THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

as normative. To think of a performance of Hamlet without its murders is as absurd an exercise as to contemplate
excising the Prince’s lengthy meditations on mortality from his soliloquies. Shakespeare’s tragic world is uncertain,
dangerous, and mortal, and the catastrophes to which all his tragic dramas inexorably move are sealed by the deaths
of their protagonists.
It is possible that this dramatic emphasis on mortality reflected the violence of contemporary political life, both at
home and abroad. If Protestant England claimed to be righteously indignant over the slaughter of French Huguenots
on St Bartholomew’s Day 1572, and if it sometimes dwelt pruriently on the seamy side of French, Italian, and Spanish
court life, it was itself an uneasy society, haunted by ideas of treason and assassination. It was also ready enough both
to extract information from suspects by torture and to execute those it deemed to be traitors according to the bloody
ritual of public hanging, drawing, and quartering. The idea of murder as politically expedient may have seemed
repugnant to the professionally self righteous but assassination was by no means a remote or alien phenomenon (as
the carefully staged trials of the so-called ‘Gunpowder’ plotters in 1605 brought home to contemporaries). The
glancing references in Macbeth (c. 1606) to the moral issues raised by this same Gunpowder Plot suggest how a
representation of the hurly-burly of the politics of the Scottish past could be made to reverberate into the tangled
British present. A historical tragedy written to flatter a Stuart king descended from both Banquo and Edward the
Confessor it may be, but Macbeth also reflects a deep political unease in which, despite the hiatus between past and
present, no monarch could find reassurance. The exploration of turbulence and distrust in the play is not limited to the
images of blood and dismemberment with which it begins, nor is it given full expression in King Duncan’s inability
to find ‘the mind's construction in the face’; it is rendered implicit in nature and explicit in the fatal visions, the
brain-sickly thoughts, the butchery, the desperate defences, and the fearful isolation of Macbeth himself. Far more so
than the sleepless Plantagenets of the history plays, Macbeth is a monarch haunted by
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personal desolation and by the extinction of royal ideals and of effective royal influence:
My way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.
In Macbeth Shakespeare explores a monarch’s despair at having to live with the consequences of his desperate and
bloody appliances to the inherent political diseases of autocratic government.
The usurping Claudius in Hamlet, still clinging to ‘those effects for which I did the murder - | My crown, mine
own ambition and my queen’, seems, despite his own soliloquy of ineffective penitence, to experience relatively little
of Macbeth's heavy affliction of conscience. Claudius is Shakespeare’s supremely politic king; manipulative,
calculating, smooth, secretive, suspicious, and generally well-served by malleable courtiers. His Elsinore is
characterized by its eavesdroppers, its note-takers and its double agents. It is not a place where innocence thrives.
Elsinore forms a tortuous, patriarchal maze for Ophelia who fails both to negotiate its pitfalls and to understand the
cynical logic of its twists and turns; it is a prison for Hamlet who multiplies its complexities while ostensibly
attempting to purge them. Hamlet’s public problem is how to avenge a political murder in a culture where private
vengeance is politically and morally unacceptable; his equally pressing private problem is how to come to terms with
the death of his father, with his uncle’s accession, and, above all, with his mother’s remarriage (and possible
complicity in Claudius’s crimes). The intertwined dilemmas posed by those problems render the Prince an unsteady
and an ineffective revenger. Hamlet the drama confuses and complicates the clean lines of a ‘revenge play’ as soon as
Hamlet the character begins to assume roles, to experiment with devices, and to debate issues which veer off from the
central one. His meditations, one of which leads Horatio to suggest that he considers ‘too curiously’, confront him
again and again with the fear not of judgement, but with the chill shiver of death and the prospect of a dream-haunted
afterlife. The active life is waylaid by the idly contemplative, the confident Renaissance prince by the restless
melancholic, the concept of man as the paragon of animals by the memento mori. Hamlet’s most significant stageprops
are a rapier and a skull. Hamlet ends with a certain moral neatness which compensates for the disordered heap
of corpses which litters the stage. Its protagonist has proved himself ready both for his own contrived death and for
the wild justice he brings down upon Claudius and Laertes. Nevertheless, his is an end which contrasts with the more
resolute deaths of Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes.