Olivier, Freud, and Hamlet

by JOHN ASHWORTH

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FOLLOWING the fashion in movies and books, Sir Laurence Olivier has acted and directed a Hamlet with a simplified Freudian interpretation. The mad Ophelia makes caressing motions over a phallic ornament on the back of a chair, the camera focuses with heavy significance on the labial drapes over the Queen’s bed, and why Hamlet doesn’t kill the King in the first reel can be explained only in Hamlet’s unconscious. In brief, the drama of Hamlet’s life is replaced by the drama of what Hamlet might reveal from a couch.

At the beginning of the movie, a narrator intones through the fogs of Elsinore: “This is the tragedy of a man who couldn’t make up his mind.” Then Sir Laurence appears as the ineffective dreamer, the hysteric, the oversensitive, “scholar.” Hamlet’s alleged procrastination, which for over a century was considered a literary enigma, is attributed — by Freudian trappings, by the neurasthenic quality of the acting, and by cutting significant parts of the play — to the Oedipus complex.

After writing that Shakespeare’s play “does not give the cause or motive” of Hamlet’s “hesitation,” Freud himself explained it as follows: Hamlet can’t take vengeance upon the man who takes his father’s place with his mother, because Hamlet as a child has repressed the desire to do the same thing. So Hamlet’s unconscious tells him that “he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish,” and the “loathing” which should have driven him to revenge is replaced by “self-reproach" and “conscientious scruples.” Thus Freud found an explanation for what most intellectuals of his generation, following Goethe and other nineteenthcentury critics, already believed in—Hamlet’s “hesitation.”

The main trouble with this interpretation is that Hamlet does not hesitate. He does in fact kill the King with remarkable dispatch, as many Shakespeareans have pointed out. So Freud’s description of Hamlet’s character was based on a wrong promise. Because he couldn’t perceive Hamlet’s motives, he swallowed the nonsense that a workmanlike dramatist like Shakespeare had written a play without showing the motives of the central character. In consequence he was able to exchange for Hamlet’s real motives the prevalent interpretation of his day that Hamlet was a procrastinator, and then to deal clinically with the alleged procrastination.

Now Olivier has filmed the whole tangle.

Although the neurasthenic procrastinator is certainly a meaningful figure in our neurasthenic age, and a good subject for a meaningful movie, let’s not confuse him with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Literature is perverted to serve contemporary myth.

Let’s look at the play as Shakespeare intended it to be looked at — from the point of view of an Elizabethan audience. To them, Hamlet’s “hesitation is no occult problem because the play is half over before Hamlet can be sure that the King really did the murder. All that Hamlet has to go on is the word of a ghost, and he isn’t sure of the Ghost’s identity. For Hamlet, like nearly all Elizabethans, not only believes in ghosts, but also believes that demons can masquerade as ghosts. The apparition may be the ghost of his father or it may be a demon disguised as the ghost of his father, trying to trick him into killing an innocent man.

This doubt about the Ghost was perfectly clear to an Elizabethan audience, if not to Freud; and because it is of first importance in understanding the plol, Shakespeare takes the trouble, as any competent dramatist might, to explain it three times: when Hamlet first speaks to the Ghost (“Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d”); in Horatio’s warning not to follow the Ghost (“What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord. . . . And there assume some other horrible form?”); and in Hamlet’s explanation that he will use the players to trick the King into revealing his guilt, if he is guilty.

When Freud ignores Hamlet’s sensible precaution not to kill a man who might be innocent, and assumes that Hamlet is hesitating to kill a man with whom he unconsciously identifies himself, he simply annihilates the Elizabethan audience for whom Shakespeare wrote— to whom Hamlet s scheme in ihe players’ scene was obvious. In the Rank-Olivier production, the lines in which Hamlet explains his practical purpose are cut; and Olivier pirouettes wildly as he cries, “The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” Without the explanation, however, the audience can’t see “wherein.” The whole scheme looks like an hysteric’s infantile backbiting. And since the real reason for the players’ scene is not clear, spectators are likely to assume that Hamlet is “hesitating” for some extraordinary and subtle reason.

