THE NECESSARY QUESTION OF THE PLAY:

THE CONTRIBUTION OF SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

TO BALTHASAR’S DRAMATIC CATEGORIES

by SØREN FILIPSKI M.A. Franciscan University of Steubenville B.A. Thomas Aquinas College

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Systematic Theology, Ave Maria University, May 18, 2018

Advisor

DR. MICHAEL WALDSTEIN

Dissertation Board

DR. MICHAEL WALDSTEIN

DR. MICHAEL DAUPHINAIS

DR. T. ADAM VAN WART

© Søren Filipski, 2018

Contents

Contents ...... 2

Prologue ...... 1

I: Balthasar, Hegel, and the Problem of Hamlet ...... 4

A Note on Textual Criticism ...... 20

II: Shakespeare and Revenge ...... 23

III: Ghost Writers ...... 40

John Dover Wilson ...... 42

Lily Bess Campbell ...... 47

I.J. Semper ...... 51

Roy W. Battenhouse ...... 52

Sister Miriam Joseph ...... 55

Eleanor Prosser ...... 60

Arthur McGee ...... 67

The School of Ambiguity ...... 75

IV: He That Plays the King ...... 78

V: Fortune’s Fingers ...... 112

Love (168-188) ...... 118

Time (188-217) ...... 121

Fortune (219-238) ...... 123

Place (238-420) ...... 128

VI: A Silence in the Heavens ...... 135

The Hecuba Soliloquy ...... 140

To Be or Not to Be ...... 151

VII: The Judge of Israel ...... 170

VIII: To Define True Madness ...... 183

Aesthetic Madness ...... 186

Dramatic Madness ...... 188

True Madness ...... 200

Conclusion ...... 203

Appendix ...... 215

Bibliography ...... 217

Make us to know the shortness of our life that we may gain wisdom of heart. -Ps. 90:12

1

Prologue

It is a warm afternoon in 1601. A mass of spectators crams its way inside of London’s

Globe Theatre for the first performance of a new play called The Tragicall Historie of

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The house fills quickly, and the busy audience is expectant.

They have seen great plays in this theater before, and though they do not all know the author’s name, they have admired his work for years. Few members of this audience have arrived with any greater purpose than to get a good afternoon’s entertainment. None of them knows he is about to see a “great” play, let alone the greatest ever written. No one present has studied Hamlet in school, heard its speeches quoted, or been instructed in any theory of its interpretation. They enter the theater with nothing but themselves, with their own ideas, their own beliefs, their own prejudices, their own instincts. It is from this perspective only that they will judge the play they are to see.

From the start, the play is excellent. The action is dynamic, the characters lifelike, the poetry sweeping, and every joke is funny. The conniving old man is particularly good, and Mr. Burbage’s lead performance is full of dash and daring. This play is good fare for the peasants, but it might have been written for a monarch.

Then, in the midst of the entertainment, comes a sobering scene. A disconsolate man stands alone on the stage. He is a king; he is also a murderer, now struck by grief for his crime. Confounded by guilt, the king weighs the power of repentance. He asks himself:

What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood? Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? (Ham F1 3.3.43-46)1

1 All quotations of Hamlet marked F1 (First Folio) or Q1 (First Quarto) are to Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Quotations 2

He knows that there is rain enough, for his God is a forgiving God, who “wil that all men shalbe saued, & and come vnto knowledge of the trueth” (1 Tim 2:4).2 Yet though the king knows God’s arms are open to him, he cannot perform the necessary penance because

I am still possess’d Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition and my queen. (3.3.53-55) Now the king falls to his knees, calls the angels to his aid, and seems to pray. The suspense of the moment stretches tightly through the theater, and the audience is caught in a hush. Will the king repent? Will God forgive him?

As the crowd ponders these questions, another figure appears onstage. He is strangely clothed, disheveled, and wild. He moves stealthily towards the king, draws his sword, and whispers, “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying” (73-74)! A thrill of fear charges through the crowd. One nobleman in the audience imagines that the prince steps quickly forward and thrusts his sword through the king’s back ribs, into the area nearest his heart.

The king kicks out his legs and falls lifeless to the floor. The idea is at once grotesque; the nobleman grips the sides of his chair, not wanting to look, but unable to turn his eyes from the stage.

But William Shakespeare (for that is the name of the author) is more tasteful than to subject his audience to such a savage spectacle—He gives them a more savage spectacle instead: the prince stops, raises his sword, walks upstage, and exits. After a manner, this is a desirable action, because it spares the life of the pitiful king. But in its larger

marked Q2 (Second Quarto) are to Hamlet, ed. Thompson and Taylor (2006). All other citations to Shakespeare are to the respective 2nd Arden editions of the various plays and sonnets. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all English quotations of the Bible are to the Geneva Bible of 1560, which is the most frequently quoted version in Shakespeare’s plays. 3 meaning, it is more disconcerting than if Hamlet had killed him. For the prince has not paused out of mercy, out of sorrow, or even out of pity for his mother. The motive for his delay is his hatred, and the formal object of his choice is an evil per se:

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed, Or at gaming, swearing, or about some act That hath no relish of salvation in’t. Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heav’n, And that his soul may be as damn’d and black As hell whereto its goes. (89-95) This is not the delay of an irresolute man, but of a man resolved upon evil. This happens in a play by William Shakespeare, whose works abound with the praises of forgiveness and mercy.

4

I: Balthasar, Hegel, and the Problem of Hamlet

“What constitutes a Christian drama?” is a theological question requiring a theological answer. If an answer is given solely from the sociology of Christianity and other external factors, the answer will be only nominal. A true and substantive answer must turn to revelation, even when it makes material use of other principles and sources.

It must explain how the revealed light of Christ shows itself in drama through what is interior to it as an art.

As Vatican II’s Inter Mirifica understands, the question and its answer are of urgent importance for maintaining—and today reviving—moral and aesthetic health in the arts, in theater, television, and film. Yet they have another importance a well, which has especially come to light through the efforts of Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his Theo-

Drama, to enlist dramatics in the service of theology proper. Balthasar’s proposal is that the stage, whose task is “to make the drama of existence explicit so that we may view it,”3 is “the missing link” that consolidates the beautiful, the good, and the true, because

“it transforms the event into a picture that can be viewed… while at the same time it is already translating this picture into speech.” This gives to the phenomenon of theater an orientation to the divine, since “it is a projection of human existence onto a stage, interpreting to itself that existence which is beyond it.”4 As theater reveals the dramatic

3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I: Prolegomena, trans. Graham Harrison, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 32 4 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 20 5 character of existence as such, pointing to a higher reality, which is active and embraces the totality of all action, it “is making its own contribution to fundamental theology.”5

Balthasar justifies this foundational claim in two primary ways. First, he argues that a theological dramatic theory is necessitated by a theological aesthetics. His Theo-Drama is the second part of a trilogy, which begins with a Theological Aesthetics and concludes with a Theo-Logic. The structure of the series is derived from the three transcendentals identical with being and the one: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Balthasar, however, reverses their conventional order as the beautiful, the good, and the true. This reordering is principally justified by its fruits, and for correcting a neglect of aesthetics in modern theology, but it is also a confrontational device to set Balthasar’s trilogy against the three critiques of Kant. Kant deals with truth and the possibility of knowledge first, in his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he conceives of the knowledge of objects as functions of mental construction, whereby the mind dictates categories and finally laws to reality as perceived. His treatment of the good in The Critique of Practical Reason builds on the first critique by establishing a system for the mind to legislate universal moral laws from the necessity of logical consistency in its constructions rather than from desirable ends. He reserves the consideration of beauty until last in his Critique of

Judgment, where he defines beauty as whatever the mind experiences with indifference, as having no further end. Only in the absence of purposiveness can delight in beauty be good taste.

Balthasar’s objection to Kant begins in aesthetics, for when St. John says, “We beheld his glory” (John 1:14), he is not speaking of a construct, but of the truth of an object

5 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 21 6 whose very nature is to disclose itself in a visible form, or Gestalt. It belongs to the subject beholding that reality not to construct it, but to receive it through the seeing power of faith and a free response to the beautiful. To behold Christ’s glory is a dialogical experience in which the viewer is tested, and Christ himself is manifested, not as a static picture but as a person in action. Dialogue and action are the elements of drama, and so the Gestalt of Christ reveals him as good in a dramatic role, and so we are called to join him in his play, or rather, to accept his entrance into our play in the

Incarnation:

Thus, by entering into contact with the world theatre, the good which takes place in God’s action really is affected by the world’s ambiguity and remains a hidden good. This good is something done: it cannot be contemplated in pure “aesthetics” nor proved and demonstrated in pure “logic”. It takes place nowhere but on the world stage—which is every living person’s present moment—and its destiny is seen in the drama of a world history that is continually unfolding. What takes place, thus decisively, for us and in us, has already been decided in itself; but, as a result of the contact between God’s drama and the world theatre, the “for us” cannot be isolated from the “in itself”. … The good which God does to us can only be experienced as the truth if we share in performing it (Jn 7:17; 8:31f) ); we must “do the truth in love” (aletheuein en agape [Eph 4:15]) not only in order to perceive the truth of the good but, equally, in order to embody it increasingly in the world, thus leading the ambiguities of the world theatre beyond themselves to a singleness of meaning that can only come from God. This is possible because it is already a reality for God and through God, because he has already taken the drama of existence which play on the world stage and inserted it into his quite different “play” which, nonetheless, he wished to play on our stage. It is a case of the play within the play: our play “plays” in his play.6 The second foundation of Balthasar’s theological dramatics is the existence of theater itself. Man is not only distinguished from the beasts as a rational animal, a political animal, and a religious animal, but also as a theater-goer. This is because theater assists us in our rational need to situate ourselves within reality:

In fact, theatre owes its very existence substantially to man’s need to recognize himself as playing a role. It continually delivers him from the sense of being trapped and from the temptation to regard existence as something closed in upon itself. Through the theatre, man acquires the habit of looking for meaning at a higher and less obvious level. And at the same time it dispels the disheartening notion that this higher level is no longer dramatic but a static level where nothing happens and which relativizes all events beneath and external to it. In this way the theatre acts as a brake on all tidy philosophies: it

6 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 19-20 7

maintains the existential character of existence against all attempts to relativize it; it shows that this existential character is a part of the all-embracing reality itself.7 With this understanding of theater as an encounter with active reality, Balthasar develops a set of “dramatic categories”—conceptual principles culled from the phenomenon of theater as it interprets existence, and which can therefore be employed to interpret revelation. Balthasar establishes these categories in his Prolegomena, which make up the first volume of his Theo-drama. The book is mostly taken up by theological criticism of important plays and authors ranging from Sophocles, Shakespeare, and

Calderon to Ionesco, Brecht, and Wilder. Balthasar roots his speculations in a highly concrete investigation into drama as it has actually occurred in human culture, bolstered by the particular contributions of Christian dramatists:

Insofar as, in Christianity, the norm of Christian conduct is itself dramatic, we can glimpse from this vantage point a genuine, Christian dramatic genre which—given the right artistic kairos—can stand beside the classical tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles. As we shall show, certain of Shakespeare’s plays attain this theological level.8 In finding a “theological level” in Christian drama, Balthasar is most successful in his studies of Calderon and Shakespeare, but even he underestimates how much theological value Shakespeare offers for his project. The present study seeks to augment Balthasar’s survey through a concentrated theological reading of one particular play, Shakespeare’s

Hamlet. The primary reason I have chosen this work is the same reason Balthasar chooses every play in his own study, for its “theological fruitfulness,”9 but also because

Balthasar misunderstands Hamlet in ways that weaken the evidence for his dramatic theory while missing many of the profound opportunities this particular play offers for theological speculation.

7 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 20-1 8 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 118 9 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 9 8

The fruit that Balthasar overlooks in Hamlet, besides its theologically fascinating and instructive story, is an implicit system of fundamental Christian dramatic theory, which strikingly anticipates his own most essential theses. The speculative concepts in Hamlet are not stated propositionally, but through poetic and theatrical devices, but when discovered, they can be translated into propositions of theological weight. Precisely,

Hamlet contains a theological anthropology that interprets the dramatic categories of person and role as either unified in the mission of Christ or dissolved in sin. The framework for this anthropology is the analogy of the world-stage, in which playing a role well is analogous to living a good life. This notion of role-playing is in turn situated within a metaphysic of the transcendentals, the beautiful, the good, and the true, with dramatics standing in the place of the good.

To give the reader a prelimiary hint at why I believe this, there is a scene at the mid- point of Hamlet where a character enters and asks, “To be or not to be,” a question as weighted with the burdens of metaphysical knowledge as by the concrete and immediate fardels of evil fortune that press down on his sorrowful back, as he struggles in his mind to decide just what he ought to do. He then proceeds to ponder his last end, transferring the question of existence to that of Christian morality and the Final Judgement. The scene where this happens is bracketed by two major excurses into theater that present the stage as a mirror of life. This mirror reveals and judges those who view it as well as those who act in it. In understanding this nexus of moral theology, theatrical craft, aesthetics, and metaphysics—the very things that theological dramatics aims to unite—lies nothing less than the solution to the play. 9

To demonstrate this will require me to follow a circuitous path, because many layers of hermeneutical controversy lie between the typical reader of the play and the premises that yield its greatest riches. More than half of this study will be spent dispelling a range of common misunderstandings, which have prevented the theo-dramatic nature of Hamlet from being seen for what it is, and replacing them with a different, theological framework for imagining the play. Foremost among these misunderstandings is the belief—a myth in my opinion—that the ethic of Hamlet is favorable to private revenge. Challenges to that assumption are not new; in fact, it has fallen on hard times among scholars for the better part of a century, but with only a moderate effect on the popular reception of the play.

The coming chapters will introduce the work of many important writers who have contributed to the subject, particularly as it bears on the debate about the nature of

Hamlet’s ghost and the morality of its command. This debate, as to whether the ghost is good, evil, or ambiguous has become increasingly informed by scholarship in historical theology. In recent decades, these investigations have culminated in a paradigm shift, as

David Scott Kastan, general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, explains:

It is now a commonplace that the problem of Hamlet, the problem for Hamlet, is his uncertainty about the nature of the ghost, an issue that can be decided (or perhaps can’t) by turning to religious debate in the sixteenth century on the question of salvation. Even the Prince knows that spirits are likely to be devils and that he must have “grounds/More relative than” (2.2.538-9) the words of an ontologically ambiguous apparition to justify killing the King. Where the twentieth century, following Freud’s student, Ernest Jones, tended to see the tragedy mainly in psychological terms, recently we have been more likely to see it in theological ones. An individual’s Oedipus complex has been replaced by the culture’s complex religious history as the motor of the play. Theology has replaced psychology as the favored tool to penetrate the heart of the mystery that is Hamlet.10 That theological examination has entered the mainstream of scholarship in Hamlet is in itself encouraging, and yet the theologically sensitive reader must feel a deficiency, or

10 David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 118 10 even sense the presence of an old mole working in the earth, beneath Kastan’s phrase,

“favored tool.” Theology proper is not a tool, but a wisdom that is good in itself, “for it does not pertain to it to prove the principles of other sciences, but only to judge them.”11

What Kastan calls “theology” is really the sociology of religion. If the play is read theologically, in the most authentic sense, then theological argument must bear not only on its interpretation but on its judgment as a good or bad work of art. The play may be considered a success if it is constructive and enlivening for its audience and performers as

Christians. It need not be instructive per se, by teaching a doctrine or a set of morals, but it must conform to the health of the Christian soul, by making explicit a Christian reality that is good in itself.

