How Not to Be:

D. H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death”

Elise Brault-Dreux
(Valenciennes University)

Introduction
This article explores the peculiar notions of “being” and “not being”, and of ac-
cess to “being” as a passage through “not being”, in D. H. Lawrence’s poem “The
Ship of Death” (1993, 716–20) and its significant—though transient—intertextual
echoes and borrowings from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. I will try to show how
the Lawrentian I then subtly sheds its own “being” so as to furtively interpret his
very personal version of Hamlet’s “being” which, in the meantime, he subversively
blames for not knowing how to be.
In May 1911, the young D. H. Lawrence wrote to his sweetheart, Louie Bur-
rows:

I am so Hamletty—I am so confoundedly and absurdly Hamletty, it’s enough

to make you sick. When I begin to rant in the ‘To be or not to be’ style,
you should say, ‘Hello, he’s off again,’ and wait for the rhyme which rings
conclusion if not reason. (Lawrence 1979, 269)

These at once amused and dramatically serious words, which cast Hamlet as a
melodramatic character, set the tone for Lawrence’s written references to Hamlet
throughout his life. Between 1911 and 1927, he recurrently referred to or quoted
short passages of the play in his letters. In May 1913, for instance, he wrote to
Edward Garnett, “if Hamlet and Oedipus were published now, they wouldn’t sell
more than 100 copies, unless they were pushed” (Lawrence 1979, 546). In 1922, to
Amy Lowell, he quoted the play: “I am enjoying the face of the earth and letting my
Muse, dear hussy, repent her ways. ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ I said to her” (Lawrence
1991, 243). In his collection of essays Twilight in Italy, first published in 1916, he
devotes a long subsection entitled “The Theatre” to his reactions to a performance
of the play he saw in Italy in 1913 and, annoyed, condemns Hamlet for being
excessively self-conscious. In his famous novel Women in Love, published in 1921,
Birkin, one of the four main characters, complains, “One shouldn’t talk when one
is tired and wretched—One Hamletises, and it seems a lie” (2000, 187), once more
introducing Hamlet as an almost melodramatic figure. Hamlet’s words are also
subtly present in the poem “And Oh—That the Man I Am Might Cease to Be”,

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published in 1917. As he contemplates the imminence of death, the Lawrentian

I expresses his wish to see Nature and himself caught and carried away into the
thick darkness of oblivion, hence suggesting Hamlet’s words from Act 3, Scene
1: “a consummation / Devoutly to be wished”. Like Hamlet, but from a different
perspective, he ponders on the idea of sleep, implicitly and tentatively relating it
to transient oblivion: “What is sleep? / It goes over me like a shadow over a hill”.
The presence of Hamlet reappears years later more explicitly in a longer and more
famous poem “The Ship of Death”, which was posthumously published in 1932.
The apparitions of Hamlet’s words in Lawrence’s letters, essays, fictional and
poetic writings show the poet and novelist’s intimate acquaintance with the play
and an idiosyncratic interpretation of it. As often with Lawrence, they give way to
ambiguous reactions, mixing pleasure in the poetic mouthing of dramatic speeches
with fierce anger at the scope of the words. He makes his equivocal stance clear in
the poem “When I Read Shakespeare”:

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder

that such trivial people should muse and thunder
in such lovely language.
[. . .]
And Hamlet, how boring, how boring to live with,
so mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring
his wonderful speeches, full of other folks’ whoring!
[. . .]
How boring, how small Shakespeare’s people are!
Yet the language so lovely! Like the dyes from gas-tar.
(Lawrence 1993, 494)

Lawrence thus almost comically explains both his contempt for Shakespeare’s
characters and his admiration for the playwright’s poetic language. In “The Ship
of Death” he relies on this double-edged position as he fleetingly makes Hamlet’s
words his own and then refutes Hamlet’s worried and self-conscious stance before
death.
Before going further, Lawrence’s use of Hamlet deserves to be apprehended
within a historical and textual frame of reference, since his approach to Shake-
speare’s play was renewed by the early twentieth-century zeitgeist. As Max Plow-
man rightly remarks, “every age finds its own portrait of Hamlet” (712). In the
modernist era, the heroic figure perceived by the Romantics was undergoing a con-
siderable new turn. Jeffrey Perl, in The Tradition of Return, insists on this contrast
between the Romantic perception and the modern destabilisation of the heroic fig-
ure (started, according to Perl by T. S. Eliot in “Hamlet and His Problems”), and
thus makes Hamlet almost a symptom of cultural and ontological evolution:

