Horatio: A Shakespearian Confidant

Author(s): Francis G. Schoff

Source: Shakespeare Quarterly , Winter, 1956, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter, 1956), pp. 53-57
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2866115

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 Horatio: a Shakespearian Confidant
FRANCIS G. SCHOFF

HE character of Horatio offers one of the many instances in

Hamlet of subjects for critical disagreement. It forms a less
important one than many; and the differences over it have
fewer facets than have those concerning other problems. Such
as they are, however, they form an exceptionally clear in-
stance of the distortion and the contradictory points of view
which may occur when one allows Shakespeare and his play to be dispossessed
by one's own vision of what happens there, or what one thinks ought to happen.
The chief issue concerns the relationship Horatio bears to Hamlet, and his
significance if any in evaluating Hamlet's character. His most ardent admirer is
of course Professor Lily B. Campbell in her famous study of Shakespeare's
tragic heroes. As everyone knows, she finds Horatio one of "the two characters
in the play in whom reason has swayed passion". Hence, unlike everyone else
except Fortinbras, he is not a puppet of Fortune. "And such", she points out, "is
the lesson of tragedy".' But twelve years before her study Thomas M. Kettle
had more than anticipated, so far as Horatio is concerned, later objectors to her
thesis. In a casually humorous essay, he had argued that Horatio's record in the
play is weak; that he is never of real assistance to Hamlet. "In fact", he wrote,

from beginning to end he is a wandering ineptitude who has never a single

suggestion, and whose speech consists mainly of "Ay, my Lords," "That is
most certain," "Is it possible," and other helpful phrases.... And this is
the strong silent man after whom Hamlet should have modeled himself!2

Between these deadly serious and mildly humorous extremes lie other points of
view; but almost all of them have in common one idea: that Shakespeare cre-
ated in Horatio an individualized character of sufficient stature to warrant con-
sidered analysis and a qualitative comparison of him with the play's protagonist.
In this common assumption lies the root of the problem, and, I believe, a
lesson worth remembering. For the evidence within the play points to a very
different one. If the amount a character speaks and the things he does mean
anything, Horatio is one of Shakespeare's most completely negative characters,
scarcely developed at all, and even more than the Racinian confidant a mere
reporter of events and auditor for the protagonist.
Since for a reason I shall mention shortly we all share a feeling that Horatio
is an important figure in the play, it is necessary to begin with the concrete if
irritating business of statistics. A rapid line count, in which part lines were
counted as wholes until they reached the brevity of "E'en so", gave Horatio 29o
1 Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge University Press, I930), pp.
I 46- I 47.

2 "A New Way of Misunderstanding Hamlet", in his The Day's Burden (New York, i9i8),
p. 72.

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54 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

lines out of the play's 3931.3 This figure is striking in itself. But a division of
Horatio's lines among his nine appearances on stage is yet more revelatory than
the total sum. In scenes i, ii, iv, and v of Act I he speaks I92 lines out of the
scenes' 442. Thus he has had over forty per cent of the lines there; but at the
same time, when this expository prologue is over, he has fewer than ioo lines
left to speak in the entire play. He is now off stage completely through the long
second act and the first scene of Act III; and, when he reappears at Hamlet's
call in III.ii, Shakespeare has evidently considered it necessary to remind us
through the famous little eulogy that he is a friend of Hamlet's. Horatio him-
self speaks 5 of 38 lines in the exchange, and then is silent until after the Mouse-
trap, when he has 4 lines out of 23 before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter
and he again becomes dumb. Once more off stage until IV. v, he has 2 lines in
that scene. In IV. vi he has 8 lines with the sailors, plus iS more if one counts as
his the lines of the letter from Hamlet which he reads to us. Then he vanishes
again, to reenter with Hamlet and speak ii lines in the graveyard before the
entrance of the cortege, and i after it. From that point until Hamlet's death in
V. ii, he has 27 lines out of 370; after it, he has 22 lines of the play's remaining 44.
Thus, the only time that Horatio has anything like a sizable quantity or
percentage of lines is when he has something to report: the tale of the elder
Hamlet's duel and of young Fortinbras' "lawless resolutes" in I. i; the story of
the ghost in I. ii; the reading of Hamlet's letter in IV. vi; and the digest of events
for Fortinbras and the English Ambassador at the end. In these scenes he speaks
223 lines, of which ii6 are actual reporting. Elsewhere, he speaks fewer than
70 lines.
So much for the evidence of statistics: one hundred lines for Horatio dur-
ing the four acts which form the body of the play; of his total number, but
seventy in scenes during which he does not function as informant. Perhaps,
however, his actions, like Cordelia's, contradict this sort of evidence?
On the contrary, they confirm it. He is, of course, on stage a good deal more
than these figures suggest. But so far as the play's action is concerned he is
almost entirely a passive or ineffectual character. He suggests that the appear-
ance of the ghost be reported to Hamlet, and later that the Queen had best see
the mad Ophelia; and these suggestions are carried out. Otherwise his rare bits
of advice go unheeded. For example, Hamlet follows the Ghost in spite of
Horatio's ten lines of warning; in the graveyard Hamlet continues to speculate
on death in spite of Horatio's mild objection; and later in that scene Horatio's
"Be quiet, my Lord", after the struggle at the grave, is virtually an introduction
to Hamlet's dissertation on love and ranting. Similarly, when once or twice
Horatio tries to do something he fails. He cannot get the Ghost to speak or stay
at the beginning, nor can he commit suicide at the end. Even Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern have a more active part in the development of the action than
Horatio. At least they try to extract information from Hamlet, and after the
play scene they assist in raising his fury and disgust to a peak. Horatio merely
reports or listens or-watches.
Doubtless it is partly through the watching that we get our sense that
Horatio is a significant character. As Harley Granville-Barker observed, Horatio
3The total for the play is taken from Hardin Craig's The Complete Works of Shakespeare
(Chicago, 1951), p. 38.

