Hamlet’s Cue For Passion in the Nunnery Scene ArTHUR NoeL Kincaip Tie reason for Hamlet's abrupt change of tone in the nunnery scene (ULi) and the apparent alteration of his attitude toward Ophelia at or just after the line “Where's your father?” have long been the subject of controversy. Various interpretations have been put forward, many of them farfetched.* Two of the most famous and most favored are those of Dover Wilson and Granville-Barker. Dover Wilson? constructs an elaborate device—which is not in any de- tail justified in the existing texts—by which Hamlet overhears the end of the plot to “loose” Ophelia to him. This necessitates Hamlet's being given a false entrance on the inner stage in ILii a few lines earlier than prescribed by the usual stage direction and by Gertrude’s comment on his entrance. Having entered early, he must overhear the conclusion of the plot, pause, compose his features, and come forward at the appropriate time. This theory is untenable for two reasons. First, it depends on an unjustifiable speculation: that two entrances (one on the inner stage, one on the fore- stage) were given Hamlet in Shakespeare's manuscript and that the compos- itor, mistaking the former for a prompt, omitted it, thus leaving us in Folio and Quarto with only the entrance at line 167, where Gertrude re- marks it. Second, it is doubtful whether on the large Elizabethan stage a movement so subtle as a false entrance would have been possible. Nowhere does Hamlet tell us he has overheard anything. We must be wary of assuming that a character overhears unless he clearly informs or shows us that he does. The techniques by which Shakespeare sets up scenes of overhearing can be seen in numerous cases, some of the most famous being in Love’s Labor's Lost (IV.ii), Midsummer Night's Dream (Ili and ILL.i), Romeo and Juliet (I1.ii), Richard If (iILiv), Much Ado (ILi, and IILi), Measure for Measure (IIl.i), Othello (IV.i), Troilus (V.ii), Macbeth (V.i), and Tempest (IIL.i). In Titus (V.i) and As You Like It (Ili), people report what they have overheard. That Timon has overheard the Poet and Painter in V.i is reflected in his subsequent behavior to them. But he has let the au- dience know, by his asides commenting directly on what they say, that he is overhearing these characters. In Hamlet we have three undisputed over- hearings with which to compare this conjectural one: Claudius overhears 99100 Arruur Nort Kincarp once (III.i) and Polonius twice (IIL.i and ILiv). In addition, Hamlet at one point (IIL iii), though not actually overhearing, views Claudius without the latter’s knowledge. The device of overhearing or overseeing seems to be one of Shakespeare’s favorite tricks, and the techniques he uses to convey it are invariably clear to the audience. Dover Wilson nevertheless proceeds with assurance: the plot to use Ophelia as decoy would have been flawless “if the subject of it had not happened to overhear the whole plot the day before” (p. 126). For in the midst of the scene with Ophelia, Hamlet suddenly remembers what he had casually overheard “the day before," and from that moment on, alll his ut- terances are directed at the eavesdroppers. The moment this theory favours for his realization occurs just before “Ha, ha! are you honest?”> Dover Wil- son commends his explanation to us because it “happily rids us of the trad- itional stage-business of Polonius’ exposing himself to the eye of Hamlet and the audience,” which he considers “a trick crude and inadequate,” for it shows Polonius as far too clumsy and, though it might suffice for a mod- ern audience familiar with the play, would probably not have served for Elizabethans (pp. 133ff.). Granville-Barker’s theory, so called for convenience (it derives from stage tradition originating in the 1820s‘), is that Hamlet during his conver- sation with Ophelia Suddenly becomes aware that they are being watched; and can he resist the conclusion that she is in league with the watchers? . By stage tradition his inconsequent: Where's your father? is prompted by a movement of the arras or an actual glimpse of Polonius, or the King, or both. . Her clumsy, fearful lie . . . shatters her credit with him. It is the second such wound. The first ranked his mother as an adulteress; and the poison of it infected all womankind for him. This explanation is, like that of Dover Wilson, theatrically too frail. We are asked to believe that an author who spent his working life in the thea- ter hinges a crucial scene on a stage direction of which no mention is made anywhere in the play. That Shakespeare intended for Hamlet to see or hear the eavesdroppers is, as Arthur Colby Sprague remarks, “scarcely demon- strable” (p. 152). And it would be contrary to Shakespeare’s habit of em- ploying “built-in” stage directions, For example, when we are told “LookHamlet's Cue For Passion 101 where sadly the poor wretch comes reading,” we are to do so then and not, as Dover Wilson would have us, before that point, when looking at Hamlet would divert our attention from the important conversation of Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius. Our