Authors: Clive James
Since these were the very people that the less judicious republican activists had grown fond of calling unpatriotic, the result of the referendum can be seen as a blessing for everyone, and
especially for the republicans. Had they won, they would have faced the impossible task of presenting, to an audience they had only just finished insulting, a model of the state on which they
themselves had not yet managed to agree. Now they have time to clarify matters both for themselves and others, although the latter part of the task, especially, will require listening as well as
talking. We can look forward to a battle of the books, in which books written by journalists are bound to play a key role. As this article goes to press, the justly lauded Australian expatriate
journalist Philip Knightley is about to publish his
magnum opus
called
Australia: A Biography
. I have seen the unbound proofs, which teem with pertinent facts and original
judgements. Reviewing the finished work will take an article not much shorter than the book, but perhaps I can jump the gun legitimately by citing a real-life conversation Knightley had with
Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Knightley records how Kapuscinski assured him that there was an answer for despairing citizens of the quondam Soviet satellite countries who now found it impossible to live the way Americans
would like. There
was
such a thing as a just society that was also free: it was called Australia. Knightley believes it, and the belief makes his book a labour of love even at its most
caustic. As I write these last lines here in London, Knightley has just said in the
Sunday Times
that Australia seems so attractive to live in now that he wonders if he was right to leave.
I know what he means, but the fact remains that we all remain: nobody leaves, and nobody forgets. As Knightley recalled in his contribution to
The Best Australian Essays
1999
, he
once, so very long ago, pestered Menzies for a quote outside Kingsford-Smith airport in Sydney. ‘Young man, I don’t know you,’ said Ming. ‘I have not been introduced to you,
and I have no wish so to be.’ Travel as far and as long as you like, you can from your mind a moment like that banish never.
Australian Review of Books
, September 2000
In the years of my apprenticeship I devoted a lot of effort to making writing sound like speech. Ideally, I think, any kind of sentence, at any level of ambition, should obey
the rule of never needing to be read again to get the sense. If it can obey that rule – which is the rule of speech – then it is more likely to invite being read again to get more of
its meaning. But there is still a difference between prose written to be read and prose written to be read out. Prose designed in the first instance to be spoken will tend to be much more linear in
construction, and thus susceptible to – because more tolerant of – rhetorical tricks. For the pieces reproduced in this section, I don’t claim the title of oratory, but I do hope
to avoid the accusation of rhetoric. One of them is a television script, on the subject of
Hamlet
, whose hero warned about the negative effects of sawing the air with one’s hand. It
is a piece I might have reproduced earlier, but thought to leave aside because at the time I still believed there were no exceptions to the rule that words written to pictures could not survive
being melted out of the amalgam. But on second thoughts, the pictures for this
Hamlet
script were pretty skimpy – I wandered around castles of the type that Shakespeare ‘must
have’ known about even if he never actually entered them, etc. – and a lot of people kindly wrote to say that they would like to possess the script in a less unwieldy form. Eventually,
of course, one hopes that the audience feels the same way about anything one writes to be spoken. Indeed I can’t think of any other way to be impressive, as a would-be latter-day Pericles,
except
to say something that sounds more carefully composed than it needs to be – which is practically the definition of good writing anyway. Whether these pieces pass that test I
leave the reader to judge, but the reader can be sure that I was trying hard. The Anzac Day address, for example, is the kind of thing nobody should ever take on unless he has a fair idea of what
he wants to say, and a better than fair idea of how to get it said. People remember. Admittedly it is said that the people who actually heard Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg forgot every word
of it, but that just proves the favour he did us by allowing it to be reprinted. (Sir Kingsley: ‘Yes, but
you
aren’t Abraham Lincoln,
are
you?’)
Fifteen years ago I was an undergraduate at Cambridge and then later on I stuck around for a while as a postgraduate. I hope I was too weatherbeaten to fall for the mystique
that these old dens of privilege supposedly generate, but I can’t deny that I’ve got the sort of affection for Cambridge that anybody feels for a place where he read a lot and thought a
lot and wasted a lot of time. Hamlet feels the same way about his university – Wittenberg.
