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Hide fox, and all after Joe Winter offers some reasons for yet another book on Hamlet Listen carefully and you’ll hear an army of wood-boring beetles. In every scholarly press, in every arts faculty, the Hamlet industry is on the march. Every year more books, more articles, more theories emerge. So why should I contribute to the crunching of dead wood and the rustle of dead pages? It’s because for fifty years the play wouldn’t leave me alone. And so ‘Hide Fox, and All After: What lies concealed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet?’ has joined the pile, courtesy of Sussex Academic Press. But with a difference: no mention is made of any other literary work, by Shakespeare or anyone else, nor is there a single reference to any work of criticism. The play’s the thing says the prince, Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. He is setting a trap for Claudius; but the first words may yet help the commentator avoid another trap. The play is the thing. Taken out of context the words can be a reminder of the primacy of the spectacle itself. A discussion is offered that seeks to operate to an extent as a spectator at a performance, observing what is in front of the nose, rather than the mass of comparative material or commentary below it. This is not to say that a student should not refer to the views of others. One must learn to be a scholar, to present different sides of an argument, to come to a balanced view. But one must also learn to see. The book begins with the text of the play itself, with a good deal of cross-reference in the commentary that follows. Scene by scene, this seeks to bring the reader closer to the action, easier said than done with this classic of inertia. For lo! his sword, / Which was declining on the milky head / Of reverend Priam, seem’d i’the air to stick. / So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, / And like a neutral to his will and matter / Did nothing. The Player’s recitation, started off by the prince himself, appears almost unnaturally to capture the latter’s hesitancy as, mirrored in Pyrrhus, he sets out to avenge his father. We discover he is anything but inactive however. The inertia he is so conscious of conceals a deep-seated going forward. He needs to expose Claudius to the outward world as evil, not merely to kill him. Honour demands an outright and immediate revenge: but this is incompatible with a deeper need that on the surface he seems to know nothing of at all. Created magnificently out of such a dilemma, the play can be seen in part to be an exposition of the unconscious at work. It is of course magnificent too in poetry. My edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has eight full pages devoted to Hamlet (Marlowe’s entire oeuvre by contrast occupies one and a half). The inspiration of the words is included in that of the dramatic action, and the commentary seeks to bring the reader closer to this delight also. Again a phrase from the text is adopted, again out of context (this time with something of a wrench, the excuse being that it seems worth it). O what a deed / As from the body of contraction plucks / The very soul, and sweet religion makes / A rhapsody of words. The prince is furious with his mother for deserting the spirit of the marriage contract
sealed with his father. ‘Rhapsody’ there and then would have meant something like ‘rambling poetic effusion’, but with the slight shift in its current definition, the phrase is lifted as an alert to the commentator. Is not the cascade of poetry throughout an old-time drama in some respect ‘a rhapsody of words’? It is not perhaps a scholarly appropriation but, in the narrow sense, this is not a scholarly book. One hopes it may be inspirational nonetheless. Poetry should not be analysed to dullness. There is only so much one can say, in any event, on such an exclamation of Hamlet’s as he advances upon Laertes who has leapt into Ophelia’s grave. What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow / Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand / Like wonder-wounded hearers? Yet merely to mention it may allow the student the mental space to marvel; and to compare the final phrase with the Priest’s ‘peace-parted souls’ of a few lines earlier may encourage a sense of being able to glimpse the goings-on in the poetic engine, here in the making of a compound adjective. The use of the pentameter, key to so much of drama and poetry in English, is noticed here and there almost as a character of the text, dressed to the occasion in its pace and colour; and the extraordinary imagery throughout is taken note of and at times explored. In addition to the familiar motif of rot and corruption, the figures the poet finds for another theme are visited. The reader is brought within conscious earshot, so to speak, of a metaphorical by-play that surely possessed Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote. The play is riddled with the thought-world of blind consequence. Targets missed, the wrong target hit: again and again we are reminded of the innate capacity for human error. Hamlet’s apology to Laertes just before the fencing-match is perhaps the Autumn 2018
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