Up from Hamlet
Hamlet, Father and Son. By Peter Alexander. (O.U.P., 15s.) 'Tins is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.' It is from this point, the Prologue in the Olivier film of Hamlet, that Professor Alexander starts his inquiry into the true nature of tragedy, and in particular the true nature of Hamlet. For years, he says—even from the very beginning—we have been led astray by the concentration of critics on Aristotle's terms catharsis and hamartia in the Poetics: `purgation,"reconciliation,"redemption,' 'tragic flaw'—do all these approximate translations have much bearing on the real substance of tragedy?
Mr. Alexander thinks he has found the answer to these teasers which plague the undergraduate. Sophoclean and Shakespearian tragedy, he maintains, was based on the hero's aretd, virtue, the 'fairest prize in life.' In another context, it is 'coolness under fire.' Flaws and faults there must be in tragedy, but they are what the 'man of honour' must contend with : 'What consumes and sweeps
away the disagreeables' is 'the sense of something in mortals that has risen superior to their condition.' And here Mr. Alexander brings on the scene an unusual ally, or witness, Mr. Raymond Chandler, who, it seems, has satisfactorily dealt with the 'man of honour' in a contemporary situation; for 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark' and 'I doubt some foul play' read 'a world . . . in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob' and 'the hold-up men may have friends with long guns.' Aristotle talked about catharsis; Mr. Alexander and Mr. Chandler talk about 'redempt4m.' Mr. Alexander tells us that the heart of Greek tragedy was the dramatist's conception of arete; Mr. Chandler tells us in his Simple Art of Murder that the tragic hero 'must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.' The two concepts are in fact, Mr. Alexander assures us, the same; and Shakespeare understood them and used them for the basis of his tragedy. Mr. Alexander is of necessity forced to spend much of his time putting•up and then knocking down everything every- one else has said; but even when he is mocking or digressive— perhaps just because he is—he is entertaining.
ANTHONY THWAITE
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