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 HORATIO: A SHAKESPEARIAN CONFIDANT 55

is made by Hamlet's faith in him and warmth for him, and by his own silent
presence at critical times.4 In himself, however, judged by his speech and actions,
it remains true that Horatio is very nearly a nobody. It is only through Hamlet
that we are made aware of him as an individual; only through Hamlet that we
feel that his presence on d'tage supplies Hamlet with one decent and loyal asso-
ciate in the mad and rotten world in which he finds himself: one person oil
whose reports or testimony he can rely; one person to whom he can speak openly
and freely. Otherwise, Horatio would remain for the audience merely a "Mes-
senger", a "Nuncio".
Because of Hamlet's attitude, Horatio stands on a slightly higher step. We
find his peers later, as I have suggested, in Doris and Arcas, in Pylade and
CUphise, in Thleramene and Ismene: in, that is, Racine's gouverneurs and confi-
dents, though they are likely to have more active roles than his. Like Horatio,
these figures listen attentively, report events, make an occasional suggestion
which as a rule has no effect. Like Horatio, they are devoted to their more
important associates. Unlike Horatio, on the other hand, they often make it
clear that though helpless they have definite opinions concerning the conduct
of the people to whom they are attached; and occasionally they do in fact in-
fluence their conduct. Pylade, for instance, urges Oreste at some length, though
futilely, to break the chains of his dotage on Hermione; and in the same play
Cleone, by playing on jealousy and pride, actually persuades Hermione to give
Oreste hope.5
Thus, these figures sometimes reveal themselves as individual entities in a
manner that Horatio never does. True, he boggles at Alexander's dust stopping
a bung-hole; and Hamlet thinks his friend has doubts concerning the ethics of
his arrangements for the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but in each
situation Horatio's single line of comment is left undeveloped, and an instant
later he is back in Hamlet's shadow. In fact, the real use of each of these remarks
is most probably that it breaks up Hamlet's discussion and prevents it from
being too obviously a monologue; only in tedious critical analysis of this sort
does either one appear to have dramatic import.
Horatio, then, is a nonentity in the play except in the degree that Hamlet's
treatment of him makes us feel otherwise. Because the hero loves and trusts
him, we do. And thus, apart from being auditor and reporter, he becomes an
embodiment of that helpless love for Hamlet which each member of the audi-
ence feels. That, and that only, is his meaningful function in the play. To take
such a figure and analyze it, to find flaws in its conduct, seems hardly sound;
and it seems even less sound to hold it up as in any way a counterpoise to
Hamlet: to argue that it serves to mark a way of life which Hamlet should have
followed, but did not.
In this connection it is necessary to consider Hamlet's eulogy of Horatio
in III. ii, which is sometimes offered as evidence that Hamlet admired in Horatio
qualities which he himself lacked. We have already noticed that this eulogy
serves to remind the audience that Horatio, who has been out of sight for more
than an act and might turn out to be just another Rosencrantz or Guildenstern,

4 Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton University Press, 1946), I, 200-20I.

