Assighnment: paper-10

Cultural Studies 

 

Topic:Cultural Studies in Practice: Hamlet

Name: Kalani Jalpa H.

Roll No: 13

Semester:2

Batch:2010-11

Submitted: To:  Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English, Bhavnagar University.

Cultural Studies in Practice: Hamlet

In several instances earlier in this chapter we noted the cultural and new historical emphases on power relationships. For example, we noted that cultural critics assume “oppositional” roles in terms of power structures, wherever they might be found. Veeser, we pointed out, credited the new historicists with dealing with “questions of politics, power, indeed on all matters that deeply affect people’s practical lives”. And of course there are the large emphases on power in the matter of Jonathan Swift’s Laputta, as previously noted. Let us new approach Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a view to seeing its cultural context.

Shortly after the play within the play, Claudius is talking privately with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet’s fellow students from Wittenberg. In response to Claudius’s plan to send Hamlet to England, Rosencrantz delivers a speech that- if read out of context- is both an excellent set of metaphors and a summation of the Elizabethan concept of the role and power of kingship:

The singular and peculiar life is bound

With all the strength and armor of the Mind

To keep itself from noyance, but much more

That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests

The lives of many. The cease of majesty

Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw

What’s near it with it? It is a massy wheel

Fixed on the summit of the highest mount.

To who’s huge spokes ten thousand lesser things

Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls

Each small annexment, petty consequences

Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone

 Did the king sigh out with a general groan?

Then alone, the passage is a thoughtful and imagistically successful passage, worthy of a wise and accomplished statesman.

But how many readers and viewers of the play would rank this passage among the best-known lines of the play- with Hamlet’s soliloquies, for instance, or with the king’s effort to pray, or even with the aphorisms addressed by Polonius to his son Laertes? We venture to say that the passage, intrinsically good if one looks at it alone, is simply not well known.

Attention to the context and to the speaker gives the answer. Guildenstern had just agreed that he and Rosencrantz would do the king’s bidding. The agreement is only a reaffirmation of what they had told the king when he received them at court. Both speeches are wholly in character, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are among the jellyfish of Shakespeare’s characters. Easy it is forget which of the two speaks which lines-indeed easy it is forget most of their lines altogether. The two are distinctly plot-driven: empty of personality, sycophantic in a sniveling way, eager to curry favor with power even if it means spying on their erstwhile friend weakly they admit, without much skill of denial, that they “were sent for”. Even less successfully they try to play on Hamlet’s metaphorical “pipe”, to know his “stops”, when they are forced to admit that they could not even handle the literal musical instrument that Hamlet shows them. Still later these nonentities meet their destined “non-being ness”, as it were, when hamlet, who can play  the pipe  so much more efficiently, substitutes their names in the death warrant intended for him. If ever we wished to study two characters that are marginalized, then let us look upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are from the Dutch-German: literally, ‘garland of roses’ and ‘golde4n star. Although of religious origin, both names together sound singing and add to English ears. Their jingling gives them lightness, and birds the individuality of the characters they label.

Lightness to be sure. Harley Granville Barker once wrote in an offhand way of the reaction these two roles call up for actors. Commenting on Solanio and Salarino from The Merchant of Vanice, he noted that their roles are “cursed by actors as the two worst bores in the whole Shakespearean canon; not excepting, even those other twin brethren in nonentity, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.

Obvious too is the fact that the two would not fit the social level or have the level of influence of those whom Harold Jenkins reports as historical persons bearing these names: “These splendidly resounding names, by contrast with the unlocalized classical ones, are evidently chosen has particularly Danish. Both were common among the most influential Danish families’ nobles and even note the appearance of the name as Wittenberg students around 1590.

No, these details do not seem to fit the personalities and general vacuity of Shakespeare’s two incompetents. So, let us look elsewhere for what these two characters tell us. Let us review what they do, and what is done to them. Simply, they have been student at Wittenberg. They return to Denmark, apparently at the direct request of Claudius. They try to prey from Hamlet some of his inner thought especially of ambition and frustration about the crown, hamlet foils them. They crumble before his own questioning. As noted above, Claudius later sends them on an embassy with Hamlet, carrying a letter to the king of England that would have Hamlet summarily executed. Though they may not have known the contents of that “grand commission”, Hamlet’s suspicion of them- and to “trust them as adders fanged”.

They must sweep my way,

And marshal me to knavery. Let it work, for it’s the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard. And it shall go hard but I will delve one yard below their mines and blow them to the moon: Oh,’it’s most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet.

