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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 10. August 9, 1951

[Introduction]

We might have thought that the Problem of Hamlet was now settled and closed for all time; Olivier's interpretation seemed to have set the seal on Shakespeare's intention of drawing "the struggle between the goal and the will of an individual" (as Goethe put it); or, in Freudian terms, schizophrenia, a chronic inability to make a decision,—streaked with a little of that spicy complex named after Oedipus.

It seemed to satisfy most of us. But then, just as we were feeling that there was no need ever to worry about the question again,—John Bamborough gave a talk over the B.B.C., (published in the English "Listener" for July 14, 1949), under the title of "The Missing Speech in Hamlet." His theme is that mere indecision is no answer to the "Hamlet problem." There must be a cause of the indecision. Now this is a basic question, and affects more problems than just Hamlet's. It strikes at the roots of Aldous Huxley's theory in Ends and Means, for instance, that the cause of war is basically "psychological." For the attitude implied in Bamborough's talk, looks for an objective mind as secondary, reflections of some external stress. It ultimately attacks the whole idea of the mind and human nature as absolutes. It blames the collective for what is wrong with the psyche of the individual.

Bamborough would include another soliloquy into the play—he isn't sure where. In it he would insert the real reason for Hamlet's indecision,—notably that his whole philosophy revolted against the act that his obligation to vengeance implied: the murder of one who was both his blood relation and his King.

Now this is, I suggest, the true motive for the Dane's becoming, like John o' Dreams, unpregnant of his cause. But I further suggest that there is no need to add anything to Shakespeare. There is no need to demand another speech giving expression to these motives. We can easily and justly infer them to have been true from the whole plot of the play and the character of the hero.

Much is said about Shakespeare's "universality," of how the human passions and situations to which he gives expression, transcend time and place. But Shakespeare himself was only too conscious of his limitations in this direction: Hamlet, speaking of the players, remarks, "They are the abstract and brief chronicle of the time" (II,2), and again, that the aim of drama "both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, score her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and the pressure." (111:2).

His greatest tragedies, it seems to me, are great for the very reason that they deal more dramatically and completely with the great conflicts of the age in which they were written, than any contemporary from the fact that the conflicts of that age have since proved to be of vital importance to the world.