Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the third part in our serialization of Hamlet and Questions, the lecture Eli Siegel gave on November 14, 1976. Are the questions present in a literary work like the questions in our own lives? Are they like our everyday questions and also our deep, bewildering questions, many of which we’ve not been able to articulate? That is what this important lecture is about.

In its first three sections, Mr. Siegel speaks of questions present in early scenes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

He explains that he is not, in this talk, dealing with the meaning of the play, or the self of its main character—whom he loved. Elsewhere he did speak and write often about Hamlet, always newly and with critical delight and power—and also passion, tenderness, often humor. In fact, as I see it, in all of literary criticism there is no greater dealing with a single work than Eli Siegel’s comprehension and explanation of Hamlet.

That Much Debated Question

In the history of literary criticism, no question has been more written about than Why could not Hamlet avenge the murder of his father, though this father, as Ghost, asked him, intensely urged him, to do so? Eli Siegel is, I believe, the critic who has truly answered it, in his Hamlet Revisited and elsewhere. So to provide a certain context for the present section of Hamlet and Questions, I quote him giving the underlying reason Hamlet could not act on his father’s fervently expressed wish:

A key thing in the play of Shakespeare is that Hamlet did not revere his father,…that the son had something more—or less—than a mythological awe towards his royal parent….Did Hamlet see himself as seen justly by his father? Can we care for anyone completely who we feel does not see us justly? The answer…is no.¹

Hamlet, Eli Siegel showed, could not do the big thing his father asked of him, because Hamlet was not for, entirely, how his father saw the world and him.

Mr. Siegel knew Shakespearean criticism in its extensiveness—the work of all the noted critics certainly, but also of the not so noted. He was just to them all, even as he saw what they hadn’t seen.

I’ll quote a poem by him, expressing some of the feeling that he saw Hamlet as having. There is, in the present section of Hamlet and Questions, a touch of what this poem describes:

That poem has firmness and murmur, yearning and logic. It has thought proceeding kindly (the author’s and Hamlet’s). And all this has become poetic music.

There Are These Questions

It can be said that the test of civilization is how much people are able to ask the right questions, including of and about themselves. That is: the more we can know and ask the most needed questions, the more civilized we are. I have seen that through the principles of Aesthetic Realism, a person can ask oneself at last questions that will enable one to have the life and feelings and perceptions one longs for.

Let us take this Aesthetic Realism principle (embodying, really, several principles): The big fight in every person is between our deepest desire, to like the world through knowing it, and our desire to have contempt—“get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the most hurtful thing in a person; it is the cause of every injustice, from snobbishness and lying to war and genocide.

A question, burningly urgent, for people and nations to ask is whether the explanation presented in the above paragraph is true. I have seen that it is. And there are questions arising from it that, while universal, are personal for everyone. I present ten of those many questions a person can ask him- or herself—and needs to in order to be truly proud and happy. They are all about the fight of contempt for the world versus respect for it, the honest liking of it:

1) If I can’t feel superior to a person, do I resent that person?

2) Do I judge people mainly on whether they make a lot of me—or on how truly and justly they see all things and people?

3) Which am I more interested in: being praised or seeing value, meaning—even beauty—in things?

4) Am I more interested in understanding a person or having my way? Right now, as I’m angry with someone, do I want to beat him out or understand him?

5) Is it possible (as Aesthetic Realism explains) that my desire to have contempt makes me feel momentarily important but really makes me unsure, ashamed, deeply dull and against myself?

6) Is my deepest desire to see meaning in things, value in them? And is that why going after fake glory for myself by belittling things and people makes me unsure of myself?

7) Is the reason love fails, the following?: Two people have gotten a thrill feeling superior to the world together, making much of each other while diminishing other persons. But they inevitably come to resent each other, because they’ve betrayed their deepest desire—to respect, value, understand people and reality.

8) Does intelligence come from respect—the desire to have things as they truly are be within one? And is contempt a swaggering stupidity, because it’s against that true merging with things which constitutes knowing?

9) Is contempt the cause of racism and all cruelty? And is the desire to respect—to see what things are and relate them to each other and oneself—the source of all art?

10) Again, in love: do I want to feel a person is mine, or do I want to understand this person? Is my purpose never to stop trying to understand this person?

Those, then, are some questions that people thirst to ask themselves. They arise from Aesthetic Realism principles. And I’ve not yet quoted, in this TRO, the central principle of Aesthetic Realism. I’ll quote it now; and some sentences of Eli Siegel that are about it. That great principle is: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

The literature of Aesthetic Realism is replete with illustration of that statement. But here is a brief passage from Aesthetic Realism: Three Instances; it has lightness and depth, and questions. Mr. Siegel writes:

The structure of what thing cannot illuminate our own structure? Does not a sheet of paper in its wideness and narrowness bring some essential likeness to us, to ourselves? Is not a twig, on or off a branch, in its simplicity and complexity, continuity and discontinuity, an abstract and tangible presentation of what we are?…Education, principally, is the pleasant finding out of how things can help us know who we are as we see them.

What that passage tells of is the magnificent opponent of contempt: we are important not through contempt but because we’re related to everything through the opposites.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Hamlet Asks Why?—& More

By Eli Siegel

Note. Earlier in act 1, the ghost of Hamlet’s father was seen by Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio. Soon he will tell Hamlet that he—Hamlet Sr., the King—was murdered by Claudius. He will strenuously ask Hamlet to avenge his murder.

