Good Night, Tough Prince

TKE COURT AND THE CASTLE (319 pp.)--Rebecca West--Yale University ($3.75).

In Yugoslavia. Rebecca West once invited a professor who lived in a smaller town to come to Belgrade. He declined, saying: "Thank you very much, but I am like Hamlet. I want very much to go to Belgrade, but I cannot make up my mind." Most Shakespearean producers, critics and audiences have agreed with this point of view, complains Author West. Hamlet, they say, is the most fascinating of plays--and Hamlet the most irresolute of princes. But, Author West suggests, how about taking another look at Shakespeare's text? Instead of seeming an ambivalent neurotic with a pure heart, does the sweet prince not really emerge as a tough, virile "Renaissance man" who stops at nothing?

Hamlet kills three men (Claudius, Polonius and Laertes) with his own hand. After stabbing Polonius in his mother's presence, Hamlet says briskly: "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room," and cracks a joke about the corpse starting to stink in a month or so. Far from feeling queasy in matters of life and death, Hamlet shows repeatedly that he is coldly vindictive and diabolically foresighted. He not only sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England with a sealed letter containing their own death warrants, but urges England's king to bump them off without warning--so that they cannot be shriven by a priest and will surely go to hell.

Unpleasant Revelation. Why, asks Author West, has the world so falsified the character of Hamlet? "If a work of art should make a revelation which discredits what most human beings wish to believe," she writes, "they pretend that the author wrote something quite other than what he did." The world, she theorizes, would rather not swallow the "revelation" contained in Hamlet.

The nature of that revelation is the theme of The Court and the Castle, 16 literary essays based on Rebecca West's Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation lectures at Yale. Author West agrees with Turgenev, who said: "There is not one of us but recognizes in the prince . . . our own characteristics." But the characteristics that men really recognize are neither noble aspirations nor irresoluteness: men see, in fact, their own traits of taint and corruption. Hamlet is stamped with Original Sin. Hamlet cannot be "pure"--nor can mankind. This is the message that people have managed to ignore for three centuries, because they have found it too unpleasant.

The king and court of Shakespeare's Elsinore, argues Author West, represent all governments, all men. Nobody has clean hands. Ophelia is usually presented on the stage as a convent-type sweetie who has a nervous breakdown; in fact she is just "a disreputable young woman," a docile pawn in her father's plot to match her with Eligible Bachelor Hamlet. "No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for him." Even the ghost of Hamlet's father is tainted, as Author West sees it: he is the voice of the past, of tradition--and man's past is no cleaner than his present. Thus Hamlet, like every man, is in a hopeless plight: stab and kill as he may, he will never be able to right man's original wrong.

Native Heresy. As Author West points out, Britain's principal heretic, the 4th century monk Pelagius, disagreed with this view of Original Sin. Man, said Pelagius, is free to choose between good and evil, and should he choose good, his own natural ability will enable him to reach moral perfection. Britain has always had a weakness for its native heresy--particularly in the optimistic 19th century. The resulting division between the view of man as essentially sinful and essentially perfectible--between Christian orthodoxy and humanist selfhelp, between Hamlet and Pelagius--runs through all English literature, as Author West sees it. Most of the rest of this book is devoted to tracing the division through various authors and their works. Samples:

HENRY FIELDING, in Author West's view, was Britain's foremost literary Pelagian. Fielding believed that "Heavenly Wisdom" assumed the "form of Good Nature" when it appeared upon earth, and that "the more, therefore, we cultivate the sweet disposition in our minds, the nearer we draw to divine perfection." Good nature, Fielding contended, was the product of intelligence--and thus Hamlet, being the most intelligent person at Elsinore, ought to have worked wonders. Unfortunately. Author West retorts dryly, he worked to send "unshriven men to their death."

ANTHONY TROLLOPE agreed with the Shakespearean view that man is corrupt and, in consequence, that injustice is inevitable. Moreover, he felt intensely that "the court" (i.e., society and its laws) should not be turned upside down just because it is always unfair to some people. Trollope felt, as Author West interprets him, "that society is playing a game of putting pegs in holes, with far more pegs than holes, but that, cruel as this game is ... it would be still more cruel if the game were broken up."

JOSEPH CONRAD was in a sense "nearer Shakespeare than any other modern novelist." If old Sea Dog Conrad had found himself in Hamlet's place, he would have viewed the court of Elsinore as if it were a ship. Only in the event of the skipper-king's failing to command the society-ship properly at a time of danger did the crew possibly have the right to gang up on him, depose him, and set a usurper in his high place. "It is to be noted," adds Author West, "that Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny dealt with material common to Shakespeare and Conrad."

The Cain Mutiny. From The Caine Mutiny to Cain's mark is, for Author West, only a short step. In furtherance of her theme, which expands until it embraces most of man's problems respecting his God, his government and his own salvation. Author West discusses numerous other British novelists and a few selected foreigners (Proust, Rousseau. Kafka). The weakness of The Court and the Castle is that, having shaped her holes in advance, Author West often has difficulty forcing so many different pegs into them.

But the book is a fine, always exciting tour de force. It is also what is known as a "germinal" book--which is another way of saying that if it ever falls into the hands of an ambitious producer, audiences will see Hamlet with a stiff spine and Ophelia with round heels.

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