Hamlet the Doom-scroller

Or, Why Shakespeare? (Part Two)

According to Coleridge, Hamlet’s external world is dim compared to the vibrant, internal world of the self. Photo by Humam on Unsplash

In last Wednesday’s post (click here for that), we explored Samuel Johnson’s assessment of Shakespeare in the preface to his 1765 edition of the plays. Today, we will consider a very different perspective, that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing about fifty years later. Coleridge’s Shakespeare is a radical departure from Johnson’s; I’ll leave you to decide which is closer to your own.

Our starting point is the two critics’ respective readings of the unforgettable scene in Act III of Hamlet, in which the prince has an opportunity to kill Claudius but decides not to do so because the usurper is praying:

And so am I revenged. That would be scanned:

A villain kills my father and for that,

I, his sole son, do this same villain send

To heaven.

He concludes that he will wait to act until he finds the king committing some sin so as to forever damn him, but he leaves the stage before he hears Claudius’s concluding couplet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” If Hamlet would stick around for a few more seconds, he would hear Claudius admit to himself that he is without contrition, which renders his private confession meaningless.

Johnson and Coleridge disagree concerning how we should read this scene. Johnson writes:

This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered.

This conclusion follows logically from Johnson’s literary theory as expressed, for example, in his essay on fiction in The Rambler, in which he insists that while fiction should be mimetic, it is the responsibility of authors to shape their protagonists as essentially moral figures. For Johnson, it is problematic for the reader to empathize with immoral ideas, and he sees Hamlet’s resolution to seek another’s damnation as fundamentally immoral. While Coleridge doesn’t necessarily contradict this general idea, he thinks that Johnson has utterly misread the scene. I’ll quote Coleridge at some length here in order to give you a sense of the extent to which he emphasizes this point and his disagreement with Johnson:

Another objection has been taken by Dr. Johnson, and Shakespeare has been taxed very severely. I refer to the scene where Hamlet enters and finds his uncle praying, and refuses to take his life, excepting when he is in the height of iniquity. To assail him at such a moment of confession and repentance, Hamlet declares, “Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.” He therefore forbears, and postpones his uncle’s death, until he can catch him in some act “That has no relish of salvation in’t.”

This conduct, and this sentiment, Dr. Johnson has pronounced to be so atrocious and horrible, as to be unfit to be put into the mouth of a human being. The fact, however, is that Dr. Johnson did not understand the character of Hamlet, and censured accordingly: the determination to allow the guilty King to escape at such a moment is only part of the indecision and irresoluteness of the hero. Hamlet seizes hold of a pretext for not acting, when he might have acted so instantly and effectually: therefore, he again defers the revenge he was bound to seek, and declares his determination to accomplish it at some time,

“When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’incestuous pleasures of his bed.”

This, allow me to impress upon you most emphatically, was merely the excuse Hamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this particular and favorable moment for doing justice upon his guilty uncle, at the urgent instance of the spirit of his father.

Why does Coleridge insist on this reading so emphatically? The answer to this question will, I think, tell us a great deal, not only about Coleridge’s assessment of Shakespeare, but also about why we continue to value Shakespeare, and this play in particular, so highly.

David Tennant as Hamlet, Patrick Stewart as Claudius

Coleridge’s essential thesis, which has been tremendously influential for Shakespeareans ever since, is that the primary drama of Hamlet occurs inside the protagonist’s head—this despite all of the exciting external action of the play—the sword fight, the ghost, the play within a play, the killing of Polonius, etc. Hamlet repeatedly retreats into his own consciousness, and this moment with Claudius is the most extraordinary example of that retreat, of his choosing further contemplation over the action of avenging his father’s murder.

And contemplation paired with an overactive imagination is what holds Hamlet back through almost the entirety of five dramatic acts. Coleridge holds that Hamlet is clearly the most intelligent figure in the play—the smartest person in any room he walks into—and that his interest is primarily reflective, internal, intellectual. He has relatively little interest in external happenings except “when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind.” He is, in other words, very much like the prototypical image of the Romantic poet—the Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey” or the Coleridge of “Dejection: An Ode.” While the natural world is important for the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it is largely the phenomenological experience of nature and the effect it has on the self that provides inspiration to the Romantic poet.

Coleridge as a young, melancholy poet, about Hamlet’s age

This is the idea of the poet that Wordsworth establishes in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), which Coleridge suggested that he write: the primary material for the poet is the poet’s sensibilities, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” which becomes the object of contemplation and, ultimately, of poetry. This idea of the poet is still dominant over two hundred years later, though it is markedly different from earlier conceptions (for example, from that of Johnson or Pope, both of whom saw the poet as a public figure and a moral voice).

This, of course, is a vast oversimplification, both of Coleridge’s Romantic sensibilities and of Hamlet, and, in fact, Coleridge sees Hamlet’s behavior as problematic, though in a different way from Johnson. Self-obsession is the primary danger for the Romantic poet, as it is for Hamlet: Hamlet is the belly-button gazing, intelligent adolescent; he is the doom-scroller; he is the compulsively self-analyzing intellectual. He reminds me of myself as a thirteen-year-old, too smart for my own good (or so I thought), lying in the dark on the floor of my room, listening to Joy Division. As a result of this self-obsession, Hamlet treats Ophelia horribly, acts impulsively in accidentally killing Polonius, and makes any number of questionable decisions, or non-decisions.

In this way, he is hyper-modern. Intelligent readers of whatever gender or race, can see themselves in him. And that can be a problem—both for him and for us. But that also may be why he continues to be such a compelling figure in the twenty-first century. His depression (or melancholy—see this post on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) seems modern as well—as he wishes to retreat away from physicality and into a pure mental space, or into oblivion, for without our bodies and without the external world, we are nothing:

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

In this first of the great soliloquies, Hamlet introduces a theme that he will revisit throughout the play: a desire to withdraw from the physical world, a turning inward. And it is that retreat into the inner self that, for Coleridge, is the heart of the play:

Shakespeare has shown the fullness and force of his powers: all that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.

With this conclusion, Coleridge warns us against the extreme tendencies of self-reflection, to which he himself was subject. In doing so, he offers a corrective to the self-indulgent aspects of Romanticism, even as he admires the mind that generates them.

Why Shakespeare? Coleridge gets it. Shakespeare shows us ourselves, the light and the darkness, the searching mind and the doom-scroller.