Hamlet has to act out his destiny on the sleet-spattered battlements of Elsinore, while Horatio makes regular trips back to Wittenberg for the port and walnuts and the relative safety of
academic intrigue. Many a time in Fleet Street, as I’ve sat there sucking my typewriter and waiting desperately for inspiration, I’ve envied those of my contemporaries who stayed on to
become academics – the Horatios. In other words, I identify with Hamlet. In my mind’s eye, he even looks a bit like me. Perhaps a couple of stone lighter, with blond hair and more of
it: one of those rare Aussies who happen to fence quite well and stand first in line of succession to the throne of Denmark.
I don’t think this is mad conceit because I think all men and most women who’ve ever read or seen the play feel that its hero is a reflection of themselves. What’s more, I
think Shakespeare felt the same way. All his characters in all his plays – men or women, heroes or villains – are aspects of himself because his was a universal self and he knew it
inside out. Shakespeare was everybody. But Hamlet is probably the character who comes closest to reflecting Shakespeare’s whole self. When I think of what Shakespeare was like, I think of
Hamlet. Shakespeare probably didn’t behave like that, and he almost certainly didn’t talk like that. Hamlet talks a great deal and Shakespeare probably spent most of his time listening.
At the end of the night’s revelry in the tavern, he was probably the only one sober and the only one silent. Nor was Shakespeare famous for being indecisive. From what little we know of him,
he was a practical man of affairs. But he was a practical man of affairs in the theatre, which gave unlimited scope to his imagination. He was an art prince, like Michelangelo. If he’d been
the other kind of prince, his imagination would have become his enemy, the enemy of action.
In Shakespeare’s time, the biggest question of the day was how the Prince should rule. When
Hamlet
was being written, as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth, the
stable reign of Queen Elizabeth, amid universal trepidation, was drawing to its end. The Earl of Essex, ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form, the observed of all observers’, had
dished himself through not knowing how to do what when. Essex died on the block somewhere about the time that Hamlet was being born on the page. Shakespeare was a keen student of these weighty
matters. He was a keen student of everything. Not that
he
ever went to university. His university was the theatre. The same has held true for a lot of our best playwrights, right down to
the present day. Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard – they were all educated in the university of life. Shakespeare was a gigantic natural intellect who had no more need of a university than Einstein
had, who didn’t go to one either. But Shakespeare did have a contemplative mentality. We know that much for certain because we’ve heard so little about him. Only in the theatre did
Shakespeare create experience; in the outside world he was content to reflect upon it.
Shakespeare knew that he was a man of outstanding gifts. Talent of that magnitude is never modest, although it is almost always humble. He knew that he could dream up a whole kingdom and breathe
so much life into it that it would live in men’s minds, perhaps for ever. But he also knew that he didn’t have what it took to rule a real kingdom for a week. He lacked the limitations.
He wasn’t simple enough, and it was out of that realization that he created Hamlet, who is really a changeling. Hamlet is what would happen if a great poet grew up to be a prince. He might
speak great speeches, but the native hue of resolution would be ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’.
‘To be, or not to be’ – I wish I’d said that. By now that speech has been translated into every major language on earth and most of the minor ones, and it is remarkable
how the first line always seems to come out sounding the same. ‘
Sein, oder nicht sein
,’ runs the German version, ‘
das ist die Frage
,’ which perhaps lacks
the fresh charm of the English subtitle in the recent Hindi film version – ‘Shall I live, or do myself in? I do not know.’ Today, Hamlet belongs to the world. He’s come a
long way from Elsinore. And there’s no reason why not. After all, Shakespeare not only didn’t go to university, he didn’t go to Denmark, either.
