Hamlet as a Summing-Up

A few days ago I quoted Harold C. Goddard explaining how Hamlet precipitates out among so many characters in Troilus and Cressida.  But Hamlet is not just a beginning.  Others have pointed out that Shakespeare wrote the play at just about the midpoint of his career, and can be seen as using the character as on occasion to tell us everything he had learned about the theatre.  Here Goddard itemizes how Hamlet encapsulates what has gone before:

He has the passion of Romeo ("Romeo is Hamlet in love," says Hazlitt), the dash and audacity of Hotspur, the tenderness and genius for friendship of Antonio, the wit, wisdom, resourcefulness, and histrionic gift of Falstaff, the bravery of Faulconbridge, the boyish charm of the earlier Hal at his best, the poetic fancy of Richard II, the analogic power and meditative melancholy of Jaques, the idealism of Brutus, the simplicity and human sympathy of Henry VI, and, after the assumption of his antic disposition, the wiliness and talent for disguise of Henry IV and the cynicism and irony of Richard III--not to mention gifts and graces that stem more from certain of Shakespeare's heroines than from his heroes--for, like Rosalind, the inimitable boy-girl, Hamlet is an early draft of a new creature on the Platonic order. ... Hamlet has been pronounced both a hero and a dreamer, hard and soft, cruel and gentle, brutal and angelic, like a lion and like a dove.  One by one, these judgments are all wrong.  Together they are all right--

These contraries such unity do hold ...

So Goddard  in The Meaning of Shakespeare vol. 1, 332 (1951).  I  may seem that I'm at risk of quoting the whole book.  Not really.  I could be tempted but the fact is that anything I leave behind is as rich as what I quote.

Seeking Hamlet in Another Place

They say that the actor who plays Hamlet gets to go into heaven by a private door.  Harold C. Goddard offers a hint as to why as he goes to seek Hamlet in what was perhaps the next (or, less likely the next previous) play that Shakespeare wrote:

...Troilus and Cressida was evidently a part of the same creative wave that produced Hamlet. … [T]he plays are in a sense intellectual twins, or, better, rhe lessser a sort of intellectual satellite of the greater. The leading characters of Troilus can be conceived of with equal ease as the elements or fragments of the Prince of Denmark (Even an element or a fragment of Hamlet surpasses an ordinary man.). Hector, for instance, is Hamlet's modety and nobility ombined with his inability to live up to his convidtions; Troilus is his alternating feminine fineness and savage masculine fury; Achilles his brooding and inaction transformed in the end to their opposite; Ulysses is his intellect and craft; Therites hiscontempt and incredible coarseness; Pandarus his wit and scorn of innocence. All this cannot be coincidence. 

--Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 2, 4 (1951)

The Gravely See

I took a night train along the edge of the Gobi Desert last year. The bunks were hard and I spent a good deal of the night standing between cars looking out at the vast wasteland under the stars. Apparently "Gobi" means “gravel,” or in any event, it certainly should. Boulders, in all direction boulders. Not the kind of place you want to wake up after a bad drunk.

The Voyage and Travel of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, is perhaps the granddaddy of all modern travel literature. He is commonly understood as a pack of lies—the source, inter alia, of the stories that Othello used to woo Desdemona:

And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

--Shakespeare, Othello, I, 3

On the other hand...

….In this contree, is the See that men clepen the Gravely See, that is alle Gravelle and Sond, with outen any drope of Watre: And it ebbeth and flowethe in grete Wawes, as other Sees don: and it is never stille ne in pes, in no mater cesoun. And no man may passé that See be Navye, ne be no maner of craft: and therefore may ne man knowe, what Lond is beyond that See. . . .

And a 3 iourneys long fro that See, ben gret Mountaynes; out of the whiche gothe out a gret Flood, that comethe out of Paradys: and it is fulle of precious Stones, with outen ony drope of Water: and it rennethe throghe the Desert, on that o side; so that it makethe the See gravely: and it berethe into that See, and there it endethe. . . . And anon as thei ben entred in to the gravely See, thei ben seyn no more; but lost for evere more.

--Chapter XXVII Of the Ryall Estate of Prestre John
Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville, Kt.