Page 53 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xW HAMLE T

or attribute his conduct to a mother-complex acquired
in infancy, are merely cutting the figure out of the canvas
and sticking it in a doll's-house of their own invention.
As for Hamlet-psychology, the best thing ever said on
that head came to us the other day from Australia: 'We
can find out no more secrets about Hamlet's motives.
A play is not a mine of secret motives. We persist in
digging for them; what happens usually is that our spade
1
goes through the other side of the drama .'
Partly in reaction against such theorising, a school
of recent critics, with Professor Stoli of Minnesota,
Professor Schiicking of Breslau, and the late Mr J. M.
Robertson of this country at their head, have restated the
problem in historical instead of psychological terms.
They ask, not 'What is wrong with Hamlet?' but 'What
is wrong with HamletV and the answer they give is that
nearly everything is wrong. Shakespeare, they inform
us, threw the cloak of his inimitable poetry over the
primitive construction of Kyd's drama, but he was quite
unable to bring it dramatically to life, so that the un-
accountable behaviour of the hero is simply one, though
the most flagrant, indication of what Mr T. S. Eliot,
dancing to Mr Robertson's pipe, has called 'most
2
certainly an artistic failure .' Yet the historians are even
further astray than the psychologists. They appear to
have no aesthetic, or at least dramatic, principles what-
ever, but seek to explain and appraise everything in
Shakespeare by reference to historical causes. Thus,
when they come upon passages, scenes or characters
which perplex them, instead of asking themselves what
Shakespeare's purpose might have been or what artistic
Junction such passages, scenes or characters might con-
ceivably possess in a play written for the Elizabethan
1
Hamlett a study of critical method, by A. J. A. Waldock,
1931, p. 98. Cf. an admirable footnote on p. 158 of
Schiicking's Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays.
2
The Sacred Wood (2nd ed.), p. 98.