I do not believe that many critics have attempted this with Hamlet, and those who have tried have succeeded only marginally, if at all. Balthasar tries his hand at it in an excellent excursus he gives on “Shakespeare and Forgiveness.”12 He interprets

Shakespeare’s treatment of Christian forgiveness, in the context of divine judgement, as the decisive element in his dramatic worldview. This is expressed idealistically in the comedies, especially Measure for Measure, through radical acts of mercy, when characters are moved to forgiveness by a divine hand even at the expense of psychological realism. The tragedies as well, whatever horrors they present, are marked in their conclusions by reconciliation and peace. In the histories, realism holds more sway, bringing mercy into contact with hard political requirements, but sustains mercy nonetheless as the summit of Christian virtue. Balthasar’s treatment is convincing in its

11 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2: “Et ideo non pertinet ad eam probare principia aliarum scientiarum, sed solum iudicare de eis.” 12 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 465-78 11 main lines, if not every detail, but when he comes to Hamlet’s immortal revenge, he meets an obstacle. Here is what he says:

Hamlet, essentially a tragedy of revenge, clearly shows its nature in the king’s prayer scene. But even here the emphasis is more on the mind of the culprit, and how it is possible for him to pray while enjoying the fruits of his crime, than on what is going on in Hamlet’s mind—how he will have to kill the king when he is “about some act/That has no relish of salvation in’t” (III,3). All the same, Hamlet does not avenge himself but carries out a command that come from the yonder world (like Orestes); and, what is more difficult, he is told to spare his mother.13 This argument does nothing but distract from Hamlet’s explicit intentions to extraneous circumstances. The very nature of a speech is to call attention to the mind of the one speaking, not the one who has just spoken, and what Hamlet’s speech shows about his mind is reprehensible in its own right regardless of what one thinks about the king, or whether he should spare his mother. Hamlet’s yonder world is also not that of

Orestes, because the ghost claims to be from a Catholic Purgatory, an unlikely source for a commandment to contrive someone’s damnation. If the ghost has not commanded this, it comes from Hamlet and not yonder world; if the ghost has, it calls yonder world into question. Since Balthasar himself argues for the divinity of mercy because it comes to

Shakespeare’s heroes from a higher power, it would follow from the same reasoning that

Hamlet’s immortal revenge is also divinely ratified. Balthasar goes on to argue that

Hamlet’s mutual forgiveness of Laertes gives mercy the final word, and so it does, but again this calls attention away from the problem rather than resolving it.

The inadequacy of Balthasar’s reading has two consequences. The first is that it impedes the positive understanding of Hamlet’s theology that will be explicated throughout this study. The second is that it partly undermines one of the main lines of

Balthasar’s own argument in the Prolegomena, namely, his response to the dramatic

13 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 472-3 12 theory of Hegel’s Aesthetics (1835), which denies that theological dramatics is possible for Christianity.

Hegel interprets the history of drama in light of a principle, similar to Balthasar’s view of theater as an encounter with existence, that the highest vocation of drama is to manifest the Absolute in the setting of a community. This vocation, however, has been eclipsed by Christian theology, and then by philosophy, so that it now belongs entirely to the past. In the pre-Christian society of the Greeks, art was capable of truly showing the gods as they were thought to be: in the most primitive, symbolic art a statue of Hermes authentically presented Hermes, the architecture of the temple was really his house, and so forth. In the higher, classical art of drama, the Absolute was manifested through the synthesis of epic and lyric poetry. Epic is the largely objective narrative form, whose

Ursprung is the ethos of a society, rather than that of an individual; lyric is the subjective form that principally expresses the individual pathos of the poet’s mind, regardless of whether the poet is the subject of the poem. Drama unifies these forms by the conjunction of character and the plot advanced by the character’s deeds:

Therefore in drama a specific attitude of mind passes over into an impulse, next into its willed actualization, and then into an action; it externalizes and objectifies itself and so inclines towards the sort of reality we find in epic. But the external phenomenon, instead of existing as a mere happening, contains, in the individual’s view, his own intentions and aims. The action is the achievement of his will and is known as such as regards both its origin and beginning in himself and also its final result.14 In tragedy specifically, the union of the epic and lyric appears as the “ethical pathos” of the tragic hero, who experiences the demands of the Absolute subjectively. In

Antigone, Hegel’s favorite example, Antigone experiences as pathos the absolute claims of familial love and piety, while Creon embodies the equal claims of state justice. Yet

14 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T.M. Knox, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) 1161 13 each is at fault for laying claim to the Absolute one-sidedly, for Antigone herself is a subject of Creon and owes him allegiance, while Creon himself is related to Antigone. In consequence, “there is immanent in both Antigone and Creon something that in their own way they attack, so that they are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own actual being.”15 Since they pursue opposed ends without compromise, the ensuing collision entails self-destruction.

Because such characters in classical tragedy identify with some aspect of the

Absolute in their conflict, that conflict is the basis of their existence in the drama.

Classical tragedy, therefore, requires that the identity of the character be identical with the character’s action and fate, since “A genuine end is only attained when the aim and interest of the action, on which the whole drama turns, is identical with the individuals and absolutely bound up with them.”16 That many classical tragedies end not in death but in reconciliation is no barrier to this theory. In these plays, the characters still embrace the Absolute in their conflicts, but in the end “the individual agent gives up the one- sidedness of his aim.”17 What is definitive of classical tragedy is the identity of the action with the substantive appearance of the Divine:

In general terms, therefore, we may say that the proper theme of the original type of tragedy is the Divine; not, however, the Divine as the object of the religious consciousness as such, but as it enters the world and individual action. Yet in this actual appearance it does not lose its substantive character, nor does it see itself there as inverted into the opposite of itself. In this form the spiritual substance of will and accomplishment is the concrete ethical order. For if we take the ethical order in its direct genuineness and do not interpret it from the point of view of subjective reflection as abstract morality, then it is the Divine made real in the world and so the substantive basis which in all its aspects, whether particular or essential, provides the motive for truly human action, and it is in action itself that these aspects develop and actualize this their essence.18

15 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1217-8 16 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1167 17 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1218 18 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1195 14

The “substantive character” of the Divine remains even as its appearance determines conflict and war, which emerge from the particularity of the characters even as they identify with aspects of the Absolute:

Everything that forces its way into the objective and real world is subject to the principle of particularization; consequently the ethical powers, just like the agents, are differentiated in their domain and their individual appearance. Now if, as dramatic poetry requires, these thus differentiated powers are summoned into appearance as active and are actualized as the specific aim of a human ‘pathos’ which passes over into action, then their harmony is cancelled and they come on the scene as opposition to one another in reciprocal independence. … The original essence of tragedy consists then in the fact that within such a conflict each of the opposed sides, if taken by itself, has justification; while each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by denying and infringing the equally justified power of the other. The consequence is that in its moral life, and because of it, each is nevertheless involved in guilt.19 It is difficult to read the many passages of this type that Hegel provides without suspecting that this theory of tragedy is the root, spiritual origin of his dialectic. Although the Aesthetics is a late work of Hegel, its chief theses are already summarized in his

Phenomenology,20 which could itself be described as a series of intellectual tragedies.

There is as first a unified thesis, which divides into two opposed positions equally justified by or even identical with the thesis or each other, whose life-and-death conflicts come to a resolution only by dispelling the one-sidedness of each position in favor of a new conclusion, which ends each successive play. At every point the Absolute makes an appearance even in the conflict of opposed positions, since each thesis is retained as an essential moment in a process of discovering the Absolute.

Now the vocation of tragedy to manifest the Absolute is unique to the classical kairos, which ends in the advent of Christianity. Hegel believes that Christianity’s thorough insistence that “God is spirit” (Jn 4:24) means that the Absolute defies

19 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1195-6 20 See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) 424-452 15 representation, since spirit is essentially subjective, self-conscious being, and so cannot be represented objectively, as in art. Indeed, one of the achievements of art after Christ is to demonstrate its own inadequacy for that end. With drama thus deprived of its highest vocation, two types of theater emerge. The first is “utilitarian” theater, such as Roman dramas and medieval morality plays, which pursue the end of edifying instruction. The second is Romantic or “modern” drama, epitomized by Shakespeare, in which the subjective, lyric principle overtakes the objective, epic principle. In these plays the characters live at a distance from the Absolute, and the drama’s principal interest is the individuality and subjectivity of the characters. “Ethical pathos” is not essential to the heroes of Romantic plays, and ethics itself is only accidentally present in them:

The Greek heroes too do act in their individual capacity, but, as I have said, when Greek tragedy is at its height their individuality is itself of necessity an inherently ethical ‘pathos’, whereas in modern tragedy it remains a matter of chance whether the individual’s character is gripped by something intrinsically justified or whether he is led into crime and wrong, and in either case he makes his decision according to his own wishes and needs, or owing to external influences, etc. It is true, therefore, that character and an ethical end may coincide, but since aims, passions, and the subjective inner life are all particular, this coincidence is not the essential foundation and objective condition of the depth and beauty of a tragedy.21 Hegel is so firm in this position that he asserts it even of Macbeth.

Hegel is highly dismissive of utilitarian theater but fond of the Romantic, yet what is truly important is the implication of the division itself: that Christianity is not a dramatic religion. Once drama is conditioned by Christianity, it can only make a feeble, didactic attempt at what it once had achieved in action or abandon the attempt and pursue different values. With ethics only accidentally involved, the Good is no longer a determining feature of the action, nor is ultimate judgement. On these grounds alone, theological dramatics ought to be impossible. The flagship play on which Hegel founds

21 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1226 16 this theory is Hamlet; in fact, he invests so much in that single play that one could almost define his theory of Romantic drama as his theory of Hamlet.22

The immediate source for Hegel’s interpretation is an enormously influential description of Hamlet in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-6). The protagonist, Wilhelm, proposes and enacts a performance of Hamlet, which interprets the herp as a sentimentalist who cannot perform “a heavy deed placed on a soul which is not adequate to cope with it.” The incapacity native to Hamlet’s inner life is not absolute, for his character contains nothing of the universal. The tragic situation is instead that his particularity, including his virtuous feelings, is unhappily misaligned with his unique circumstances:

“A fine, pure, noble and highly moral person, but devoid of that emotional strength that characterizes a hero, goes to pieces beneath a burden that it can neither support nor cast off. Every obligation is sacred to him, but this one is too heavy. The impossible is demanded of him—not the impossible in any absolute sense, but what is impossible for him. How he twists and turns, trembles, advances and retreats, always being reminded, always reminding himself, and finally almost losing sight of his goal, yet without ever regaining happiness!”23

Wilhelm insists that Hamlet is less like a character in a play than in a novel, for “In the novel it is primarily sentiments and events that are presented; in drama, characters and deeds.”24 Like the hero of a novel, Hamlet is “really only has sentiments, and it is only external events that work upon him.”25 This means that Shakespeare’s achievement in

Hamlet is to make a drama founded on the particularized relation of individual feeling to the external world rather than an essential ethical relation to a universal morality disclosed in character and deed.

22 “In order to exhibit in more detail the difference in this respect between Greek and modern tragedy, I will direct attention only to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” 1225 23 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Eric A Blackall, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989) Book 4, Ch. 13, 146 24 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 185 25 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 186 17

This description of Hamlet strikingly resembles the titular character of Goethe’s own earlier novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), whose delicate and noble sensibilities, beautiful in themselves, make him unfit for the stern demands of the world around him. The prominence of feeling Goethe finds in Hamlet is correspondent to the case of Werther. Halfway through the novel, Werther gives a sentimental defense of suicide in terms plainly reminiscent of the traditional, suicidal interpretation of “To be or not to be.” He compares suicide to certain great acts, “enterprises of great pith and moment,” as it were, and claims that self-slaughter is the natural result of a particular person’s inability to bear a certain degree of sorrow. This condition is too subjective for strict moral judgment.26 When Werther ultimately kills himself and is denied Christian burial, his argument for suicide leads the reader to feel this as an injustice, since the suicide arose from the truth of his passions. Goethe’s theory of Hamlet, which underwrites Werther, seized the imagination of the Sturm und Drang movement and was the dominant theory in Germany by the time of Hegel’s writing.

Hegel runs with Goethe’s reading by using it to exemplify the difference between classical and Romantic drama. While the ethical pathos of Antigone and Oedipus makes them identical with their own destinies, since their actions arise freely from a spontaneous inner necessity, Hamlet’s identity as a subject is in part alienated from his fate. He does die as a consequence of his particular character and subjective state, and it is not strictly an accident. Yet his existence in the play is not founded on an essential claim to the Absolute, and so his form of particularity causes his doom to appear in the

26 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, also Goethe’s remarks on Hamlet’s melancholy as emotional inspiration and on suicide as “an event of human nature that demands everyone’s sympathy” in Reflections on Werther, trans. Catherine Hutter, in The Sorrows of Young Werther and Other Writings, (London: Signet Classics, 2013) 39-43, 125-9. 18 form of accidental circumstances. Hamlet’s disgust at the wickedness of the world overpowers him to the point that he abandons action and dooms himself to the outcome of unwilled, external contingencies:

But on the other hand, the tragic denouement is also displayed as purely the effect of unfortunate circumstances and external accidents which might have turned out otherwise and produced a happy ending. In this case the sole spectacle offered to us is that the modern individual with the non-universal nature of his character, his circumstances, and the complications in which he is involved, is necessarily surrendered to the fragility of all that is mundane and must endure the fate of finitude. … Such a history may touch us acutely, and yet it seems only dreadful and we feel a pressing demand for a necessary correspondence between the external circumstances and what the inner nature of those fine characters really is. … Looked at from the outside, Hamlet’s death seems to be brought about accidentally owing to the fight with Laertes and the exchange of rapiers. But death lay from the beginning in the back of Hamlet’s mind. The sands of time do not content him. In his melancholy and weakness, his worry, his disgust at all the affairs of life, we sense from the start that in all his terrible surroundings he is a lost man, almost consumed already by inner disgust before death comes to him from the outside. … Thus the chief interest is made to lie in the individual’s own personal disposition and the goodness or evil of his heart. But the more the abstract moral disposition is made the kingpin, the less can it be a passionate concentration on something, on a really substantial end, that the individual is tied to, while in the last resort even a definite character cannot hold out and accomplish his aim.27 Due to the anti-theo-dramatic account of theater that stands upon this reading, it is important for a study like Balthasar’s to give a viable, alternative account of Hamlet in particular. For that account to be successful, it would need to discover in Hamlet a necessary connection within the Christian ethical sphere between the individual character and the moral universal. This is what Hegel fundamentally denies that Christian drama contains and Balthasar fundamentally affirms.

