[Below, Willeford views the character of Hamlet as a tragic fool.]

According to an anecdote, the cross-eyed Ben Turpin fell into his métier as a slapstick comedian in the silent films from the tragic heights of Hamlet, as he tried on the stage to play the role straight. Whether or not the story is true, the image of Turpin as Hamlet is horrible, funny, and somehow legitimate. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy has been burlesqued by many comedians; if Turpin were to have done it as a gag, we might have seen Hamlet's consciousness, which Henry James called the widest in all of literature, reduced to the mindlessness of a frightened chicken and his traipsing about the stage sped up to become part of a frenzied chase.

The pathetic sublimity of Hamlet, like that of Romeo, invites the clown, the noble words and gestures that he apes suddenly seeming themselves clownish pretense. In openly or surreptitiously establishing his parity with the hero, the clown presents a vision of the clod that will survive all winters as the heroic consciousness rooted in the same soil will not. The clown assumes the heroic role in the service of folly; the parity between the clown and the hero is also a contrast that supplies the fool show with materials and energies.

The clown's attraction to the heroic role is partly based on the quality of greatness that the hero shares with the king; but in addition, the hero, freer to act than is the king, stationary at the center, provides a suitable alter ego for the clown in his mobility and his urge actively and concretely to explore the unknown. The image of Ben Turpin as Hamlet accommodates the clown to the role of the hero in an even more specific sense: the presence of the clown within the character of Hamlet is not only a general fact about the heroic nature but belongs to the uniqueness of his character and to the deepest truth of the over-all action of the piece.

Since the time of Dr. Johnson several writers have seen similarities of one kind or another between Hamlet and the fool. Coleridge remarked that in Hamlet the character of the fool is divided and dispersed throughout the play, an idea that has also been developed, among others, by Francis Fergusson, Geoffrey Bush, L. G. Salingar and Harry Levin, who have described the ways in which Hamlet for moments becomes a part-incarnation of the foolish presence that can be felt in the background of the action.¹ Bush writes: "There is no fool in Hamlet; Yorick [the jester of the late king, Hamlet's father] is dead; and it is Hamlet himself who . . . puts on an antic disposition. . . . With a 'crafty madness,' Hamlet 'keeps aloof.' Like the fool, he is both within and without his situation; it is not only his misfortune, but his tragic privilege, to stand at one remove from the world."² This description would fit Lear's Fool, the punctum indifferens, as Enid Welsford describes him, of the Lear story. But the difference between Hamlet-as-jester and Lear's Fool parallels that between Hamlet the dispossessed young king (or king-to-be) and Lear the dispossessed old king. Hamlet is called upon to act, though he cannot find a metaphysical and moral basis for the action demanded of him; Lear (after his initial folly) is deprived of the basis he had for action. Thus, although Hamlet and Lear superficially share the fate of the dispossessed, there is an essential difference in the demands placed upon them by their dispossession.

Hamlet's dispossession has come through no fault of his own, but he is left with the imperative of an action that will affect the whole body politic. Lear is dispossessed partly through his own folly, though behind his treatment of his daughters and his division of the kingdom stands his senility as a natural fact; and the range of action that is left him is primarily personal, with little direct consequence in the affairs of state. Hamlet must search for a metaphysical and moral basis for his action, because that basis, as it is provided naturally in the primitive kingship, has failed and become the lie of the person of the king, Claudius, against his office. Hamlet must find his way from his own position, with its personal motivations, to one from which he can act for the general weal. Thus the purification of purpose he must undergo in a sense leads in an opposite direction from that of Lear—from the personal to the collective, rather than the reverse; and it is in this necessity that he adopts the ambiguous, helpful, and disruptive role of the fool.

The background against which Hamlet acts and clowns is the rottenness in the state of Denmark; more specifically, it is the corruption of the center, which is expressed (whether as cause or effect or both) in Claudius' killing of the rightful king and the "unseemly haste" with which Hamlet's mother entered into her union, in any case incestuous, with the usurper. What is at stake in the action is the kingdom itself; the concept of kingship that informs the play is alive with the mythical significance of the center with its ritual and magical overtones. Rosenkrantz' speech about "the cease of Majesty," for example, draws for its effect upon the primitive sense of the king as the embodiment of the cosmic center:

It is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortis'd and adjoin'd; which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

(III. iii. 17-23)

As Fergusson writes (following Dover Wilson): "Hamlet has lost a throne, and he has lost thereby a social, publicly acceptable persona, a local habitation and a name. It is for this reason that he haunts the stage like the dispossessed of classical drama."³ And this dispos-session—quite apart from his melancholy and the other flaws critics have found in his character—maims his capacity for action, since in the archaic conception it is precisely the hero's relation to the throne that not only defines his actions but ultimately makes them possible. And the problem of the center upon which the movement of the play is based may be seen in part in the absence of the fool. Just as the kingdom lacks an adequate king, so it lacks anyone in whom folly assumes a redeeming form: the hero is not really abetted by his folly, and there is no helpful jester. The ambiguity in the person of the king is reflected in Hamlet's fluctuation between the possibilities of heroism and those of folly.

