George Washington University
Shakespeare and the Double Man
Author(s): Thomas F. Connolly
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1950), pp. 30-35
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University
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SHAKESPEAREAND THE DOUBLE MAN
By THOMAS F. CONNOLLY
I Hamlet and the Double Man
HAT is the value and meaningof Hamlet'smadnessin Shakespeare's
play? Of course the poet was following his sources and brought his
hero's madnessover from them as he did so much else, but it is changed
in the process. This change has led to some discussion as to whether Shakespeare was not in this case following his source rather automatically, without
too much regard for the pertinence, to his work, of some of the aspects of the
older plays. It is pointed out that in the earlier treatments of the legend the
madness is a defensive measure against the suspicions of the king, while in the
Shakespeareversion there is no need for such evasion since there is no suspicion; that, in fact, such suspicion as is generated is the result rather than the
cause of his apparentmadness, and that it is therefore not required by the plot
as Shakespearehandles it. Perhaps it is required by something other than the
plot. It does serve as the excuse for some of Hamlet's more pointed speeches,
speeches which are, ". . . of a happiness that often madness hits on, which
reasonand sanitycould not so prosperouslybe delivered of" (I, ii).
This speech in itself gives a hint of the obvious and immediate dramatic
advantage in having a hero of unsound mind: he may speak more freely, indulge in the more fantastic ironies safely. This could be justificationenough,
but an examination of the other tragedies, beginning with Julius Caesar, indicates that there may be more to it than this. What appears in each of these
plays is that Shakespeare employs a single device to enhance the irony or
tragedy of the hero's situation: he gives him an alter ego, a familiar spirit.
The immediate function of the familiar may vary with the needs of the individual play, but certain things may be said about it which would be true of
all of its different appearances: it may be a creature (or several) of good or
of evil, but it is nearly always sardonic and cynical. It may mock with excellent
advice as does Lear's fool, or deceive as lago does, or goad to crime as do
Jago, Lady Macbeth, the three Witches, and Cassius, but beneath these differences its essential characteristicsremain the same: the alter ego is always complex as opposed to simple in nature, practicalratherthan idealistic, and always,
sooner or later, a little more or less than sane.
Though the readerwill no doubt think of certain additions and inevitable
qualifications,a list of these alter egos would read something like this:
Julius Caesar: Brutus-Cassius.
Hamlet: Hamlet-his own mad side.
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SHAKESPEAREAND THE DOUBLE MAN
31
Othello: Othello-Iago.
Lear: Lear-his "bitterfool".
Macbeth: Macbeth-his wife and the three witches.
By way of further definition, the two sides of the double man are these:
one is brave, honorable, strong, inclined to be conventional and not too bright,
while the other is the devious characteralready described, who places intelligence, even a dark intelligence, above mere honor. His problems too may be
considered as variations on a single theme: the hero is in a position where he
must decide whether to force an issue or wait and see what is going to happen.
It is this which makes Lear the most tragic figure. When the play opens he
has already decided to give up his power, to evade the making of decisions,
and the rest is his punishmentfor making this choice. Talk about Shakespeare's
failure in not fully motivating Lear's move is beside the point; this is not a
play about the making of a choice but of the consequencesof one alreadymade.
In suggesting that this series of plays may be rewardingly studied as
variationson this theme of the double man, there is no intention to imply that
they are nothing more, or even that they were conceived as such, but that the
theme was one which struck Shakespeare,one which he could not keep out of
his later plays. The chronologicalorder of the plays leads to such an impression,
since there seems to be a crystallisationof the idea taking place. In Julius Caesar, the first of the series, the situation is not quite so dear cut, the antithesis
not so striking, and Cassius, though he is envious, devious, and "thinks too
much", is much too sane; his evil is conventionallymotivated comparedto that
of Iago.