Up to a point, Balthasar does succeed in this. Speaking of the “theological level” in

Shakespeare’s plays, he writes,

The connection with the primal image does not need to be made explicit, nor need the dramatist himself be aware of it: it is simply there, to the extent that the play is written from a particular horizon of faith and consciousness. Naturally, if the work is to be objectively grasped, this horizon is just as essential as the reality of Zeus or Apollo or the Eumenides in classical tragedy. To attempt to abstract from this theological horizon and reduce it to the ordinary psychological categories of a “great character” is necessarily to

27 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1231-33 19

misinterpret the core of the action. Both Goethe and Hegel succumbed to this in their interpretations of Hamlet.28

This is a sound appraisal, and yet the weaknesses in Balthasar’s own reading of Hamlet give it a questionable foundation. Explaining away Hamlet’s un-Christian, immortal revenge along traditional lines only muddies the waters at the very point where Balthasar directs his argument. As we have seen, Balthasar leaves the reader with questions as basic as whether the command from yonder world is good or evil, and, supposing as he does that it is good, whether Hamlet’s evil interpretation of it should be relativized by paying more attention to the king’s state of mind than Hamlet’s or simply counter-balancing it with his forgiveness of Laertes. If these are the best alternatives, it is reasonable to ask if the play is really written from the horizon of faith or merely borrows incidental Christian themes from the author’s cultural milieu, making them, as Hegel would have it, incidental to the essential action.

By contrast, it may be said in favor of the Goethe and Hegel that they provide a rationale for the moral questions to stay unresolved. An individual’s conflicted passions admit more ambiguity and contradiction than firm moral laws. Though many have wondered how a good man who forgives Laertes could still damn Claudius or how an evil man who damns Claudius could still forgive Laertes, no one has ever claimed that some man, given the right disposition and circumstances, might indeed do both. If the play is about subjectivity and sentiment in a sense that makes ethics unessential, it obviates the problem. Indeed, one historical consequence of Goethe’s popularity is that he enabled critics in the nineteenth century, who were often explicitly appalled by Hamlet’s decision, to interpret the play nonetheless as if the problem were not there, by substituting

28 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 118 20 psychological for moral analysis. This developed to such a point, that by the turn of the twentieth century, A.C. Bradley was able to dominate the field with a modified version of

Hegel’s reading, which, though it attempts to moralize Hamlet more than Hegel, seems entirely numb to the central difficulty.

Balthasar is right to feel the weight of the problem, but it is not sufficient, because

Hegel gives a rationale for ignoring it. It may not speak well for Hegel that one of his distinctive strengths is a capacity for evasion, but in the absence of a satisfying Christian solution Hegel’s reading would seem to win by default. Hegel can afford moral laxity; in fact, his theory calls for it. Balthasar has no such luxury.

Of course, Balthasar’s difficulty with Hamlet is not peculiar. In fact he handles it better than many others if only because he realizes the need to qualify the scope of its revenge ethic. What distinguishes his treatment is that by bringing Hamlet’s revenge into a discussion of Christian forgiveness in Shakespeare, he calls attention to how severely it clashes with everything else we know about Shakespeare’s worldview. This incongruity is instructive, because it shows that there is something amiss about the way Hamlet has traditionally been read, and this at least throws the ball back into Hegel’s court. Yet it does not tell us what is amiss, only that there is something. The first task of the coming pages will be to show what that something is.

A Note on Textual Criticism

Before proceeding to the study of Hamlet, it will be necessary to outline my approach to textual criticism. In recent years, textual scholarship on Hamlet has undergone significant changes. Traditionally, most editions of the play have been conflations derived chiefly from two sources, the Second Quarto of 1604 (Q2) and the First Folio of 21

1623 (F1). The dominant view, accepted in many great editions, like the New Variorum edition of H.H. Furness (1877) and the Arden edition of Harold Jenkins (1980), is that the

Second Quarto represents a draft text, proximate to Shakespeare’s original autograph, while the Folio, edited by actors in Shakespeare’s company, represents the shortened and revised prompt books used in actual productions. The first edition to be printed, however, the First Quarto of 1601 (Q1), is a highly corrupt version, possibly reconstructed by actors who rewrote the play from their memories. This version has almost the same cuts to the text as F1, suggesting it is based on a performance version, but contains a very large number of unique, variant readings. The belief that the variants in Q1 are almost all corruptions has earned it the name of the “Bad Quarto,” but in recent years, Q1’s reputation has improved, and it seems likely to represent an authentic, early version of the play. It may even be that the Ur-Hamlet, a supposedly lost version of Hamlet, probably by Thomas Kyd and dating no later than 1889, is an early work by a young Shakespeare, substantially retained in Q1.29

My own textual philosophy is broadly inclusive. Since Shakespeare is listed as the sole author on the title page of each version, all variant readings are presumed valid, as representing his intention at some stage in the text’s development. Even suspect passages that clearly appear to be redactions by printers or insertions by actors are also presumed legitimate as contemporary glosses to Shakespeare’s text.

Because I am more interested in how the different versions compliment and enlarge each other than how they correct each other, the present study will avoid taking strong positions on any textual disputes except the one most important: the order and number of

29 On the changing reception of the different versions, see Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, (New York: Random house, 2006) 29-99. 22

Hamlet’s soliloquies. In Q1, “To be or not to be” precedes the Hecuba Soliloquy, while

F1 and Q2 put the Hecuba Soliloquy first. Q2 also includes Hamlet’s soliloquy about

Fortinbras which does not occur at all in the other versions. For reasons that will emerge in the next chapter, in the section on Eleanor Prosser, I believe the F1 version represents the most finished organization for the play’s soliloquies: the Hecuba Soliloquy first and

“To be or not to be” second, with the Fortinbras Speech excluded.

In order to maintain discipline in light of this position, the present study will primarily cite F1 only, and comment on the other versions only in special cases, when they bear directly upon the argument being made about F1. By resisting the use of a composite text, I hope to achieve a cohesive interpretation of F1 as it stands, even though it will not always fit the other versions perfectly. By keeping one eye on Q1 and Q2, I aim to enhance the reading of all three versions by seeing how changes in specific choices of wording and structure often reflect diverse efforts at a single meaning. 23

II: Shakespeare and Revenge

Despite the ongoing popular acceptance that Hamlet’s first audiences would have accepted revenge as a duty, twentieth-century scholarship has extensively shown that the opposite is true. The mainstream opinion of Shakespeare’s contemporaries was that revenge as such is a damnable sin in almost every case. The Elizabethan era witnessed a widespread outcry against private revenge propagated in print and from the pulpit. This outcry stemmed from religious and political concerns.

Politically, English law banned private revenge of crime for the same reason that modern law does: revenge subverts legal justice. Revenge was an act of rebellion and anarchy, and sixteenth century England had seen too much of both. The preservation of law, therefore, was an urgent concern against the dangerous anarchism of private vendetta.30 Francis Bacon, in his essay Of Revenge (1625) gives the standard Elizabethan position:

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong putteth that law out of office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon. … This is certain: that a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well. … [V]indictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so they end unfortunate.31 More important to Elizabethan thinking than political arguments against revenge were the moral teachings of Christianity, which forbade all human vengeance. According to

Elizabethan clergy and moral philosophers, the Bible had forbidden human revenge by

30 Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1940) 10-12. 31 Francis Bacon, “Of Revenge” in Selected Essays of Francis Bacon, ed.Max J. Patrick, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc., 1948) 5-6 24 reserving the right of vengeance to God only. St. Paul had said in Romans 12:18-19:

If possible, on your part, live at peace with all. Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”32 Moralists quoted this passage often, emphasizing the distinction between the revenge of

God and the revenge of man. By their reasoning, “revenge” is an act of punitive justice whose execution belongs only to God, who reserves the sole power to kill or spare according to His own justice or mercy. God’s revenge is just by definition, but any revenge other than his is by definition sinful and blasphemous, since it usurps a divine prerogative. Fredson Bowers, in his seminal book Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, explains the matter at length:

Though legal condemnation of private revenge came slowly in England, it was preceded by the denunciations of clerics and moralists. And after a system of state justice had finally been established, the religious and ethical protest against revenge increased until, in the God-fearing Elizabethan age, it exercised a force second to none in the constant war against the private lawlessness of the times. The old Mosaic laws legitimizing blood- revenge in the Bible were either twisted so as to apply to state justice or were ignored, or contrasted to the new world created by Christ. The strongest expression of this overthrow of the Mosaic law as applied to life in England is given by Daniel Tuvil in 1609: “Ierusalem is now new erected; among her Citizens, there is now no thirsting for reuenge. The law of Retribution is disanuld amongst them. It is not a dictum est antiquis, but a dico vobis which they follow. An eie no longer for an eie: a tooth no longer for a tooth.” The chief argument against revenge may be quoted from Thomas Becon (1560), although it was the staple of every other moralist: “To desire to be revenged, when all vengeance pertaineth to God, as he saith, ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will reward … this to do ye are forbidden.’” There was no gainsaying this direct command. “God would never have assumed the power of reuenge as a parcell of his owne prerogatiue in case his purpos had bene to leaue all men to the reuenge of their owne particularities.” With the word of God so expressly forbidding private revenge, it was only natural to believe damnation awaited those who disobeyed. Cleaver (1612) declares that the revenger “strips himselfe of Gods protection, he neither can pray for a blessing, nor haue a blessing; because he is out of Gods defence: he promiseth no shelter, neither do his Angels watch ouer him that is out of his ways.” Bishop Hall (1612) predicts for the revenger a double death, of body and of soul. The religious writers denounced the fact that men could “thinke that God is fauorable … when as they imagine, that the reuenge they pursue is iust, and that they haue been vnworthily abused.” No private revenge could ever partake of justice. On a lower and more practical plane, it was argued that an act of revenge decreased rather than increased honor, since “the honour that is won by her hath

32 Paul is quoting Deut 32:39-42: “Beholde now, for I, I am he, and there is no gods with me: I kil, and giue life: I wounde, &I make whole: nether is there anie that can deliuer out of mine hand. For I lift vp mine hand to heauen, & say, I liue for euer. If I whet my glittering sworde, and mine hand take holde on iudgement, I wil execute vengeance on mine enemies, and wil rewarde them that hate me. I wil make mine arrows dronke with blood, (and my sworde shal eat flesh) for the blood of the slaine, & of the captiues, when I beginne to take vengeance of the enemie.” 25

an ill ground.… Honor is a thing too noble of it selfe, to depend of a superfluous humour, so base and vilainous, as the desire of vengeance is.”33 The Christian prohibition against revenge allowed one significant exception: human agents could exact revenge if they were divinely appointed ministers such as kings and magistrates, whom Providence had selected to mete out God’s revenge through public law. The public revenge of kings was, by this reasoning, a participation in God’s revenge and, therefore, not condemned in scripture. Private persons could only participate in

God’s revenge by taking recourse to laws established by kings and their ministers.34

Since human governments were divinely appointed, revenge against legal authorities was emphatically condemned, especially against kings. Sixteenth-century nationalism had brought the Divine Right of Kings into such high vogue in England that Elizabethan writers were quite serious saying that the king (or in their case the queen) held the same place in the state that the primum mobile held in the universe, not to be moved by any object beneath itself in the Chain of Being.35 Since the king was God’s primary minister, he was answerable to God only, and exempt from all revenge, save that of God Himself, who would hold all kings accountable on the Day of Judgment. If the king were a murderer, it was no matter; the obedience of the subject forbade any action of revenge against him.36 English law asserted the Divine Right to the extent that some Englishman were occasionally imprisoned or executed for publicly questioning the doctrine.37

There were, however, some exceptions. Bowers explains:

Retaliation for base injuries, then, was the first occasion on which certain writers tolerated revenge. There was a second occasion… when revenge was considered allowable.… William Perkins (1606) whose books carried weight with every Elizabethan, argues that defense by force is lawful ‘when violence is offered, and the Magistrate

33 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 12-14. 34 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 13-20 35 See E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943) 8, 89. 36 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 171. 37 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 171-172. 26

absent;… In this case, God puts the sword into the private man’s hands.’ … Undoubtedly there seems to be a loophole here for the stage revenger in a good cause who, like Hamlet, Antonio, and Maximus, may not be able to procure justice by law. … We come now to the third and most important justification of revenge: blood-revenge of murder. Legally the avenger of blood incurred the same penalties as any other murderer. Religiously, too, he was banned, since all revenges belonged to God. There is, however, much evidence for an Elizabethan sympathy for blood revenge, which had survived from the tumultuous times not so long past.38 By this consideration, it seems that Hamlet’s revenge on Claudius could have appeared reasonably sympathetic to Elizabethan audiences, though only as an exception to a rule. But two components of Hamlet’s revenge do not fit with any Elizabethan moral beliefs: first, that he seeks revenge upon a king; second, that he wills the king’s damnation. Given the particularly religious character of the outcry against revenge,

Hamlet’s blasphemous usurpation of a divine prerogative could not have been more allowable to the Elizabethans than to any Christian audience. It lay so far from the

Christian imagination, that Sir Thomas Browne was skeptical of a story he heard about revenge in Italy, in which a murderer would promise to spare a man if he renounced

Christ, and then kill him when he did to insure his damnation:

To pray for Enemies, that is, for their salvation, is no harsh precept, but the practice of our daily and ordinary devotions. I cannot beleeve the story of the Italian, our bad wishes and uncharitable desires proceed no further than this life; it is the Devill, and the uncharitable votes of Hell, that desire our misery in the world to come.39 It is important to note that Browne says not merely that immortal revenge is wrong, but that it is unheard of. Elizabethan society knew of no such thing, and Hamlet is in fact the first known play in the English language to represent it. Revengers in later plays who seek to damn their victims imitate Hamlet, and are always blasphemous psychopaths.40

Revenge, nonetheless, was a popular subject of the Elizabethan stage, around which a

38 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 36-37. 39 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, (London: Andrew Crooke, 1645) 147. 40 Geoffrey Bollough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973) 58-9 27 whole genre with a distinct set of conventions evolved, comparable in some sense to modern crime films, in which audience’s feel emotional sympathy for a protagonist while knowing his actions are objectively evil. The Elizabethan revenge dramas, however, were not glamorous or nihilistic. Geoffrey Bullough describes the genre aptly:

“Hamlet” is a revenge play in a tradition of tragedy that depended on terrible happenings to be watched with mixed feelings. On the one hand, revenge was justified under certain circumstances. … On the other hand Christian doctrine and the law were against it, and the revenge of such heroes as Heironimo and Titus Andronicus must be viewed with mingled approval and horror as the agent of justice in pursuit of his right and duty violates the more refined ethics of modern civilization and involves himself in deeds of savage cruelty only credible if performed in a state of near-madness.] Showing that opposition to revenge was orthodox in England is different from showing that Shakespeare accepted that orthodoxy. Yet since revenge is a frequent subject in Shakespeare, cropping up in more than half of his plays in a variety of plot- types, his attitude can be discerned quite clearly.

