Abstract
Those who look for ‘secret motives’ in Shakespeare are sometimes treated as well-meaning lunatics, prospectors panning for fairy gold. To credit Hamlet with motives of which he himself remains unaware or, worse still, with impulses that contradict his stated motives, is, we are told, to confuse two different modes of being: a dramatic character has no past and no inwardness corresponding to yours or mine. As I have already argued, these are slippery ideas and generalisation can be dangerous.1 In Shakespeare the boundaries between past and present, inner and outer, will not always be firmly marked; indeed, unless a play begins with a clear statement of intent (for example Richard III), it often obliges the audience to assume a lifelike character’s inwardness and to speculate about his ‘motives’ until he declares himself, and thus it positively encourages the habit of ‘secret motive hunting’. Even before Hamlet speaks (in I. 2) we are expected to wonder why he alone wears black and behaves so oddly; after he has soliloquised several times we wonder (with Hamlet) why his stated motives and actions fail to tally; and throughout the play one passing remark after another challenges us to spot the motive. ‘Art thou there, truepenny?’ A strange phrase — what can be the reason for it? ‘Buzz, buzz’ (to Polonius) — the reason ?
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Notes
See Coleridge’s Table Talk (1917 ed.) p. 65, and Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1895 ed.) p. 74.
R. A. Foakes, ‘Hamlet and the Court of Elsinore’, Shakespeare Survey, ix (1956) 38. Compare also Granville-Barker, Prefaces, iII, 6z.
See Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s ITnagery (Boston, 1958 ed.) p. 316; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (196o ed.) p. z8.
‘Hamlet’, in Selected Essays (1953 ed.) P. 145.
i6 See G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Embassy of Death: an Essay on Hamlet’, first published in i93o, and ‘Hamlet Reconsidered (i947)’. Both essays are in The Wheel of Fire (i96o ed.).
L. C. Knights, An Approach to ‘Hamlet’ (Peregrine ed., 1966) pp. zoz, zio—i4.
Ibid., p. 212.
Compare H. Granville-Barker: ‘He seems indeed to have Claudius beaten … he scourges him from the field’ (Prefaces, III, 96).
H. D. F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama (1956) p. 33o; quoted by Knights, An Approach to ‘Hamlet’, p. 177.
C. S. Lewis, ‘Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem7’, in Studies in Shakespeare, British Academy Lectures, ed. Peter Alexander (1964) p. 210.
See also Nicholas Brooke on Hamlet’s conscience in Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) pp. 166, 195ff.
Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (1967) pp. 1oz, 103.
Ibid., pp. 122, 138.
Ibid., pp. 98, 119.
Ibid., pp. Iz1-z.
Ibid., pp. 133ff.; compare pp. 108ff.
Ibid., p. 140.
Miss Prosser was not impressed by the Ghost’s Christian doctrine. ‘The Ghost urges Christian forbearance for Gertrude. Admitted. But that is what we are warned the Devil will do’ (ibid., p. 137). Well: if you are determined to find a devil you will find a devil. I believe that the Ghost’s Christian feeling will affect the audience more decisively than its doctrine, but that even its predominantly Christian feeling fails to satisfy us completely — i.e. it remains ambiguous.
In this chapter I am indebted at several points to Nigel Alexander’s Poison, Play and Duel (1971). Compare also Stephen Booth, ‘On the Value of Hamlet’, in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, English Institute Essays, ed. N. Rabkin (1969).
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© 2002 E.A.J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (2002). Secret Motives in Othello . In: Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503038_6
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