Hamlet became the object of an almost religious veneration because roman-

tics could identify easily with its protagonist, whose predicament symbolized

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a conviction near and dear to their hearts [. . .]. The cultic adoration of Ham-
let had been so universal since the time of Goethe and Coleridge that we
may take 1919 as a turning point in aesthetic history simply because dur-
ing that year a cheeky London review (T. S. Eliot) called Hamlet “an artistic
failure” [. . .]. Eliot’s essay, in fact, is a carefully contrived response to the
various romantic Hamlets. (Perl 85)

The modern zeitgeist, led by new convictions and afflicted with new doubts about
humans’ fundamental nature, implied that the more traditional image of Hamlet
no longer fitted the condition of modern humanity. Hamlet’s words could not be
trusted anymore, they had to be adapted to the period, and that is precisely what
Stein does in Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim:

“Strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured but how to live.” He
approved with his head, a little sadly, as it seemed. “Ja! Ja! In general
adapting the words of your great poet: That is the question. . . ” He went on
nodding sympathetically. . . “How to be! Ach! How to be.” (Conrad 128)

Hamlet’s closed question “To be, or not to be”, whose binary nature has a somewhat
reassuring effect, has been replaced by Stein with the open interrogation “how
to be”, which reveals both a modern ontological instability and also the aporetic
nature of the question suggested by the absence of a question mark.
Hamlet, therefore, is not just any text. Along with Faust and the Oresteia it
is, as George Steiner defines it in The Death of Tragedy, a “world possession”
(46) whose highly metaphysical scope, however obscure it may have appeared, has
fascinated various commentators, psychoanalysts and poets. The modernists, like
Conrad, Eliot and Lawrence, as they made use of Shakespeare’s play, brought fur-
ther rupture with the immediate past. In reinterpreting the play, they broke away
from Romantic interpretations and hence prompted a literary crisis: their intertex-
tual exploitation of Hamlet, written by a playwright who himself was violating
the neoclassical precepts of tragedy, clearly subverts or revolutionises the imme-
diately preceding understanding of the play, while simultaneously inscribing the
modernists’ text in the universal canon. To be or not to be part of the British liter-
ary tradition, here is the dilemma which seems to surface in the modernist writers’
uses of Hamlet. But more accurately, the fundamental question revealed in their
intertextual and dramatic interpretation of the play is rather how to be inscribed
in the tradition while simultaneously seeking to revolutionise it and make it new.
T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock summarises to some extent this modernist revolutionary and
innately paradoxical stance when he claims, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was
meant to be” (Eliot 16). The focus of the line on “to be”, which resonates with
Hamlet’s soliloquy, subtly contradicts Prufrock’s introductory denial of his own
identification with Hamlet.
Lawrence, deliberately or not, made use of this revolutionary underlying princi-
ple as he used Hamlet’s words to deliver messages about immediate cultural crises,
about humanity and more indirectly about the status of the poetic voice, as he

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constantly oscillated between the ideas of “being”, “not being” and, like Conrad’s
character, “how to be”. Through studying “The Ship of Death”, in which Hamlet’s
words are handled, or actually mishandled, by Lawrence, this article will show how
Lawrence’s conception of “not being” is a way to have eventual access to what
he positively sees as “being”. I will first be focusing on the transitional moment
Lawrence chooses to borrow scraps of Hamlet’s speech, a moment of both cultural
and ontological rupture. This should lead us to the significance of Lawrence’s in-
tertextual borrowing as he contemplates the idea of suicide. Finally the article will
focus on Lawrence’s renewing poetic performance of Hamlet, as he wears the mask
of the Shakespearean persona, thus “not being” himself but incarnating the other.

Transitional Processes
Written a few months before the poet’s death, “The Ship of Death” captures the
poetic I’s quite peaceful apprehension of forthcoming oblivion. The I-voice is
preparing its passage through the state of “not being” at the end of a natural cycle,
when autumn fruit is falling:

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self

On the verge of death, Lawrence then explains, one can have two different reac-
tions: either one builds one’s “ship of death” to sail across the sea of change (and,
unlike Hamlet, not one “of trouble”) or one rather makes “his own quietus [. . .]
/ with a bare bodkin”. Lawrence thus turns to Hamlet at a critical moment in the
individual’s existence, the moment of death. But this individual crisis is intimately
coupled with Lawrence’s awareness of a much broader cultural crisis.
Throughout his oeuvre, in his poetry, fiction and essays, Lawrence condemns
the damage caused by modern society to the individual. According to him, Chris-
tianity started annihilating physical instincts, granting all power to the mind, and
modern industrialism and machinery were dramatically completing the process of
destruction. “Evil is mechanical” Lawrence asserts in a poem (1993, 713–14),
fully aware of a massive cultural crisis in early twentieth-century Europe. Ratio-
cination, hyper-consciousness and mechanicity have taken over, thus transforming
what was meant by “being”. In a letter addressed to Ernest Collings in January
1913, Lawrence wrote:

We know too much. No, we only think we know such a lot. A flame isn’t
a flame because it lights up two, or twenty objects on the table. It’s a flame
because it is itself. And we have forgotten ourselves. We are Hamlet without
the Prince of Denmark. We cannot be. “To be or not to be”—it is the question

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with us now, by Jove. And nearly every Englishman says “Not to be.” [. . .]
The real way of living is to answer to one’s wants. Not “I want to light up
with my intelligence as many things as are possible”—but “For the living of
my full flame—I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of
peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub, and have a good time,
I want to look a beastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult
that man. (1979, 504, emphasis mine)

Lawrence’s contemporary Western world has, according to him, killed the self: it
has organised what he calls in “The Theatre” “the omission of the self” (72), the
end of the aristocracy of the self. People are therefore merging into a threatening
democratic mass of “Not-Me” (72) and losing their individual specificities. But
for Lawrence, the nature of this modern process is not new. It is both the long-
term consequence and the mere repetition of what had already occurred during the
Renaissance:
The monk rose up with [. . .] the Christian ecstasy. There was a death to
die: the flesh, the self, must die, so that the spirit should rise again immortal,
eternal infinite. I am dead unto myself, but I live in the Infinite. The finite
Me is no more, only the Infinite, the Eternal, is. At the Renaissance this
great half-truth overcame the other great half-truth. The Christian Infinite,
reached by a process of abnegation, a process of being absorbed, dissolved,
diffused into the great Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein
the self like a root threw out branches and radicals which embraced the whole
universe, became the Whole. (“The Theatre” 71)

The abnegation of the self took over the liveliness of the pagan élan vital. In the
Renaissance, according to Lawrence, the energy of the Me was superseded by the
moribund Christian Not-Self. Lawrence’s comments on, and regrets about, the
modern loss of what is meant by “being” blatantly echo what he says here about
the Renaissance, where he persistently insists on the responsibility of Christianity
for the eventual omission of the self. For him, both the Renaissance and modernity
suffer equally from intense pangs that are akin in nature.
This conflation of different periods of history in the Lawrentian discourse is
coupled with another type of conflation pointed out by Neil Corcoran. It is the
conflation of preoccupations about the individual with preoccupations on the state
of a nation. Corcoran remarks that in his essay “The Theatre,” Lawrence allies “the
privacy of ‘the soul’ with the fate of a nation” (Corcoran 219). Lawrence indeed
persistently asserts that the death of King I, ending the overpowering aristocracy,
corresponds to the end of the aristocracy of the self and the beginning of the loss
of the Me. All these aspects which reveal the dissolution of the self in masses of
indeterminate beings, and that, according to Lawrence, are regrettably blatant in
immediate modern Europe, he finds in Hamlet too. He therefore brings the play
into his poetry, and the gleam of decay he perceives in Hamlet is in keeping, or
so he hopes the reader will perceive it to be, with the ambient state of decay in
his contemporary Europe. Lawrence thus uses the rupture between vital pagan-
ism and Hamlet’s Renaissance which he thinks are latent in the words he borrows

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from Hamlet, in order to suggest, by a form of historical analogy, the crises of

