G. Wilson Knight on Hamlet

I’ve been reading and very much enjoying G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire. 

Both of his essays on Hamlet are brilliant and should be read in full, but there are some major points that I find particularly interesting. 

The general thought of death and the pain in Hamlet’s mind are suffused throughout the whole play, but: 

“… the play, as a whole, scarcely gives us that sense of blackness and the abysms of spiritual evil which we find in Macbeth; nor is there the universal gloom of King Lear. Macbeth, the protagonist and heroic victim of evil, rises gigantic from the murk of an evil universe; Lear, the king of suffering, towers over a universe that itself toils in pain.” 

The atmospheres in Macbeth and King Lear, Knight argues, support the mental universe of the hero but it’s not so in Hamlet.  

“Except for the original murder of Hamlet’s father, the Hamlet universe is one of healthy and robust life, good-nature, humour, romantic strength, and welfare: against this background is the figure of Hamlet pale with the consciousness of death. He is the ambassador of death walking amid life.”

We don’t need to see the world through Hamlet’s eyes. Knight also challenges the common idea of Hamlet as a noble hero and Claudius as a cruel villain or hardened criminal: Claudius indeed kills his brother to become king, but he does love Gertrude, feels remorse, and is a good king; Gertrude is a kind, loving woman, torn between her love for Hamlet and her love for Claudius; Hamlet is intelligent and has his noble side, but readers tend to romanticise and sentimentalise him, and ignore his cruel, cynical, and sardonic side.

Claudius “is distinguished by a creative and wise action, a sense of purpose, benevolence, a faith in himself and those around him, by love of his Queen.” 

“In short he is very human. Now these are the very qualities Hamlet lacks. Hamlet is inhuman. He has seen through humanity. And this inhuman cynicism, however justifiable in this case on the plane of causality and individual responsibility, is a deadly and venomous thing. […] The other persons are firmly drawn, in the round, creatures of flesh and blood. But Hamlet is not of flesh and blood, he is a spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and misery, without faith in himself or anyone else, murdering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity, taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing his mother’s heart, a poison in the midst of a healthy bustle of the court.” 

Knight doesn’t deny that Hamlet is intelligent and right about others’ hypocrisy and deceit, but his philosophy is the negation of life, it is death, and Hamlet is understandably seen as a threat. 

I don’t agree with Knight about everything—for example, I despise Polonius, whom he sees as “eminently lovable”, and I think he goes too far in defending Claudius and praising his virtues—but his arguments are compelling and he does have a point about Hamlet’s cruelty and cynicism, and Claudius’s good qualities. 

Here is his interpretation of Hamlet’s delay: 

“Adieu, Adieu, Hamlet, remember me. (I. V. 91) 

Hamlet does not neglect his father’s final behest—he obeys it, not wisely but only too well. Hamlet remembers—not alone his father’s ghost, but all the death of which it is a symbol. What would have been the use of killing Claudius? Would that have saved his mother’s honour, have brought life to his father’s mouldering body, have enabled Hamlet himself, who had so long lived in death, to have found again childish joy in the kisses of Ophelia? Would that have altered the universal scheme? To Hamlet, the universe smells of mortality; and his soul is sick to death.”

That makes sense. 

(This is one of the things I love about Shakespeare: his plays are complex and full of layers of meaning so there can be multiple interpretations that are very different but still coherent and compelling).