Page 52 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

I N T R O D U C T I O N xlv

vitiates this and most previous attempts of the kind: tlut
of treating Hamlet as if he were a living man or a
historical character, instead of being a single figure, if
the central figure, in a dramatic composition. Prospero
Shakespeare has put his spell upon the world; he has
filled his plays with creatures so life-like that we imagine
they must have an existence beyond the element they
move in. Yet they are confined spirits; and though the
illusion of their freedom is perhaps the highest of all
tributes to the potency of the magician's wand, the fact
that he has thus enchanted his greatest critics gives rise
to grave errors concerning the nature of his art. Even
the young Goethe was bewitched. The hero of Wilhelm
'
Meister reveals his critical method: I sought^' he says,
'for every indication of what the character of Hamlet
was before the death of his father; I took note of all that
this" interesting youth had been, independently of that
sad event, independently of tie subsequent terrible
occurrences, and I imagined what he might have been
1
without them .' Dr Jones, crediting Hamlet with an
CEdipus complex, is only carrying the procedure a step
further. Apart from the play, apart from his actions,
from what he tells us about himself and what other
characters tell us about him, there is no Hamlet. He is
like a figure in a picture; his position therein, the light
and shade around him, the lines and curves which
constitute his form, are part of the composition of the
whole, and derive their sole life and significance from
their relation to the rest of the picture. Critics who
speculate upon what Hamlet was like before the play
opens, who talk about his life with Horatio at Witten-
berg, discuss how he came to fall in love with Ophelia,

of Loning who anticipates Bradley, shows wider reading
of previous criticism, especially of German criticism, than
most English writings on the subject.
1
Wilhelm Meister, Bk iv, ch. iii (trans, in Furness,
Variorum Hamlet, ii. 272).