5 Cf. Andromaque, I. i and II. i.

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 56 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

is in fact a trusted and reliable friend suitable for the position of assisting ob-
server at the Mouse-trap. It also gives reasons why Hamlet values him: his
stoical acceptance of adversity and his ability to control passion by reason. Now
I must not here enter the merry battle over the character of Hamlet. But it seems
not very controversial to suggest that if we are to take the character of Horatio,
with his 290 lines, as a counterpoise to that of Hamlet we ought to be shown
him putting these traits into action. And it is noteworthy that we do not. On
the contrary, Horatio's one completely independent and positive action might
easily be construed as refuting Hamlet's analysis. For Hamlet's death provides
the only moment in the play in which Horatio is subjected to such emotional
pressure as Hamlet has been feeling most of the way through it. And, ironically
for Horatio's admirers, it is Horatio, not Hamlet, who under such pressure sur-
renders impetuously to the idea of self-slaughter. Thus Horatio's attempt at
suicide could be used to demonstrate that when his emotions were aroused by
a sharp personal blow he proved to have no stoicism or self-control at all. It was
Hamlet's domination, not his own reason, which restrained him then. And so
one might "prove"-as the saying goes when a Shakespearian incident is used
to buttress an extraneous theory-that Horatio is not at all a man whose passion
is controlled by his reason. Then, putting this "fact" side by side with Hamlet's
eulogy, we might argue that evidently Hamlet was a poor judge of character,
and . . . from there the road to a new interpretation of the play would be easy
and interesting.6
Of course such a demonstration, the whole of it, would be unsound. Horatio
gets his eulogy quite obviously because Hamlet is to have one reliable friend,
and the sort of man he describes will fit excellently the inactive role Horatio is
to play. Horatio's try at suicide two acts later has, again, no relationship with
the eulogy. It is simply a dramatically logical development of the love for Ham-
let which he has been embodying for us all along, and satisfies us as a climactic
demonstration of the devotion Hamlet could inspire in a genuinely admirable
person. To make more of either eulogy or would-be suicide than that, or to
insist that a significant relationship exists between the two events, would be to
fall into the trap which the play proves regularly to have set: the temptation to
go behind or beyond the clear evidence of the play as a whole to prove a theory.
But succumbing to this temptation is, I would suggest, the basic danger in
interpreting Shakespeare. It leads one, furthermore, into a second danger: use
of the device I just toyed with of dismissing the play's movement in time and,
by laying out its various scenes "spatially"7 and fitting them together like parts
of a puzzle, discovering previously unnoticed possibilities in the relationships
among them. Not that relationships do not exist among the different parts of a
Shakespearian play. But if they are not clearly obvious without long study, or
6 Lest this notion seem past tolerance silly, let me hastily recall that no less a man than
W. W. Greg once argued in print, from the premise that Claudius did not blench at the Mouse-
trap's dumbshow, that Claudius did not murder his brother by pouring poison in his ear, and
thence in due course that Hamlet saw no ghost. Cf. "Hamlet's Hallucination", Modern Language
Review, XII (1917), 393-421. Later he good-humoredly surrendered most of his position; but
there remain those thirty pages of dexterous argument to demonstrate an absurdity.
7 Professor G. Wilson Knight's well known term. Treating imagery after the same fashion,
Robert Heilman refers to "semasiological relationships . . . different from those of the immediate
grammatical context". Cf. This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (Baton Rouge,
1948), p. 6.

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 HORATIO: A SHAKESPEARIAN CONFIDANT 57

if they run counter to the total impact of the play in the theater, they ought
surely to be tested against Shakespeare's known, repeated reliance on the theater
audience's inattention to what is not hammered home. Criticism which neglects
or pushes aside correctives like this has told us that Othello was an egoistic
sexual voluptuary,8 and that he was sexually impotent.9 It has explained that
Hamlet was the really evil element in Denmark,' that he was hampered in
obtaining his revenge by his new, Christian, point of view,11 and that he was
trying to escape from the problems of adult life.12 It has pointed out many other
mutually contradictory things about Shakespeare's characters and the possible
significances of his plays. From it we learn a good deal about the various authors
of Shakespearian criticism; but nothing about the works of the man who was,
after all, the genius in the case: Shakespeare.
For all such criticism the small problem of Horatio may serve as a gentle
warning. In considering one of Shakespeare's plays we need to remember always
its over-all design as part of a drama moving in time, and to avoid letting our
incidental perceptions of detail, determined as they usually are by our own
personalities, throw out of balance Shakespeare's patterns. That is why it has
seemed worth while to take time through this analysis to suggest what appears
to be the fact about Horatio. He is not sufficiently developed as a character to
justify anything but the most casual appraisal; still less is he a character of suffi-
cient importance in the play's structure to be poised against Hamlet in any way.
He remains everywhere Hamlet's devoted shadow, and no more: his confidant.

North Dakota Agricultural College

8 F. R. Leavis, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero", Scrutiny, VI (I937), 259-283.
9 H. Somerville, Madness in Shakespearian Tragedy (London, 1929), pp. 72-76, passim.
10 G. Wilson Knight, "Hamlet's Melancholia", in his The Wheel of Fire (Oxford University
Press, 1930).
'1 J. A. Chapman, Hamlet (Oxford University Press, 1932).
12 L. C. Knights, "Prince Hamlet", Scrutiny, IX (1940), 148-i60.

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