-09). As Nietzsche says, "Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence" (p. 60). Life is diseased at the core.

Nietzsche said that we have art in order not to die of the truth, and by "art" he referred not merely to the fine arts, but to the phenomenal world, "the veil of beautiful appearance thrown over the horrors of chaos.'7 In Hamlet this veil might be characterized as feminine and Hamlet's distrust of appearance related to his an- tagonism to woman. Woman is a creature preoccupied with appearance and associated in the play with imagery of painting and pictures: "let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come" (V.i.181-82). Hamlet's remark suggests that woman resists the true or real. And indeed both Gertrude and Ophelia seem more or less unconcerned with the intense investigations of the men around them. According to Nietzsche life is a woman who deceives us with her ambiguous apparitions, not because she conceals an essence or reality beneath appearances, but because she has no essence and would only like to make us think that she does: "Her 'essence' is to appear."'8 This statement casts some light on the curious hollow- ness of Gertrude and Ophelia, their passive drifting upon the surface of life. Perhaps the women in the play symbolize the vita femina, which plays like a child, offering herself only as spectacle and giving of herself only in error and illusion: "all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspective and error" (Nietzsche, quoted by Blondel, p. 162).

If woman is associated with life, whose essence is to appear, then man, who cannot rest content with life but must probe beneath her surface for essence, manifests a kind of death instinct. The attempt to do away with illusion, to find being in the heart of becoming, is diseased. "To be, or not to be," asks Hamlet, and finds that there is little difference between them. "I will find / Where truth is hid,




though it were hid indeed / Within the center" (II.ii.157-59), says the foolish Polonius. Yet no one finds the truth, even Hamlet. All he has is the word of the ghost, which he must prove by forcing occulted guilt to reveal itself. But so long as he attempts to catch the conscience of the king he fails, stabbing Polonius through the arras, sparing the king at prayer-continually deceived by appearances. Only when he gives up thinking and probing and accepts life as appearance and play does he penetrate to the core; and only then does providence provide the opportunity for revenge. The truth of Claudius' guilt is finally revealed when Laertes cries "the king's to blame" (V.ii.309); yet in the course of the play Hamlet has become concerned with a more profound problem of truth, the problematic relation between appearance and reality. And here he has learned that appearance is the only reality: underneath is a chaos of in- stincts, of physiological processes, of "bestial oblivion" (IV.iv.40). In Nietzsche's words,

Our moral judgments and valuations are only the images and fantasies of a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of convenient language to describe certain nerve stimuli. All our so-called consciousness is only a more or less fantastic commentary upon an unconscious text, one which is perhaps unknowable but yet felt ...

(The Dawn, quoted by Blondel, p. 170)

This unconscious "text" is in constant flux; indeed everything is constantly changing, constantly becoming, as Hamlet recognizes in the graveyard scene. Again to quote Nietzsche, "Chaotic being has no grounds, no reasons; it is groundless-an abyss" (Granier, p. 139). In such a world the will to truth is a will to death: illusion is necessary to life. In fact, illusion is the only "reality." The purpose of playing, says Hamlet, is to hold the mirror up to nature or life- that is, to reflect truth. A mirror, of course, reflects appearance. As Nietzsche says, "Art treats appearance as appearance, therefore it does not seek to deceive; it is true" (Blondel, p. 171). Or in Ham- let's words: "The players cannot keep counsel; they'll tell all" (IJl.ii. 133-34).

It has often been said that we enjoy a picture of something more than the thing itself, that what happens in a story or play moves us more than if the same things happened in what we call real life. Thus the player is moved to tears by his own fictitious words about Hecuba while Hamlet, who has real matter for grief, can say nothing. Perhaps one reason for this delight in appearance is that life