early twentieth-century disillusioned Europe. Both Hamlet and modern European
humanity then are sadly moving towards a morbid state of “not being”.
This unexpected atemporal reunion of two states of decay, that of the Renais-
sance with that of European modernity, is coupled with another unpredicted cul-
tural conflation. In 1927 Lawrence visited Etruscan tombs and wrote a compilation
of essays entitled Etruscan Places. Much inspired by the lively poetry suggested in
the frescoes, he made extensive use of the Etruscan atmosphere in his Last Poems.
In “The Ship of Death”, Hamlet’s preoccupation with suicide is quite unexpectedly
surrounded by Etruscan décor, where the approach of death and the tomb atmo-
sphere are not handled in a moribund way but with a lively positive dynamism.
“The soft effect of relaxed flesh” (Etruscan Places 31) which Lawrence perceived
in the Etruscan frescoes subtly appears in the image of the fruit at the beginning
of the poem, and the whole poem is then punctuated with images and symbols he
had seen in the tombs: “dishes”, “great jars and bowls, and smaller mixing bowls,
and drinking cups” (Etruscan Places 31) all reappear in the poem with reference
to “food / and little dishes, and all accoutrements” and “little cooking pans” that
are to be taken after death on the journey across the sea of change. Etruscan cul-
ture, for Lawrence, conveys the mystery of life and “the sense of touch” (Etruscan
Places 45) and depicts the departure into the underworld (53). Lawrence therefore,
caught in an Etruscan enthusiasm for life, came to conceive of death as an after-
life journey. With the Etruscans he was attempting to retrieve what he called the
“phallic” power of existence, the aristocracy of the self lost both by Hamlet and
by Lawrence’s contemporaries. In so gathering, within the same poem, Hamlet’s
words, Etruscan motifs and modern concerns, he proceeds to a sort of modernist
syncretic mythmaking through which he, both ontologically and textually, endeav-
ours to overthrow Christian and modern sterile ways of life and to reinfuse vitality
in people (including Hamlet), reconnect the latter with the natural cycles of ex-
istence, and therefore let them fully physically be, be in touch with “the natural
flowing of life” (Etruscan Places 49) which he grasps in the Etruscan tombs.
Through this syncretic superintegration in “The Ship of Death”, Lawrence uses
Hamlet as the epitome of the bitter self-contemptuous man who despises the burn-
ing flame that vitalises aristocratic “being”. It is when the poetic I faces death that
this aspect becomes most obvious.

Fear versus Pagan Trust

Like Hamlet in his “to be, or not to be” soliloquy, Lawrence in “The Ship of Death”
ponders suicide and, using the collective “we”, widens his narrow personal preoc-
cupation into a larger ontological reflection. Like in Hamlet again, in “The Ship of
Death” suicide is rejected. The soul, and Lawrence uses the word “soul” to refer
to “personality” (Etruscan Places 67), would rather prepare its voyage through the
sea of oblivion than commit suicide:

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And in the bruised body, the frightened soul

finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.
III
And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?
With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life;
but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?
Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder
ever a quietus make?
IV
O let us talk of quiet that we know
that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet
of a strong heart at peace!
How can we this, our own quietus, make?

The reader immediately recognises Hamlet’s words and interrogative rhetorical

tone in the first question. But Lawrence is obviously more mundane and prag-
matic as he then draws a list of concrete objects that can be of use to make his
own quietus (“daggers, bodkins” and the more modern “bullets”), as though he
were demonstrating the very practical possibility of the act. He then erects a first
obstacle to the “quietus” with “but” (not unlike Hamlet with “But that the dread
of something after death”) in rhetorically provoking the reader (with “O tell me”),
before radically rejecting the option of suicide. Lawrence does not provide any ex-
plicit nor rational reason for his rejection. Yet the use of the term “quiet”—which,
though it evokes “quietus,” is not its root,1 since it rather implies a “discharge from
obligation”—suggests a peaceful approach to natural death that totally diverges
from Hamlet’s.
If both Lawrence and Hamlet reject suicide, their respective reasons diverge
since they rely on contrastive ideas of what “not being” is or, more precisely, on
a contrast between Lawrence’s idea of “not being” and what he assumes is Ham-
let’s idea of “not being”. For Lawrence “not being” means going through the rich
“quiet” darkness he describes as peaceful oblivion; it is a moment of individual,
natural and cosmic change whose mystery is never rationally explained nor dis-
sected. This, once again, he found in Etruscan and other pagan rituals. It derives
from a faith in the adventure of death which nonetheless requires effort to build
one’s own ship:
Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.
And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new
1
“Middle English quietus est, from Medieval Latin, he is quit, formula of discharge from obliga-
tion” (OED).

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In the aforementioned poem “And Oh—That the Man I Am Might Cease to Be”,
Lawrence already follows a more or less identical pattern. He first rejects death
and then expresses his desire to experience oblivion:

And death would ache still, I am sure;

it would be lambent, uneasy.
I wish it would be completely dark everywhere,
inside me, and out, heavily dark
utterly.

