“How does Shakespeare challenge ideas of the classical past in his writings?”;
How does Shakespeare challenge ideas of the classical past in his writings?
In his intricately constructed Sonnet 12, Shakespeare weaves a metaphorical comparison between the natural elements of “Time” and the subsequent fragility of human life (Atkins, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 173). In the metaphorical reference to the “scythe” in the volta of the last two lines, Shakespeare presents time as mechanical, postulating that it is near impossible to resist “Time’s” grasp.
“And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence”
(Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12, line 13)
Amongst critical debate, there is a generalised acceptance of Shakespeare as a dramaturgical maverick for disregarding Aristotelian poetic “Unity” in his works. Dewar-Watson, in Shakespeare and Aristotle forthrightly claims that “Shakespeare adopt[s] an oppositional stance to Aristotelian doctrine” (abstract), grounding this statement on Shakespeare’s detachment from the “the three unities” of place, time and action. This problem of disunity is raised to philosophical status when Polonius declares that Hamlet and Ophelia “fell out, by time, by means, by place” (Hamlet, 2.2.124). Moreover, in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Hugh Richmond declares that “Shakespeare’s practice violates Aristotle’s assertions repeatedly”, promulgating Shakespeare’s total negation of “unity of tone” (Shakespeare’s Theatre,464). These criticisms, however, are likely to be drawn, perhaps inadvertently, from the neo-Classical Renaissance concept of “verisimilitude”, defined by Louis Friedland as fidelity to truth, which restricts time and place to producing “semblance to reality” (The Dramatic Unities,58). However, Michael Davis, in his preface to On Poetics, attributes to its status as more than just a “treatise on tragedy”, making the distinction that Aristotle “has a concern that extends beyond poetry to the very structure of the human soul in relation to what it is” (On Poetics, Preface). Through an exploration of On Poetics and Hamlet I argue that Shakespeare’s works philosophically engage with Classical literary theory, by exploring the frictions surrounding the transmutability of time. Time, or Chronos, (On Poetics, 4, 25, 43) in Hamlet, cannot be reduced to Aristotelian “Unity” for it is an impenetrable and intangible force both driving and limiting the action of the protagonists.
It must be noted that Aristotle does not explicitly define the three theatrical “Unities” in On Poetry, but that this is a neo-Classical ideal based on Aristotelian principles, brought to fruition by the works of Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poesy (75) and his contemporaries. Through canonisation, translation and reinterpretation, most significantly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance period, Aristotle’s On Poetics morphed into an ideological, neo-Aristotelian, framework to which tragedy must strictly adhere. The “Unity of Time”, was a principal legitimised by Horace (Brink, Horace on Poetry, 80-81) in his Ars Poetica and later expanded by Dryden, in the 17th Century, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie. Perhaps deriving from Aristotle’s declaration that tragedy, in its ideal form “tries especially to be bound to one circuit of the sun” (On Poetics, 17), Dryden articulates that “The unity of Time they [Aristotle and Horace] comprehend in 24 hours” (18). This immediately problematises Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for it spans more than the venerated 24hours.
The play traverses the events of thirty years, a temporal scope revealed by the Clown wherein he expresses to Hamlet “I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.” (Hamlet, 5.1.152). Shakespeare opens the play with acute attention to time as the sentries “watch the minutes of this night” (1.1.30), an awareness which is then elevated to erudition through Polonius’ rhetoric “why day is day, night is night and time is time” (2.2.88). Such awareness of temporal brevity, the unavoidable and corrupting passing of time, can be seen to illustrate Shakespeare’s refusal to be “bound to one circuit of the sun” in his works. By characterizing time’s momentariness, Shakespeare is able to reveal its tormenting potentiality on the individual. In Ophelia’s soliloquy, Shakespeare uses a shift in tense within a single line of prose to express the overwhelming constancy of Ophelia’s lamentation in “Oh, woe is me,//T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” (3.1.161-2). When focalising on the pleasures of the past, Shakespeare uses euphonic phrasing, to create a sense of honeysweet nostalgia wherein she “sucked” on the “honey” of Hamlet’s “musicked vows” (3.1.155). This is given a bittersweet edge when in the present she laments to “see what I see”. This paradox traces the shift from blissful past to fugacious present, drawing on the corruptive potential of time, rendering the present Ophelia self-deprecating “deject and wretched” (3.1.154). The blissful past is corrupted by Shakespeare’s dysphonic “bells jangled out of time and harsh” (3.1.157), illustrating that time is a constant and inescapable source of anxiety in the play.