What does not appear in this play shows up, as a gift from the sources,
in the next one in order, in Hamlet. One characteristicof the sardonichalf, and
an important one, is his real or apparent madness, which may range from the
jibes of Lear's bitter and beloved fool to the strange, incompletely motivated
evil of Iago. He is that side of man which is hidden from the light of day, but
which cannot be denied. He is the not-quite-normal,and yet the full figure
of the tragic man is empty without him. Under the special privilege many societies have granted to the insane or eccentric,he may take certain liberties with
logic; he may have flashes of illuminating insight which outpace the less spectacular ploddings of the sane; he may see certain uncomfortable truths which
the sane are too sane to see and speak them out in the form of seeming doggerel or veiled oracular statements. He is in fact what is now called the subconscious, though in this case the clinical jargon is unnecessaryand perhaps too
specially connotated. In every case but that of Hamlet the alter ego appears
separately upon the stage. In Julius Caesar he appears but is not completely
realized: in Hamlet the all-important madness is added and the stage is set
for Othello. Hamlet is the double man in one package and he must therefore
talk to himself, be deceived and mocked by himself. He is mad because he
must be his own fool and, like many of the others, he is "but mad north-northwest."
Fortinbras,Laertes and Horatio might be suggested as candidates for the
role of alter ego for Hamlet. They are, however, foils of a more obvious type;
each in his own way is an example of what Hamlet could be but is not: the
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32
THE SHAKESPEAREQUARTERLY
active and unquestioning soldier, the man who is able to act directly, and the
solid, "normal"person. They are good dramatic foils and point up aspects of
his character,but simple contrast is not enough. This can be shown in reverse
by comparing each of them with Jago, for example. There is something ini
Hamlet which plays an lago role, something which leads him to doubts and
rationalizations and eventual defeat, and it is not to be found in any of the
three men mentioned. The only counterpart in Hamlet for such a figure as
Lear's fool is to be found in Hamlet himself. The mockery, the derision,
the foolishness and the mad wisdom are mixed in him. It is true that contrast
is one of the functions of the alter ego, but the contrast is that of what may
be called the "day" and "night" sides of man, and not that of different types
of men.
What the sardonic half says to the hero in any of these plays might in
a modern novel be suggested by the stream-of-consciousnesstechnique or by
the use of dreams. The anxieties of Hamlet, the temptations by Lady Macbeth,
the baseless suspicionsof Othello, are the sort of thing suppressedby the "waking consciousness",by that side of man which accepts the conventions as the
facts of life. In Macbeth both his wife and the witches represent these unconscious motivations. The witches delude as reverie does, by falsely true promises
of success, and Lady Macbeth by her stubborn refusal to foresee moral consequences. This, the latest of the series, seems the most deliberate and comIn the beginning Macplex. Recall the X-like crossing of the plot in AMacbeth.
beth is the one with the imagination; he quails before the deed because he can
envision it before it occurs. His wife complains of what she calls his weakness
because she is incapable of being appalled by an event which has not yet taken
place. But after the murder their positions are reversed: Macbeth, fresh from
the crime, is laconic, even ironic, in his answers to Lennox. He says, "T'was a
rough night." The Lady, faced by the actual fact, soon goes mad. It is then
her turn to make the speech about blood on the hands. In other words, as far
as Macbeth is concerned,his "evil" side has taken command. The prodding of
the wife is no longer needed and she drops from sight for most of the rest
of the play.
To repeat, the problem confronting the main figures in these plays is that
of action versus inaction. The double man is man in the face of the "powers
that be", and they may be within or outside of him. If he abdicatesbefore them,
as Lear did, they pelt him with mud. If he rushes them as did Macbeth, who
had only to wait out the prophecy to be safe, they kill him. If he trusts them
they delude him, as with Othello and Macbeth. And finally, even to hedge
can be fatal: Hamlet.
To repeat, there is no intention here to imply that these plays are reduced
to a formula by this view of them, or that any other problems treated in them
are superficialor secondary.It is offered rather as a point of view which lends
a unity to them without in any way limiting their individuality; which answers
certain questions which can be answered only by taking the series as a whole,
in the same way that a painter's retrospective exhibition throws light on some
of the unsolved problems contained in his earlier works.
