Hamlet & Oedipus Part 2

The Raven returns:

His gear is only half-unpacked. His room, apart from the reading light over his desk, is almost completely dark, and the rest of the house is empty, everyone else is still away. There is no food in the kitchen; no lights on anywhere else.    

He looks back at his screen and considers what he has just written. He’s out of touch; he feels off-key, having just returned from six weeks in the sub-Antarctic summer, down on an island in the deep Southern Ocean. When he wasn’t with the others, monitoring the great colonies of breeding migratory birds on the clifftops he would stride along the dark beaches, his head full of Shakespeare – that cliff that ‘beetles o’er its base’ in Elsinore, those isles of ‘kerns and gallowglasses’ that open up the wide scene of Macbeth. (When he first read that he thought that kerns and gallowglasses might be the names of birds.) He had always loved the idea of unpeopled islands and here he was, for the first time, like a castaway, on an island so far to the South that after the brief summer season ends it is unvisited by anything except the wandering Albatross. 

And now he’s back; back in a city which, without the permanent ringing cries of the nesting birds, the thunder of steep seas, the endless whistling of the wind, seems silent and alien. He needs to concentrate otherwise panic might set in and he might rush down to the wharf to seek some battered container ship going South.

 Trying to settle himself down, for this first night of resettlement after mighty displacement, he has decided to write about the loneliness of the Tragic Hero – and how less and less he can fit himself down comfortably inside the world that all others inhabit- Oedipus who has been the ruler of his city, Hamlet who has been a sociable young student, fond of a good time with his friends, both set forth, once the first alarms that all is not well are sounded, upon a road to isolation and death. 

He thinks of it as a parabola – a curve of meaning that springs up out of the first of the great tragedies, Sophocles’ Theban Plays, that like the flight of an arrow makes its way across great distances in time and place to the court of the Danish king at Elsinore. ‘The tragic curve’, he calls it. It’s remarkably clear in Oedipus Rex – that the more Oedipus tries to outrun the fate decreed by the gods the closer he gets to it all the time. The line of fate, however, is not so clearly delineated in the much more modern tragedy of Hamlet the Dane; it’s closer to the complication of the world as we all experience it in our own lives than to the onslaught of clarity under which Oedipus, his mother-bride Jocasta, their children and indeed the city of Thebes all go down, Count no man happy until he dies is the final Choric chant.

                                                            *

In contrast human happiness, individual and societal, is always in prospect in Hamlet’s world, on ‘this goodly frame, th’earth. His speech in Act 2, scene 2, is the quintessence of Renaissance optimism. Though Oedipus Rex begins in the human world, in the city of Thebes, a kingdom long purged of the Sphinx, a world we can recognize as a template of our own, societal, governed by the rule of law, it ends not just in affliction, plague and disorder but in complete Cata Strophe ( we have derived the word, without alteration, from ancient Greek, Greek as Sophocles spoke and wrote it).  Over the course of the play our vision of human life on earth is revealed as so dominated by the will of the gods and an unremitting curse that must be purged that we can never take our bearings in merely human reality again. No one, no matter how singular or brave he, (if it’s Oedipus we are thinking of), or she (Jocasta his mother-wife) can outrun fate, the will of the gods. In the course of a single day so much has come up to the surface out of the primitive depths of things that it’s hard to know how to get back on to the plane of human reality again. Indeed, there is no going back that can be envisaged at the end of the play, no viable human reality to return to.

            In contrast, Hamlet shows a world where human beings are at the centre of God’s world, the Christian view where man is the lord of God’s creation. Even here in Act 2 Scene 2 where Hamlet is already sounding the depths of his own disposition that sense of the overarching value of human existence is maintained. He’s at rock bottom himself; but his speech nevertheless expresses, without blemish or alteration, the great central principle of Renaissance Humanism that places ‘man’ at the centre of all meaning and at the heart of all values. 

            What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,

            in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in     apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…

 Even though his own sickness and weakness appall him they do not rot away or contaminate this vision of universal humanity. What a contrast with the current world  where self-weariness, sickness of self, colours our sense of the larger truths of human existence in the 21st century. But for Hamlet this goodly frame the earthstands unalterably beautiful, not weakened by self loathing. In that way there is available to Hamlet, even if his peculiar circumstances will never allow him to avail himself of them again, the irrepressible wonders of human existence under This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire…’

It is Hamlet himself, in all his misery and self-dislike, who is the one pointing this out, Look you.

That this uncontaminated idealism survives in his mind, even as he is sinking into heaviness himself (I have of late…lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises), even as he himself sees the earth as a sterile promontory, to me indicates the most extraordinary change that has come over our thinking. That it is at least in part due to the psychoanalytic revolution that has swept our subjectivity onto the centre of the stage is worth debating, but not here in ‘these spindrift pages’, not now, not tonight, thinks the Raven, who gets up and on his own in his empty room recites, from memory, one of the most perfect short poems ever written in English, In my craft or sullen art, by Dylan Thomas.

And here we will leave him till next time. And here it is, because I have memorized it too.

                        In my craft or sullen art,

                        Exercised in the still night

                        When only the moon rages

                        And the lovers lie abed

                        With all their grief in their arms

                        I labour by singing light

                        Not for ambition or bread

                        Or the strut and trade of charms

                        On the ivory stages

                        But for the common wages

                        Of their most secret heart.

            Not for the proud man apart

            From the raging moon I write

            On these spindrift pages

            Nor for the towering dead

            With their nightingales and psalms,

            But for the lovers, their arms 

            Round the grief of the ages

            Who pay no praise or wages

            Nor heed my craft or art.

Like me the Raven knows that it’s important to be able, at any given time, to reproduce from memory your current favourite short poem, just as anyone studying the humanities should be able to say, again at any given time, what are currently their three favourite paintings. I used to say this to my students at the beginning of the year. They looked at me for the most part without conviction, one or two with horror, but after a while it started happening, and it was great.