Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley's Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake's Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom's provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist; How to Read and Why; Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds; Hamlet: Poem Unlimited; Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?; and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.

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Hamlet

Chelsea House Publications

Chapter One

Hamlet is part of Shakespeare's revenge upon revengetragedy, and is of no genre. Of all poems, itis the most unlimited. As a meditation upon humanfragility in confrontation with death, it competes onlywith the world's scriptures.

Contrary, doubtless, to Shakespeare's intention,Hamlet has become the center of a secular scripture. It isscarcely conceivable that Shakespeare could have anticipatedhow universal the play has proved to be. Ringedround it are summits of Western literature: the Iliad,the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales,King Lear, Macbeth, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, War andPeace, The Brothers Karamazov, Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick,In Search of Lost Time, among others. Except forShakespeare's, no dramas are included. Aeschylus andSophocles, Caldersn and Racine are not secular, while Isuggest the paradox that Dante, Milton, and Dostoevskyare secular, despite their professions of piety.

Hamlet's obsessions are not necessarily Shakespeare's,though playwright and prince share an intensetheatricality and a distrust of motives. Shakespeare is inthe play not as Hamlet, but as the Ghost and as the FirstPlayer (Player King), roles he evidently acted. Of theGhost, we are certain from the start that he indeed isKing Hamlet's spirit, escaped from the afterlife to enlisthis son to revenge:

If thou didst ever thy dear father love-

[I.v.23]

The spirit does not speak of any love for his son, whowould appear to have been rather a neglected child.When not bashing enemies, the late warrior-king kepthis hands upon Queen Gertrude, a sexual magnet. Thegraveyard scene (V.i) allows us to infer that the princefound father and mother in Yorick, the royal jester:

He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now-how abhorred in my imagination it is-my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.

[V.i.185-89]

Hamlet is his own Falstaff (as Harold Goddard remarked)because Yorick, "a fellow of infinite jest, ofmost excellent fancy," raised him until the prince wasseven. The Grave-digger, the only personage in theplay witty enough to hold his own with Hamlet, tells usthat Yorick's skull has been in the earth twenty-threeyears, and that it is thirty years since Hamlet's birth. Yetwho would take the prince of the first four acts, a studentat the University of Wittenberg (a German Protestantinstitution, famous for Martin Luther), as havingreached thirty? Like his college chums, the unfortunateRosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet can be no olderthan about twenty at the start, and the lapsed time representedin the tragedy cannot be more than eight weeks,at the most. Shakespeare, wonderfully careless on mattersof time and space, wanted a preternaturally maturedHamlet for Act V.

Though we speak of act and scene divisions, andlater in this little book I will center upon the final act,these are not Shakespeare's divisions, since all his playswere performed straight through, without intermissions,at the Globe Theatre. The uncut Hamlet, in our moderneditions, which brings together all verified texts, runs tonearly four thousand lines, twice the length of Macbeth.Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and the prince'srole (at about fifteen hundred lines) is similarly unique.Only if you run the two parts of Henry IV together (aswe should) can you find a Shakespearean equivalent,with Falstaff's role as massive, though unlike Hamlet mysublime prototype speaks prose only-the best prose inthe language, except perhaps for Hamlet's.

The Tragical Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarkestands apart among Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays,quite aside from its universal fame. Its length and varietyare matched by its experimentalism. After four centuries,Hamlet remains our world's most advanced drama,imitated but scarcely transcended by Ibsen, Chekhov,Pirandello, and Beckett. You cannot get beyond Hamlet,which establishes the limits of theatricality, just as Hamlethimself is a frontier of consciousness yet to be passed. Ithink it wise to confront both the play and the princewith awe and wonder, because they know more than wedo. I have been willing to call such a stance Bardolatry,which seems to me only another name for authentic responseto Shakespeare.

How should we begin reading Hamlet, or how attendit in performance, in the unlikely event of findingthe play responsibly directed? I suggest that we try toinfer just how the young man attired in black became soformidably unique an individual. Claudius addresses theprince as "my son," meaning he has adopted his nephewas royal heir, but also gallingly reminding Hamlet thathe is a stepson by marriage. The first line spoken byHamlet is, "A little more than kin, and less than kind,"while the next concludes punningly, "I am too much inthe sun." Is there an anxiety that Hamlet actually maybe Claudius's son, since he cannot know for certain exactlywhen what he regards as adultery and incest beganbetween Claudius and Gertrude? His notorious hesitationsat hacking down Claudius stem partly from thesheer magnitude of his consciousness, but they may alsoindicate a realistic doubt as to his paternity.

We are left alone with Hamlet for the first of hisseven soliloquies. Its opening lines carry us a long wayinto the labyrinths of his spirit:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew ...

[I.ii.129-30]

The First Folio gives us "solid flesh," while the SecondQuarto reads "sallied flesh." While "sallied" could mean"assailed," it is probably a variant for "sullied." Hamlet'srecoil from sullied flesh justifies D. H. Lawrence's darkobservation that "a sense of corruption in the fleshmakes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never admit that it ishis own flesh." Lawrence's aversion remains very striking:"A creeping, unclean thing he seems.... His nastypoking and sniffling at his mother, his traps for theKing, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make himalways intolerable." Though Lawrence's perspective isdisputable, we need not contest it, because Lawrencehimself did: "For the soliloquies of Hamlet are as deepas the soul of man can go ... and as sincere as the HolySpirit itself in their essence." We can sympathize withLawrence's ambivalence: that "a creeping, unclean thing"should also be "as sincere as the Holy Spirit" is theessence of Hamlet's view of humankind, and of himselfin particular.

The central question then becomes: How did Hamletdevelop into so extraordinarily ambivalent a consciousness?I think we may discount any notion that the doubleshock of his father's sudden death and his mother'sremarriage has brought about a radical change in him.Hamlet always has had nothing in common with his father,his mother, and his uncle. He is a kind of changeling,nurtured by Yorick, yet fathered by himself, an actor-playwrightfrom the start, though it would not be helpfulto identify him with his author. Shakespeare distancesHamlet from himself, partly by appearing on stage at hisside, as paternal ghost and as Player King, but primarilyby endowing the prince with an authorial consciousnessof his own, as well as with an actor's proclivities. Hamlet,his own Falstaff, is also his own Shakescene, endlessly interested in theater. Indeed, his first speech thatgoes...