The action of the play, the killing of the false king, requires a hero; but the problem on which the action is based, the hidden malady of the state, is one with which the hero alone, without the blessing of his folly, cannot deal; a vicious circle ensues that draws Hamlet again and again into the "imposthume" that he should stand outside and lance as though it were a monster or human enemy outside the kingdom. The vicious circle comes from the fact that the integrity of the center needs to be restored, but the abscess at the center destroys the basis for the action needed. It is, of course, possible for a hero to set himself against a corrupt or failing monarch and to assume the throne himself: even the crime of regicide may be regarded as justifiable under certain circumstances, especially when there is confusion as to who is the rightful king. But for a hero legitimately to oppose the reigning king, he must have a clear and undivided allegiance to the ground of the kingdom, to the center prior to its embodiment in that king. Hamlet is caught in the uncertainties which permeate the whole kingdom, in which none of the main characters is sure of his relation to anyone else, as may be seen in the elaborate spying on one another that engages them. Moreover, Hamlet's allegiance is divided between his dead father and his living mother, who, he feels, might not be spared if he were to give his capacities for action free play. He must admonish himself:

Let me be cruel, not unnatural:
I will speak daggers to her, but use none;
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites.

(III. ii. 413-15)

in the same moment in which he is fighting to overcome what he feels to be hypocrisy. And insofar as the Oedipus complex, following Ernest Jones's interpretation, is central to Hamlet's dilemma, he is in his personal feelings toward his mother caught in a variant of Claudius' incestuous relationship to her.

The whole kingdom needs to free itself of the murk and disease that envelops and covers the center and obscures the working of the cosmic principle; thus Hamlet must purify his motives in an affirmation of allegiance to the ground of the kingdom, the archaic level of the kingship that overrides considerations of personality, including that of the reigning king. The purgation of the kingdom is, as Fergusson demonstrates, to be achieved through what he calls the ritual and improvisational elements of the play. The ritual elements are in part formal actions, magical in intent, arising from the primitive basis of the kingship and affecting it in turn; they are like attempts at self-healing by a physical organism. He writes: "If one thinks over the succession of ritual scenes as they appear in the play, it is clear that they serve to focus attention on the Danish body politic and its hidden malady: they are ceremonious invocations of the well-being of society, and secular or religious devices for securing it."⁴ The improvisational elements of the play consist most importantly of Hamlet's clowning and playing of the madman. By stepping outside the main course of the action, Hamlet taps the fool's ability to suspend and even dissolve personal feelings when they become too sticky: he gropes for the freedom found by the mourner who laughs at a funeral. The ritual and improvisational strands would ideally be united in the figure of the court jester; but the position of Yorick stands empty, except insofar as it is illegitimately filled by Hamlet—as does that of Yorick's royal master, except insofar as it is illegitimately filled by Claudius.

The role of the clown seems to Hamlet to provide him with the sought-for position of a punctum indifferens in the midst of the action, but the role is a trap from which he must fight to get out, though he fights in vain. The fool becomes the punctum indifferens through the renunciation of action; and to renounce action in face of the threat of raging chaos is to become a fool either in the sense of the failed hero or in that of Lear's jester. Lear can become interchangeable with his fool, because the fool in his incapacity for action and his humble and shrewd acceptance of that incapacity leads Lear toward the moral condition in which he may find whatever salvation is open to him, a state in which he must leave off posturing as the personal agent of a might he does not have. But for Hamlet the necessity is to become the personal agent of a power that he does not have but should have. It is the power of the hero only partly differentiated from the fool, a state in which the hero is open to the dispositions of unseen powers and to the unexpected possibilities in the present moment for action, in which he is free from the inertia of his personal feelings and deaf to the play of reason when it is not immediately relevant to the task at hand. As Hamlet assumes the role of the fool actor, he becomes dissociated from the kind of folly that would have furthered heroism. It is appropriate to the nature of Hamlet's dilemma that at the peripeteia of the action, the play within the play, he should retire to a position between the Danish audience and the players. It is appropriate because the crucial members of the audience are infected with the disease of the state and because the enacted killing of the king points both to the source of that disease in the past and to the task demanded of the hero in the future. If (from Hamlet's viewpoint) the essentials of the action can be reduced to drama, there is a chance that the real world, momentarily focused in the spectacle, will become irradiated with the relative clarity and consciseness of the playlet and that Hamlet will be jarred from his own dramatic role-playing to become an actor in the world.

