Hamlet in His Modern Guises by Alexander Welsh (review)

Abstract

166 Reviews Hamlet in his Modern Guises. By Alexander Welsh. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2001. xii+178 pp. $32; ?21.95. ISBN 0-69105093 -7. Alexander Welsh has written a locally illuminating study of intersections he proposes between revenge tragedy, Hamlet, and five novels: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship , Scott's Redgauntlet, Dickens's Great Expectations, Melville's Pierre, and Joyce's Ulysses. It is neither new nor surprising, however, to consider the extent to which Shakespeare can be construed as the ghost haunting novelists from the late eighteenth century on: with the exception of Pierre and Redgauntlet, Barbara Everett deals with exactly these novels in her Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The potential value of Hamlet in his Modern Guises, then, has to reside in the argument it brings to bear on affinities, reactions, and mutations that are, in themselves, often familiar enough. For Welsh, the 'leading difference between Hamlet and the earlier narrated adventures ofthe same hero is the introduction of a close-knit family' (p. ix). Represented by this family, and by Shakespeare's further inclusion of Polonius and his 'second two-generation family' (p. 13), is the oppressive nature of the older generation. If 'Hamlet the Dane is the great antiparent of our mythologies', then Polonius's 'chil? dren are precisely those representatives of the younger generation who alert us to the troubles of compliance' (p. 23). The substance of Welsh's argument on Hamlet itself is that 'mourning', rather than 'revenge', takes precedence (p. 30). 'Mourning continues to fuel the revelation of the inward hero throughout the firsthalf of the play'; and ultimately, 'the contemplation of revenge', rather than its execution, 'suffices formourning' (pp. 36-37). Much is made here of Hamlet's necessary insincerity, or ambivalence, as a mourner, and the extent to which this dubious mourning relates to Hamlet's ascendancy as an icon of Western culture. Partly dramatized by Goethe, Scott, and Dickens in this light, in motifs taken up in ironic and parodic modes by Pierre and Ulysses, is the extent to which a constituting element of modernity is the repudiation by sons of fathers as an obstacle to progress. In essence, Welsh locates Shakespeare in that context identified by George Lukacs as the 'novelization' of a drama distracted by psychological introspections and the minutiae of bourgeois social life. It is difficultto see, though, why Hamlet in itself should be promoted as the founding, and agentive, discourse of modernity. Hamlet is only one of many texts that explore, necessarily synthesizing them in the pro? cess, those forms of interiority and psychological introspection pitched by sons (and daughters) against authority and the past. The emphasis in Wilhelm Meister may be on youth, and Welsh plausibly argues that in Redgauntlet 'the resistance to fathers significantly coincides with resistance to the ancien regime' (p. 72). Similarly, Great Expectations can certainly be read as a text in which contests between the old and the young are inflected by the intense guilt of the latter, propelled as they are by ambition and an imperative to surpass. But are these elements of the contemporary self instances of 'Hamlet in his modern guise' ? Is it really the case that 'modernism' could 'almost be said to have been invented by Dickens, with a little help from Shakespeare' (p. 140)? This seems no more convincing than to argue that Shakespeare anticipated a 'psychoanalytic narrative and the sort of critic prepared to conduct the analysis' in the shape of Freud and Dickens (p. 136). On offerhere is Hamlet as a firstcause rather than one powerfully shaping effect among many; and the sophistry of Welsh's attempts to force connections between the play and subsequent texts frequently results in rhetorical fissures as he protesteth too much. Redgauntlet's paternity in Hamlet cannot be attested to simply by its 'autobio? graphical cast' and an 'attack [. . .] upon fathers' (p. 84); otherwise much ofthe whole of Western literature (before and after Shakespeare) could be collapsed into the play. MLRy 98.1,2003 167 Similarly tenuous, along with the mapping of Claudius onto Jaggers, is the notion that as 'so much resentment tends to vioient death...