Then Hamlet goes to the Queen’s “closet” (a private apartment where the Queen entertains the councilor Polonius as wadi as Prince Hamlet — a room which would not, as in the movie, contain a bed. If Princess Elizabeth were to receive Bevin in her private apartment, would there be a bed in the room?). Hearing Polonius behind the arras, Hamlet, thinks it’s the King, shouts, “A rat? Head for a ducat, dead!” and sticks his sword into the hidden body. There’s Freud’s “hesitation” for you! There’s the ability “to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father”!

Moreover, Freud wrote that Hamlet was not “wholly incapable of action,” since “in a sudden burst of rage . . . he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras.” After assuming Hamlet’s “hesitation” to kill the King, Freud sidesteps this fact: Hamlet thinks the “eavesdropper” whom he does kill without any hesitation whatsoever is the King. How can such an incredible blind spot in Freud be explained? Didn’t he know that Hamlet thinks the eavesdropper is the King? Did he read the play accurately? If he did, why did he so perversely overlook the reality of the dramatic situation?

The Freudian Dr. Ernest Jones in his “Introduction” to Hamlet accepts the wrong premise that Freud accepted and then becomes even more unreal. Citing the “Amleth” story as it appeared in Saxo Grammaticus about A.D. 1200, Jones makes much of the “infantile euriosily theme” in Shakespeare’s play, and finds it significant that Polonius spies in the Queen’s “bedchamber” (Jones’s word, not Shakespeare’s). Like Freud, Jones is unable to see the dramatic facts: that in the players’ scene Hamlet makes sure of the King’s guilt, and the King finds out that Hamlel has somehow discovered the truth about the murder. So Hamlet is now watched because he knows too much. If the “curiosity” of a King about a man plotting against his life is infantile, then we can say with Jones that Shakespeare is developing an “infantile curiosity theme.”

What did Shakespeare’s audience see?

After the players’ scene, the play is no longer concerned with Hamlet’s finding the facts of the murder, but with the attempts of Hamlet and the King to kill each other — “the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.” Neither can fight openly: the King can’t sentence Hamlet publicly for the murder of Polonius because, as he tells Laertes, “The Queen his mother Lives almost by his looks,” and because of “the great love the general gender bear him”; Hamlet can’t kill the King publicly because he has no proof of the crime that would have any public validity and because Claudius, like all kings, is constantly guarded.

Of course, the Elizabethan was accustomed to seeing royalty well “attended" both in life and in plays. Also, Shakespeare’s stage directions are explicit, if brief. What do those who talk about Hamlet’s “hesitation” have in mind? That he just stick a sword into the King before anybody can stop him? Naturally, even if he succeeded, he would immediately lose his own life. Does that matter?

Actually, both Hamlet and the King try to kill each other twice. Both fail once, and both succeed in the second attempt. Hamlet fails when the man behind the arras turns out to be Polonius instead of the King; and the King fails when Hamlet escapes from the ship that is carrying him to execution in England. Hamlet refrains from an attempt while the King is praying because the King’s soul would go to Heaven, while his own father’s soul is “confin’d to fast in fires.” This belief, like the belief in demons and ghosts, was of course perfectly understandable to an Elizabethan audience. As soon as Hamlet comes back to court after his adventures with the pirates, the fencing match is arranged. During the confusion that follows the poisoning of the Queen, the disclosure that an unbuttoned foil is being used, and the revelations of the dying Laertes, Hamlet kills the King.

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WHERE in the name of common sense is the “hesitation” in all this? Almost as soon as Hamlet is in the same country with the King, after he has made sure that the King committed the crime, Hamlet kills him. Yet the name “Hamlet’ has come to mean the weak-willed dreamer, the “scholarly” anemic procrastinator.

Why?

Two reasons for confusion seem very simple. We must have some knowledge of both the culture and the language even to understand what happens in Hamlet. Freud displayed no interest in Shakespeare’s culture — the belief in ghosis and demons, for example. Probably — remember his ambiguous reference to the “eavesdropper” he couldn;t even read accurately Shakespeare’s English.

The peculiar persistency of the misrepresentation of Hamlet has been pointed out by philologists for years. Even before the First World War, George Lyman Kittredge, who spent much of his life helping people understand Shakespeare’s language, called the belief that Hamlet was a weak-willed procrastinator “a complete misrepresentation of his mental and moral character.” However, we don’t have the kind of world in which psychoanalysts and philologists get together. While Freud wrote impressively about Shakespeare without understanding what he said, Kittredge frequently spoke contemptuously of the “psychologists.”

