REVIEW
Mack, Maynard. "The World of Hamlet."
Yale Review 41 (1951-52): 502-23.


Thesis: Mack's subject is "the imaginative environment that the play asks us to enter when we read it or go to see it" (502). He believes that this environment accounts for the "play's peculiar hold on everyone's imagination" (503); because Hamlet "seems to lie closer to the illogical logic of life than Shakespeare's other tragedies" (504) "critics and playgoers alike have been tempted to see . . . an evocation not simply of Hamlet's world but of their own" (507).

Mack identifies three dominant and interrelated attributes of the world of Hamlet: "mysteriousness" (504), "the problematic nature of reality and the relation of reality to appearance" (507), and "human infirmity" (520). Mack goes on to assert that at first Hamlet struggles against his world, but that after his sea voyage "Hamlet accepts his world and we discover a different man" (520); in the last act Hamlet knows that "evil holds the poisoned rapier and the poisoned chalice" and he also knows that "if we win at all, it costs not less than everything" (523).

Representative Paragraphs: Mack's method is to point out how patterns of words, images, and ideas create atmosphere and meaning. Here are some examples:

On the sense of mysteriousness in Hamlet:
Thus the mysteriousness of Hamlet's world is of a piece. It is not simply a matter of missing motivations, to be expunged if only we could find the perfect clue. It is built in. It is evidently an important part of what the play wishes to say to us. And it is certainly an element that the play thrusts upon us from the opening word. Everyone, I think, recalls the mysteriousness of that first scene. The cold middle of the night on the castle platform, the muffled sentries, the uneasy atmosphere of apprehension, the challenges leaping out of the dark, the questions that follow the challenges, feeling out the darkness, searching for identities, for relations, for assurance. "Bernardo?" "Have you had quiet guard?" "Who hath reliev'd you?" "What, is Horatio there?" "What, has this thing appear'd again tonight?" "Looks 'a not like the king?" "How now, Horatio! . . . Is not this something more than fantasy? What think you on't?" "Is it not like the king?" "Why this same strict and most observant watch . . . ?" "Shall I strike at it with my partisan?" "Do you consent we shall acquaint [young Hamlet] with it?"   (506-7)


On the problem of appearance and reality:
A second pattern of imagery springs from terms of painting: the paints, the colorings, the varnishes that may either conceal, or, as in the painter's art, reveal. Art in Claudius conceals. "The harlot's cheek," he tells us in his one aside, "beautied with plastering art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed to my most painted word." Art in Ophelia, loosed to Hamlet in the episode already noticed to which this speech of the king's is prelude, is more complex. She looks so beautiful -- "the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia," Hamlet has called her in his love letter. But now, what does beautified mean? Perfected with all the innocent beauties of a lovely woman? Or "beautied" like the harlot's cheek? "I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another."   (512)


On human frailty:
But the chief form in which the theme of [human frailty] reaches us, it seems to me, is as a profound consciousness of loss. Hamlet's father expresses something of the kind when he tells Hamlet how is "most seeming-virtuous queen," betraying a love which "was of that dignity / That it went hand in hand even / With the vow I made to her in marriage," had chosen to "decline Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine." "O Hamlet, what a falling off was there!" Ophelia expresses it again, on hearing Hamlet's denunciation of love and woman in the nunnery scene, which she takes to be the product of a disordered brain:
   O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
   The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
   Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state,
   The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
   Th' observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down!

The passage invites us to remember that we have never actually seen such a Hamlet -- that his mother's marriage has brought a falling off in him before we meet him. And then there is that further falling off, if I may call it so, when Ophelia too goes mad -- "Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts."   (516-17)


On Hamlet's change of attitude:
Till his return from the voyage he had been trying to act beyond these ["the boundries in which human action, human judgment, are enclosed"], had been encroaching on the role of providence, if I may exaggerate to make a vital point. He had been too quick to take the burden of the whole world and its condition upon his limited and finite self. Faced with a task of sufficient difficulty in its own right, he had dilated it into a cosmic problem -- as indeed every task is, but if we think about this too precisely we cannot act at all. The whole time is out of joint, he feels, and in his young man's egocentricity, he will set it right. Hence he misjudges Ophelia, seeing in her only a breeder of sinners. Hence he misjudges himself, seeing himself a vermin crawling between earth and heaven. Hence he takes it upon himself to be his mother's conscience, though the ghost has warned that this is no fit task for him, and returns to repeat the warning: "Leave her to heaven, / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge." Even with the king, Hamlet has sought to play at God. He it must be who decides the issue of Claudius's salvation, saving him for a more damnable occasion. Now, he has learned that there are limits to the before and after that human reason can comprehend. Rashness, even, is sometimes good. Through rashness he has saved his life from the commission for his death, "and prais'd be rashness for it." This happy circumstance and the unexpected arrival of the pirate ship make it plain that the roles of life are not entirely self-assigned. "There is a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will." Hamlet is ready now for what may happen, seeking neither to foreknow it nor avoid it. "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."   (521-2)


Bottom Line: Clear, persuasive, and eloquent. Also, Mack knows when to say "it seems to me."