Thesis: At the beginning of the second part of his two-part essay (published in successive issues of The Sewanee Review), Empson sums up his theory: The first part of this essay argued that the 1600 Globe audiences would have laughed at the Kyd version of Hamlet simply because they could shout "Hurry Up"; thus the first probiem, for Shakespeare in re-writing it was to find how to stop them, by making the delay itself a subject of interest. From this point of view, I maintained, it is reasonable to revive the idea that he wrote two versions of Hamlet, and that the mangled First Quarto gives indirect evidence about the first one; an idea common among Victorian critics, but blown upon since then by Sir Edmund Chambers and Professor Dover Wilson. The first version, for 1600, solved the technical problem so well that it established Hamlet as a "mystery" among the first audiences; then a minor revision for 1601 gratified this line of interest by making him a baffling one and spread:ng mystery all round. Thus the soliloquy "How all occasions," which seems to defy the commentators deliberately, was written as an extra for audiences especially fascinated by Hamlet; our full text was meant to be used sometimes but not regularly. These assertions, I would claim, fit in with the textual evidence, which is very confusing, better than anything else; but the main reason for believing them is that they explain how such an extraordinary play could get written at all. We need some picture of the first audiences even to understand what was intended. (185)In other words, Shakespeare started with a badly-written play in which there was really no good reason for Hamlet to take five acts to kill the King. Shakespeare then "solved" that problem by making Hamlet's motivations a mystery, even to himself. The second half of the essay follows up on the idea that Hamlet's character is deliberately mysterious. Empson says that Hamlet's outbursts against Ophelia were put in "to screw up the paradoxes in the character of Hamlet rather than to affect Ophelia herself" (186). [Time has made some of Empson's colloquialisms confusing. "Screw up" meant "heighten," not "ruin," as it does now in the U.S.] Empson also says that the old play of Hamlet must have clearly shown that the Queen knew that her marriage to Claudius was wrong but that she had no part in the murder of Old Hamlet, and that Shakespeare removed all of that information in order to "surround [Hamlet] with mystery and make him drive into a situation which the audience too feels to be unplumbable" (195). In addition to making his points, Empson wanders about quite a bit, discussing other critics, the balcony of the Globe Theater, the Freudian theory of Hamlet's character, and whatnot. A Note on William Empson: Sir William Empson (1906-1984), poet and critic, is best known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), in which he uses close examination of literary texts to support his assertion that works of literature cannot be confined to moral or historical pigeonholes. Bottom Line: Empson treats Hamlet as a deliberately confusing revision of a bad play. |