AC Bradley’s Hamlet

AC Bradley’s 1904 lectures on Shakespearean tragedy are deservedly regarded as classics of criticism. His analysis of Hamlet is deservedly famous, particularly his discussion of the famed problem of Hamlet’s delay.

He classifies theories of the delay into several large categories. First are those that suggest that Hamlet delays mainly or primarily because of external circumstances – the risks of moving ahead with only the ghost’s word for it, the need to bring the King to public justice and therefore the need to expose the king’s guilt before the entire court, and so on. Bradley says that the theory is plausible until one reads the play. Contrary to this theory, Hamlet never describes any external obstacles to the execution of the ghost’s instructions, assumes he has the means and the right to carry out those instructions, he never speaks of intending to bring Claudius to public justice.

A second sort of theory attributes Hamlet’s delay to moral scruples. Bradley admits that Hamlet attributes the delay in part to conscience (5.2.63ff) but that this is neither nor the main reason cited for the delay. Further, Hamlet appears in the main to consider killing Claudius a moral duty. One might shift the ground a bit to suggest that Hamlet is unconsciously ambivalent about this duty: “in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a moral repulsion to the deed.” Bradley considers this a stronger position, but cannot accept it for a variety of reasons, among them the assumption that the ghost’s instructions are not to be obeyed. He thinks it “clear that, whatever we in the twentieth century may think about Hamlet’s duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he ought to have obeyed the Ghost.”

Bradley also considers what he calls the “sentimental” view of Hamlet, made popular by a phrase from Goethe, according to which he is “a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like Shelley’s and a voice like Mr Tree’s.” (I have no idea who “Mr Tree” is supposed to be, but that’s still a very funny sentence.) As Bradley rightly points out, this view won’t stand a moment’s scrutiny: Hamlet freely insults Claudius and runs rings around Polonius, is vicious with Ophelia and his mother, cheerfully sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern off to their deaths in England, and so on. This is no wilting flower; the action-hero-Hamlet of Last Action Hero , meant as a parody, is closer to the play than this theory.

As something of a variation on this, Coleridge and Schlegel proposed the view that Hamlet delayed because he was an intellectual who “loses himself in labyrinths of thought.” Again, this fails to account for the active young man we actually see in the text.

In place of all these, Bradley proposes that Hamlet delays because of melancholy. This was not his usual state of mind; it is not mainly a “habitual excess of reflectiveness,” but a temporary depression that paralyzes him in contempt for everything – the world, the flesh, and himself. Bradley comes near to saying that Hamlet was bi-polar: “one would judge that by temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, too rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it was joyous or depressed.” This is what Elizabethans would have described as a melancholy disposition, and Hamlet’s own bout of melancholia was sparked by the “exceptional strain” that faced him with the sudden death of his father and the quick remarriage of his mother. When the ghost gives him a charge to set right the disjointed times, he is already deep in melancholy, and therefore cannot respond with his normal vigor.

For Bradley, this “disgust at life and everything in it, himself included – a disguist which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy” explains everything. He explains his bursts of energy and even delight (eg, when the players show up); it accounts for his “savage irritability”; it accounts for his outbursts of “transitory, almost hysterical, and quite fruitless emotion.” It, finally, accounts for the fact that he does not understand his own inaction, and reproaches himself in dismay over his unwillingness to avenge an honored father.