Shakespeare’s Refusers

Abstract

What should we make of Horatio’s negativity, in the light of renewed interest in a humanist response to Shakespeare? Such a return might entail a positive mental attitude, healing our presently alienated condition and enabling literature to act, once more, as a guide to the good life – or at least as a way to face the whole variety of our experience. Yet this second of discord between allies points to an alienation which runs against the ingrained critical assumption that Shakespeare’s plays are life-enhancing and all-embracing. Perhaps Horatio merely seeks to add a detail – ‘Not the time I was there, by the way’ – but his words could be an uncompromising denial of his companions‘ account (his curtness and the clipped ‘saw’t’ seem to urge this view).

Hamlet. Very like, very like. Stayed it long?

Horatio. While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred.

Barnardo and Marcellus. Longer, longer.

Horatio. Not when I saw’t. (Shakespeare 2005, Hamlet, 1.2.235–8)