PARTISAN REVIEW
to
the social functions embodied in the various characters. Hamlet is
the Prince, Horatio the Poor Courtier, Ophelia the Good Daughter;
and because Polonius is the Prime Minister, and such dignitaries were
respected by Courts, Polonius is not a figure of fun and should not be
so played by modern actors. Somewhat less fantastic is Lily B. Camp–
bell's study of the tragedies in the light of Elizabethan mental science,
a book known to all earnest Shakespeareans. The tragic heroes, Miss
Campbell suggests, exhibits the symptoms of various disorders - grief,
jealousy, anger in old age,
etc.
-
as described in contemporary treat–
ises on psychology. As a study of lore that Shakespeare undoubtedly
knew and used, the book is engrossing. It has, however, often been
taken as a positive aid to critical understanding ; and Shakesphere be–
comes a kind of medical examiner filing reports in beautiful language.
Of such books one's complaint is not that they are bad criticism but
that they are inferior science: they fail to define their terms and pur–
poses. Even E. M. W. Tillyard's important recent book on the chronicle
plays exaggerates the value of the political ideology.
As Yeats wrote of the Victorian critics, ". . . . because every
character was to be judged by efficiency in action, Shakespearean critic–
ism became a vulgar worshipper of Success." This, as we see, is still
the case, except that Shakespeare is now felt to have written from the
standpoint not of the Good Victorian but of the Well-Adjusted Man,
a very different conception. Let us grant the critics their changing stand–
ards. The great question is not how Shakespeare judged but whether
he judged at all. To be sure, the plays
incorporate
judgments, judgement
being a fact of experience. But are the plays to be equated with the
judgments in them any more than Shakespeare is to be equated with
his age? Yeats ·protested against such arithmetic. He said that Shake–
speare watched "the procession of the world with that untroubled sym–
pathy for men as they are, as apart from all they do and seem, which
is the substance of tragic irony."
Really Shakespeare was less the victim of a
Zeitgeist
than are the
scholars and Dr. Jones, representative moderns who insist on intruding
into art that legitimate fiction of science, the well-adjusted individual.
Otherwise Dr. Jones is as far from the scholars in method and intent
as a buccaneer is from a public accountant. He is so innocent of histor–
ical knowledge that he can, for example, regard Hamlet's outbursts of
bawdiness as peculiar to Hamlet, and so multiply inferences. By pointing
out the element of family tension in the play he performs a service -
a service which Freud's much subtler analyses have accomplished for
art in general. Freud, moreover, usually avoided the error that Dr. Jones
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