If death is evoked in a more Hamletian way than it is in “The Ship of Death”, as

the I suggests a kind of fear and uneasiness somewhat echoing Hamlet’s “dread of
something after death”, like in “The Ship of Death”, it is the image of a passage
through darkness and complete oblivion which is largely favoured. This Lawren-
tian trust in oblivious “not being” is intimately connected with a trust in the flow of
existence, and therefore in “being”. According to Lawrence, if one knows how to
be, then one will know how not to be, and vice versa. This, he declares in Twilight
in Italy: “One has to know what not being is, before [one] can be” (“The Theatre”
74). In Women in Love, Birkin tells Ursula and Hermione, “You’ve got to learn
not-to-be, before you can come into being” (2000, 44). For in quietly accepting the
passage through the changing state of “not being,” the soul (meaning the human
personality) will fully be again. Death is part of existence, it just happens and can-
not be forced into happening. Suicide, which reads as an absence of faith in this
tight connection, would interrupt the flow from “being” to “not being,” and from
“not being” to “being” again. It would therefore disconnect mankind from its cir-
cumambient universe and further the noxious enterprise instigated by Christianity
just before the Renaissance and continued by mechanical modernity.
Hamlet’s rejection of suicide is different. A Lawrentian mind would perhaps
too hastily define it as a mere fear of the “undiscovered country”, a dreadful ap-
prehension of the unknown and “punitive” (Blits 194) dimension of “not being”.
Hamlet seems to perceive no potential richness in the ultimate adventure, but only
an irreversible voyage which he cowardly refuses to make. The Lawrentian I rather
trusts a pagan form of afterlife and thus challenges the preconceived idea of death.
Once again, if Lawrence’s and Hamlet’s ideas of “not being” diverge (for one, not
being is a source of renewal whose mystery makes it all the richer, for the other
a dreadful, unknown experience), their ideas of “being”, according to Lawrence’s
reading, differ fundamentally too. And this, Lawrence makes particularly explicit
in his essay “The Theatre” where he condemns Hamlet’s denial of his flesh:

I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he

seems [. . .] The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike
and a spirit of disintegration.
There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike through much of
the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. [. . .] A sense of
corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never admit that

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it is his own flesh. [. . .] Hamlet is [. . .] a mental creature, anti-physical,

anti-sensual. The whole drama is the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the
mind from the flesh, of the spirit from the self, the reaction from the great
aristocratic to the great democratic principle. (68–69)

Throughout this opaque digression on Hamlet, Lawrence insistently deplores the

split, triggered at the Renaissance, between the Word (embodied in the Son and
related to knowing) and the Flesh (embodied in the Father, the King, and related
to being). The loss of balance between polarities, and in favour of knowing, led
mankind to its “self-conscious disintegration” (Kinkhead-Weekes 267). Hamlet,
according to Lawrence, is the epitome of this imbalance in favour of the Word:
The question to be or not to be, which Hamlet puts himself, does not mean,
to live or not to live. It is not the simple human being who puts himself the
question, it is the supreme I, King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father,
in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be. (“The Theatre” 70)

In threatening the equilibrium and thus giving advantage to the Word, Hamlet re-
presses his Flesh, over-contemplates his mind and in the end chooses “not to be”. It
is on this precise point that Lawrence’s perceptions of both Hamlet and of modern
Europeans converge. The problem of their choice for “not being” lies in the fact
that neither Hamlet nor the modern human knows “how not to be”. According to
Lawrence “not being” is an experience that requires a vitality that they both lack as
they apprehend it as a moribund physical state, at once fearful and painful. Their
approach to death then cannot be other than fearful. Lawrence, on the other hand,
persistently insists on his privileged somewhat pagan acquaintance with a positive
experience of “not being”, fundamentally based on a constructive and reconstruc-
tive passage through a lively physical experience. On the totally different level of
the metatext, Lawrence subtly reveals this privileged acquaintance as, through self-
dramatisation, he furtively becomes Hamlet in “The Ship of Death”, therefore not
being himself anymore for a few lines, before being his Me again in the following
stanza.

Self-Dramatisation
In the aforementioned poem “When I Read Shakespeare,” Lawrence, as a reader
or spectator, deplores the failed incarnation of Shakespeare’s poetic language. The
characters are merely Words without Flesh. But from his position of criticising
spectator in “The Ship of Death”, he shifts to that of a performer: he actually
repeats Hamlet’s words, he performs a fragmented and distorted Hamletian role in
the intertextual process. In other words, he acts. And to push the metaphor a bit
further, we could say that Lawrence is perfunctorily wearing the mask of Hamlet
as he is incarnating the speech which he judges dramatically lacks incarnation in
Shakespeare’s play.
Hamlet’s words are quite subtly introduced in Lawrence’s speech, with no ex-
plicit quoting, and therefore no apparent graft on the surface of the poem. The