Revenge plots in the comedies fall into three categories. The first type involves clownish characters who pursue absurd, prankish revenges; the second involves noble characters who deny the temptation to revenge; the third involves characters who pursue murderous revenges, but who usually repent and receive forgiveness.

The two clownish revenges are that of Sir Toby Blech against Malvolio and the

Merry Wives against Falstaff. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby tricks Malvolio into believing

Olivia is in love with him, in revenge for spoiling his drinking party. For most of the play, this revenge is a source of mirth for the audience, but it is told in the attitude of farce, without genuine moral approval, and the play’s final word is against revenge.

Olivia declares that Malvolio “hath been most notoriously abused” (TN 5.1.384), and when Feste tries to moralize that “the whirlygig of time brings in his revenges” (381-2)

Malvolio responds, “I’ll be reveng’d upon the whole pack of you” (383). Revenge does 28 not finally “pluck on laughter” (372) as Fabian hopes: it plucks on more revenge.

The revenge of the merry wives against Falstaff for his attempts to seduce them are humorous rather than cruel; they never subject Falstaff to actual harm, but only give him his due humiliation. At last, their sport ends happily, with every character reconciled, as the play concludes with Mistress Page telling her husband,

Good husband, let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire; Sir John and all. (MW 5.5.232-5) Heroes who deny revenge are prominent in the comedies. When in Much Ado About

Nothing Claudio offers to suffer any “revenge” Leonato might wish on him for slandering his daughter Hero as a wanton, Leonato asks only that Claudio publish Hero’s innocence and marry her cousin, who proves to be Hero herself. Upon this verdict, Leonato concludes, “so dies my revenge” (Much Ado, 5.1.305). In As You Like It, Orlando is moved by “kindness, nobler ever than revenge” (AYLI 4.3.130) to save the life of his evil brother Oliver. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the King of France forgives Bertram’s cruelty to Helena:

My honour’d lady, I have forgiven and forgotten all, Though my revenges were high bent upon him And watch’d the time to shoot. (All’s Well 5.3.8-11) In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine forgives Proteus’s treachery and attempted rape of Sylvia because

Who by repentance is not satisfied Is nor of heaven nor earth; for these are pleas’d. By penitence the immortal wrath’s appeas’d. (2 Gent 5.4.85-7) In The Tempest, Prospero is satisfied with the repentance of his usurping brother, and chooses to pursue no revenge:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury 29

Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. (Temp 5.1.25-30) Perhaps the greatest of Shakespeare’s forgiving heroes is Isabella in Measure for

Measure, who pleads to the judge Angelo to spare her brother’s life:

Why all the souls that were were forfeit once, And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be If he which is the top of judgment should But judge you as you are? O, think on that, And mercy then will breathe upon your lips Like man new made. (Meas 2.2.94-100) By the end of the play, Angelo has attempted to rape Isabella by commanding her to yield him her body in exchange for Claudio’s life. In the final scene, the Duke of Vienna condemns Angelo to die for this abuse of power and for the apparent death of Claudio.

But Isabella, not hungry for revenge, pleads before the duke to spare him.

Three comedies involve characters who pursue violent, murderous revenges:

Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice. The revenge plots in

Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, are so similar that they should be studied in conjunction.

Posthumus Leonatus, the hero of Cymbeline, is so confident of his wife Imogen’s virtue that he wagers with the villain Iachimo that she cannot be seduced. To win the wager, Iachimo makes an attempt on her virtue. When she repels him, he steals a bracelet from her room and uses it, with other evidence, to convince Posthumus that Imogen was unfaithful. Posthumus falls into a rage, rashly ordering his servant Pisanio to murder

Imogen. The good Pisanio spares her, but tells Posthumus that she is dead. When

Posthumus’s anger eventually cools, he sees the wrongfulness of the murder, and sorrowfully repents. Finally, however, Iachimo admits to his fraud, and Imogen reappears 30 alive.

In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicilia, becomes irrationally suspicious that his wife, Hermione, has been unfaithful. Leontes orders his servant Camillo to poison her suspected lover, but Camillo, like Pisanio, will not commit murder and flees the country.

Then Leontes imprisons Hermione and condemns her to death pending confirmation of her guilt from the Delphic Oracle. When the Oracle declares that Hermione is chaste,

Leontes repents of his revenge, but too late, for Leontes’s son has died of fear for his mother, and Hermione soon dies of grief. Leontes mourns for the next sixteen years until, like Posthumus, he finds his goods restored to him when his lost daughter returns from exile and Hermione also returns alive.

The casual reader of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale can overlook that each is in part about the evil of revenge, since Posthumus and Leontes err primarily in their rash jealousy, which leads them take needless revenge on the innocent. Yet revenge itself is a significant topic in each play. In the Trial Scene of The Winter’s Tale, Hermione urges her innocence bravely, concluding with a merciful invocation against revenge:

The Emperor of Russia was my father. O, that he were alive, and here beholding His daughter’s trial! That he did but see The flatness of my mis’ry; yet with eyes Of pity, not revenge! (3.2.117-121) Hermione’s plea for “pity, not revenge” is the last complete sentence that she utters before she dies, and Leontes’s penitence moments later admits the wisdom of her words:

Apollo, pardon My great profaneness ’gainst thine oracle. I’ll reconcile me to Polixenes, New woo my Queen, recall the good Camillo— Whom I proclaim a man of truth, of mercy. For, being transported by my jealousies To bloody thoughts and to revenge, I chose Camillo for the minister to poison My friend Polixenes. (3.2.150-8) 31

Leontes names “jealousies” as the first cause of his error, but gives due weight to “bloody thoughts” and “revenge” by pairing them against Camillo’s antithetical virtues of “truth” and “mercy,” just as Hermione stressed the antitheses of “pity” and “revenge.”

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s denies revenge more subtly, but no less deeply. The revenge motif begins when Iachimo tries to seduce Imogen by telling her that Posthumus has been unfaithful to her and then suggests that she revenge herself by taking Iachimo to her bed. Imogen is repulsed, and her refusal of revenge provides a contrast to Posthumus.

When he is convinced of Imogen’s dishonesty, he gives an enraged soliloquy, shouting,

“O vengeance, vengeance!” and falls into a misogynistic rant:

…for there’s no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it, The woman’s: flattering, hers; deceiving, hers: Lust, and rank thoughts, hers, hers: revenges, hers: Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, Nice longing, slanders, mutability; All faults that name, nay, that hell knows, why, hers In part, or all: but rather all. (Cym 2.4.172-180) Posthumus accuses women of “revenges,” yet he swears revenge on the very woman who refused revenge on him for the same crime. This irony is too pointed to be accidental.

Yet Cymbeline is still a comedy. It ends with its heroes reconciled, and Posthumus, recognizing his own need for mercy, repents of his revenge even before he discovers

Imogen’s innocence:

Gods, if you Should have ta’en vengeance on my faults, I never Had liv’d to put on this: so had you saved The noble Imogen, to repent, and struck Me, wretch, more worth your vengeance. (5.1.7-11) Iachimo also repents in the end and offers to die for his crimes, but Posthumus responds with forgiveness:

Kneel not to me: The power that I have on you, is to spare you: 32

The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live And deal with others better. (5.5.418-421) The only serious comic revenger who remains unrepentant is Shylock in The

Merchant of Venice, who claims his bond on Antonio’s flesh in revenge for Antonio being a Christian and for cursing the Jewish race. The sadistic form of Shylock’s revenge can seem too excessive to bear comparison to others, but Shakespeare enlarges Shylock’s revenge into a comment on all revenges, when he tells Salerio and Solanio,

…if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?—if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?—why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (Mer 3.1.59-66) Shylock argues that his revenge is not a unique perversion, but a paramount one, spawned by a universal disorder in humanity. His brutality is not anomalous but exemplary, revealing what the revenges of Christians really are. Portia’s eventual answers Shylock’s claim is that the Christian “quality of mercy” raises human acts above vengeful nature through an imitation of divine nature:

But mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice: therefore Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy, And that same prayer, doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. (4.1.189-198) If one were to deduce Shakespeare’s attitude towards revenge on the basis of his comedies alone, all the evidence shows that his expressed views were in accord with the

Christian thinking of his day. Out of seventeen comedies, eleven contain significant discussion of revenge. Of these, ten contrast mercy favorably against revenge, and five portray revenge as directly evil. The only revenge that finds moral approval in any of the 33

Comedies is the divine revenge on Cleon, Dionyza, Antiochus, and his daughter, in

Pericles, who “The gods for murder seemed so content to punish” (Per epi.15-16).

The strongest proof of Shakespeare’s opposition to revenge in the comedies is not to be found in the sheer numbers of quotable anti-revenge passages they yield, but in the moral nature of these plays. Balthasar has every reason to point to mercy as the primary value in Shakespeare. The spirit of mercy in these plays is in every way humane, touched by kindness and religious affection for human existence, not easily reconciled with the eternal revenge of Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s treatment of revenge in the tragedies and histories is less idealistic than in the comedies and, therefore, not as one-sided in its moral implications. The overriding attitude, however, is the same, supportive of mercy and strongly unfavorable to revenge.

In the Roman plays, revenge is chiefly a political act, wrought by hell to bring destruction on the state, as when Antony calls on “Casear’s spirit, ranging for revenge,/with Ate by his side come hot from hell” (JC 3.1.289-90) to let slip to dogs of war and cover the ground with carrion men. Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus each pursue revenge against Rome by raising a foreign army against the state. When

Coriolanus defects to join Aufidius, he offers his “revengeful services” to “fight/Against my canker’d country with the spleen/Of all the under fiends” (Cor 4.5.91-3). Titus’s effort to raise an army of Goths is unsuccessful, and he otherwise resists taking revenge against Saturninus, Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius for the murder of Bassianus and rape of Lavinia. Yet he degenerates into madness in his suffering and eventually changes his mind. When Publius urges him to “revenge from hell” (Tit 4.3.39), he resolves to “pull her out of Acheron by the heels” (45) and then undertakes a revenge of ghastly villainy, 34 serving the bodies of Chiron and Demetrius to their mother in a pie before slaying her, and killing his own daughter to escape the shame of her rape.

Shakespeare’s English histories also see revenge through a political lens as a danger to the state, but stress the king’s role as the legitimate minister of divine revenge. The king’s revenge is a public rather than private right, so that when Henry V condemns

Scroop and his accomplices to death, he says nonetheless, “Touching our person, seek we no revenge” (Hen V 2.2.175).

As a unique executor of divine justice, the king himself is immune to revenge by any subject, but is not immune to God. Richard II gives a scenario similar to Titus

Andronicus, and for that matter to Hamlet, in which John of Gaunt knows the king to be guilty of his brother’s murder, yet refuses to take vengeance:

God’s is the quarrel; for God’s substitute, His deputy anointed in his sight, Hath caused his death; the which if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge; for I may never lift An angry arm against his minister. (RII 1.2.37-41) The foundational opposition to revenge contained in these lines is not entirely evident throughout the histories because characters in these plays sometimes toss the term

“revenge” loosely about, often in the heat of battle (e.g. Hen VI, I 1.4.57, 4.6.30; Hen IV,

I, 5.2.147). These passages admit some ambiguity, because they are spoken in immediate rage, earnest but not fully deliberate, but on the other hand they also reflect the moral confidence of the speakers, who each assume his side of the battle acts with legal right.

When the histories discuss revenge in strict and deliberate contexts, the usual pattern is for virtuous characters who desire revenge to refer their cause to the king’s revenge, while villainous characters urge their revenges at the king’s expense or directly against him. The insurrectionist Hotspur plans to “Revenge the jeering and disdained 35 contempt/Of this proud king” (Hen IV, I 1.3.186-7). An instructive example is the treason of Suffolk in Henry VI, Part II. Suffolk murders the Lord Protector to gain influence over the King but triggers a popular uprising against himself. Although Suffolk is guilty, Warwick tells Henry that the mob’s lawlessness undermines the king’s justice:

The commons, like an angry hive of bees That want their leader, scatter up and down And care not who they sting in his revenge. Myself have calmed their spleenful mutiny, Until they hear the order of his death. (Hen VI, II 3.2.125-129) Suffolk’s death eventually comes at the lawless hands of the pirate Walter Whitmore, who kills him in revenge for losing his eye in the course of capturing him:

Never yet did bade dishonor blur our name, But with our sword we wiped away the blot, Therefore, when merchant-like I sell revenge, Broke be my sword, my arms torn and defaced, And I proclaimed a coward through the world. (4.2.39-43) Though Suffolk has committed a capital crime, his death at Whitmore’s hand itself calls for the king’s vengeance. A gentlemen who witnesses the murder carries his body to the king saying, “If he revenge it not, yet will his friends” (148).

Revenge in the tragedies is presented consistently with the other plays. Romeo is not excused for his revenge on Tybalt. Although “His fault concludes but what the law should end” (R&J 3.1.187), he is banished on pain of death, and dies a renegade. The revenge of Othello is murderous and demonic. When he cries, “Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell” (Oth 3.1.450), and plots a double murder, it is clear that his jealous belief in his wife’s slander is only one half of his tragedy; the other is his degeneration in revenge. Lear’s threats of revenge against his daughters are impotent and never carried out, but terrible nonetheless. His curse upon Goneril’s womb (Lear 1.4.267-81) ranks with the most dreadful sentiments that wrath can generate. It is a providential mercy to

Lear that he never has a chance to enact “the terrors of the earth” (2.2.471) in vengeance; 36 he becomes ashamed of his wrath, and Cordelia’s mercy restores him to his right mind.

Only three significant revenge plots occur in Shakespeare with the author’s evident approval, and each is reducible to divine revenge embodied in state justice. They are:

Albany and Edgar’s revenges against Cornwall and Edmund in King Lear; Macduff’s revenge against Macbeth; and the revenge of Richmond and his followers against Richard

III.

In King Lear, Albany vows to take revenge for Gloucester’s blinding, but when he learns that Cornwall, who put out his eyes, has died, he praises the gods for divine revenge:

This shows you are above, You justicers, that these our nether crimes So speedily can venge! (Lear 4.2.89-91) In his action against Edmund, Albany asserts a legal right, telling him, “I hold you but a subject of this war,/Not as a brother.” (5.3.66-7) Edgar’s killing of Edmund is not a private revenge, but a public trial by combat, performed in accord with the law of war under the aegis of Albany (5.3.83-94, 149-51).

Macduff’s revenge is likewise circumscribed by state justice. When Macbeth murders

Macduff’s family, it is Malcolm who says, in the royal we, “Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,/To cure this deadly grief” (Mac 4.3.217-8). Macduff assents to this revenge by serving in Malcolm’s army against an “untitled tyrant” (104). His slaying of

Macbeth is a fair kill in battle, and Macduff even offers to spare him if he will yield

(5.8.23-27). Though he taunts Macbeth into rejecting this offer, the offer itself confirms the legality of his action. Were Macbeth to yield and Macduff still killed him, it would be damnable revenge.

