HAMLET'S GRIEF BY ARTHUR KIRSCH Hamlet is a tragedy perhaps most often, and justly, admired for itsintellectual energy. Hamlet's mind comprehends a universe of ideas, and he astonishes us with the copiousness and eloquence and luminousness of his thoughts. But I think we should re-member, as Hamlet is compelled to remember, that behind thesethoughts, and usually their occasion, is a continuous and tremen-dous experience of pain and suffering. We are accustomed to thinking of the other major tragedies, Lear and Othello especially, as plays whose greatest genius lies in the depiction of the deepest movements of human feeling. I think we should attend to such movements in Hamlet as well. As Hamlet himself tells us, it is his heart which he unpacks with words, it is against what he calls the "heart-ache" (III.1.62)1 of human existence that he protests in his most famous soliloquy (and this is the first use of the term in that sense the OED records), and there are few plays in the canon in which the word "heart" itself is more prominent. Hamlet is a revenge play, and judging by the prodigious num- ber of performances, parodies, and editions of The Spanish Tragedy alone, the genre enjoyed an extraordinary popularity on the Elizabethan stage. Part of the reason for that popularity is the theat- rical power of the revenge motif itself. The quest for vengeance satisfies an audience's most primitive wishes for intrigue and vio- lence. "The Tragic Auditory," as Charles Lamb once remarked, "wants blood,"2 and the revenge motif provides it in abundance. Equally important, it gives significant shape to the plot and sus- tained energy to the action.3 But if vengeance composes the plot of the revenge play, grief composes its essential emotional content, its substance. There is a character in Marlowe's Jew of Malta who, finding the body of his son killed in a duel, cries out in his loss that he wishes his son had been murdered so that he could avenge his death.4 It is a casual line, but it suggests a deep connection between anger and sorrow in the revenge play genre itself which both Kyd and Shakespeare draw upon profoundly. At the end of The Spanish Tragedy the ghost of Andrea says, "Ay, now my hopes have end in 17 ELH Vol. 48 Pp. 17-36 0013-8304/81/0481-017 $01.00 ? 1981 by The Johns Hopkins University Press This content downloaded from 130.15.244.167 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 16:09:54 UTC All use subject to their effects, / When blood and sorrow finish my desires,"5 and it was unquestionably Kyd's brilliance in representing the elemental power of sorrow, as well as of blood, that enabled the revenge genre to establish so large a claim on the Elizabethan theatrical imagina- tion. The speeches in which Hieronimo gives voice to his grief, including the famous, "Oh eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; / Oh life! no life, but lively form of death,"6 were parodied for decades after their first performance, so great was their impact, and the moving figure of an old man maddened with grief over the loss of his son was a major part of Shakespeare's theatrical inheritance.
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