Pieces of My Mind by Frank Kermode

Author:Frank Kermode
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger …

(iii.1.166 ff)

This has to be glossed as ‘that which will be disclosed when it hatches’ or in some equally unsatisfactory way; it is a very good example of the linguistic disturbance this form of doubling entails, an image of the anxieties that the play broods over. A simple double like the Queen’s exclamation at the death of Polonius, ‘O what a rash and bloody deed is this!’ (iii.4.27) may begin a train of very complex ones: ‘A bloody deed, / Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king and marry with his brother’ (28-9), where ‘good’ seems to stand antithetically to ‘bad’ but is yoked, with ironic conventionality, and in Hamlet’s view inappropriately, with ‘mother’; where ‘kill’ and ‘marry’ form a wicked pair, and where the rhyme of ‘mother’ and ‘brother’ mimes the too rich rhyme of incest. The Closet scene, indeed, is full of such conundrums, far too many to mention: form and cause, scourge and minister, sense and secrecy. Hamlet’s final soliloquy, ‘How all occasions … ’ (iv.4.32 ff), anomalous as its position certainly is, nevertheless forms a kind of coda, recapitulating the theme thus: good and market, sleep and feed, before and after, capability and godlike reason, bestial oblivion and craven scruple, mass and charge, fantasy and trick, tomb and continent, delicate and tender, mortal and unsure. The crux at i.54 (‘Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honour’s at the stake’) turns on the question of whether ‘not’ should properly be ‘not not’, one not doing the work of two, two negatives in a single mutual flame.

This, then, is a play in which self is sometimes joined with, sometimes divided from, same; opposites are conjoined and similars separated. Why is Horatio both familiar and a stranger? Why are we to be troubled with the question whether the Ghost is honest or not? Why should Hamlet double his abuse of woman, and berate Ophelia as he does his mother? Why, having persuaded her of her guilt, turned her eyes into her very soul, does he double his condemnations? Having cleft her heart in twain, why does he repeat his lecture on abstinence? Why is he doubly mad or not mad at all? A shadow of the actor who is himself but a shadow? Why, in short, is the play so often like a pair of twins, a divided hermaphrodite? The restoration of the primal hermaphrodite, according to Aristophanes in the Symposium, is attempted by the divided halves when, their private parts moved around to the front, they make the beast with two backs, when, in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed they reunite, touch, as The Winter’s Tale expresses it, forbiddenly.

We can say, at any rate, that in the year or so that was occupied by

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