Page 47 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xl HAMLET

clowning in plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It
has been missed because editors have not been sufficiently
on the look-out for the double meaning, the loss is still
more serious in Hamlet. Riddle and quibble are close
of kin, and Shakespeare's Prince of Denmark inherited
both from his legendary ancestor Amleth. To repeat the
words of Saxo: 'astutiam veriloquio permiscebat, ut nee
dictis veracitas deesset, nee acuminis modus verorum
iudicio proderetur.' It would be difficult to find a more
apt description of Hamlet's speech when he assumes his
'antic disposition,' and spectators or readers are robbed
of the 'mirth' which, as Dr Johnson says, 'the pretended
madness of Hamlet causes' if they do not attempt to
detect the point of the 'acumen.' To write, as Aldis
Wright does on one occasion, 'Hamlet is talking non-
sense designedly' is to throw up the editorial sponge.
Dowden saw deeper. 'If ingenuities are anywhere
pardonable,' he concludes, 'it is in conjecturing the
meaning of Hamlet's riddling speeches; it was not his
1
use ever to talk sheer nonsense .' At his maddest, there
is always an edge, a sharp edge, to what he says. We can
be sure that Shakespeare's audience realised this to the
full, and that the judicious among them took great
pleasure in attempting to solve the enigmas which he set
them. Stage-quibbling was indeed a kind of game, like
the modern crossword puzzle or the problems with
which writers of detective stories pose their readers; and
in Hamlet it was 'performed at height' The very first
words Hamlet utters are a riddle. 'A little more than
kin, and less than kind'—what might that mean?
Obviously that he had suffered some unkindness at the
hands of Claudius. But the full meaning, for those keen
enough to see it, does not come before the end of the
first soliloquy. Or take—

Hamlet. The king is a thing—
1
Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare), p. x.