Rebecca West as Critic

...just as we are told that "The Trial describes the last days of a bank clerk," although Kafka takes pains to show that K.'s position is higher than this, is a "comparatively high post" which he must hold if the gradual attrition of his dignity is to be made tragic...

...is as loose as to say that "No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for Hamlet...

...No, this sort of slipshod after-dinner chat simply will not do, not even as the Terry lectures at Yale...

...in her pages, Hamlet now dies saying, "The rest is silenced" {sic...

...Of course Hamlet develops—purifies himself for his revenge, in Johnson's reading—and maintains his identity as a human being by doing so...

...In the same way, Laertes is seen as also "subject to lust" on the basis of a father's quite natural suspicions...

...The interpretation of the Queen is equally superficial, while the picture of Hamlet as lustful owner of Ophelia's body vulgarizes the entire relationship and makes nonsense of any sensitive reading of Hamlet's words about Ophelia at the grave, of his letters, and so on...

...an intemperate speech by Henry IV, whom Shakespeare depicted as a particular character and a vacillating one, is taken as representative of what "Shakespeare regarded as the royal mode...

...Miss West then concludes with two alarmingly cavalier studies of Proust and Kafka...

...The Venables," "The Passionate Land" Rebecca West's new book turns out to be a set of loosely connected belles lettres dealing with the literary "sense that there exists, outside this world, a system of values different from any established by humanity, and that this system is superior to ours...

...We are told that the lovingly drawn servant Frangoise in Proust's opus is insensitive, ignoring Franchise's tears over the kitchenmaid's confinement...

...The point of her bawdy songs in the insanity scene is no longer, then, a touchingly ironic reversal of character, while to deny Ophelia any "affection" in the face of Hamlet's, Gertrude's and Polonius's beliefs to the contrary is ridiculous...

...So much for Miss West's impressions...

...In doing so, her own thought is shown to lack rigor, too...

...Ignoring generations of Shakespeare critics dissatisfied with the "thought-sick" legend propagated by Goethe and Coleridge, down to Stoll, Nicoll and even Jones (whose rather romantically Freudian classification of "abulia" allows Hamlet considerable resolution)—to say nothing of a recent critic who finds the play a projection of Claudius's "irresolution...

...Shades of Frank Harris haunt us in her equally arbitrary treatment of the history plays...

...We are next supposed to read Hamlet's attitude to the Ghost as flippant, since he uses terms such as "old mole" and "truepenny," although this establishes an "antic disposition" before Hamlet puts it on (Jones) and ignores the respectful speech with which the act ends—-"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit...

...Ophelia herself shows affection in Act III, ii, 163, and to ignore this passage displays ignorance of the whole purpose of the Elizabethan soliloquy...

...The exercise of power, on the human level, draws man from this submission to higher authority and reduces his activity to a contest of wills in a "court of kings...

...The whole problem of religious orthodoxy in the cathedral scene in this work is quite missed by Miss West...

...Possibly to fit her highly contemporary argument, Miss West sees Hamlet as a static character, a "bad man" because he was out to kill both soul and body of his enemy (although this is "good,'' if she wants him to obey the Ghost properly...

...Miss West is an important political journalist, and journalism often requires a hieratic rearrangement of values to serve a thesis...

...By her standards, Desdemona must be more of a "strumpet" than Ophelia, whose "virtues," Gertrude explicitly hopes, will physic her suffering son...

...Miss West gleefully knocks down her straw men of Shakespearean scholarship for page after page...

...The sections on the novel, which follow and complete the volume, contain some suggestive comments on Fielding, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and Trollope, through whose work the importance of the individual shines and who thus approach nearer the "castle" than meliorists lite Hardy or Meredith...

...Nor can it be said that the Ghost's requests are "disregarded" because they are not implemented...

...and the speeches in III, iv...

...Thus, the artist's search is ideally from the court to "the castle of God.' Almost half the book is devoted to establishing, via criticism of Hamlet, what anyone familiar with characters like Edmund and Iago knows, namely that Shakespeare took just this transcendental, rather than immanent, view of the universe...

...as it does I, v, 91 ff...

...That "Ophelia has lost her integrity" by being used as a bait would scarcely surprise Hamlet, who explicitly exclaims, "If you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty...

...But Miss West refuses to read the play as it was written, as a Renaissance revenge tragedy, and takes puns carrying obscene connotations for the groundlings as character indications...

...But Miss West plunges on and cheapens next for us The Tempest, wherein Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda is calmly equated with Miranda's first charming reaction to Ferdinand...

...this situation is "man without God...

...It is equally unoriginal to attack an allegedly "protective" misreading of Hamlet's character as "a symbol of irresolution...

...Literature does not...

...To claim "tolerance of Hamlet's obscene conversations" by Ophelia at the play, where she makes modestly reproving, if knowledgeable, rejoinders to Hamlet (what else could she do...

...The taste of Virginia Woolf, who called Ulysses "an illiterate, underbred book," is referred to as "flawless...

...Presented in an esthetically affective manner, however, it may be "the negative impression of God...

...It is as well, however, for a critic who uncovers "mis-readings" not to correct the text as often as she does...

...In the teeth of voluminous studies by Leon Edel, Robert Humphrey and Melvin Friedman, Miss West is allowed to say that poor old Dorothy Richardson, of all people, "can fairly claim to be the originator of the interior monologue...