Some of the greatest questioning of a person is in act 1, scene 4 of Hamlet. This is a highpoint of questioning. Hamlet asks more than one question in this scene, and I have written about it a great deal. I have also said there is something humorous here. The mood of Hamlet is various. But scene 4 of act 1 is perhaps the best known scene in English drama.

Horatio says to Hamlet, “Look, my lord, it comes.” The stage direction reads “Enter Ghost.” Then Hamlet speaks to the Ghost, and we have exclamation—which is also part of poetry:

Then the stage direction is “Ghost beckons Hamlet”—which is a way of saying, I’d like to tell you, but we’d better have another place for that.

Hamlet has asked, “What may this mean…?” In a certain sense, every time we see something we ask What does it mean?—though we ask it, as life goes on, so faintly that we don’t even know we ask. What’s all this about?

In Hamlet’s Words

Looking at those lines: The first thing is an exclamation having to do with taking care of oneself: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” Then a matter of good and evil comes up in supernatural terms: “Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned”—do you stand for something good or do you stand for something bad?

“Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell—” What’s being asked through these lines is What is the meaning of that? It’s something we’re asking all the time: What is the meaning of ourselves and of what’s around us, life itself?

“Be thy intents wicked or charitable, / Thou com’st in such a questionable shape—” Hamlet has something there, because this presence of the Ghost is not the best way to give information. The word questionable is used.

Hamlet doesn’t know how to see his father. I think in ordinary life he didn’t know either. “I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me! / Let me not burst in ignorance.” People would like to know what is the meaning of themselves and what is the meaning of life. Every play tries to tell you that, every novel, every poem.

“Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell / Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death, / Have burst their cerements….” It seems that the Ghost, though he doesn’t seem to have been very attentive as to religion, was buried properly. This is in keeping with the American phrase We’ll give you a fine funeral.

“Why the sepulcher / Wherein we saw thee quietly interred / Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws / To cast thee up again.” I think that question is very necessary. Most people, when they’re in their graves, stay there, and don’t go around informing persons. So there’s the question of why this particular king of Denmark should go out of his grave. That’s a question we still have with us, because it’s not been wholly answered. Meantime, there’s poetry in the blank verse of those lines that shows what blank verse can do.

“What may this mean / That thou, dead corse—” The text I’m reading has “dead corse.” Others have “dread corse,” which is better. (And corse means corpse.)

“…again in complete steel, / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, / Making night hideous—” Hamlet is asking Why? It’s a question that traditionally a reporter wasn’t supposed to deal with. A reporter was supposed to tell what happened—although reporters have sometimes gotten into the field of why. Traditionally, the four questions for a reporter to deal with are Who? What? Where? When? Those are the reporter’s questions. And Hamlet asks them too. But the big question here is Wherefore?, or Why?

“—and we fools of nature / So horridly to shake our disposition / With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?” This has to do with the question we all have: we have feelings and we don’t know why we have them. As Heine said, “Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, / Dass ich so traurig bin.” (“I do not know what it means / That I am so sad.”) There are many questions asked in all languages, and German is quite good for them. Carlyle calls the place of his hero in Sartor Resartus Weissnichtwo, meaning Don’t-know-where. Meanwhile, Hamlet asks, “Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?”

A Famous Answer

After a while, Hamlet follows the Ghost, and there is an answer. It’s the most famous answer in English literature; in fact, in world literature. There’s more to that answer, but this first part is the most famous answer in English drama or in any drama. We’re now in act 1, scene 5:

I’m not now talking about Hamlet itself. I’m talking about questions where they have to do with Hamlet and with poetry. So we have this answer of the Ghost. And anyone’s saying, for instance, I’m your grandmother’s spirit—well, I think it would be rather surprising. The Ghost’s answer is surprising, but direct: “I am thy father’s spirit.” It’s grammatical.

Then, after you hear that a person is that person, a spirit is that spirit, you want to know what he’s doing and how he finds things. So that’s in the next line: “Doomed for a certain term to walk the night.” The Ghost doesn’t say where, but apparently one of the places could be Elsinore, and is.

“And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.” It does seem strange, but I was the first commentator who took the Ghost seriously here. If the Ghost says he has committed foul crimes, or sins, I am disposed to believe that he has—which is one of the reasons Hamlet had a difficult time punishing Claudius. We don’t even now know whether those crimes or sins are “purged away.”

There Are Things He Cannot Say

As I pointed out in Hamlet Revisited, the next lines are lovely but are a little boasting. The Ghost says, Whatever I haven’t done, I’ve come to know things that you, my son, can’t know, with all your education: “But that I am forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison house—” There are things he knows, but— don’t ask me, because I can’t tell you.

“I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood—” There would be astonishment and freezing.

“Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.” That is in keeping with the English adjective hair-raising.

What follows is very poetic: “But this eternal blazon must not be / To ears of flesh and blood.” The Ghost is saying that what eternity is like and what it means, he cannot talk about. He could add: If you were in the same world as I, my son, I might talk to you—we’d compare notes on the eternal blazon—but not now. Then: “List, list, O, list!” Those four monosyllables—still effective.

The Ghost tells more. But as I said, my purpose in this talk is to relate questions that are in Hamlet to poetry generally. And there are other questions that I hope to get to.