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Hamletian fragment of discourse is rather smoothly inserted by the conjunction

“And” in “And can a man his own quietus make”, which reads like an ordinary
syntactical development. There is therefore a sort of effort at discretion in the act
of putting the Shakespearean mask on. Yet this effort sounds obviously fake, since
the reader quickly recognises or unmasks the famous words repeated or rehearsed
by the Lawrentian I. The very familiar words “can a man his own quietus make /
with a bare bodkin” sound like an “anomaly” (Rogers 81) in the ears or eyes of
the reader who realises that these are not Lawrence’s words. But if this item of
public knowledge stands out in the poem, the reader does not hear Hamlet’s words
alone, but a mere fragment of Hamlet’s soliloquy as it is performed by a Lawren-
tian voice. It is the very hybridisation of both voices and their coexistence in a
somewhat Etruscan context that makes new sense, as neither voice annihilates the
other. For Lawrence, in fact, incarnates the persona in order not to usurp Ham-
let’s words, but so as first to add both a dramatic and metaphysical dimension to
the poem and then, most of all, to reorient the original Shakespearean discourse.
Lawrence thus wants to keep the Hamletian quality created but to relocate it into a
lively and positive atmosphere and to remain himself visible behind the mask. As
when a spectator is aware that the actor on stage is wearing a mask, the reader is
supposed to be aware of the presence of Lawrence’s voice behind Hamlet’s furtive
speech.
On a more symbolic level, Bethan Jones remarks that “the fragments of the text
of Hamlet are, though changed, modified, subverted, pieces, little accoutrements
carried by the dying subject in its travel across the sea” (63). Here Jones’ idea
fits the analogy drawn in this essay between Hamlet’s intertextual fragment and a
mask. For the pagans, death was a rite of initiation and quite often primitive people
would place a mask on the dead person’s face before he was carried away and, not
unlike in “The Ship of Death”, initiated into the other shore. The mask is therefore
a fundamental object in the rite of passage. So if poetically Hamlet’s intertextual
fragment could be apprehended as one among the pagan objects carried on the ship
of death amid pagan décor, on another level, Lawrence, on the eve of dying, was
himself, as a man, preparing his own crossing to the other shore, wearing the mask
of the “great poet” (Conrad 128) whose poetic language he fundamentally admired,
performing a form of ritual in the brotherhood of poets.
As he speaks through Hamlet’s mask and recontextualises the scene in a cele-
brated Etruscan setting, the Lawrentian poetic I rescues the living potential of the
dramatic persona. At the moment of cultural and individual death, he gives new
impetus to the Shakespearean language and gives it new flesh by exalting it in a
pagan environment. That is where the poetic level is in keeping with Lawrence’s
ontological message: “It is the end, it is oblivion [. . .] / A flush of rose and the
whole thing starts again”. The prosaic phrase “the whole thing”, with its quite
vague extratextual reference, could well be apprehended as including life and po-
etry. The soul reemerges after a passage through “not being”, just as the poetic
voices do: Lawrence’s voice “is” again, after being Hamlet fleetingly, and Hamlet
is again too, in the poem, as he is newly incarnated, given flesh, by the poetic voice.

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So if Corcoran raises the question about the “provoking or sterilizing” (Corcoran

3) nature of Shakespearean intertextuality, here, the hybridisation of poetic voices
is surely thematically and metapoetically provoking.
Lawrence seems to be using Hamlet as the epitome of both the Renaissance
and the modern demoralised man. In incarnating and relocating Hamlet’s speech,
Lawrence makes it “be” again, while he simultaneously rejects Hamlet’s concep-
tion of “not being” as he too refuses the quietus. In his essay “The Theatre”,
Lawrence makes his own position quite clear: besides referring to erroneous ap-
prehensions of “being” and “not being”, it seems that one of the fundamental prob-
lems of Hamlet’s question is its exclusiveness—“to be or not to be”, Lawrence
comments, “it is no longer our question, at least, not in the same sense” (“The
Theatre” 73). For indeed, Lawrence adds, “It is a question of knowing how to be,
and how not to be, for we must fulfil both” (73). The widening movement implicit
in “how” is coupled with the disappearance of the exclusive “or” in favour of the
combining “and”. For Lawrence, one can “be” in accepting the flow that leads to
“not to be” and vice versa. It is not a matter of choice between two opposite alter-
native possibilities that a suicidal act could resolve. It is “being” and “not being”
caught together in the dynamic flow of vital life.

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