In order to properly explore the way in which Shakespeare’s utilisation of temporality creates a dialogue with Aristotle’s On Poetics in Hamlet, it is important to recognise the upsurge in emphasis on temporal awareness in the Renaissance period, the epistemological shift within which Shakespeare can be subsequently categorised. Georges Poulet attributes this academic interest in transience as a result of philological scholarship, perceiving the Renaissance man as conscious of the “precarious and fugitive character of each lived moment.” (Studies in Human Time,10). Kastan, in Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, situates Shakespeare within this category, describing his world as “one in which the unidirectional and irreversible flow of time brings an intensified sense of the fragility and precariousness of being” (6). Time, in Hamlet, takes on this anisotropic dynamic, governing the plot and the character’s actions such that they cannot be reduced to neo-Aristotelian unity.
Aristotle’s On Poetics attributes primacy to the “putting together” of events in the plot in a manner wherein “What has a beginning, a middle and an end is a whole” (On Poetics, 24), presenting this as the correct compositional form for tragedy. In chapter 18 of On Poetics, Aristotle divides the plot of a tragic drama into two parts: the desis (δέσις) or 'complication' and the lusis (λύσις) or 'resolution'. The desis is defined as the part of the plot which comes before the metabasis (the turning point, recognition, or agnorisis) and the lusis as the action which follows the metabasis (Pozzo, The impact of Aristotelianism, 224). Aristotle explicitly explains “the entanglement (desis) to be that from which is from the beginning until that part which it changes into good fortune or misfortune (lusis)” (On Poetics, 45). Herein defined is Aristotle’s distinction that the story (desis) must follow a linear temporal progression, tracing the trajectory of the protagonist from good to bad fortune, or vice versa, following a turning point.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet thus problematises Aristotelian notions of time as linear. Time and fortune are fundamentally displaced, for the action of the play is driven by ties to the past; Prince Hamlet’s future bound by his duty to avenge his murdered father. Yet he still trusts in his agency over events, as he bitterly laments “O cursèd spite //That ever I was born to set it right!” (Hamlet,1.5.188-189). Shakespeare’s conjoined allusion to both birth and vengeance, without separation by caesura, defines just how intrinsically linked Hamlet’s “desis” and “lusis” are. This superficially direct concept is convoluted somewhat in Davis’ explanation of Aristotle’s theory of poetic “wholeness” wherein poetry facilitates our ability to “experience our action as a whole before it is whole. This wholeness then becomes a part of the experience itself. Or rather, since the conjunction does not really occur temporally, poetry constitutes the experience.” (On Poetics, Intro, xv-xvi). Whilst seemingly problematic, this theory of “wholeness” argues that poetic art itself bridges the gap between thought and “action” in a way in which serves to separate Hamlet from Richmond’s simplification of Shakespeare’s dramatic intentions. This overlooked nuance in Aristotle’s theory allows, through poetic art, wholeness to be attributed to Shakespeare’s tragedy without strict adherence to Aristotelian plot composition.
Aristotle defines the plot as the “soul of the tragedy” (On Poetics, 22), which should imply that the soul cannot be separated from its body. This is problematic if one turns to the Penguin Classics translation of Poetics for an understanding of “Unity”, which states that “A plot is not (as some think) unified by a single person” (Poetics, 15). When Prince Hamlet proclaims that “The time is out of joint” (1.5.186), he describes time as if it is physically manifested within himself, as if its “heterogeneity feels like a skeletal, or at least deeply somatic, dislocation” (Freeman, Time Binds, 14). This attributes visceral, anatomical qualities to time that do not conform to Aristotelian notions that “characters are second” to the plot (On Poetics, 22), for it merges the dislocated temporality of the play with a dislocated sense of self, making Prince Hamlet the body to Aristotle’s theoretical “soul”. Herein, Shakespeare distorts the Aristotelian concept of plot composition, giving character agency over plot. If indeed, through poetry, we can experience our action as “whole before it is whole”, Shakespeare here delivers the character of Hamlet who is in an anticipatory state, awaiting his wholeness (lusis).