Although the legal right of Richmond to depose Richard III is historically dubious, it 37 was the foundation of the Tudor monarchy, and Richard III simply assumes its legitimacy. A sign of this is that the specter of divine revenge hovers over Richard’s head throughout the play, beginning with his first victim. When Clarence’s murderers tell him he is to die for his broken oath to Lancaster, he warns them not to break the law of God, who “holds vengeance in His hand/To hurl upon their heads that break His law” (RIII

1.4.188-9). They reply that Gloucester’s broken his oath has brought that very vengeance on himself, but he continues his appeal to divine revenge:

If God will be avenged for the deed, Then know thou yet, He doth it publicly; Take not the quarrel from his powerful arm. (204-6) With this moral hanging over the front of the play, Richard foreshadows God’s vengeance on himself by saying twice of Clarence’s death, “God will revenge it” (2.1.40;

2.2.14). As Richard’s doom approaches, Queen Margaret anticipates his downfall with relish, saying “I am hungry for revenge” (4.4.61), but her hunger is not for wild justice.

She anticipates the entire cosmos of earthly, heavenly, and infernal powers rising in accord to do God’s will on Richard:

But at hand, at hand, Ensues his piteous and unpitied end: Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray, To have him suddenly convey’d away. Cancel his bond of life, dear God I pray,, That I may live to say, The dog is dead! (73-8) This is as potboiling a speech as Shakespeare ever gives for a cause sympathetic to the audience. But the revenge is not something Margaret wants to enact as a private person, but to witness by the hand of God.

This synopsis of Shakespeare’s treatment of revenge shows him to be essentially orthodox in firmly condemning it. Yet, like the orthodoxy he espouses, his condemnation is not undifferentiated. “Revenge” most commonly indicates a sin, yet because the malice 38 of that sin comes from its usurpation of a divine right, in which men can and do participate, it is also the name of an excellent and princely virtue, the virtus vindicationis of St. Thomas.41 As we turn to Hamlet, therefore, we must begin with an understanding that we cannot deduce from word “revenge” alone that an act is either vicious or virtuous without additional criteria. In particular, we must be ready to ask—and accept neither vague nor gratifying answers—if Hamlet undertakes revenge upon licit authority. To ask this question is to ask if Hamlet’s revenge is from heaven or hell. That means it is a question about the ghost.

As the next chapter will show, I am far from the first to raise of question of the morality of revenge in Hamlet and address this question to the ghost. A fascinating body of literature already does this, although the best works on the subject are not sufficiently well known to the general public or appreciated by scholars to have had the full impact they deserve. I will, therefore, review the most important works dealing with the ghost, asking if it a Catholic spirit from Purgatory commanding a divine duty, a devil from hell commanding a blasphemy, a fusion of Christian and pagan mythologies, or an intentionally unanswerable riddle, intended to raise hard questions and answer none. I believe exactly one of these answers is correct and can be proven so, but that the terms of the debate and the evidential grounds for its resolution are not sufficiently appreciated by most scholars of the play, including many who advance Catholic interpretations of it. A critical account of the historical debate and the philosophical and theological assumptions of its various schools is a corrective to this. The chapter following this review will move away from the critical literature to adjudicate, the debate about the ghost directly, from a

41 See ST II-II, q.108, a2. 39 close reading of Act I. This chapter will both repeat arguments made by others and augment them with new ones, along with responses to rebuttals not anticipated by earlier writers.

The study of the ghost will comprise most of the present work, and is theologically instructive in its own right, but also opens the door to a deeper speculative inquiry about

Hamlet’s contribution to Christian dramatics. This inquiry will be carried out by giving an exposition of the play as a whole, but with a concentrated study on only two full scenes and two short interludes that are particularly serviceable to that end. The first full scene is Act 2, scene 2, in which Hamlet has his interviews with Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, encounters the players, and hatches the scheme of The Mousetrap.

Next is the following scene, where he delivers “To be or not to be,” and encounters

Ophelia. Following this, I shall only summarize the remainder of the play giving special attention only to Hamlet’s advice to the player on the art of acting and his interview with

Osric. The final chapter will give the solution to the famous question of the nature of

Hamlet’s madness, and show how that answer anticipates Balthasar’s dramatic categories.

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III: Ghost Writers

“Hamlet,” writes C.S. Lewis, “…is no more separable from his ghost than Macbeth from his witches, Una from her lion, or Dick Whittington from his cat.”42 Because all his actions proceed from the appearance of the ghost, any interpretation of Hamlet, especially if it questions the morality of revenge, must begin with the ghost, its nature, and the meaning of its dread command. The essential question about the ghost is posed by

Hamlet himself:

The spirit that I have seen May be the devil, and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me! (F1 2.2.593-598) Many nineteenth-century critics, influenced by the Schlegel-Coleridge theory, which claims Hamlet is doomed by indecisiveness borne of excessive thought, viewed Hamlet’s doubt as rational but unfortunate, because it bolsters his tendency to indecision.43 A.C.

Bradley, the Oxford Professor of Poetry whose lectures on Shakespearean Tragedy

(1904) became the benchmark for the first decades of Shakespearean criticism in the twentieth century, brought into vogue an extreme variant of this thesis. Arguing that the simple theory of an overthinking Hamlet denigrates speculative reason, Bradley attributes

Hamlet’s delay not to overthinking as such, but to having the wrong kind of thought, that

42 “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem” in C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 97 43 Neither Schlegel nor Coleridge criticizes Hamlet for questioning the ghost per se, and Coleridge defends Hamlet for it. See Lectures on Shakespeare, (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1907) 150. Their general theory, however—that in Hamlet’s loss of “equilibrium between the real and imaginary worlds,” his punctiliar resolutions to act are continually buried by the “everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet’s thought” (137)—sits uneasily with admitting the urgency of his central doubt. Once their central thesis is assumed as a paradigm, it is a small step to dismiss Hamlet’s need to test the ghost.

41 is, “otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought, an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction.”44 On this account, Bradley denied that Hamlet himself genuinely doubts the ghost, offers only an empty ratiocination posing as insight:

Evidently this sudden doubt, of which there has not been the slightest trace before, is no genuine doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay—and for its continuance.45 Bradley’s premise that there has “not been the slightest trace before” of Hamlet’s doubt strongly implies that in addition to Hamlet never personally questioning the ghost, the audience has not either. Only to an audience that has already accepted the spirit could

Hamlet be “trying to convince himself that he has doubts about the ghost.”46 If, however, the audience anticipates his doubt, his problem appears legitimate, while the intervening period in which he has not questioned the ghost may appear as the real digression from dutiful action. Bradley’s claim then, and in fact any other that faults Hamlet for doubting, depends on whether the play leads the audience to doubt the ghost as well.

Developments in critical scholarship throughout the century since Bradley have answered this question resoundingly in the affirmative: the text of the first act, from the gloom and fear of its opening lines to the frantic oath-making at its conclusion, is

44 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, 2nd ed., (Glasgow: University Press, 1905) 123 45 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 129. Bradley’s assessment of Hamlet’s doubt was challenged in his own day. Tucker Brooke cogently rebutted that “The idea, then, that Shakespeare ventured on the dangerous expedient of requiring his auditors to understand the eloquent conclusion of his most elaborate soliloquy in a Pickwickian sense, as ‘no genuine doubt’ or as ‘suppositious,’ would seem allowable only as a last resort after failure to discover any logical reason for the words” whereas Hamlet “asks only what any scrupulous man must have demanded—’grounds more relative’ than his two-months’ old recollection of his impression of the spirit’s sincerity.” “Hamlet’s Third Soliloquy,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Apr., 1917): 117-22, 119. Notwithstanding such objections, Bradley’s theory was accepted so widely and so fervently, that Lily B. Campbell would later recall of her professors during that time, “So great was their enthusiasm that, to explain Shakespeare, they took to explaining Bradley and they oriented all Shakespeare studies to the new sun.” “Bradley Revisited: Forty Years After,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Apr., 1947): 174-194, 174. That Bradley’s interpretation was embraced so deeply despite an objection as evident as Brooke’s illustrates that the preconception to fault Hamlet for his ruminations had become highly dispositive. 46 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 129

42 designed to provoke the audience to misgivings about the ghost. Whether and how their doubt is resolved remains a subject of debate, but the legitimacy of the question is essentially established. While most of the evidence responsible for this development is apparent on the surface of the text, the crucial element in bringing scholarly attention to it has been the rediscovery of Elizabethan ghost-lore and its theological contents. The present chapter will review the key movements involved in that discovery, by examining seven highly original authors contributing to it: John Dover Wilson, Lily Bess Campbell,

I.J. Semper, Roy W. Battenhouse, Sister Miriam Joseph, Eleanor Prosser, and Arthur

McGee. An eighth section will briefly review a single school of thought, exemplified by

Stephen Greenblatt, which maintains the that ghost’s identity is unanswerable. This study will carry us historically from the nineteenth century to the present state of the question, while revealing the theological stakes underlying the debate about the ghost.

John Dover Wilson

The occasion that stimulated John Dover Wilson to write his masterpiece, What

Happens in Hamlet (1935), was an article by Sir Walter Wilson Greg, which argued that the ghost is not real, but “an hallucination produced by auto-suggestion in Hamlet’s own brain.”47 However strange Greg’s thesis may sound intuitively, it fit within the Freudian

Zeitgeist and the psychologism that had become fashionable in the study Hamlet in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, most of Greg’s reading is alarmingly straightforward for such an offbeat thesis. He identifies numerous overlooked passages and incongruities in the plot that do tend to cast doubt on the ghost’s credibility. Wilson could not accept

47 Walter Wilson Greg, “Hamlet’s Hallucination,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 12, no. 14 (Oct., 1917): 393-421, 417.

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Greg’s thesis, but recognized that he had exposed real difficulties in the text. Doubt and disquiet about the ghost, of its very reality, are stitched into all its scenes, which are saturated with questions about evidence, the credibility of witnesses, of sense perception, and of memory itself. But the reason for this, Wilson argues, is that the play’s attitude towards the ghost is one of “overwhelming realism”:

The ghost in Hamlet comes, not from the mythical Tartarus, but from the place of departed spirits in which post-medieval England, despite the veneer of Protestantism, still believed at the end of the sixteenth century. And in doing this, in making horror more awesome by giving it a contemporary spiritual background, Shakespeare managed at the same time to lift the whole ghost-business on to a higher level, to transform a ranting roistering abstraction into a thing at once tender and majestical.48 The early scenes question the ghost empirically not to disprove its reality, but to establish it, by putting the ghost through an objective trial:

Four appearances, three witnesses and one of them a sceptic—why this minute detail, why this accumulation of circumstantial evidence, if not to assure us of the ghost’s objectivity, before it encounters Hamlet. Such an assurance, indeed, is vital to Shakespeare’s purpose. For Hamlet, and I believe the audience also, are later to entertain doubts about the Ghost, not of its reality but of its nature; and it was of great importance that such doubts should not be confused with those of the sceptical Horatio before they were dispelled by “the sensible and true avouch” of his own eyes.49 From this realist stance, Wilson undertakes an “excursion into the realm of Elizabethan theology”50 to acquaint the reader “not only with the current superstitions regarding ghosts in Shakespeare’s day but also with the current philosophical and theological opinions concerning them.”51 As warrant for this move, Wilson identifies numerous passages that relate events on the stage to specific factual claims in Elizabethan ghost lore. For instance, as Hamlet prepares to rush after the ghost, Horatio warns him:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord? Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o’er his base into the sea, And there assumes some other horrible form Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason

48 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956) 56-7 49 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 59-60 50 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 61 51 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 60

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And draw you into madness? Think of it! (1.4.48-74) Wilson compares this passage to a text in King James I’s widely published

Daemonologie (1597), which teaches that a demon might kill a man by luring him to dangerous vicinities52:

PHI. [W]hich is I pray you the end and mark he [the Devil] shoots at in this turne? EPI. It is to obtaine one of two thinges thereby, if he may: The one is the tinsell of their life, by inducing them to such perrilous places at such time as he either followes or possesses them, which may procure the same. … The other thinge that hee preases to obteine by troubling of them, is the tinsell of their soule, by intising them to mistruste and blaspheme God.53 The agreement of Horatio’s warning with the published opinion of the heir apparent to the English throne alone excites a plausible doubt as to the ghost’s nature on a realist basis at an early point in the play.

Even more problematic for a simple acceptance of the ghost, Wilson finds positive evidence that it could be a demon. He is particularly struck by the ghost’s behavior in the

Cellerage Scene, as it moves like a “worthy pioner” (1.5.162-3) under the earth prompting Horatio and Marcellus to swear thrice on Hamlet’s sword. This notoriously strange scene resembles accounts given in two works of Protestant demonology, contemporary with Hamlet: Lewes Lavater’s Of Ghostes an Spirites Walking by Nyght

(1572) and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Both tell of devils who would work in the earth disguised as miners, or “pioners,”54 whence Sir Toby Belch calls

52 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 77-78. Cf King Lear 4.6.67-72. 53 James VI & I. Daemonologie, 1597, 71-72. 54 “Pioners or diggers for mettal, do affirme, that in many mines, there appeare straunge shapes and spirites, who are apparelled like vnto other laborer in the pit. These wander vp and down in caues and undermingings, & seeme to besturre them selues in all kinde of labour, as to digge under ye veine, to carrie togither oare, to put it into baskets, and to turne the winding whele to drawe it vp, when in very deede they do nothing lesse. These very seldome hurt the laborers (as they say) except they prouoke them by laughing and rayling at them: for then they throw grauel stones at them, or hurt them by some other means. These are epecially haunting in ittes, where mettall moste aboundeth.” Lewes Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght 1572, ed. John Dover Wilson and May Yardley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929) 73-4. See also pp. 75, 191ff.

