Hamlet as the Complete Man :: Shakespeare Hamlet

Hamlet as the Complete Man Tragedy, Shakespe are had make do to see when he was writing Hamlet, is a kind of consecration of the common ele ments of mans lesson life. Shakespeare introduces the common man in Hamlet not for what we are given(predicate) to think of as his commonness but for this strange power heretofore you care to name it that he possesses-we have used art, or virtue, or we might have borrowed from Henry James the individual vision of decency. In Tragedy there is no longer a Chorus woful round the altar of a god but if Proust is right the spectators are still participants in a supernatural ceremony. Perhaps I may put the aspect of Tragedy I wish to keep in front you more clearly by drawing on Professor Harbages field of battle of Shakespeares ideal man. Collecting the approving references he finds that this ideal man is s ancientierly, scholarly, and honest. If these men seem to lack the larger idealism that is so common and large in our own generat ion, there is no suspicion that Shakespeares men pull up stakes fail to back with their own skin their apparently modest programs. As Professor Harbage says All soldierly, scholarly, honest men are potential martyrs -you feces substitute for martyrs tragic figures. Of that Shakespearean type Hamlet is the ideal. Shakespeare had before him in Saxo and Belleforest what was presented as an ideal type. This type Shakespeare transformed. To what may be called the instinctive acquaintance of antiquity and her heroic passions, represented so impressively by Hamlets father, Shakespeare has get together the meditative wisdom of later ages in Hamlet himself. There is no surrender of the old pieties, and the idea of the drama comes from the impact of unsanded circum1stances upon the old forms of feeling and estimation there is a conflict between new exigencies and old pieties, that have somehow to be reconciled. The play dramatizes the perpetual manage to which all civilizati on that is genuine is doomed. To live up to its own ideals it has to induct itself at a disadvantage with the cunning and treacherous. The problem Mr. Chandler (1) sets his hero is incessantly complicated in Hamlet-to be humane without loss of toughness. The hero mustiness touch both extremes without one he is just brutal, lacking the former(a) he is merely wet.