When Hamlet is considered by itself, his madness may legitimately be
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SHAKESPEARE
AND THE DOUBLEMAN
33
thought to be nothing more than a valuable bit of stage business, adding to
the mystery and interest of the character.This it is indeed, and as such it is
quite justified. The fact that it can be seen to be something more is an addition
to and not a twisting of the sense. For example Shakespeare'sindebtedness to
Montaigne's "Renaissancescepticism"; for that aspect of Hamlet's character
can be admitted and yet said to be only half of the picture. Hamlet's answer
to the optimistic surety of the Renaissance is contained in his familiar lines
to Horatio (I, v), "There are more things in heaven or earth, Horatio,
than are dreamedof in your philosophy." One must rememberthat these words
are addressed to the one man who stands for the rounded, healthy, human
personality. This is the answer of medievalism to the Renaissance, the line
which could well have been the motto of the Romanticmovement in its reaction
to the sterility of the later neoclassicism, the neo-classicism which owed so
much of its being to the France of Montaigne, the France which, long after
Goethe, had so much difficulty in understanding Shakespeare. There is not
much difference in thinking of the split in the characterof Hamlet as being
that between the conscious and the subconscious,or between the Renaissance
and the medieval man, or for that matter the flesh and the spirit or the soldier
and the artist. The conception is not so limiting: all that is stated is that one
side is of the day and the other of the night.The Renaissanceended by stressing
the conscious overmuch;it pinned all its hopes upon it, and, to use a familiar
simile, the conscious part of the human mind is like the exposed part of an
iceberg, while most of the mass lies submerged.Shakespeare'strue worth does
not lie only in his being a great figure of the Renaissance,but in the fact that
he did not succumbto it, that he recognized the importanceof the submerged
mass.
Similarly, when Othello is considered alone, someone usually raises the
question of the motivation of Jago. Does envy alone account for his unmitigated evil? He seems to be enjoying it for its own sake. Actually it is unexplainable in terms of normalcy. The. motivation of Othello is what must be
explained and this is done by pointing to lago, who is the prime mover. He is
the sardonichalf of Hamlet running rampantand Othello is too much the fool,
more so even than Lear, to take the play out of his hands. For this reason it
is the warped logic of lago which dominates the scene completely until near
the ending of the play, the continuing success of his insanity making it appear
almost sane.
II The Double MAain Western Literature
To insist that the theme of the double man is uniquely in Shakespeare
would overstate the case. The theme of the double man is one of the oldest in
the literature of Western Europe, spoken or written. It is the essence of the
Faust legend and appears in serio-comicform as the tale of Don Quixote and
Sancho. Shakespeare,Cervantes, and Goethe have more in common than their
being the giants of their respective literatures; they rise above them only because they have descended to find the common source beneath them. lagroand
Othello are closely related to Mephistopheles and Faust, and the four find their
ancestryin the medieval division of the "spirit and the flesh." It is no accident
that the leaders of the Romantic movement, with the revival of interest in the
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THE SHAKESPEAREQUARTERLY
darker side of the human personality, all turned to the middle ages and to
Shakespeare,whether they lived in England, Germany or France.
The tradition is still very much alive. When Emerson, among others,
broughtthe Romanticmovement to America, two of his attentive listeners were
Hawthorne and Melville. Each discarded most of the transcendentalismhe
brought with it but kept what was essential. Hawthorne's studies of the conflict between the "heart and the head" and the spirit and the flesh are still
consideredto be peculiarlyAmericanor even Puritanby those who look for no
more than personal "influences."His Ethan Brand is Faustian complete to the
fire which awaits him at the end, and his crime is the same, ambition and
intellectual pride.
