Paper : Cultural Studies
Roll No. : 13
Enrollment Number : 306920200009
Email ID : jethavanidhi8@gmail.com
Batch : 20-22( MA SEM- 3)
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja KrishnaKumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Cultural Studies in Practice : Two Characters in Hamlet:
Marginalization with a Vengeance.
What is Cultural Studies ?
Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.
Two Characters in Hamlet:
Marginalization with a Vengeance
In several instances earlier in this chapter we noted the cultural
and new historical emphases on power relationships. For
example, we noted that cultural critics assume "oppositional"
roles in terms of power structures, wherever they might be
found. Veeser, we pointed out, credited the new historicists
with dealing with "questions of politics, power, indeed on allmatters that deeply affect people's practical lives" (ix). And of
course there are the large emphases on power in the matter of
fonathan Swift's Laputa, as previously noted.
Let us now approach Shakespeare's Hamlet with a view to
seeing power in its cultural context.
Shortly after the play within the play, Claudius is talking pri-
vately with Rosencranttz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's fellow
students from Wittenberg (III.iii). In response to Claudius's
plan to send Hamlet to England, Rosencrantz delivers a speech
that-if read out of context-is both an excellent set of
metaphors (almost in the shape of a sonnet) and a summation
of the Elizabethan concept of the role and power of kingship:
The singular and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armor of the mind
To keep itselfrom noyance, but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. lt is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the King sigh but with a general troun.,,,,.,,,,
Taken alone, the passage is a thoughtful and imagistically suc-
cessful passage, worthy of a wise and accomplished statesman.
But how many readers and viewers of the play would rank
this passage among the best-known lines of the play-with
Hamlet's soliloquies, for instance, or with the king's effort to
pray, or even with the aphorisms addressed by Polonius to his
son Laertes? We venture to say that the passage, intrinsically
good if one looks at it alone, is simply not well known.
why?
Attention to the context and to the speaker gives the answer.
Guildenstern had just agreed that he and Rosencrantz would
do the king's bidding. The agreement is only a reaffirmation of
what they had told the king when he first received them at
court (II.ii). Both speeches are wholly in character, for Rosen-
crarttz and Cuildenstern are among the jellyfish of Shake-
speare's characters. Easy it is to forget which of the two speaks
which lines-indeed easy it is to forget most of their lines alto-
gether. The two are distinctly plot-driven: empty of personality,
sycophantic in a sniveling waf, eager to curry favor with
power even if it means spying on their erstwhile friend.
Weakly they admit, without much skill at denial, that they
"were sent for" . Even less successfully they try to play on
Hamlet's metaphorical"pipe," to know his "stops," when they
are forced to admit that they could not even handle the literal
musical instrument that Hamlet shows them . Still later
these nonentities meet their destined "non-beingness," as it
were, when Hamlet, who can play the pipe so much more effi-
ciently, substitutes their names in the death warrant intended
for him.
If ever we wished to study two characters who are marginal-
ized, then let us look upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The meanings of their names hardly match what seems to be
the essence of their characters. Murray J. Levith, for example,
has written that "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are from the
Dutch-German: literally, 'garland of roses' and 'golden star.'
Although of religious origin, both names together sound
singsong and odd to English ears. Their jingling gives them a
lightness, and blurs the individuality of the characters they
label".
Lightness to be sure. Harley Granville-Barker once wrote in
an offhand way of the reaction these two roles call up for
actors. Commenting on Solanio and Salarino fuorn The Mer-
chant of Venice, he noted that their roles are "cursed by actors as
the two worst bores in the whole Shakespearean canon; not
excepting, even those other twin brethren in nonentity, Rosen-
crantz and Guildenstern" .
Obvious too is the fact that the two would not fit the social
level or have the level of influence of those whom Harold Jen-
kins reports as historical persons bearing these names: "These
splendidly resounding names, by contrast with the unlocalized
classical ones, are evidently chosen as particularly Danish.
Both were common among the most influential Danish fami-
lies, and they are often found together" He cites various
appearances of the names among Danish nobles, and even
notes the appearance of the names as Wittenberg students
around 7590.
No, these details do not seem to fit the personalities and gen-
eral vacuity of Shakespeare's two incompetents. So let us look
elsewhere for what these two characters tell us. Let us review
what they do, and what is done to them. Simply, they have been
students at Wittenberg. They return to Denmark, apparently
at the direct request of Claudius (II.ii). They try to pry from
Hamlet some of his inner thoughts, especially of ambition and
frustration about the crowrl (ILii). Hamlet foils them. They
crumble before his own questioning. As noted above, Claudius
later sends them on an embassy with Hamlet, carrying a letter to
the King of England that would have Hamlet summarily exe-
cuted. Though they may not have known the contents of that
"grandcommission," Hamlet's suspicion of them is enough for
him to contemplate their future-and to "trust them as adders
fanged":
They must sweep my way,
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard. And 't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them to the moon: Oh, 'tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
In a moment of utmost trickery on his own part, Hamlet
blithely substitutes a forged document bearing their names
rather than his as the ones to be "put to sudden death,/Not
shriving time allowed" . When Horatio responds laconi-
cally with "So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't," Hamlet
is unmoved:
Why, man, they did make love to this employment.
