ADJUSTING HAMLET
Macbeth. She would have been very admirable, we decided, and we
came to feel tha her unlucky marriage was the real point of the play.
Now Dr. Ernest Jones, president of the international Psychoanalytical
Society, whose famous study of
Hamlet
in the light of the Oedipus
Complex has just been re-issued, takes similar liberties with Shakespeare.
He treats characters as if they were people, and generally mistakes for
the real thing the Shakespearean
illusion
of infinite human complexity.
"The relationship with Ophelia never flowers because Hamlet's uncon–
scious only partly desires her ; in part Ophelia is felt to be a pem1itted
substitute for the desired relationship with Laertes," says Dr. Jones;
and although we know him as a devoted Freudian, he seems at this point
to be talking like the Baron de Charlus.
Psychology, which has come to be an established science directed
towards a recognized category of experience, was to Shakespeare a form
of revelation, a flare in the darkness. He was capable of the maximum
of such insight; yet what he often gives us is a scant minimum. Critics
like Dr. Jones, heeding only the first of these propositions, have in their
day fathered some monstrous theories, together with some indispensable
insights; but their day has long been past. Shakespearean criticism is
now firmly in the hands of historical scholars, the effect of whose re–
searches into Elizabethan conditions has been to quite obscure the ques–
tion of Shakespeare's originality. Many of the researches are valuable;
and the scholars are themselves often persons of sensibility.
If
challenged
they would doubtless agree that he was superior to his conditions, but
they are seldom challenged. A professional myopia prevents them from
seeing the large critical issues raised by their activities. Especially are
they incapable of that refinement of the historical method which con–
sists
in
noting the extent to which the history of literature and the
history of society do
not
run parallel. And so they present us with a
Shakespeare who was a creature of conventions, a good Elizabethan
faithfully reflecting the realities of his theatre, the limitations of six–
teenth century English, the judgments and ideas of what is called -
and
too
often hypostasized as - the Elizabethan world-view. This crit–
icism has long been the official criticism, praised as scientific, encour–
aged by the universities. It has not stopped with chastening the literary
Shakespearean; it has practically driven him from the field. The re–
cent existentialist study of
Hamlet,
by Wylie Sypher, was a forlorn gest–
ure.
One tendency of the scholars has been to turn Shakespeare into
an impeccable utilitarian. He was a Court Dramatist, says one of them,
and
Hamlet
is to be understood in terms of the Court audience's response
1137
