RITUAL AND THE DRAMA
745
tion to the main theme. Mr. Fergusson, it seems to me, is entirely right
in his criticism of this view, which treats
Hamlet
as if it were a late
nineteenth-century problem play amenable to resolution in neat, con–
ceptual terms. Starting from
J.
Dover Wilson's reminder that Hamlet was
a prince, who lost a throne as well as a father, Mr. Fergusson works out
an interpretation of
Hamlet
as a ritual drama similar in nature to
Oedipus
but fiIled with an ironic complexity alien to Sophocles.
Like
Oedipus,
it is the order of the state which is at stake in
Hamlet,
and ultimately, the order of the cosmos itself as symbolized by the stage.
The function of the court ceremonies in
Hamlet,
Mr. Fergusson acutely
points out, is "to serve to focus attention on the Danish body politic
and its hidden malady: they are ceremonious invocations of the well–
being of society, and religious or secular devices for securing it." All the
divergent plot-lines are linked "by analogy" with this central theme of
the play, united not by any abstract idea but by the connection still felt
in Elizabethan times between the health of the state and the order of
the cosmos; though Hamlet himself-and this is the heart of his personal
tragedy-has begun to doubt the traditional cosmos without having any
new faith to take its place. From this perspective, Mr. Fergusson is able
to synthesize the leading modern theories about
Hamlet
into a re–
markably comprehensive and convincing unity focussed around his own
conception of ritual drama.
By this time, Mr. Fergusson's own "ideal" of a theater should be
fairly clear. It is a theater like that of Sophocles and Shakespeare: re–
flecting a unified culture and cosmos in which the action "imitated" by
the drama is based on the ritual sense of life and human destiny formu–
lated by the tragic rhythm. Measured by this ideal, of course, the
modern drama is a chaos of "partial perspectives," each imposing a
different convention on a reality no longer shaped by a traditional
intuition of human destiny. In the last great theater, that of modern
realism, the "publicly accepted scene of human life was that of the
Philistine bourgeoisie"; Ibsen and Chekhov created their theater within
this "publicly accepted scene." Nonetheless, they managed to get beneath
the superficial machinery of the well-made play-a degeneration of
Racine's theater of Reason-to capture "not a concatenation of events
but a movement of the psyche." In the theater of modern realism.
however, "the anagoge is lacking"-there is no larger world of meaning
into which the tragedy opens, as
Oedipus
opens into a recognition of
the mysterious justice of the gods, or as
Hamlet
opens into the arrival of.
Fortinbras which restores the state and the cosmos. Yet the theater of
Chekhov in particular, Mr. Fergusson asserts, captured those "moments