Frank Kermode, much like Aristotle’s desis and lusis, distinguishes temporality in tragedy as having two distinct forms, applying the terms of Chronos; “passing/waiting time” and Kairos “A point in time filled with significance, charged with meaning derived from its relation to the end” (Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 47,87). In Hamlet’s hasty reaction to learning of his father’s murder, he vows to “wipe away all trivial fond records” from the “table” (Hamlet, 1.5.98-9) of his memory, rendering him bound to “the authority or primacy of the past” (Levy, Resistance to Time, 3). Therefore, the play can be seen to be trapped in a state of Chronos, of inaction, of “antagonising instants” (Sypher, 67), Prince Hamlet unavoidably bearing the “whips and scorns of time” (Hamlet, 3.1.69). Prince Hamlet’s personal entrapment is mirrored by Shakespeare in the language “sulphurous and tormenting flames” (1.5.4) where the Ghost is situated in an “eternal blazon” (1.5.21), eternality and flames connoting purgatory. This state of temporal stasis, fueled by the displaced temporality of the protagonist directly refutes Aristotle’s seminal statement that “tragedy is an imitation, not of human beings, but of action” (On Poetics, 20), for it provides a basis for a delay in the “action” of the protagonist, articulated by Shakespeare through Hamlet’s deeply introspective soliloquys.
This reading of Chronos as the limiting factor of the play’s unity of time can be further enhanced by observing the classical theory of Chronos. Cronus, a classical mythological figure, represented the all-consuming nature of destructive, ravaging time: future consumed by past, youth suppressed by older generations, much like Shakespeare’s representation of the relationship between Hamlet and his father. In this context, the Ghost takes the form of a messenger from the realms of purgatorial timelessness, wounding Hamlet’s own sense of time. During the Renaissance, the amalgamation of Cronus and Chronos gave rise to "Father Time" (Beekes, 1652) wielding his harvesting scythe. This draws parallels with the paradox of human existence explored in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12, rendering humanity as secondary to the fate determined by “Time’s” metaphorical “scythe”. Herein, the only way in which Hamlet can escape Chronos is to accept death in its entirety, and transition from contemplation “To be, or not to be” (3.1.55) to realisation (agnorisis), and finally action (lusis). Shakespeare, in act 5, uses Yorick’s Skull as a memento mori, allowing Hamlet to finally recognise the inevitability of death and disintegration of one’s body. This speech converges an enlightened perception of the present with memory of the past “Here hung those lips that I have kissed” (Hamlet, 5.1.177-8), “hung” being indicative of decay and absence. This realisation spurs a nihilistic acceptance of the future “To what base uses we may return” (5.1.189), allowing Hamlet to transition from Chronos to Kairos, and the plot to finally unfold. Following this moment of Kairos, the “dis[joint]ed” sense of time earlier alluded to by Prince Hamlet seems to converge. Crucially, Aristotle recognises the redemptive nature of philosophy, alluding to man’s natural appetite for knowledge, that in “contemplating there is a coincidence of learning and figuring out” (On Poetics, 9), which is arguably a simplification of his agnorisis (matabasis or recognition). In act 5, following the episode with Yorick’s skull Shakespeare gives Hamlet his moment of agnorisis, in his declaration “the readiness is all.” (5.2.237). For Hamlet, this “readiness” allows him relinquish his incessant contemplation; to free himself from Chronos, in both senses of the word; and act to kill Claudius, thus allowing the action of the plot to finally unfold. Hamlet’s finite embrace of death itself allows Denmark under Fortinbras to begin anew, and facilitates the play’s lusis.
Shakespeare, in Hamlet, creates a play which moves beyond the confines of neo-Aristotelian concepts of unity to mediate on the human condition and the inescapability of time’s anisotropy. Unity, in Hamlet, comes not from the idealised conventions of place, time, and action, but is driven, against Aristotelian doctrine that plot has primacy over character, by Prince Hamlet himself. Shakespeare’s tragedy is not a soul without a body; its plot is spurred by the character of Prince Hamlet and his constant attempts to resist “Time’s scythe”. Therefore, it cannot be ascertained that Shakespeare wholly rejects Aristotelian unities: He explores the extent to which they can be challenged.