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will. Hamlet, it will be remembered, was so thrust by his father's
ghost. Hamlet , of course, did not himself invent the circumstance in
which he was entangled, though at times he suspects himself of hav–
ing done so . Swinging counterweight, Don Quixote has actually
chosen to be caught in the circumstance he imagines he is in. He
wants to fight a giant, the windmill promptly becomes one, and he
spurs Rosinante to charge the giant he has postulated to be there. Is
he mad? To be sure . But his madness, like Hamlet's, has method to
it. . . .
The value to a playwright of such a character is that he is
capable of inserting himself into a plot without ever consulting his
author. The six characters of Pirandello's masterpiece tell the stage
manager they accost that they are in search of an author, but once
on stage and given a chance to enact their roles , show that they do
not need an author at all . Released on the stage they commence to
live - at the risk of life itself. Their belief is that "the play is the
thing," whatever its outcome for them.
The individual of heroic temper is, as Bernard Knox has in–
dicated ,
undaunted .
Now the hero of metatheater is not necessarily
that firm . He would not say like "the undaunted daughter of desire"
that "it kills me not to die for thee ." The hero of one remarkable work
of metatheater, Prince Frederick of Homburg, is so dominated by
fear that at one point he rejects the woman he loves and even sug–
gests that she marry another of her suitors if in this way he may
escape death . He is certainly unqualified to be the hero of a tragedy ,
as the Prussian militarists were quick to point out . After a single ex–
hibition of cowardice , they said , one can no more be a hero than a
woman once seduced can be called "pure ." Let me add that even the
quite fearless Cyrano yields, if not to the force , position , or skill of
another , yet to the shame he feels for part of his own body, his too
prominent nose. Thus he volunteers to help his rival Christian, in–
stead of boldly speaking to Roxanne of his love for her. Is Hamlet
undaunted? How could he be, weakened by doubt as to his mother's
role in his father's murder and by his loss of faith in womanly virtue?
There are all sorts of critics who have labored to transform Shake–
speare's hero into one more appropriate to tragedy , but such efforts
fail to convince .
It
is time to see them for what they are : obstinate
refusals to desist from the shallow reading of an ever enigmatic and
ever revealing play. . . .
But is not Don Quixote undaunted in his persevering effort to
be a knight errant in a world which rejects his efforts as mad? My