seems meaningless until transmuted by the human imagination: we have art in order not to die of the truth. Thus our need and love for fiction testifies to the fact that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Art masks the chaos of life by interpreting it. Adapting Nietzsche, we might say that in art "being . . . interprets itself within its own self-dissimulation" (Granier, p. 141). The actor lies, yet speaks the truth, whereas in life men believe they speak the truth yet lie. Art is more real than life precisely because it does not pretend to be real. Hamlet comes to accept the power of appearance when he tells his mother to "Assume a virtue, if you have it not," for habit "almost can change the stamp of nature" (IJJ.iv.161-69): acting can change being. This is just what happens to the player in his Hecuba speech. Appearance can penetrate into being, as it were, as Hamlet also suggests when he tells his mother that he will "set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you" (IJJ.iv.20-21); and when he tries to catch the conscience of the king: "I'll observe his looks, / I'll tent him to the quick" (IJ.ii.582-83). Appearance, then, seems paradoxically related to the power of the word, which can penetrate the soul and transform being. As words contain a power per se regardless of whether they express fact or fiction, so appearance has the power to transform reality, that is change the "truth." As Hamlet tells Ophelia, "the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his like- ness" (JIJ.i.111-13). Thus appearance can work upon and change reality, while reality cannot have a corresponding effect upon appearance. This is simply a way of saying that phenomena have no essence: "being is mask, it is phenomenon" (Granier, p. 141).

Throughout the play Hamlet has been trying to reconcile appearance and reality, playing with appearances in order to reveal the hidden truth. In the last act, however, as many have noticed, Ham- let seems different; and this, I think, is because he has resigned himself to the fact that one cannot know in this life. "The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes?" (V.ii.211-12). Ophelia said that "we know what we are, but know not what we may be" (IV.v.43-44). But do we even know what we are? Hamlet calls Claudius his mother, and when the king corrects him replies, "My mother-father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh, and so, my mother" (IV.iii.50-51). This sardonic syllogism stems from the fact that there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. Good and bad can change




places and become just as indistinguishable as mother and father. In his close analysis of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, Stephen Booth has shown how the distinction between them becomes less and less easy to maintain: being and its opposite become indistinguishable. He finds the soliloquy typical of the play as a whole-a play in which "any identity can be indistinguishable from its opposite."'9 Perhaps, then, one is not really oneself-or to put it more clearly, does not have a self, that is, an invariable essence. Rosen- crantz is almost indistinguishable from Guildenstern, Gertrude and Ophelia seem blank and characterless, mere pictures of women. Claudius is just a player king, as Hamlet suggests: "The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing ... Of nothing" (IV.ii.26-29). And the essence of Hamlet himself remains inscrutable: dreamer, thinker, madman, lover, fool; hesi- tant but rash, cruel but kind. Opposites coalesce in his enigmatic character. Perhaps the heart of his mystery is that it has no heart. As one's love and purpose change according to circumstances, so perhaps does one's very self, which has as many guises "As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents" (IV.vii.120). In the Sartrian phrase, existence precedes essence: man makes and remakes-and unmakes-himself as he moves through time. In short, the whole world's a stage and men and women merely players pretending to be themselves.

Hamlet seems to give up his quest for truth in the last act, content to stay on the surface, accepting life as play: he indulges in word- play with Osric, sword-play with Laertes. True, he has been playing all along from the time he met the ghost, but now he does not try to hold the mirror up to nature, to find the hidden truth. He stops thinking and relies on providence. Nietzsche would say that here Dionysus assumes the mask of Apollo, that Hamlet becomes "superficial" out of Dionysian profundity, accepting illusion as the only reality. The eye as an organ of knowledge has been found insufficient; now it appears that the eye has been "right" all along. Yet there is a difference, say, between the superficiality of Hamlet and that of Gertrude. He knows he is playing a part and therefore is profoundly superficial, a wisdom he could not have attained were it not for the whole configuration of experience associated with the ear.