Fergusson writes about the play within the play that it is

a "ritual" in that it assembles the whole tribe for an act symbolic of their deepest welfare; it is false and ineffective, like the other public occasions, in that the Danes do not really understand or intend the enactment which they witness. It is, on the other hand, not a true ritual, but an improvisation—for here the role of Hamlet, as showman, as master of ceremonies, as clown, as night-club entertainer who lewdly jokes with the embarrassed patrons—Hamlet the ironist, in sharpest contact with the audience on-stage and audience off-stage, yet a bit outside the literal belief in the story: it is here that this aspect of Hamlet's role is clearest.⁵

Moreover, when the mousetrap springs, Hamlet, who has been the failed hero, emerges not as a hero but as a failed fool. And even if he is, as a result, moved to action, part of his energies must continue to leak into the role of the unsuccessful fool-as-mock-hero, to which he has unwittingly committed himself.

The play within the play is superficially like jokes that jesters have made about the weaknesses, vices, and even villainies of their masters, but those jokes could be permitted and laughed at because the king and the jester were each in his place according to a convention that supported, even while mocking, the king's pretense of power. That Hamlet in his complex reaction to the playlet is on the verge of laughter is in keeping with Freud's idea that a joke often contains some kind of illicit material (of a sexual or aggressive nature) and that the person telling the joke uses the reaction of the hearer as a justification for his reveling in that material.⁶ But a good joke does provoke laugh-ter. According to the plausible notion of Helmuth Plessner, laughter is an autonomous reaction to a situation to which there is no answer according to one's habitual ways of thought and feeling and which is at the same time unthreatening; Hamlet's play is threatening in the extreme. It is like a joke in which the malice of the teller toward the listener is splashed like acid, the grimacing teller caught without the jester's mask of innocence, inconsequence, and unrelatedness. It is also like a joke with an even more specifically sinister purpose, which the teller gratuitously and pointlessly reveals—as when one politician or businessman intends to cheat another, makes a joke about cheating him, and, instead of luring him into the belief that the possibility of his being cheated is only a joke, puts him into a panic. Like the joke in Freud's description of it, the play within the play can be seen as an attempt to objectify Hamlet's anxieties, to justify them, and at the same time to relieve them in a wish-fulfilling fantasy. If the point of such a loaded joke does not open into the impersonal freedom of folly and thus meet Plessner's criteria for what is laughable, the joke is no longer a joke but an act of aggression or of self-immolation or of both. Hamlet's entertainment is both; it goads the king, and its point spreads like poison, working from him to Gertrude to Polonius to Laertes to Ophelia. Hamlet's position at the edge of the stage is that of both the clown and the stage manager and master of dramatic illusion. Dramatic illusion, the clown's presence, and heroic purpose cancel one another out in the offense of a bad joke that makes the teller a marked man.

In Fergusson's summary, "The performance of Hamlet's play is both rite and entertainment, and shows the Prince as at once clown and ritual head of state."⁷ But the reunion of the two separate figures of clown and ritual head of state in the larger pattern of the kingship is the culmination of a long process. In becoming the hero in a public sense, the hero divests himself of that folly until the moment of his full power, when at his accession that power is bound. Then his folly reemerges embodied in the fool actor as jester, who will re-establish his connection to the foolish ground from which he has separated himself. Hamlet, wise much before his time in the way the old king should be and lacking both the king's position and a jester of his own, must stumble in and out of the folly which he tries simultaneously to divest himself of and to enact. His course from this moment leads as though inevitably to the scene in which, in Fergusson's words, "Hamlet jokes and moralizes with the Gravedigger and Horatio. He feels like the gag-man and royal victim in one."⁸ The skull of Yorick, the late and rightful king's jester, is like a lodestone to which he is drawn throughout the action, while intending instead to earn his right to his father's throne. The death's-head and skeleton are traditional emblems of the fool in the sense that death makes a fool of life's joys and purposes, as may be seen in graphic representations by Dürer, Holbein, and others.⁹ And even more in keeping with the fun-damental action of the play, the hero-prince's familiarity with the cynical Gravedigger as they contemplate the skull of the jester is a final epiphany, outside the course of consequential events, of the disintegration of the social structure, the death of the body politic that now can only await renewal from without.

