WATCH WITH ME

WATCH WITH ME

Hamlet is hard to read. I’m not sure why that is so, but it must be: otherwise, why would it have been read and played as a revenge “tragedy” for four hundred years?

Let’s start with revenge—which will let me introduce the parallel I want to draw with Hamlet, from Christian literature. This is not to say that I want to consider Hamlet as a Christian play; the tradition to which both the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani and Hamlet belong antecedes Christianity by hundreds of years.

Revenge is called “an eye for an eye”—or, in modern slang, “getting even.” We pretend that to hit somebody back for hitting you makes up for the hurt, or that killing party A because party A has killed my friend party B will make the death of party B any less terrible. As Socrates argued, it is worse to do evil than to have evil done to you.

I learned about revenge, accidentally, when I was four years old. My father used to bring home stacks of used mimeograph paper from his office; I could use the blank sides to draw on. One afternoon I somehow got my little hands on a pair of scissors. I figured out—made up as a formula or a moral law—that if I cut a piece of paper in one direction, and then cut it again, at a ninety degree angle (I had no idea that than perpendicular was ninety degrees of course) the second cut would heal the first one. I tried out my idea, and a corner of the piece of paper fell off. So I tried again: whack, then a second whack at a right angle across the first. The corner fell out again.

But my logic was sound—or so I thought. I kept repeating the experiment, and getting more and more frustrated. Finally I had a tantrum, and attracted my mother’s attention. She came in and took the scissors away from me.

I had learned that revenge doesn’t work.

We pretend that revenge makes up for something bad. But it doesn’t. Rather, it produces a second bad something. Stupidly, revenge brings more evil into the world.

But we want Hamlet to be a revenge play. Revenge plays are simple: the first domino knocks down the second domino and the second knocks down the third. Etc. Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote dozens of such plays. If Shakespeare had wanted to write one, he could probably have done so in two or three days. But he didn’t want to write a revenge play; he wanted to write a tragedy.

“Tragedy”—despite what journalists and literary critics say—is not something bad happening. If a man killed at a railroad crossing happens to be the hard-working father of ten children his death is not necessarily a tragedy. His being the father of all those children may make his death more pathetic, but it doesn’t make his death tragic. If five hundred people are killed in an explosion, that there were five hundred of them—or that they were all children, or pregnant women, or priests—doesn’t make the accident a tragedy. It’s simply sad. And we should respond with sympathy.

The ancient Greeks invented what we call tragedy, though there were tragedies in human history preceding the Greeks. Our mythologies contain many tragic stories; the Greeks, however, made up the word, and used it to dsescribe certain kinds of plays. Curiously, the Greek word TRAGODIA means “goat song.” It has been suggested that the name comes from the prize given to the winning tragedian at the Dionysian festival each spring in Athens—but there is no evidence to support this, or for that matter any other theory about where the word comes from.

So let me suggest another origin, propose another theory.

Goats are not the most musical of animals. So it’s odd that something as serious and culturally or morally important as a TRAGODIA was called a “goat song” by the Greeks. In the zodiac, the goat is Capricorn: and his time is the beginning of the year. The twenty-second of December—the winter solstice—is the first day of Capricorn. It is also, of course, New Year’s day and Christmas day, except that we didn’t get the calendar right. The winter solstice is also integral to Hannukah, the “festival of light.”

The shortest day of the year is the day that requires the most faith: the most faith that the world will be reborn. And that faith is rewarded on the twenty-third of December, when the future is born, the earth rejuvenated, life renewed. But that rebirth requires the death of the old year.

Tragedy occurs at the bottom: when only hope can save us, when we give up what is, in order to learn and to have what will be. Tragedy is not despair: despair is the failure of hope, DE+SPERO. Faced with chaos or extinction, we can only save ourselves through hope: for Shelley, we must “hope till Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” William Butler Yeats defines tragedy as “Heaven blazing into the head": it is the understanding that will save us.

Tragedy is what we find at the end of Oedipus the King. Oedipus understands what he has done, and accepts responsibility, not for murdering his father and marrying his mother, but for his ignorance: the ignorance that let him do so. And it is this that makes him, for Sophocles, a great hero. Oedipus was a good king; he cared for his Thebes more than he cared for himself. He was not selfish, like Teiresias. In the end, when he exiles himself from Thebes to save his people and his land, he is a great king, a tragic hero.

I want to argue that Hamlet is a tragedy, the most seriously such of any of Shakesperare’s plays. But I want to argue something else as well: I want to argue that Hamlet is very much like the scene in the Christian gospels which takes place in the garden at Gethsemani on the evening before Jesus’s trial and death.

Let me begin with Gethsemani. Jesus goes there after his Last Supper. He takes some of his apostles with him. “Watch with me,” he asks them. They fall asleep. He asks again, “Can you not watch with me?” And they fall asleep. When the soldiers come to take him, Peter draws his sword and cuts off a soldier’s ear. Jesus admonishes him: put away the sword. “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” he tells Peter. Revenge accomplishes nothing.

Those who were with him at Gethsemani weren’t very attentive to Jesus. He was lucky, however, to have four gospellers who were true to him, and who understood what he taught. They recorded his condemnation of revenge, and violence in general. They recorded his kindness and his love. And according to their gospels, for every time he condemned any vice, he condemned hypocrisy fifty times. But look what that got him: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” crusades, and a grossly hypocritical church.

Hamlet’s chosen gospeller is Horatio. “Watch with me,” Hamlet might have said. But Horatio isn’t a good watcher, and his understanding of the world—his “philosophy”—is very limited. As Hamlet dies, lamenting his “wounded name,” he commissions Horatio: “tell my story.” And almost immediately, Horatio does: “. . . let me speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about.” He tells Fortinbras,

you shall hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver.


A recital of "carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts" and "casual slaughters"is not the “story” Hamlet wanted from Horatio. Hamlet’s “wounded name” will not be saved by what Horatio will tell—or by the scholars, actors, and directors who read Hamlet as a revenge play, a revenge “tragedy.”

When Hamlet realises what has happened—that both Claudius and Laertes have plotted to murder him, and that by accident he has now killed Laertes with the poison intended for himself—Hamlet, who had abhorred the idea of revenge throughout the play, now understands that he is free. Laertes has killed himself, as with a boomerang, and now Claudius will do so as well. Hamlet “stabs King Claudius,” then gives him the poisoned cup to drink.

If we see Hamlet charge madly at Claudius with his sword, we may think “revenge.” But Hamlet—wounded, dying—knows he doesn’t need to kill Claudius with the sword; all he has to do is touch him, scratch him, make him bleed. The tip is murderously poisoned—but not by Hamlet.

Claudius seems not aware that Hamlet has the poisoned foil, and Hamlet’s “stab” has not been itself a murderous, mortal wound. After Hamlet stabs Claudius, the king says, “O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt.” Then Hamlet gives him the poisoned cup: and doubly, then, Claudius kills himself:

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion.

Hamlet asked Horatio to “tell [his] story,” to “report [him] and [his] cause aright.” Horatio fails Hamlet. He will “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about,” but what he plans to say—what he can “truly deliver”—is not about Hamlet’s heroism, not about his tragic understanding and his accomplishment. It is up to us, then, taking the play home with us, to understand Hamlet’s story, and when we talk about it—or put it on stage—to “report [him] and [his] cause aright”: not as the enactment of revenge, but as an accomplishment of justice.

If we can learn to be so responsible in reading Hamlet, perhaps someday we will learn to read Jesus’s story as well: as a gospel of love, not violence, a gospel of truth and honor, not hypocrisy.

Bert Hornback
Easter 2009