There is a profound irony about the end of the play. We have said that the attempt to do away with illusion is diseased, that the will to truth is a kind of death-instinct. Accordingly, it seems that when




Hamlet surrenders himself to the play of life, the tides of providence (there may be some symbolic significance in his voyage to England20), the unstable motion of "reality," he should find life as well as succeed in his purpose. Yet he dies, so that it makes little difference, apparently, whether one is profound or superficial, seeks truth or accepts illusion. Both roads lead to death. Perhaps we might make a distinction between seeking death ("O that this too too sullied flesh would melt. . ." [J.ii. 129]) and finding or accepting it. In Act V Hamlet accepts life and therefore must perforce accept death at the same time: the readiness is all. Or we might distinguish between spiritual and physical deaths, the will to truth bringing about the former, the acceptance of illusion the latter. But this seems too rationalistic. I suspect that we have here an example of what Norman Rabkin calls the principle of complementarity. Ac- cording to Rabkin, Shakespeare tends to structure his plays in terms of a pair of polar opposites: reason v. passion or justice v. mercy. "Generally the opposition is rather between two complexes of related elements than simply between two single ideals. Always the dramatic structure sets up the opposed elements as equally valid, equally desirable, and equally destructive, so that the choice that the play forces the reader to make becomes impossible.' This seems to be the case with the eye and ear complexes that we have examined. Whether one thinks or feels, hesitates or acts, trusts appearances or seeks reality-it all comes to the same end.22 At the beginning of this essay we saw that Hieronimo, in The Spanish Tragedy, beat the painter offstage, thus suggesting the inadequacy of the eye in the expression and experience of tragedy. Yet at the end of that play Hieronimo bites out his tongue, which might suggest the equal failure of language to deal with tragic experience.23 So also in Hamlet, Horatio remains to tell the story, but for Hamlet "the rest is silence" (V.ii.347).

Dartmouth College

FOOTNOTES 1 A,980a 25; Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Indiana Univ.

Press, 1966), p. 12. 2 Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the

Senses," in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 135-56, 135. See also the appendix to his first essay, "Causality and Perception," pp. 26-33.

3 LI. 1324-30 in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). All quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition. I am indebted to Paul




Jorgensen, who served as reader of an earlier version of this essay, for this and the bibliographical references in note 8. In the same capacity, Thelma Greenfield made a number of cogent and helpful criticisms.

4 III.xiiA, 11. 113-14, 151-54, in Drama of the English Renaissance, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), I, 192.

5 An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), p. 115. 6 Mark Rose, "Hamlet and the Shape of Revenge," ELR (Spring, 1971), pp. 132-43,

135. On word v. action see Norman N. Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination (Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 160ff.

7 The Artist's Journey Into The Interior and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 137.

8 Cf. Lawrence Danson: "To speak or act in a world where all speech and action are equivocal seeming is, for Hamlet, both perilous and demeaning, a kind of whor- ing." Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 32-33. On language see also Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), pp. 105-26; and Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 129-43.

9 I owe this observation to Thelma Greenfield. 10 Thelma Greenfield has pointed out the oxymoronic "But as we often see ... / A

silence . . . ," remarking that this suggests sight as the "transcendent mediator." I would rather account for the use of "see" here by the static associations of sight in contrast to the dynamism of sound. For a suggestive analysis of patterns of sound and silence in the play, see Lee Sheridan Cox, Figurative Design in Hamlet: The Sig- nificance of the Dumb Show (Ohio State Univ. Press, 1973).

11 Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The War- burg Institute, Univ. of London, 1958), p. 7.

12 Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 50. 13 The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (New York: Hill & Wang, n. d.), p.

108. 14 "The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet," in The Wheel of Fire (Fifth

Revised Edition; New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 38. 15 Topsell, quoted by Jon R. Russ, "'Old Mole' in Hamlet, I.v.162," ELN (March,

1975), pp. 163-68, 165. 16 Hamlet compares the king to "a mildewed ear / Blasting his wholesome

brother" (III.iv.65-66). "Ear" no doubt refers primarily to grain, yet also reinforces the poison-ear association.

17 See Jean Granier, "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (New York: Delta Books, 1977), pp. 135-41, 138.

18 Eric Blondel, "Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor," in The New Nietzsche, pp. 150-75, 157.

19 "On the Value of Hamlet," in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 137-76, 171.

20 For the significance of tragic journeys in Shakespeare, see Maynard Mack, "The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies," in Modern Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), pp. 323-50, 344ff.

21 Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 12.

22 Thus Hamlet spares the king at prayer and stabs Polonius through the arras, both times deceived by appearances, though in the one case he stops to think, in the other acts without thinking.

23 This was pointed out to me by my colleague, David Kastan, who also made other helpful suggestions.




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