Melville's indebtedness to Shakespeare is of course more obvious. The
soliloquies of Ahab in Moby Dick are often in iambic pentameter and Shakespearean in tone and setting. The connection is more than verbal: there is a
great similarity between Ahab and Lear. Both are blasted oaks; both have
given up what is sweet in life to go out and face a storm. Lear has his Kent
and Ahab has Starbuckto remind him that what he is doing is madness. (These
are not alter egos, but symbols of the world of common sense which both men
have left behind.) But these are merely the hints which should tell one to look
for a deeper kinship between the two mad kings. (Ahab too is a king; he has
Atharpoon as a scepter and wields it as such.) That Ahab and Lear are so alike
makes Melville's point all the sharperbecauseAhab is not a twin but a mirrorimage of Lear; he is Lear in reverse. Lear is destroyed because he gives up
his power and manhood; Ahab because he will recognize nothing but power.
He has his familiar in the dark Fedallah, the mysterious Oriental who is describedaptly as a creatureof darkness,who remainsfor most of the trip hidden
in the hold. There is the suggestion that Ahab and Fedallah share some esoteric
wisdom for which they have been willing to give up the green earth, the "insular Tahiti" which Melville says each man carrieswithin him. Reminiscentof
the witches in Macbeth, there is a fortune teller who tells Ahab the same kind
of "truelie", leading him to believe that he can die only by hanging.
The study has been continued, most notably and deliberately by Thomas
Mann, whose Doctor Faustus is just the latest of a series devoted to the problem of the divided man, the problem of the artist against the world or against
himself. Thomas Wolfe called his wandering and insatiable protagonist "Faustian."JamesJoycein Ulysses tells of Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom. Dedalus is all Jesuitical intellect on the one side of the modest hero Bloom, while
Molly is obviously the flesh. The list of examples could be multiplied but each
one would demand some qualificationand defense, and those already mentioned should indicate that the theme is a continuing one.
They are mentioned becauseit should be possible to use these works as we
have used the series of Shakespeare'stragedies for the light they throw upon
Hamlet, and perhaps arrive at a clearer statement of the nature of the underlying myth. The superficialcharacteristicsof the Romantic movement have by
now been rubbedoff by the passage of time (the noble savage, nature always
beautiful, the sickly Chattertontype of hero), and for this reason many critics
have maintained that the movement itself is ended. Most textbooks give the
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SHAKESPEAREAND THE DOUBLE MAN
35
date of its death as 1837, which is neatly enough the date of Emerson'saddress
The American Scholar. The "Nature" of Melville, like that of Shakespeare,is
both good and evil. The calm and beautiful sea is full of starving sharks. Hell
is always just beneath Ahab's feet, and the devil right by his side, as it was
for those who composed the original Faust legend, when the Gargoyles were
placed on the sides of the cathedrals as constant reminders of how far away
was God and how near were all the shapes and kinds of devils. The Mary cult
was the natural outgrowth of such a state of mind, an intercessorbeing needed
to plead man's case, something human in the divine household.
This is not a Christianmyth in the currently accepted sense of the word
but seems rather to have been a reaction to a stern and unearthly dogma. The
Christianideal, as taught by the various churches,held that the flesh was evil,
the "spirit"good. In this myth, on the other hand, the constant insistence is on
the opposite: the spirit which appearsin it is nearly always evil and of the underworld,while the flesh is salvation, and the flesh is usually female. In Joyce's
Ulysses it is Bloom's return to Molly and her final acceptance of him which
make this the one happy ending in all the studies of the subject.The implication
seems to be that it is the only possible happy ending. It is the one which is offered to Ahab by Starbuck,which his pride will not permit him to accept. (It
should not be necessary at this point to mention Lear's renunciation of Cordelia.) There is Marguerite in Faust, Ahab's absent wife, and Hester in the
Scarlet Letter. (It was not Hester who ruined Dimmesdale, but his Puritan
denial of her.) The question is the same in all of its various forms. Shall
Ahab follow Starbuckback to his wife, or listen to the whispers of Fedallah?
Shall Othello believe Desdemona or his Mephistopheles? Where the woman
does not appear, or where as in Lady Macbeth she chooses masculinity, the
story is worked out by the man alone.
And for a reversal, for sheer play, the master offers you Caliban and Ariel,
and in his role as magician pokes fun at what here at least are all too obviously
the "spirit"and the "flesh."
Brooklyn, New York
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