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Satan a “foul collier” (TN 3.4.110). Wilson has no convincing explanation for why a purgatorial spirit should imitate demons in this way, and proposes only that it is done to frighten Marcellus into silence, who “to his dying day will believe that he has sworn an oath thrice in the hearing of a powerful fiend, and will hold his tongue.”55 As to why a spirit of grace should perform such a deception, and why Marcellus should be the only one convinced, and not Horatio, Hamlet, or the audience, Wilson is silent. Whatever the reason for its behavior, the ghost ends the first act by providing concrete grounds to be distrusted, so that to Hamlet’s original audiences, “for the first half of the play the character that was on trial for them was not Hamlet’s but the Ghost’s.”56

From this starting point, Wilson sees Hamlet’s vindication of the ghost in the Play

Scene as the conclusion of a serious inquiry begun in the opening scenes, which he traces in light of three religious views about ghosts contemporary to Shakespeare. First is the

Catholic view, represented by Marcellus, who is Protestant but shows a pietism that hearkens to the old faith. He can believe in authentic apparitions of dead men, including purgatorial apparitions, but is wary of the dangers of evil spirits as well. A skeptical

Protestant view, maintained by Scot, believes in spiritual substances but mainly denies that spirits take material form. Miracles have ceased since Biblical times, and so alleged

“The same man [Michael Psellos] saith, that some divels are woorse than other, but yet that they all hate God, and are enimies to man. But the woorser moitie of divels are Aquei, Subterranei, and Lucifugi; that is, waterie, under the earth, and shunners of light: bicause (saith he) these hurt not the soules of men, but destroie mens bodies like mad and ravening beasts, molesting both the inward and outward parts thereof. Aquei are they that raise tempests, and drowne seafaring men, and doo all other mischeefes on the water. Subterranei and Lucifiigi enter into the bowels of men, and torment them that they possesse with the phrensie, and the falling evill. They also assault them that are miners or pioners, which use to worke in deepe and darke holes under the earth. Such divels as are earthie and aierie, he saith enter by subtiltie into the minds of men, to deceive them, provoking men to absurd and unlawfull affections.” Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Brinsley Nicholson, (London Elliot Stock, 1886) 114. 55 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 82 56 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 84

46 apparitions are best explained by natural causes. This is the initial stance of Horatio before he sees the apparition. Hamlet, as a student at Wittenberg, represents the third, mainstream Protestant view, held by James I and Lavater, which believes in ghosts but denies Purgatory and expects any ghost to be an angel or demon, but usually a demon.

Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, however, gives Purgatory a new credibility for him.57

These religious identifications of the characters are all open to objection,58 but Wilson does not lean too heavily on them. Most important for him is that these three possibilities from contemporary religious debates are at play in the text, recognizable to the audience.

“The nature and origin of wandering spirits was one of the great questions of the time among thinking people, and the Ghost in Hamlet was a real contribution to the subject.”59

This single observation already carries Wilson far from Bradley: as the play’s realism about evidence for the ghost extends into theological realism, it can no longer, even on a purely historicist account, be viewed as “essentially secular.”

In other respects, Wilson fits his discovery to a Bradleyan reading, but with an important change in the framework. Wilson maintains that Hamlet is indisposed to act for all the internal reasons of spirit that tradition ascribes to him, but denies that the audience should recognize his delay as a problem until after he proves the ghost is honest.

Hamlet should not be faulted for testing the ghost, and his delay emerges as a tragic flaw only when it persists after its reasonable grounds are removed. It is only after the Play

Scene, “when Hamlet’s neglect to crown his theatrical triumph with the act of vengeance

57 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 66-70 58 Wilson’s evidence for Marcellus’s Catholic tendencies is only that he believes in Christmas as a liturgical feast, though this was preserved in Anglican worship; Horatio’s initial disbelief could be a natural, rather than dogmatic skepticism; and Wilson does not explain why Hamlet is so persuadible about Purgatory if he really is a Protestant. 59 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 85

47 that should follow it cries aloud for explanation that his strange outburst at the end of 2.2 begins to be appreciated.”60

Lily Bess Campbell

Lily B. Campbell’s Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1930) was published before What Happens in Hamlet, but is reviewed here after it because she achieves a more decisive break from traditional criticism than Wilson does, though from an opposite direction. While Wilson begins with theological realism and moves to historical analysis, Campbell starts with historicism and finds her way to theology.

Campbell’s interest is in the role of Elizabethan moral philosophy and psychology in

Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. She criticizes Bradley for disregarding deranged states of mind in the heroes of these plays as unfree, amoral conditions, incidental to the essence of the characters. This, Campbell says, is “a prime illustration of a nineteenth-century mind imposing a moral pattern on the work of a sixteenth-century mind.”61 The true tendency of Elizabethan thought is to consider mental derangement as a product of the “unchecked domination of passion over reason”:

Shakespeare wrote in an age that continually used Ajax as an arch example of a tragic hero and his tragedy as an outstanding instance of the effectiveness of tragedy as a moral teacher, an age also that understood a prosecution claim in court that a man who committed a criminal act while drunk should, as Aristotle advised, be considered doubly guilty, of being drunk and of having committed the act.”62

Campbell interprets Hamlet’s downfall as a failure to bring his grief under the dominion of his reason. Because he remains disconsolate, he lapses into an acedia that

60 Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 203 61 Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960) 244 62 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 246

48 will not allow him to act. She lays the groundwork for this thesis through a study of the psychology melancholy as it was understood in Elizabethan moral and scientific literature.63 Melancholy, or black bile, was one of the four humors, along with sanguine

(blood), choler (bile or yellow bile), and phlegm. According to ancient authorities the proportioning of the four humors determined the body’s health as well as the personality types of different people. Those with a high proportion of the sanguine humor were naturally jovial and had a ruddy complexion; choleric people were irascible and physically hot; phlegmatic people were stolid and of clammy complexion; melancholics were gloomy, contemplative, and often very thin. Just as a balanced proportion among the humors was a cause of health, the excess of any one humor caused disease. The disproportion most responsible for mental illness was excessive melancholy, which could cause such commonplace sorrows as gloominess, lovesickness, and lethargy, but also serious disorders like chronic depression, hypochondria, and schizophrenia.

From among the range of melancholic maladies studied by the physicians, Campbell suggests a diagnosis for Hamlet’s. Hamlet is not melancholy by temperament; prior to his father’s death he is “The glass of fashion and the mould of form” (3.1.154) and beloved by the commons (4.3.17-25), and so Campbell speculates that he is of a naturally sanguine humor. His melancholy is, therefore, an “unnatural melancholy,” or

“melancholy adust” which has arisen to clash with his normal temperament. Timothy

Bright, in his popular book of home medicine, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), describes its maddening character:

Besides the former kindes, there are sorts of unnatural melancholie. … This sort raiseth the greatest tempest of perturbations and most of all destroyeth the braine with all his faculties, and disposition of action, and maketh both it, & the hart cheere more

63 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 73-8

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uncomfortably. … If it rise of choler, then rage playeth her part, and furie joined with madnesse, putteth all out of frame. If bloud minister matter to this fire, every serious thing for a time, is turned into a jest, & tragedies into comedies, and lamentation into gigges and dances.64 Bright’s description resembles the constant alternation of levity, misery, and anger that runs through Hamlet’s performance as a madman,65 and the vexations of melancholy madness provides Campbell with a unifying explanation for Hamlet’s fits and rashness, as when he kills Polonius, and for his constant struggle to bring himself to act:

If my analysis is correct, then, Hamlet becomes a study in the passion of grief. In Hamlet himself it is a passion which is not moderated by reason., a passion which will not yield to the consolations of philosophy. And being intemperate and excessive grief, Hamlet’s grief is, therefore, the grief that makes memory fade, that makes reason fail in directing the will, that makes him guilty of sloth. Yet Hamlet is capable of anger that demands revenge.66 This account of Hamlet as a melancholic, however, presents difficulties for interpreting the ghost. Campbell finds that Hamlet’s fear that the Devil could abuse him

“Out of my weakness and my melancholy” (2.2.595) is harmonious with Elizabethan thought, which held that the misery and fertile imaginations of melancholics made them susceptible to the Devil,67 and so she turns to the question of demonology.

Like Wilson, Campbell sees evidence of both Protestant skepticism and Catholic openness to spirits within the text, but favors a Catholic reading since the ghost claims to come from Purgatory. She begins with a list of four Catholic criteria for testing spirits in a Protestant book that Shakespeare could have known, Lewes Lavater’s Of Ghostes and

Spirites Walking by Nyght (1572). The first criterion is that a spirit should appear frightening at first, but then comfort the person it appears to; second, it should have a goodly outward form; third, its voice should be gentle; and fourth, it should be pious,

64 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, (London: Thomas Vautrollier,1586) 110-11 65 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 75-8, 130-1, 141-3 66 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 144 67 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 84-92

50 confessing its sins. It is not clear to Campbell if the ghost passes the third test, but she judges it to pass all the others, and the fourth especially, since it is a penitent from

Purgatory.68 Nonetheless, the Protestant presumption against ghosts, and against

Purgatory, bolstered by James’s Daemonologie, weighs upon her reading. Like Wilson she notices strikingly specific evidences that the ghost could be demonic. Remarking on its appearance in Gertrude’s closet, she observes,

Now James had said that the Devil could so thicken the air about a ghost that no other save the one person might see it. And James had also said that the Devil appeared a second time to the victim to whet his purpose.69 Hints of this kind, together with Protestant hostility to Purgatory, dissuade Campbell from a simple conclusion that the ghost must be from a Catholic Purgatory. She is also aware that the Elizabethan prohibition against revenge put a heavy onus on a revenger to justify his actions.70 She concludes that the play is open to opposite interpretations for different viewers:

The whole picture is skillfully wrought to show the reality viewed so contradictorily from many angles. And I truly believe that if a Papist and King James and Timothy Bright had seen the play, as they all probably did, each would have gone home confirmed in his own opinion about ghosts. The important thing is, however, that the study could not have been made in Shakespeare’s day with any but a central figure who had been made melancholy by passion, and one who could be led fittingly to a desire for revenge.71 While the individual strands of evidence that lead to this conclusion are strong in their own right, the conclusion itself is untenable, because for the play to confirm James’s theology, it would have to present the ghost as a demon only, undermining the confirmation of Purgatory that she says a Catholic should find. This frustrating conclusion stimulated different reactions against Campbell, by writers seeking a clear

68 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 123-6 69 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 127 70 Lily B. Campbell, “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England,” Modern Philology, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Feb., 1931): 281-296. 71 Campbell, Tragic Heroes, 128

51 definition of the play’s religious perspective.

I.J. Semper

Campbell and Wilson’s efforts to tease out a theological debate in Hamlet and their tenuous resolutions to the debate invited a response from Msgr. I.J. Semper. His case for a consistently Catholic interpretation of the ghost in Hamlet Without Tears (1946) is the first Catholic study to interact with the ghost lore explored by Campbell and Wilson and set the stage for most modern Catholic readings of the play.

Semper denies that Hamlet is involved in the religious controversy alleged by Wilson and Campbell, because Protestantism had no unique claim to skepticism about ghosts.

Since Catholic doctrine also advised wariness of specters, and the need to test them, characters doubting the spirit invoke no controversy. Moreover, it cannot be that the play satisfies every viewpoint, since if Hamlet does engage the controversy, it seems calculated to offend all sides. Catholics would be appalled by the ghost pretending to be a devil in the cellarage as Wilson claims. Protestants, including the royal censors, would be offended that Shakespeare raised the debate and then adjudicated it for Catholicism.

Instead, Semper argues, Shakespeare avoids controversy by setting the play in pre-

Reformation Denmark, so that the only viewpoint is Catholic. This would have been tolerable to the correctors, who allowed Catholic elements in plays set in the past or in foreign countries.72

Semper argues that a firmly Catholic understanding fits the whole line of reasoning the play takes toward the ghost and clarifies that its command to revenge is a divine injunction, and not private vengeance. To confirm this position, Semper leans heavily on

72 I.J. Semper, Hamlet Without Tears (Dubuque: The Loras Clege Press, 1946) 30-40

52 the ghost’s command to “Taint not thy mind” (1.5.85), which “forbids his son to act from the personal motives of a private avenger,”73 so that he “is to be an executioner akin to the hangman appointed by the state—not a blood-avenger in the ordinary sense.”74 As

Semper reasons,

The Ghost, therefore, comes not as a vengeful soul, but as one sent by a higher power to sanction the punishment of a Machiavellian villain who is guilty of fratricide and regicide, adultery and incest, intrigue and usurpation—crimes which it seemed impossible for man to discover and which therefore could not be brought to judgment by a legal and public process.75 Semper’s principle merit is that he brings the possibility of divinely sanctioned revenge into dialogue with Campbell and Wilson’s interpretations, and that he calls into question the Protestant setting of the play and the Protestant identity of Hamlet. These are important arguments, yet the rest of his reading is problematic. “Taint not thy mind” is not as clear an indication as Semper believes. He also lightly dismisses the demonological texts used by Campbell and Wilson as too obscure and technical for

Shakespeare’s audience.76 In fact, they are as much compendia of popular lore as scholarly speculation, and attest to culturally diffuse beliefs. Further, Semper attempts to excuse Hamlet’s desire to damn Claudius by supposing he was temporarily deranged in the Prayer Scene, defending this claim with a strained argument that he suffers from amnesia afterwards.77 Later writers would improve on Semper’s thesis, but not before it received a powerful rebuttal.

Roy W. Battenhouse

73 Semper, Hamlet Without Tears,32 74 Semper, Hamlet Without Tears, 19 75 Semper, Hamlet Without Tears, 19 76 Semper, Hamlet Without Tears, 40 77 Semper, Hamlet Without Tears, 51-5

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In 1951, Roy Battenhouse threw down a gauntlet for anyone attempting to make theological sense of the ghost. An Anglican priest and scholar of patristics, Battenhouse’s lifelong concern to sound out the “Christian premises” of Shakespeare’s plays led him to measure the theological credentials of Hamlet’s ghost against the standard of the Catholic theology of Purgatory. In his essay “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’: A Catholic Lynchpin?”78

Battenhouse criticizes Semper’s thesis, claiming that the ghost does not fit Catholic theology in the slightest and is instead pagan:

I think it can be shown that the ghost as poetically presented has neither the mind nor the action of a Christian Purgatory ghost; that his character fits, rather, a spirit from pagan hell, a region considered purgatorial in classical but not in Catholic doctrine. In a play as full of classical allusion as Hamlet, and as devoid of the Christian world-view, this should not surprise us but instead add point to our appreciation of the integrity with which Shakespeare has constructed his drama and defined its tragic elements.79 Battenhouse’s case against a Catholic ghost consists in six propositions. First, the ghost does not ask for prayers or spiritual aid, but instead says “Pity me not” (1.5.5). It displays no “pain of loss” for delay in receiving the beatific vision and “grieves over the loss not of the divine vision but of his possessions. He also seems to resent having to pay for his sins.”80 Second, rather than prayers, the ghost wants revenge, motivated by worldly values. Whereas God claims an exclusive right to revenge, the ghost never mentions God, speaking of Claudius’s crimes only as offenses to nature. Even the repentance it would desire for Gertrude seems to Battenhouse as a naturalistic, Pelagian repentance. In light of this, the sacramentality of some of the ghost’s language, as it laments dying “unhousel’d diappointed, unanel’d” (1.5.77), does not “reflect a true understanding of the relation of the sacraments to human sin,” and so “Penance and the

78 Roy W. Battenhouse, “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’: A Catholic ‘Lynchpin’?” Studies in Philology, vol. 48, no. 2 (April 1951): 161-192 79 Battenhouse, “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’” 163 80 Battenhouse, “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’” 164

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Eucharist are an unassimilated element in the ghost’s revelation… unrelated in any way to the Ghost’s vision of justice.”81 Third, “The tale the ghost unfolds lacks Christian perspective: facts are not presented in a frame of interpretation such as a soul in grace should have.”82 The ghost, Battenhouse argues, has a wholly morbid attitude toward sin.