They are not near my conscience. Their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow.
'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensdd points
Of mighty opposites. And with that Shakespeare-as well as Hamlet-is done with
these two characters. "They are not near [Hamlet's] con-
science."
Again, why? For one thing, Hamlet may well see himself as
righting the moral order, not as a murderer, and much has been
said on that matter. But let us take note of another dimension:
the implications for power. Clearly Hamlet makes reference in
the lines just noted to the "mighty opposites" represented by
himself and Claudius. Clearly, too, the ones of "baser nature"
who "[made] love to this employment" do not matter much in
this struggle between powerful antagonists. They are pawns
for Claudius first, for Hamlet second. It is almost as if Ham-
let had tried before the sea voyage to warn them of their
insignificant state; he calls Rosencrantz a sponge, provoking
this exchange:
Hervrsr: . . . Besides, to be demanded of a sponge! What
replication should be made by the son of a king?
RosErrrcru.xrz: Take you me for a sponge, my lord?
Harvrrr: Aye, siq, that soaks up the King's countenance,
his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the King
best service in the end. He keeps them, like an ape, in the
corner of his jaw, first mouthed, to be last swallowed.
\A/hen he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeez-
ing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again.
So they are pawns, or sponges, or monkey food: the message of
power keeps coming through. Thus, they do not merit a pang
of conscience. True, there may be some room for believing that
at first they intended only good for their erstwhile schoolfellow
(see, for example, Bertram Joseph ). But their more constant
motive is to please the king, the power that has brought them
here. Their fate, however, is to displease mightily the prince,
who will undermine them and "hoist [them] with [their] own
petard."
For such is power in the world of kings and princes. Nor is it
merely a literary construct. England had known the effects of
such power off and on for centuries. Whether it was the depos-
ing and later execution of Richard II, or the crimes alleged of
Richard III, or the beheading of a Thomas More or of a wife or
two, or the much more recent actions in and around the court
of Elizabeth: in all these cases, power served policy. Witness
especially the fate of the second Earl of Essex, whose attempt at
rebellion led to his own execution in 1601, and even more esPe-
cially the execution of Elizabeth's telative, Mary Queen of
Scots, who had been imprisoned by Elizabeth for years before
Elizabeth signed the death warrant. A generation later, another
king, Charles I, would also be beheaded. With historical actions
such as these, we can understand why Shakespeare's work
incorporates power struggles. (For instances of power relative
to the "other" during Elizabeth's time, and for a discussion of
Elizabeth's actions relative to Essex and Mary Queen of Scots,
see the essay by Steven Mullaney, "Brothers and Others, or the
Art of Alienation," )
Claudius was aware of power, clearly, when he observed of
Hamlet's apparent madness that "Madness in great ones must
not unwatched go" (III.i). With equal truth Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern might have observed that power in great ones
also must not unwatched go.
To say, then, that the mighty struggle between powerful
antagonists is the stuff of this play is hardly original. But our
emphasis in the present reading is that one can gain a further
insight into the play, and indeed into Shakespeare's culture, by
thinking not about kings and princes but about the lesser per-
sons caught up in the massive oppositions.
It is instructive to note that the reality of power reflective of
Shakespeare's time might in another time and in another cul-
ture reflect a radically different worldview. Let us enrich our
response to Hamlet by looking at a related cultural and philo-
sophical manifestation from the twentieth century. In the twen-
tieth century the dead, or never-living, Rosencrantz and Guil-
denstern were resuscitated by Tom Stoppard in a fascinating
re-seeing of their existence, or its lack. In Stoppard's version,
they are even more obviously two ineffectual pawns, seeking
constantly to know who they are, why they are here, where
they are going. Whether they "are" at all may be the ultimate
question of this modern play. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstetn
Are Dead, Stoppard has given the contemporary audience a
play that examines existential questions in the context of a
whole world that may have no meaning at all. Although it is
not our intention to examine that play in great detail, suffice it
to note that the essence of marginalization is here: in this view,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are archetypal human beings
caught up on a ship-spaceship Earth for the twentieth or the
twenty-first century-that leads nowhere, except to death, a
death for persons who are already dead. If these two characters
were marginalized in Hamlet, they are even more so in Stop-
pard's handling. If Shakespeare marginalized the powerless in
his own version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard
has marginalized us all in an era when-in the eyes of some-
all of us are caught up in forces beyond our control. In other
words, a cultural and historical view that was Shakespeare's is
radically reworked to reflect a cultural and philosophical view
of another time----our own.
And if the philosophical view of Stoppard goes too far for
some, consider a much more mundane phenomenon of the
later twentieth century-and times to come, we expect. We
allude to the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns, the little peo-
ple, who have been caught up in the corporate downsizing and
mergers in recent decades-the effects on these workers when
multinational companies move factories and offices around the
world like pawns on a chessboard. Not Louis XIV's "U6tat:
c'est moi," but "Power: it is capital."
Whether in Shakespeare's version or Stoppard's, Rosen-
ctantz and Guildenstern are no more than what Rosencrantz
called a "small annexment," a"petty consequence," mere noth-
ings for the "massy wheel" of kings.
Citation :
Abrams, M H, and Geoffrey G. Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston, Mass: Thomson Wadsworth, 1999.
Guerin, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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