Another reason for the confusion about Hamlet is more important than the simple lack of understanding Shakespeare’s culture and language. This is the projection of a nineteenth-century ideal into an Elizabethan hero. If the nineteenth-century actors, critics, directors, litterateurs, scholars — in fact, most of the intellectual world — hadn’t been so anxious to see a Hamlet that was not Shakespeare’s, they would have taken the trouble to understand his culture and language. But they seem to have been afraid to face the fact that Hamlet engaged in energetic, decisive, and bloody action when the need arose. Living in a world in which the intellectual became more and more inactive and sterile, in which the satisfactions of putting thought into action belonged mostly to businessmen, soldiers, and politicians, they were unable to admit that Shakespeare’s greatest hero, and a “scholar,”was so unlike themselves. Consequently, they created a Hamlet in their own image.

Because Shakespeare’s plays, particularly Hamlet, are so rich in many levels of experience, such projection has always been easy— the projector seizing upon a single aspect of Shakespeare that gratifies him most. When in 1661 John Evelyn wrote in his Diary after seeing Hamlet: “The old plays begin to disgust this refined age,” he speaks volumes for the prosy outlook of the conformist businessman after the Stuart Restoration. In the politically excited Now York of 1791, the plays were judged by the oratory with which the separate speeches were delivered; when a gentleman “lately arrived from England” inserted the latest hit-songs from Vauxhall between the speeches of Hamlet and the Ghost, the Anglophile Tory audience probably went wild. And for over a hundred years, the plays were presented as parables of Victorian morality. Like past Shakespeareans, Rank-Olivier reflect fashion — the American road-show tour is expected to gross over $2,500,000.

Sir Laurence displays the sound judgment of a good showman. His success shows how welcome today, as in the last century, is that procrastinating Hamlet whom Shakespeare never conceived, and how plausible Freud’s explanation of the nonexistent procrastination can be made to appear. Like most entertainment, Olivier’s Hamlet tells us what we like to hear: that Hamlet’s expressed anxieties actually represent his deeds—that Shakespeare’s greatest hero, like most of us intellectuals, is paralyzed by his neuroses. Too bad that Shakespeare’s play is quite different! Too bad that Hamlet says what so many of us don’t like to hear, that it is what Shaw called an “unpleasant play.”

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So Olivier is making a movie for us. Who gives a fig for Shakespeare, or his Elizabethan audience? However, while there may be a matter of taste in preferring Olivier to Shakespeare, it is a banal selfdeception if we suppose that Olivier is holding the mirror up to nature. For the society of the movie is unreal, and the people are unreal.

The society is unreal because the politics is left out. In a movie about a usurped throne and the attempts of a king and an heir-apparent to kill each other, how is this possible? It’s like leaving the Civil War out of a biography of Lincoln. In relating Olivier’s movie to life, one naturally remembers what Shakespeare did, not out of idolatrous respect for the Bard, but simply because he makes human relationships on a political level so real. And Shakespeare’s political scene included the subservient courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras and his war, the English ambassadors, and Laertes as the demagogue of social upheaval — all of which Olivier omitted.

These cuts have been attributed by enthusiastic reviewers to the requirements of cinematic art. However, couldn’t cinematic art show effectively Laertes’ mob, for example? We can guess that such shots might move the supposedly simple-minded moviegoer even more than the symbolism in the ornament on the back of a chair.

Furthermore, in the movie the King, the Queen, Hamlet, Polonius, Ophelia, and Laertes all wander around what are apparently parts of the same castle, a sparsely furnished and almost empty Romanesque pile with an atmosphere that is at the same time hothouse and cloistral and murder-mystery. (In Shakespeare’s play, Polonius and his family lived at home.) Such a setting is a logical part of the Freudian distortion. For without a real court, teeming with lords, servants, guards, troops, petitioners, ambassadors, and courtiers, the external and political difficulties of killing the King are minimized if not lost.

The society in the movie is unreal because the people in it are unreal. And again it is easiest to find reality by observing what Shakespeare did. Hamlet is the scholar-soldier-prince, the Renaissance ideal. As Fortinbras says in the last speech of the play, which in the convention of Elizabethan stagecraft contained the author’s summing-up: “ He was likely, had he been put on, To have prov’d most royally; and, for his passage, The soldiers’ music. . . .”