It takes a self-centered interest in Gertrude, bolstered by a high opinion of itself as a

“radiant angel,” while on the other hand it faults Claudius for the deficiency of his

“natural gifts” without relating these judgments to its own need for purgation.83 Fourth, contra Campbell, the ghost fails the Catholic tests reported by Lavater. Its form as a man in armor is not beautiful but ghoulish, and it says nothing to calm its hearer from fear at its appearance. It does not request prayers, and its command to revenge is inconsistent with Christian doctrine. Fifth, Hamlet never considers that the ghost could come from any place but heaven or hell, and sixth, neither do Horatio and the guards. Hamlet does swear once by St. Patrick, the patron saint of Purgatory (1.5.135), but otherwise, heaven and hell are the only possibilities mentioned.

Battenhouse seems at points to be overly hostile to a Purgatorial spirit, and several of his arguments are already anticipated and answered by Semper.84 Yet his main drift is quite powerful. There is in fact no mention of God in the ghost’s speeches, apart from the inconsequential “Adieu” at its departure, and its speeches are fraught with worldly

81 Battenhouse, “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’” 167 82 Battenhouse, “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’” 169 83 Battenhouse, “The Ghost in ‘Hamlet’” 169-71 84 To Battenhouse’s argument that Purgatory is not included in Hamlet’s binary of heaven or hell, a reply may be quoted directly from Semper: “The souls in Purgatory died in a state of grace, they are saved, they are confirmed in good. Purgatory, therefore, is a vestibule of Heaven; and the souls in Purgatory, though still in a state of suffering nonetheless belong entirely to the society of the saints. Such is the teaching of Bellarmine and Suarez, the two great theologians of Shakespeare’s day. … Therefore, the expression “spirit of health” and “airs from heaven,” can refer not only to angels and saints but also to the suffering souls. They are spirits of health, and if they return to earth, they bring with them the airs of heaven.” Hamlet Without Tears, 35-6.

55 concerns. Less convincing, however, is the way Battenhouse’s study turns theological realism against itself by concluding for a pagan worldview in Hamlet. He applies a learned theological analysis to the text only to dismiss it as inappropriate because its conclusions reflect badly on the ghost. He does not explain why his argumentum ad consequentiam should outweigh other, positive evidences of Hamlet’s Christian setting.

At best, he shows that the play contains conflicting indications about the ghost, but he does not proves why the pagan indications should be considered primary and the Catholic ones “unassimilated,” rather than vice versa. His only warrant is that the play is thick with classical allusions and “devoid of the Christian worldview.” The latter begs the question, and the former overlooks the interpenetration of classical allusion and Christian thought throughout Shakespeare’s works and all Elizabethan literature. Perhaps these elements are not unassimilated in the text, but only in Battenhouse’s conception. It is little wonder that the most important Catholic response to Battenhouse would be written by an expert in Shakespeare’s classical education.

Sister Miriam Joseph

Sister Miriam Joseph’s central contribution to Shakespearean scholarship is her book

Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (1947). In this study, she follows and supplements the work of T.W. Baldwin, whose massive William Shakspere’s Small

Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944) documents the influence of classical literature upon

Shakespeare, due to his immersion in the classics at the Stratford grammar school.85

Sister Miriam builds on Baldwin with a focused study of one aspect of Shakespeare’s

85 T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vol. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944)

56 education, the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. She argues that intensive instruction in these disciplines, originating in Aristotle and codified by Boethius, gave birth to a distinctly Elizabethan theory of writing and reading, which informs

Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Most of her book consists in copious sets of examples of how

Shakespeare uses precise, formal figures of speech in his composition; these sections, while fascinating in themselves, are most important as prolegomena to her deeper reflections of how the rhetorical principles of pathos and ethos combine to produce meaning in the plays. Her understanding of these rhetorical elements underlies her response to Battenhouse in her essay “A ‘Trivial’ Reading of Hamlet,” and two shorter pieces elaborating particular aspects of that study.86

Sister Miriam analyzes Hamlet in light of all three trivial disciplines, but primarily of rhetoric. She contends that the core principles of persuasion in classical rhetoric are also contained among the principles of drama, as attested in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics.87

She calls particular attention to the intersection of the rhetorical principles of pathos, the persuasive power of a speech upon its hearer, and ethos, the character of the speaker, which founds his credibility:

In addition, we may notice two further points: (1) the essential function which Aristotle ascribes to tragedy, namely, to arouse pity and fear in order to purge the audience agreeably of an excess of these emotions, is related to the persuasion of pathos; (2) this catharsis which is the essential function of tragedy is produced primarily by the ethos of the tragic hero, because it is through a flaw in his character or by an error of judgment that the protagonist brings upon himself the suffering which arouses in the audience pity

86 Sr. Miriam Joseph, “A ‘Trivial’ Reading of Hamlet,” Laval theologique et philosophique, vol. 15, no. 2 (1959): 182-214; “‘Hamlet,’ a Christian Tragedy,” Studies in Philology, vol. 58, no. 2, Part I, (Apr. 1962): 119-40; “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” PMLA, vol. 76 no. 5 (Dec 1961) 493-502 87 “Of the six formative elements of tragedy which Aristotle discusses in the Poetics, five are related to the three modes of rhetorical persuasion: character determines the persuasion of ethos; thought and plot (which is defined as a cause and effect, and thereby as a logical relationship) are closely related to the logos of the Rhetoric and also to the logic (Organon); melody and, frequently, spectacle are related to pathos , a third mode of persuasion treated in the Rhetoric. Diction, a sixth formative element, includes intonation, figures of speech, and grammar for style, matters treated also in the Rhetoric.

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and awe.88 In the course of Sr. Miriam’s debate with Battenhouse, it is important to notice that she incidentally provides the seed of a strictly historical objection to Hegel’s reading of

Shakespeare. Hegel would certainly accept what she says as far as the Greek tragedies.

What she argues, however, is that the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric among the

Elizabethans cultivated habits of writing that consciously utilized ethos as the foundation of pathos, making “ethical pathos” an elementary norm. Elizabethan education correctly understood that a play that relies wholly on pathos, separate from a commensurate foundation in ethos, must fail as drama, because it would first have failed as rhetoric.

Lacking the ethical grounds of persuasion, it would also lack the ethical grounds of catharsis.

Whereas Battenhouse denied that a Christian ethos is operative in Hamlet, Sr. Miriam claims that its presence is the essential grounds of its tragic catharsis. She describes

Hamlet as a “Christian tragedy,” which achieves catharsis “through incidents that have

Christian significance,” adding that “a Christian tragic hero must bring upon himself misfortune and suffering through a flaw in his character as a Christian.”89 The particular flaw that she ascribes to Hamlet is his hatred in seeking Claudius’s damnation, which contravenes the ghost’s call to heroic justice. The implication this carries for Sr. Miriam, around which she construes Hamlet’s plot, is that before Hamlet fails in one Christian virtue, he succeeds in another: the discretio spirituum.

The discernment of whether a spirit is good or evil is for Christians an obligation (2

Cor 11:13-15; 1 John 4:2-3), and the Church since ancient times has proposed a manner

88 Sr. Miriam Joseph “A ‘Trivial’ Reading of Hamlet,” 183 89 Sr. Miriam Joseph, ““Hamlet,’ A Christian Tragedy,” 119

58 of investigation, which Sr. Miriam outlines as a three-step process of elimination. First, a spirit must be proven real, and not a natural phenomenon; second, it must be established that the ghost is not a demon; and third, it may be concluded to be a spirit of God when the other possibilities are exhausted. She reads the first half of the play as a story of how

Hamlet fulfills this obligation. The first step is accomplished in the early scenes when the ghost is recognized by credible witnesses. The second consists of both moral and factual discernment. Sr. Miriam understands the ghost’s morality in the same sense as Semper, but adds supporting details. She argues that it wears armor to represent itself as king and protector of the state, to present its revenge as public justice, while Hamlet, as his natural successor and current heir apparent has a plausible legal right.90 She likewise reads “Taint not thy mind” as a prohibition of personal wrath, citing St. Thomas:

For if his intention is directed chiefly to the evil of the person on whom he takes vengeance, and rests there, then his vengeance is altogether unlawful: because to take pleasure in another’s evil belong to hatred, which is contrary to the charity whereby we are to love all men.91 By the end of the first act, the ghost has passed the doctrinal test, but the truth of its story remains to be established. While Hamlet’s experience makes him credulous at first, he later hesitates because he sees grounds for doubt.92 He chastises himself for delay during this time, but it is his passion, not his reason, that speaks.93 His delay is a moral necessity, and his conscience wins out when he contrives a means to prove his uncle’s guilt. But ironically, this moral success is prologue to a catastrophe:

Conscience is, I believe, the primary cause of Hamlet’s delay in fulfilling the ghost’s command. He had conscientious doubts about the ghost which he found no means to settle until the players came to Elsinore and provided him an opportunity to gain human evidence to test and corroborate the ghost’s message. … As we have seen, immediately after he has resolved his agonizing doubt (II.ii. 627-633;

90 Sr. Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” 500-1 91 ST II-II q. 108, a. 1 92 Sr. Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” 496 93 Sr. Miriam Joseph “A ‘Trivial’ Reading of Hamlet,” 191-2

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cf. I.iv.65-7) and has become convinced through his uncle’s reaction to the play that the ghost is a good spirit (III.iii.297) and therefore sent by God, Hamlet is free in conscience to punish the regicide and cleanse Denmark, but he must observe the two conditions which the ghost prescribes… At this point, Shakespeare illustrates dramatic genius at a peak. In rapid sequence he shows this likable prince, his sensitive conscience concerning the command now settled, act swiftly and energetically; but he violates the first and then the second of the prescribed conditions and thereby brings upon himself an avalanche of sorrow. Thus the play becomes a tense and essentially Christian tragedy. … The ghost commissioned Hamlet to execute justice, for which there is scriptural warrant…, but he expressly forbade him to violate supernatural charity.94 Structurally, this is much like Wilson’s reading, but with a deeper engagement of moral theology: Hamlet’s second reason for delay is a fault because it is sinful. But his degeneration, as he seeks his uncle’s damnation, abuses his mother, and kills Polonius, is arrested when the ghost appears in Gertrude’s closet. From that point, his soul begins a process of restoration, which carries him through to the end of the play, as his acceptance of death and providence prepare him for heaven after justly avenging his father.

Sr. Miriam Joseph’s theory of Christian tragedy bears fruit in the moral consistency of her reading. She never suspends judgment on Hamlet’s behalf, and her theory unifies the story within a coherent and Christian dramatic worldview. Her chief weakness, however, is lack of textual support for key propositions. She infers that the ghost’s origin in Purgatory authorizes its injunction as a divine command, but cites no text to show that

Hamlet or the ghost ever reasons in this way.95 For Hamlet’s legal justification, she cites only his complaint that Claudius “Popped in between th’election and my hopes”

(5.2.65),96 overlooking the difference between “hopes” and “right.” Moreover, she does not convincingly answer several of Battenhouse’s best objections. She makes no response

94 Sr. Miriam Joseph, “‘Hamlet,’ A Christian Tragedy,” 127-129 95“If the ghost is a good spirit, as Hamlet is satisfied he is after the play-test, he could not come without God’s permission, and as a saved soul confirmed in grace he could not command Hamlet to do evil. The command he brings can come only from God, the sole master of life and death.” Sr. Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” 500 96 Sr. Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” 500

60 at all to the absence of an explicit appeal to God by the ghost, and her only defense for it saying, “Pity me not,” is that it creates an impersonal context for it to recount its virtues objectively.97 These and other faults in her argument do not at once disprove her theory, but reveal that much of its foundation is conjectural. It is easier to be convinced that

Shakespeare could have written a good play along the lines Sr. Miriam describes than that he actually did so.

One almost immediate side effect of Sr. Miriam’s first article was the formulation of a distinct theory that the ghost’s nature is intentionally ambiguous—another complication to be added to the long list of Hamlet’s unknowns. Robert H. West thought the cumulative strengths and inadequacies of both Battenhouse and Sr. Miriam’s positions revealed that the problem was unanswerable. To illustrate how great an impasse the debate seemed to him, he hypothesized a third alternative:

No scholar, so far as I know, has published a detailed argument supporting the theory that the Ghost is actually a devil working to lure Hamlet into deadly sin; but anyone who cares to assert it from specifically pneumatological evidence might make as good a case as Battenhouse, Semper, and Sr. Miriam Joseph make for their views.98 As it soon proved, West was not the only person to think of this.

Eleanor Prosser

Eleanor Prosser’s Hamlet and Revenge (1967) is arguably the most iconoclastic text ever written about Shakespeare. Put simply, it is a synthesis and historical vindication of every common moral misgiving that audiences and commentators have ever voiced about

Hamlet. Those who have been shocked, Prosser argues, by Hamlet’s cruelty to Ophelia and his mother, his murders of Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, his evil in

97 Sr. Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” 488-9 98 Robert H. West, “King Hamlet’s Ambiguous Ghost,” PMLA, vol. 70, no. 5 (Dec 1955): 1107-1117, 1110

61 plotting Claudius’s damnation, and so forth, are responding to the character as

Shakespeare intends. Yet these instinctively correct responses have been deflected by a false historicism, propagated by scholars who claim in the dark that the Elizabethans viewed blood-revenge as a sacred duty, when in fact the orthodox prohibition of revenge was substantially represented in Elizabethan drama.99 Prosser argues that Hamlet’s fundamental mission is immoral, that the ghost who prompts it is therefore from hell, and that Hamlet’s destructive acts result from its temptation. Hamlet is not weighed down by a duty that is beyond him, but vigorously inclined to revenge. He is hindered at first only by his conscience, which knows above all that to obey the ghost is to be damned.

Much of Prosser’s case against the ghost consists in arguments anticipated by Wilson,

Campbell, and Battenhouse, although what they view as difficulties, she views as proofs.

The ghost does not ask for prayers like a spirit from Purgatory because it is not a spirit from Purgatory;100 it speaks as a pioner from under the stage like a fiend because it is a fiend;101 it does not appeal to God because it does not want to.102 Recognizing these things is not an objection to Hamlet’s Christian ethos, but a function of it.

This thesis calls for a radical revision of the entire traditional understanding of

Hamlet’s character and even the plot of the play, and that is what Prosser provides. She reads the first act as a story of a melancholic being seduced by a demon. She delineates

Hamlet’s melancholy in terms of Elizabethan physiology as Campbell does, but her emphasis is not on the power of grief to dampen activity, but to distort moral reasoning.