attention would be divided be- tween Hamlet's overhearing (which in this interpretation is crucial) and what he overhears (which is crucial for our following the plot of the play), and there would be a risk of our missing one or both. Very clumsy stage business for so practiced a hand. Gertrude’s line signaling Hamlet's ap- pearance, along, with Polonius’ following line, covers Hamlet's long en- trance and directs audience attention to him. Had our attention been pre- viously with him, it would not need such direction ‘The Granville-Barker theory, though it might work for modern audi- ences in making the change of mood in the nunnery scene comprehensible, is too subtle for use on the large Elizabethan stage. Could the audience's attention, concentrated on Hamlet and Ophelia, be distracted at all from them, and if so, could it be distracted with dramatic justification? If an inner stage existed, sight lines to it would almost certainly have been im- perfect from many points of the theatre. We have no indication that any scene of major consequence in Shakespeare, or any scene detailed and minute, occurred on the inner stage. Could we assume such an important piece of business as the accidental appearance of the spies—necessarily vis- ible to us as to the character—to have done so? Or we could assume that the eavesdroppers are further downstage, behind a screen. To keep them so much in our consciousness by placing them near us again distracts our attention from Hamlet and Ophelia and endangers their whole scene, The fact is that interest in this scene is concentrated solely on Hamlet and Ophelia, not on Claudius and Polonius. And thus the latter pair must have gone offstage and remained there—behind the arras, or elsewhere out of sight—to avoid dividing our attention by making us conscious of their presence. As Dover Wilson points out, making them suddenly visible is a clumsy mechanism suggesting incompetence on the part of the spies. Mar- tin Holmes, a practicing director, has this to say of such a device: The watchers have to betray themselves by a device that the audi- ence can see quite plainly, since Hamlet says nothing to draw their attention to it, and the result is likely to be a ponderous and clumsy movement that instinctively lowers our opinion of the King’s intelligence—and, subconsciously, of the dramatist’s. Whether it is a matter of feet under a curtain or shadows on a wall,102 Artur Nort Kincarp the fact that Hamlet and the audience can all see it gives it an air of ludicrous inefficiency, and in an instant the eavesdroppers are no longer sinister but only rather absurd. . . .* We have a similar situation later on when Polonius is secreted behind the arras in the closet scene (III.iv). We are allowed to forget his presence, so that we are not diverted from Hamlet and his mother, until the moment when Polonius calls attention to his presence by actually crying out—not by sticking out a clumsy head or foot. Shakespeare deviates from his sources to introduce this action and does so almost certainly because his stage demanded so clear a signal to attract the audience's attention. This is a deliberate action, for it heralds Polonius’ death, which furthers the plot. Once he is slain, identified, and given a perfunctory elegy, his body is for- gotten, presumably remaining behind the arras, so that the Gertrude- Hamlet scene may be played out without distraction until the point where it becomes important to show Hamlet's response to his deed and to get Hamlet and the body off the stage. In conclusion to this argument, we cannot, I think, allow the motive for Hamlet's behavior in the nunnery scene to hinge on something so theatri- cally tenuous as a false entrance or an accidental view of the eavesdroppers, either of which could easily be missed by half the audience in any type of theatre, neither of which is reinforced by any mention in the play itself, and both of which divide our attention in a clumsy fashion. Dover Wilson and Granville-Barker agree on one point. Dover Wilson calls Ophelia’s reply to the query Where's your father?” “the crowning point of her treachery, that provokes the frenzy with which the episode closes” (p. 134). Granville-Barker wishes us to assume that Ophelia’s “clumsy, fearful lie” (p. 79) sets Hamlet's fury in motion. Again we have no evidence. Nothing in Ophelia’s reply or in Hamlet's reaction to it indicates that she has been clumsy or fearful or that Hamlet believes her to be lying. In fact, his response and his subsequent behaviour prove just the opposite: that he believes her to be telling the truth. A far more plausible explanation for Hamlet's violent change of attitude at this point in the scene and his actions throughout the remainder of it can be found in the contemporary expectations of a young gentlewoman’s behavior. These can be traced in others of Shakespeare's plays and in the courtesy literature of the period. With remarkably few exceptions do Shakespeare’s women of good repute appear unaccompanied except in their own homes and at church. They are given more liberty by the author