And what does Hamlet do? He fences every day and more than holds his own against the redoubtable Laertes. With ruthless satisfaction he contrives the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In spite of Dr. Jones’s assumption that he is a poor lover because he is so Oedipus-ridden, Ophelia speaks of his earlier love-making with deep emotion. As the King his enemy admits, he is greatly loved by the common people; and as a matter of course he talks eloquently and warmly with strolling players and gravediggers. On the other hand, he can deal toughly and realistically with pirates.

Typical neurasthenic behavior? Shakespeare seems rather to have thought of him as an Elizabethan of the Sir Waiter Raleigh or Sir Philip Sidney stamp. Living in a culture quite different from that of Freud’s middle-class Viennese patients, Shakespeare saw no incongruity in the personality of a man who was sensitive to moral values and was burdened with an Oedipus complex, and at the same time was quick to draw a sword.

Why has Freudian thought failed to understand Shakespeare’s Hamlet? As in past failures to understand Hamlet, it seents that the Freudians project their own cultural altitudes — which they believe to be science — into Shakespeare’s creation. Such a Freudian attitude appears in a remark by Jones that purports to explain the political meaning of the play: “The origin of all revolutions is the revolution in the family.” After making this flat assertion, Jones then discusses the relationships within the Danish royal family without mentioning the same politics that Olivier left out of the movie. To one who finds that all revolutions originate in the family — without seeing any original force at all in hunger, war, property, class relationships, or personal rivalries— it is indeed logical to think of Hamlet’s motives as those of a monolithic Oedipus case, even though his mother’s husband happened to deprive him of political power, and even though Shakespeare took some pains to show the political atmosphere in the state of Denmark.

One of Freud’s doctrines may help to explain how such obscurantism grows. His belief that we resist least what is easiest to discover in our unconscious and resist most what is deepest and strongest is exemplified in the politics of the society that provided him with his own culture. It is no accident thal old middle-class Vienna, which was panicked by the Social Democrats in 1934 but embraced or submitted to Dollfuss, Schusehnigg, and Hitler, was so sensitive to the neurosis that allegedly causes political rebellion and was so insensitive to the destructiveness that can accompany respectable political conformity. In such a climate, the popular Freudian belief that social or political nonconformity is merely an indication of an Oedipus complex finds ready acceptance; for tendencies to rebel are quickly recognized and explained away, while the destructiveness in a society that is headed for submission to Hitler is so deep and strong that to recognize it at all becomes painful if not impossible. Thus, in Freud’s own science there may be at least a rule of thumb that can help to explain the lack of science in the Freudian approach to politics.

When the Freudians do not simply ignore the politics in political rebellion—in Hamlet and in life— they seek the neurosis that may or may not help to originate it. When Shakespeare dealt with the theme of revolt against evil authority, he carefully drew the face of conformist destructiveness in characters who are foils to Hamlet: in Polonius, the doddering busybody who is ardent in the service of any reigning power; in Laertes, whose rebellion is spent in demagoguery and a brief rant, so that he readily becomes the King’s tool; and in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who easily find religious and political rationalizations for carrying out the King’s command to assist in the murder of their former friend.

If we must have a hero who “hesitates” to fight, authority, for Oedipal or other motives, perhaps we should change Shakespeare’s play completely and make Polonius or Laertes or Rosencrantz the central character. It could be quite a tragedy because the non-hesitating Hamlet kills them all. In attitude toward authority, which is of first importance in understanding Hamlet, the Freudians and Shakespeare are emotionally at odds. The Freudians have not only misrepresented the play but have contrived to attribute to it a cultural attitude which is actually the opposite of its dynamic Renaissance spirit.

Opinions may differ how much vitality this spirit, and the complex art of Shakespeare, can have today. Opinions may differ whether today’s “scholar,” faced with evil authority, should contrive rationalizations supporting the evil, go into retirement, or take up arms against a sea of troubles. Certainly there is a whole ideology for “hesitating”: the priest s “render unto Caesar and “resignation,” the psychologist’s “adaptability” and “adjustment,’ the soldier’s “duly,” the Rotarian’s “goodfellowship.”The anxieties and frustrations of our world breed like roaches the formulae for security. Whatever we sav or think or do, however, let’s not lay that flattering unction to our souls that “hesitation,” even if allegedly caused by an Oedipus complex, is the act of Shakespeare’s greatest hero.

Because it isn’t.