Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

HAMLET.

In this play it is common to look for an exhibition of humor in the scene of the Grave-diggers; but those personages are only amusing as a couple of common men whose profession seems to have buried both their feelings and their wits. One of them is accidentally witty when he asks, "Is she to be buried in Christian burial, that wilfully seeks her own salvation?" But he and his companion do not make good the promise of this opening text: they turn out to be tedious louts who bring ale-house chatter to a churchyard and only rise to the dignity of being ghastly, although we know that the grave they dig is for Ophelia. We do not properly recollect and feel this till they disappear and the music of the funeral train is heard. Their shovelfuls of dirt and bones make coffin-like cæsuras in their singing, but the songs are too trivial to be trolled over a pot; scarce are they a setting to an empty skull. They rattle so dryly you wish they might be dumped in and covered up. The sexton-riddles have little more juice in them, for they are the kind that boozy gossips clink out of their cans, and not the gay pursuivants of wisdom. We begin to reflect that such triviality does not become interesting because it is well hit off, and that in one respect it is not well hit off, since it recurs too tiresomely; and we are on the point of voting the whole grave-digging business to be a mouldy impertinence, when there flashes upon us the better thought that Shakspeare was here deepening pathos upon the fair maid who must be the tenant of this grave so fatuously dug. To this complexion must we all come at last, and beauty cannot repel the loutish hands which take their fee for shovelling dirt upon its clay.

There is so little comic business in this scene that actors are at their wits' end to make it hold the audience. They used to wear a dozen or two waistcoats, and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them off, one after another; wearing all the time an air as if each one was the last, until you doubted whether, instead of a man inside, there were any thing more than a yardstick to measure vest-patterns with. So Thackeray takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well-known articles of his apparel,—"under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." But the waistcoated business always secured the laugh which the clowns' insipid discussion could not raise.

This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no existence in the earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an after-thought of Shakspeare as he moulded the play to its perfection.

In the vignettes of mediæval manuscripts and the frescoes of chapels, there were ghastly drawings of the Dance of Death, or the so-called Danse Macabre.[7] It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly man by the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood runs counter to the violent bad taste of these unfleshed processions; they contrast with the warm truth of Nature too sharply for the work of redemption. Shakspeare was anxious not to point the old moral, but to enhance our pity: he needed this contrast with Ophelia. Perhaps he was recalling those paintings when he set the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. "O rose of May, dear maid!" He purposely lifts a handful of mould to our faces, that we may smell the rose above it.

"A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,
For ——, and a shrouding sheet:
Oh, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet."

Taine mentions with surprise that the English audiences still laugh when Hamlet traces the noble dust of Alexander to its final bier in a bung-hole. The Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the incongruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. But the laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of fancy which suddenly brings together such opposite things. The effect is like that of witnessing any ludicrous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. Extremes meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair should be whipped away just as he sits down from his climax. Hamlet does not think it too curious to consider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp: she is not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune mischance the less.

After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the "antic disposition" which tints his behavior is ironical; his remarks keenly cut down to where our laugh lies, but scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw open the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor does. We enjoy seeing with what superior insight he baffles all the spies who cannot play upon a pipe, yet expect to play upon him. This gives to the scene the flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the subacid of cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied of its humor, and is only an ill-savored text to a chop-fallen discourse upon mortality.

But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment when you are least expecting it, as events transpire which ought to kill, you would think, the very heart of such a feeling: it is, indeed, expiring,—caught as it falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, with Horatio and Marcellus, the scene upon the platform after Hamlet's dread interview with a murdered father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of manner is shaken; and we hear him writing truisms in his tablet, in a flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may smile and be a villain. But let us also make a note of that, as he did: it will interpret to us the tone of his subsequent demeanor which everybody thought was madness. In the mean time we are upon this spectre-haunted platform, seeking with his friends to discover what news the ghost brought. Hamlet trifles with them to put off their curiosity; but the scene soon rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that is extorted by the experience of a vision which comes to so few that mankind has only heard of such things. But just as the human voices are about to pledge themselves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives, and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from the glare and publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice comes, building this terrific chord of a nether world up to their purpose, that it may unalterably stand. "Swear!" The deep craves it of them; it has joined the company uninvited, but they feel convinced that it is a comrade fated to go with them to their graves. "Swear!" it reiterates: no change of place can remove them from this importunity. The centre of an unatoned murder is beneath every spot to which they shift their feet.

Now the two friends of Hamlet possess nerves which have been hitherto tuned only by the vibrations of the sunshine or of the moon's unhaunted silver. Even if they had known of the murder, their interest in it would not have been personal enough to lend fortitude to help them tolerate this unseen visitor, the murdered man himself! What an encounter! Whose wits of earthly stoutness can sustain it? They feel, and so do we, that the awe is accumulating into a wave that may o'ertopple every sense.