In the circles in which I teach, we joke about increasing enrollment in courses simply by adding ". . . and Lewis" to the course title. "T. S. Eliot and D. L. Sayers . . . and C. S. Lewis" or "British Literature to 1798 . . . and C. S. Lewis" or "Contemporary Non-Western Literature . . . and C. S. Lewis" will almost certainly get more students.
Lewis is a remarkable writer on Medieval English literature—his Allegory of Love is particularly admirable—and non-dramatic English Renaissance literature (his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is tremendous).
But when it comes to Shakespeare, I'm not altogether convinced. I've tried multiple times to read Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?—the Shakespeare lecture he gave to the British Academy on Shakespeare's Birthday Eve in 1942—and I find it less than compelling and not altogether useful.
But perhaps I am too much embedded in those elements of the academy that Lewis is critiquing.
The work starts off well enough—Lewis is critiquing the current state of criticism on Hamlet:
All of that is well and good—if not entirely fair. It's true that T. S. Eliot's 1920 "Hamlet and his Problems" argued that Hamlet, lacking an "Objective Correlative" is "most certainly an artistic failure." Here's the relevant passage from Eliot:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.
I do appreciate Lewis' argument that we can find ourselves convinced by that argument—until we read or see the play again. But I don't think critics are paralyzed by the thought of their being multiple Hamlets in multiple Hamlets.
Lewis' conclusion is better—but still, somehow, inadequate. He wants the critics to get out of the way of the play—to read the play with a sense of childlike wonder:
Although I entirely sympathize with this view of Gulliver's Travels, I'm not sure how far this takes us. Is it an admonition to us as teachers not to demand a specific reading of Hamlet? Is it advice to us as readers to get caught up in the imaginative world of the play? Is it something remarkably profound and life-altering that I just don't get?
I welcome the direction of those who know more about Lewis and Shakespeare than I.
Update: The article "Hamlet in Narnia" opens some interesting doors on this subject (Sarah R. A. Walters, "Hamlet in Narnia: The Prince and the Poem in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia," Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 43, no. 1 (2024): 41–64).
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