revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet
frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da
Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously.
Michelangelo rejects any feeling of corruption, he stands by the flesh,
the flesh only. It is the corresponding reaction, but in the opposite
direction. But that is all four hundred years ago. Enrico Persevalli has
just reached the position. He _is_ Hamlet, and evidently he has great
satisfaction in the part. He is the modern Italian, suspicious,
isolated, self-nauseated, labouring in a sense of physical corruption.
But he will not admit it is in himself. He creeps about in self-conceit,
transforming his own self-loathing. With what satisfaction did he reveal
corruption--corruption in his neighbours he gloated in--letting his
mother know he had discovered her incest, her uncleanness, gloated in
torturing the incestuous King. Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the
uncleanest. But he accused only the others.
Except in the 'great' speeches, and there Enrico was betrayed, Hamlet
suffered the extremity of physical self-loathing, loathing of his own
flesh. The play is the statement of the most significant philosophic
position of the Renaissance. Hamlet is far more even than Orestes, his
prototype, a mental creature, anti-physical, anti-sensual. The whole
drama is the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the mind from the
flesh, of the spirit from the self, the reaction from the great
aristocratic to the great democratic principle.
An ordinary instinctive man, in Hamlet's position, would either have set
about murdering his uncle, by reflex action, or else would have gone
right away. There would have been no need for Hamlet to murder his
mother. It would have been sufficient blood-vengeance if he had killed
his uncle. But that is the statement according to the aristocratic
principle.
Orestes was in the same position, but the same position two thousand
years earlier, with two thousand years of experience wanting. So that
the question was not so intricate in him as in Hamlet, he was not nearly
so conscious. The whole Greek life was based on the idea of the
supremacy of the self, and the self was always male. Orestes was his
father's child, he would be the same whatever mother he had. The mother
was but the vehicle, the soil in which the paternal seed was planted.
When Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, it was as if a common individual
murdered God, to the Greek.
But Agamemnon, King and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible. He
had sacrificed Iphigenia for the sake of glory in war, for the
fulfilment of the superb idea of self, but on the other hand he had made
cruel dissension for the sake of the concubines captured in war. The
paternal flesh was fallible, ungodlike. It lusted after meaner pursuits
than glory, war, and slaying, it was not faithful to the highest idea of
the self. Orestes was driven mad by the furies of his mother, because of
the justice that they represented. Nevertheless he was in the end
exculpated. The third play of the trilogy is almost foolish, with its
prating gods. But it means that, according to the Greek conviction,
Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong. But for all that, the
infallible King, the infallible male Self, is dead in Orestes, killed by
the furies of Clytemnestra. He gains his peace of mind after the
revulsion from his own physical fallibility, but he will never be an
unquestioned lord, as Agamemnon was. Orestes is left at peace,
neutralized. He is the beginning of non-aristocratic Christianity.
Hamlet's father, the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But,
unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude,
like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady
Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the
supreme male, the ideal Self, the King and Father.
This is the tragic position Shakespeare must dwell upon. The woman
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