The plot he inherited. A Scandinavian scholar called Saxo Grammaticus wrote an early version. Hamlet was called Amleth and his wicked uncle Claudius was called Feng, who sounds like the leading
heavy in
Flash Gordon Conquers Denmark
. Saxo’s story was the basis for a later English stage version by Kyd, of
Spanish Tragedy
fame. Shakespeare took over the property and
transformed it out of all comparison, although not out of recognition; that old warhorse of a plot is still there inside it. Shakespeare civilized it. He moved it inside the mind and inside the
house. He updated
Hamlet
into the Elizabethan age.
One of the things that makes Shakespeare a great man of the theatre is that he knew the real thing when he saw it. He knew that power couldn’t be wished out of the world. If power were
used wisely and firmly, then everyone might thrive. If it were mismanaged, corruption ensued as surely as rats brought plague, and the whole State went rotten. Shakespeare believed in order and
degree. He believed in justice, too, but he didn’t think there was any hope of getting it unless the civil fabric was maintained. The idea of social breakdown was abhorrent to him. He knew
that he was a kind of prince himself, but he had no illusions about how long his own kingdom would last if the real one fell into disarray. To Shakespeare, Hamlet’s tragedy was not just
personal but political. Like Prince Hal in an earlier play and like Mark Antony in a later one, or even King Lear, Hamlet has responsibilities. And because Hamlet can’t meet those
responsibilities he gets a lot of good people killed for nothing and loses his kingdom to the simple but determined Fortinbras.
Nowadays we tend to see Hamlet’s blond head surrounded by the flattering nimbus of nineteenth-century Romanticism, which held that Hamlet was a sensitive plant with a soul too fine for the
concerns of this world. But Shakespeare was too realistic to be merely romantic. And, of course, he was too poetic to be merely realistic. He knew that there was more in this world than the mere
exercise of power. He could feel it within himself – imagination, the supreme power. But even that had its place. In the wrong place it could have tragic consequences. The first reason Hamlet
hesitates is dramatic. If Fortinbras were the play’s hero, it would be all over in five minutes instead of five acts, with Fortinbras heading for the throne by the direct route – over
Claudius’s twitching corpse. But the second reason Hamlet hesitates is that he has puzzled his own will by thinking too precisely on the event.
Throughout history, the thoughtful onlooker has been astonished at the man of action’s empty head. Napoleon and Hitler, to take extreme examples, did the unthinkable because they lacked
the imagination to realize that it couldn’t be done. With Hamlet, it’s the opposite. More than 300 years before Freud, Montaigne, a great student of the human soul, whose essays
Shakespeare knew intimately, identified the imagination as the cause of impotence. Because Hamlet can’t stop thinking, he can’t start moving. Hence his melancholy. Happiness has been
defined as a very small, very cheap cigar named after him, but really Hamlet is as sad as a man can be. He’s doubly sad because of his capacity for merriment. Clowns don’t want to play
Hamlet half as much as Hamlet wants to play the clown, but always the laughter trails off. He loses his mirth and the whole world with it. He does this with such marvellous words that he stuns us
into admiration. No actor can resist turning Hamlet’s defeat into a victory.
From the moment the part was there to be played, every important actor has looked on his own interpretation of Hamlet as defining him not just as a talent but as a human being. And every Hamlet
has studied the Hamlet before him in an almost unbroken succession from that day to this. Burbage, the original Hamlet, gave way to Joseph Taylor; Taylor gave way to Betterton. Pepys saw Betterton
play Hamlet in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in 1661, and said that Betterton played the Prince’s part beyond imagination, ‘the best part, I believe, that ever man played’. Pepys
spent a whole afternoon learning ‘To be, or not to be’ by heart. And as the seventeenth century became the eighteenth, Betterton was still playing Hamlet in his seventieth year, when
Steele saw him and said that, for action, he was perfection. Hamlet was at centre stage all over the world. In London he was at Covent Garden, he was in the Haymarket, but, above all, he was at
Drury Lane, where great actor after great actor strove to convince the audience that to play Hamlet stood as far above ordinary acting as Hamlet in the play stands above the Players.