However, Yorick's skull is an emblem of Hamlet's folly in a more personal sense as well. James Kirsch is convincing in his suggestion that the death of Ophelia means symbolically the death of Hamlet's soul;¹⁰ by the time Hamlet encounters the grave-digging clowns he is himself one of the living dead. Moreover, the fact that the skull is unearthed in the grave intended for her implies a relation between the jester and the girl as factors in Hamlet's fate. In this light the skull may be taken to represent a single ambiguous psychic content that has expressed itself in both Hamlet's clowning and Ophelia's madness. Through his clowning he has sought, as Yorick surely had before him, to sustain the value of his father's kingship and to accommodate it to the circumstances of the kingdom. But even if Hamlet could somehow have managed the illegitimate amalgamation of princely and foolish roles in which he was caught, his clowning would still have remained contaminated by the self-destructive actual madness of Ophelia, since he was bound to her by affective ties, and these, in turn, entailed projections of psychic determinants within himself.

The character of this amalgamation of roles, and its self-destructive motivation, may be seen in Hamlet's famous question, "To be, or not to be . . . ?" (III. i. 56). The ego has no right to ask such a question; asking it is a form of psychic self-mutilation—in psychoanalytic terms, of self-castration—the deliberate abandonment of any possible basis for action. If we draw ourselves up enough to reject Hamlet's pathos, we may see this question as an intellectual equivalent of a clown's attempt to take a step with one foot while standing on it with the other. Or we may treat Hamlet's pathos more respectfully by regarding the question as an intellectual equivalent of Ophelia's suicide. This crucial question of the dispossessed royal person will give way in King Lear to another: "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (I. iv. 50). The Fool's answer there—"Lear's shadow" (1. 251)—means in part that the jester, facing death with his royal master, serving as Psycho-pompos or Seelenführer, as guide to the living soul, can tell him who he is. But here, in Hamlet, the dead jester seals the Prince's doom. Just as Hamlet has been unable to find his way through his personal entanglements to a living connection with the center, so he has failed to achieve a connection with folly as the play of life furthering heroic purpose. In Yorick's skull, joy is dead and laughter silenced. In Yorick's skull, too, the force is at last objectified that has blocked Hamlet from assuming his father's throne and marrying his destined bride. (This objectification takes place somewhat in the way that a feeling-toned unconscious complex of archetypal character is sometimes revealed in the course of psychotherapy.) Hamlet's encounter with the skull might thus have signaled a new and more adequate differentiation of his motives and purposes, if it were not too late. But death has already won—and death's accomplices and foes, the grave-digging clowns.

Notes

¹ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), II, 212; Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1953); Geoffrey Bush, Shakespeare and the Natural Condition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); L. G. Salingar, "The Elizabethan Literary Renaissance," in Boris Ford (ed.), The Age of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), pp. 88-89; Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford, 1959), pp. 121-28.

² Bush, Shakespeare and the Natural Condition, p.100.

³The Idea of a Theater, p. 112.

⁴Ibid., p. 125.

⁵Ibid., p. 134.

⁶ Sigmund Freud, "The Motives of Jokes—Jokes as a Social Process," in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey, Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1960), VIII, 140-58.

⁷The Idea of a Theater, p. 126.

⁸Ibid., p. 127.

⁹ Erica Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs and Jesters in Art (New York: Phaidon, 1957), pp. 50 and 105. On the ambiguous interplay between death and the fool in literature before Shakespeare see Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 42 ff. Salingar sees Death as the "supreme 'antic'" in Hamlet (The Age of Shakespeare, pp. 88-89). William Empson turns his attention briefly to "the business of the macabre, where you make a clown out of death." He observes that "Death in the Holbein Dance of Death, a skeleton still skinny, is often an elegant and charming small figure whose wasp waist gives him a certain mixed-sex quality, and though we are to think otherwise he conceives himself as poking fun; he is seen at his best when piping to an idiot clown and leading him on, presumably to some precipice, treating this great coy figure with so gay and sympathetic an admiration that the picture stays in one's mind chiefly as a love scene" (Some Versions of Pastoral [Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1950], p. 14).

¹⁰Shakespeare's Royal Self (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1966), p. 174.