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You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won't formulate - that almost but don't quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant nothing or else I came near enough meaning something he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes. Well well well.
- Robert Frost
WHEN T. S. ELIOT revised his English collection Elizabethan Essays for an American edition twenty- two years after its initial publication, he made a number of serious cuts.1 In cutting "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," "Hamlet and His Problems," and "Four Elizabethan Dramatists," he remarked that these essays "on re-examination embanassed me by their callowness, and by a facility of unqualified assertion which verges, here and there, on impudence. The Hamlet, of course, had been kept afloat all these years by the phrase Objective correlative' - a phrase which, I am now told, is not even my own but was first used by Washington Alston."2 Eliot's greatest impudence, given the conclusions drawn in the other two essays, came, one assumes, in his insistence that Hamlet lacks an "objective correlative." This formula, attempting as it does to characterize the play's failure, the "problems" of Hamlet tried and found wanting as a cause for his studied inaction, is a product that far exceeds Eliot's purported reviewing of two books on Shakespeare's tragedy and its protagonist. The essay is instead one of the steps in the poet/critic's efforts to clear the way for, while clarifying the genealogy of, his modernist project. Eliot's aggressive reading of this play has much to tell us about the role of the critic in configuring the identity of modernist poetic practice as well as demonstrating how the play lures readers, even one as astute as Eliot, into a fixation with its main character.
The formula-producing moments of Eliot's early theorizing on the representational practice of poetry are frequently articulated in the context of his work on Renaissance drama and early seventeenth- century poetry3 What is it about Hamlet the...