In a moment of almost trickery on his own part, hamlet blithely substitutes forged documents bearing their names rather than his as the ones to be “put to sudden death, /not shriving time allowed”. When Horatio responds laconically with “so Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to‘t, hamlet is unmoved.

Why, man, they did make love to this employment.

They are not near my conscience. Their defeat

Does by their own insinuation grow?

This dangerous when the baser nature comes

 Between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.

And with that Shakespeare as well as Hamlet- is done with these two characters “they are not near Hamlet’s conscience”.

Again, why? For one thing, Hamlet may well see himself as righting the moral order, not as a murderer. And much has been said on that matter. But let us take note of another dimension: the implications for power. Clearly Hamlet makes reference in the lines just noted to the “mighty opposites” represented by himself and Claudius. Clearly, too, the ones of “baser nature” who “love to this employment” do not matter much in this struggle between powerful antagonists. They are pawns for Claudius first for Hamlet second. It is almost as if Hamlet had tried before the sea voyage to warn them a sponge, provoking this exchange:

Hamlet: …Besides, to be demanded of a sponge! What replication should be made by the son of a king?

Rosencrantz: Take you me for a sponge, my lord?

Hamlet: Aye, sir, that soaks up the king’s countenance, his authorities. But such officers do the king best service in the end. He keeps them, like an ape, in the corner of his Jaw, first mouthed, to be last swallowed. When he needs what you have   gleaned, it is but squeezing you and, sponge you shall be dry again.

So they are pawns, or sponges, or monkey food: the message of power keeps coming through. Thus, they do not merit a pang of conscience. True, there may be some room for believing that at first they intended only good for their erstwhile schoolfellow. But their king, the power that has brought them here. Their face, however, is to displease mightily the prince, who will undermine them and “hoist with own petard”.

For such is power in the world of kings and princes. Nor is it merely a literary construct. England had known the effects of such power off and on for centuries .whether it was the deposing and later execution of Richard-2, or the crimes alleged of Richard-3, or the beheading of a Thomas More or of a wife or two, or the much more recent actions in and around the court of Elizabeth: in all these cases, power served policy. Witness especially the face of the second earl of Essex, whose attempt at rebellion led to his own execution in 1601, and even more especially the execution of Elizabeth’s relative, Mary Queen of Scots, who had been imprisoned by Elizabeth for years before Elizabeth signed the death warrant. A generation later, another king, Charles-1, would also be beheaded. With historical actions such as these, we can understand why Shakespeare’s work incorporates power struggles.

Claudius was aware of power, clearly, when he observed of Hamlet’s apparent madness that “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

To say, then, that the mighty struggle between powerful antagonists is the stuff of this play is hardly original. But our emphasis in the present reading is that one can gain a further insight into the play, and indeed into Shakespeare’s culture, about the lesser persons caught up in the massive oppositions.

It is in instructive note that the reality of power reflective of Shakespeare’s time might in another time and in another culture reflect a radically different worldview. Let us enrich our response to Hamlet by looking at a related cultural and philosophical manifestation from the twentieth century. In the twentieth century the dead, or never-living, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were resuscitated by Tom Stoppard in a fascinating re-seeing of their existence, or its lack. In Stoppard’s version, they are even more obviously two ineffectual pawns, seeking constantly to know who they are, why they are here, where they are going. Whether they “are” at all may be the ultimate question of this modern play. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard has given the contemporary audience a play that examines existential questions in the context of a whole world that may have no meaning at all. Although it is not our intension to examine that play in great detail, suffice it to note that the essence of marginalization is here: in this view, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are archetypal human beings caught up on a Ship-Spaceship Earth for the twentieth or the twenty-first century- that leads nowhere, except to death, a death for persons who are already dead. If these two characters were marginalized in Hamlet, they are even more so in Stoppard’s handling. If Shakespeare marginalized the powerless in his own version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard has marginalized us all in an era when-in the eyes of some- all of us are caught up in forces beyond our control. In other words, a cultural and historical view that was Shakespeare’s is radically reworked to reflect a cultural and philosophical view of another time- our own.

And if the philosophical view of Stoppard goes too far for some, consider a much more mundane phenomenon of the later twentieth century- and times to come, we except. We allude to the Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s, the little people, who have been caught up in recent decades the effects on these workers when multinational companies move factories and offices around the world like pawns on a chessboard.

Whether in Shakespeare’s version or Stoppard’s, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no more than what Rosencrantz called a “small annexment”, a “petty consequence”, mere nothings for the “massy wheel” of kings.