The Renaissance physiologists maintained that excessive melancholy stimulates an

99 See Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967) 3-94 100 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 136 101 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 140-1 102 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 139

62 overactive imagination through brooding, making melancholics susceptible to the false appearances of demons. This is the mental disturbance from which Hamlet suffers, and

Prosser reads the hoary imagery in many of the ghost’s lines as efforts to exploit this weakness.103 In light of this, she takes the ghost’s command to “taint not thy mind” as a

“brutally ironic” commentary on the way the ghost “for over fifty lines… has done everything possible to taint Hamlet’s mind with lacerating grief, sexual nausea, hatred, and fury.”104 She finds nothing virtuous in its command of forbearance to Gertrude either:

The irony is surely the clue. Why Gertrude but not Claudius? The implication may not be immediately obvious when we see the play; we have been trapped along with Hamlet by our emotions. But if Shakespeare did not intend the irony, why did he so closely echo the familiar Christian language of exhortation—“leave them to heaven”?… Not once does the Ghost suggest that its command to revenge is the will of God.… Any doubt is eliminated when Hamlet is told to pursue revenge in any way he chooses so long as he leaves Gertrude to Heaven. By implication, Claudius is not to be punished by Heaven. The Ghost treats Hamlet as if he we a private agent who is to act out of purely personal motives.105 West had noted that there is anti-Catholic potential in a Purgatorial spirit turning out to be a demon,106 but Prosser insists on judging the ghost on its own terms, by Catholic doctrine, trusting to the imagination of a Protestant audience.107 She believes the ghost fails on Catholic grounds, for roughly the same reasons as Battenhouse, but her final conclusion is quite ecumenical, that Protestants and Catholics should both agree on the most important test of the ghost, that “its command violates Christian teaching.”108 As for the theory of divine revenge, “I can find no warrant in the play for believing that the

Ghost is on a divine mission.”109

103 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 127-8, 134-6 104 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 137 105 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 137, 9 106 West, “King Hamlet’s Ambiguous Ghost,” 1110-1 107 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 133 108 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 136 109 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 139

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In the second act, Hamlet emerges in his role as a madman, which he has assumed for some unstated practical purpose, and his behavior reveals him to be active and vigorous, his melancholy thrust aside, as the ghost “has shocked Hamlet out of his lethargy, rather than into it.”110 When the players appear, the recitation about Pyrrhus murdering Priam is meant as a moral comment on the revenge Hamlet himself pursues. His following soliloquy in response to the player’s performance shows that something in his soul, implicitly his conscience, is at odds with his instinctive desire to take action.111 Then in

“To be or not to be,” Hamlet comes to terms with his conscience by posing for himself a question not about suicide, but the moral character of an authentic existence:

He states his dilemma as “to be or not to be”—not as “to live or not to live.” The issue, as he sees it, is not between mere temporal existence and non-existence, but between “being” and “non-being.” In other words, he is struggling with a metaphysical issue: not the narrow personal question of whether he, an individual man, should kill himself, but the wider philosophical question of man’s essence. It is the universal question heard in Job’s “What is a man?,” suggested in Lear’s “Is man no more than this?,” and echoed by the trader in Conrad’s Lord Jim: “How to be?”112 With the question thus posed, Hamlet frames a choice between sufferance and opposition as the nobler response to outrageous fortune. Knowing that the act of opposition, in his case revenge, brings with it certain death, he enquires into the state of the soul after death, contrasting the sleep of blessedness with the dreams of the damned. When he concludes that “conscience does make cowards of us all” (3.1.83), he means that the fear of damnation has been restraining his hand, but on the final words, “the name of action”

(88), he musters his resolve and chooses to act in spite of conscience. The first, dreadful fruit of this decision is his verbal mauling of Ophelia following the soliloquy.113

From this point, Hamlet descends into evil: his antics during the play scene, his

110 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 144 111 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 151-8 112 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 159-60 113 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 169-76

64 resolution to damn his uncle, his mistreatment of Gertrude and murder of Polonius are the fruit of his knowing choice to rise above the limits of his conscience. The ghost’s appearance in Gertrude’s closet is not a moral restorative for him, but a trick to prove to

Gertrude that Hamlet is mad, so that she does not repent even as he calls her to repentance. Hamlet’s behavior after the ghost departs is as evil as before, for the entire scene is a study in hypocrisy, as Hamlet chastises his mother for her sins in the presence of a corpse he has wantonly murdered. The moral doctrine Hamlet presents in this scene is, in keeping with his slavery to the imagination, vitiated by appeals to sense rather than reason, and finally demonstrates his hypocrisy, not his excellence. Shakespeare’s point is that the expression of moral sentiment is not a substitute for a moral life.114 After the ghost’s appearance, his malice does not abate but worsens, as he mistreats Polonius’s body and arranges the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern without shriving time.115

When, however, Hamlet returns from England, he has begun a process of transformation: he encounters death again in the graveyard, feels remorse for railing at

Laertes, and revisits the question of whether to kill the king by weighing the claims of justice rather than revenge, asking “Is’t not perfect conscience/To quit him with this arm”

(5.1.67-8)? Hamlet’s soul is finally restored to peace in his speech about “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.167-8), when he resigns himself to divine guidance, and concludes, “Let be” (Q2 5.2.201-2). His apology to Laertes is then sincere, as is his forgiveness of him before death, and his slaying of Claudius is a just act of self- defense.116 The tale he leaves Horatio to tell is bloody and violent, but he dies

114 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 191-204 115 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 203-4, 225-6 116 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 216-37

65 unexpectedly in a state of grace: “In Shakespeare’s eyes, Hamlet’s soul is ultimately saved, but in spite of, not because of, his revenge. He has fought his way out of hell.”117

I will forgo comment on her interpretation of the ghost until my own treatment of it in the next chapter, and remark here only on two weak links at crucial points in her account of “To be or not to be,” which threaten her entire reading of the play. Denying that the soliloquy is about suicide, she alleges that its “metaphors all suggest that Hamlet’s choice is between suffering the ills of this world and taking resolute action against them, not between enduring evil and evading it.”118 While she can safely support this claim from phrases like “to take arms against” (3.1.59), “by opposing end them” (60), and

“enterprises of great pith and moment” (86), she makes no mention of the more explicit

“When he himself might his quietus make/With a bare bodkin” (75-6)—the locus classicus for proving the speech is about suicide. Her claim that Hamlet resolves to act in the final line is entirely inferential, and tenuous from the soliloquy alone, since Hamlet only asserts speculatively that enterprises lose the name of action with regard to conscience. He draws no practical conclusion as to whether or how this pertains to himself.

A case can nonetheless be made for reading a decision in the final line, on the basis of a text-critical argument about which Prosser is almost certainly correct. In her reading of

Hamlet’s soliloquy on Fortinbras at Q2 4.4.31-65, Prosser argues that the speech is an alternate draft of “To be or not to be.” She notes that Hamlet’s appearance after

Fortinbras’s dialogue with the captain occurs only in Q2 and so was likely not performed on the Elizabethan stage, while glaring chronological problems within the speech and

117 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 237 118 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 159

66 surrounding dialogue suggest it does not fit in Act IV.119 Seeing that Hamlet’s question in that speech, “What is a man, etc.” (32)? approximates her own understanding of “To be or not to be,” and finding other points of consonance in the arguments of the soliloquies,

Prosser concludes it is a remnant of an earlier version of the play, originally intended to occur late in Act II or at the start of Act III, but replaced by “To be or not to be.”120 Since the Fortinbras Speech concludes with a distinct statement of resolution—“From this time forth,/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth” (64-5)!—there is grounds to ask if the same decision is implied at the end of “To be or not to be.”

Prosser’s text-critical argument is supported by even more evidence than she notices, because the Fortinbras Speech also resembles the Hecuba Soliloquy, Since Hamlet in both compares himself unfavorably against another character who acts more vigorously than himself. He could well ask, “What’s Poland to Fortinbras, or Fortinbras to Poland?”

It is easy to imagine on Prosser’s reading that Shakespeare at some point conceived the two consecutive soliloquies as one, and that the Fortinbras Speech could have fit neatly into the position the other soliloquies occupy in F1. The differing order and number of

Hamlet’s soliloquies among all three versions suggest that the poet struggled to fit all the parts together, so the Fortinbras Speech could have emerged in the course of that struggle. When Shakespeare finally removed it, he preserved the dialogue between

Fortinbras and the captain at the beginning of the scene, but moved it to a later point, so

119 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 205-208. Prosser points out that Hamlet is not being conveyed swiftly out of Denmark, but is “on a casual saunter through his domain” (205) with friends who leave him alone to muse. He claims he presently has the “means” (Q2 4.4.44) to kill Claudius. His resolution to act, “My thoughts be bloody” (65), is redundant after “To be or not to be” and Hamlet’s bloody deeds in the third act. To this I add that it is incongruous as a transition to action, since his reason for delay in the Prayer Scene is identical to it: “know though a more horrid hent” (3.3.87). “Horrid” literally means “bloody,” and hent means “idea.” 120 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 208-9

67 as not to interrupt the action of the earlier scenes. Then Shakespeare, or an editor of Q2, which, perhaps to compete with Q1, was advertised as “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was” reinserted the speech at that point.

This provides a reason, as Prosser proposes, to omit the Fortinbras Speech from performance, while taking it into account when reading “To be or not to be.” It does not, however, support her assertion that “‘To be or not to be’ and ‘How all occasions’ exactly parallel each other in the issues under debate and the decision reached.”121 Rather it provokes the question of why one speech ends in decision and the other does not. If

Shakespeare wrestled with the organization of the soliloquies, then he likely excluded a statement of resolution from “To be or not be” for intentionally—because the story had evolved to a point where it no longer belonged there. The possibility of major artistic revisions is why the Fortinbras Speech is only suggestive, not prescriptive, of what the other speeches say. Since Prosser’s plot structure turns on Hamlet coming to a decision in

“To be or not to be,” her whole interpretation comes into question with her reading of this single speech.

Arthur McGee

Arthur McGee follows and attempts to surpass Prosser in The Elizabethan Hamlet

(1987). He praises Prosser for providing “The most detailed, and in many respects the most convincing, study of the ghost lore of the time,”122 but claims that Protestant partiality is a core principle in the play. While the religious attitudes of Shakespeare and his audience have always seemed a thorny problem to critics, McGee calls attention to

121 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 208 122 Arthur McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) 45

68 one viewpoint that is not in doubt: the Protestantism of Shakespeare’s censors. He argues that the entire premise of interpreting the ghost through the lens of religious pluralism is unhistorical, for Elizabethan state censorship would not have allowed a Purgatorial spirit to be shown onstage. The quartos of Hamlet were published “in a period of stringent censorship,”123 when Catholic publication was a strictly underground activity. It is therefore a mistake to conclude that the play is meant to speak to pluralism, for then it could not have been published:

Now all these studies really depend upon a single unstated premise, and that is that Purgatory whether classical or Catholic was a fit subject for controversy and speculation in the contemporary drama, but, as we have seen, the censorship would not have allowed such freedom of discussion. Purgatory, for the correctors, simply did not exist, and it was heresy to claim that it did. If, as Dover Wilson claimed, the Ghost came from the Catholic Purgatory, Hamlet, the Protestant student of Wittenberg, has surely turned Catholic when he finally believes in the Ghost—and so has Horatio. It is difficult to believe that any Elizabethan corrector would have allowed such a play. And if Battenhouse is correct we have the option of having a Catholic Ghost from a pagan Underworld—in other words he postulates a degree of doctrinal confusion for which there is no evidence; Catholics believed in Purgatory and Protestants did not. … That the ghost is Catholic, however, there is no doubt and its regret for not having received the Last Rites would not endear it to a Protestant censor because the sacrament of Extreme Unction disappeared from the revised Prayer Book, as imposed by Edward VI’s parliament, in 1552, and had no place thereafter in the liturgical reform that took place. It follows therefore that performance of these rites as a sacrament would be a violation of Elizabeth’s Prayer Book…. Thus it would seem that Shakespeare has taken great pains to present the correctors with just the sort of material that would incur their wrath and that it did not can only be explained by its being so manifestly evil that no audience could fail to recognize it as such.124 Those who, like myself, are persuaded of Shakespeare’s Catholicism—and emotionally invested in it—must wince at this line of argument, especially as McGee proceeds to document the harsh and even scurrilous attacks on Purgatory that flowed from Elizabethan presses.125 Yet when the wincing is done, the merits of his argument must be respected. Indeed, McGee draws heavily on premises shared by most pro-

Catholic interpreters of Shakespeare, and in doing so, he incidentally exposes a glaring

123 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 26 124 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 46 125 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 28-42

69 inconsistency in the way the Catholic case is usually made about Hamlet. It is quite standard in Catholic interpretations, notably in recent years by Clare Asquith, to assert that because “The precarious Tudor regime made sophisticated use of propaganda and exercised tight control over the country’s small number of licensed printing presses,”126

Catholic writers were forced to find subtle means to express themselves, so that fellow believers would understand what the censors did not. Scholars who follow this line routinely cite Purgatory in Hamlet as premier evidence of his Catholic sympathies, but do not comment on the difficulty that such an overt example poses for the general theory: if the ghost is from Purgatory, then the play’s Catholicism is in no way esoteric; this proves that esoteric writing was unnecessary for Shakespeare, and so undermines the raison d’etre for every other part of the Catholic hypothesis.127 If in Twelfth Night, for example,

Feste’s interview with Malvolio (4.2.26-129) really is a parody of the trial of Edmund

Campion, the extreme subtley of the clues is only justifiable if Shakespeare needed to hide his intentions between the lines.128 Yet if his objections to the state’s execution of

Campion were so dangerous that he had to write them in code, it is incongruous that he would have openly published the more patently seditious scenario of a Catholic spirit prompting a hero to kill his sovereign. There is something suspicious in fruit that hangs

126 Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, (New York: Public Affairs, 2005) 4 127 Silent commission of this contradiction seems to be universal. See, for instance, Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare, (Woodlands: BBC Worldwide Ltd., 2003) 78, Asquith, Shadowplay, 152-60, 240, Peter Milward, Shakespeare the Papist, (Naples: Sapientia Press, 2005) 162-164, David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays, (Plymouth: Rosemont Printing, 2008) 91-99, Joseph Pearce, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010) 118-24. All these works argue for a Catholicism in Shakespeare that is either esoteric or sufficiently understated that the authorities could forgive it in view of his talent, while holding at the same time for a plainly Purgatorial spirit, with no acknowledgement of the internal tension this creates. 128 See C. Richard Desper, “Allusions to Edmund Campion in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,” http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/edmund-campion-12th-night in Elizabethan Review, Spring/Summer 1995.

70 so low. This difficulty should vex the Catholic reader of Hamlet, and we shall return to it.

Now McGee does not internally critique Catholic readings of Hamlet, but aims to externally justify a Protestant one; and what he produces is a masterpiece of scorched- earth anti-Catholicism. McGee sees Hamlet’s Elsinore as an abstract of the unregenerate

Catholic world. He reads every allusion to Catholic doctrine and practice in the text as a type of lampoon. Every character is Catholic, and every character, even Horatio, is evil.

Hamlet’s role as the madman in this idolatrous setting is based on the medieval Vice, a clownish and blasphemous servant of the Devil in morality plays, whose purpose was to tempt the innocent, torment the guilty, and prompt the audience to ridicule Satan.

McGee construes the plot along lines similar to Prosser, but with some major deviations.

He rejects her reading of “To be or not to be” in favor of the suicidal interpretation. He argues that Hamlet’s desire to kill himself and his fear of damnation for it would not denote him to the Elizabethans as a penetrating thinker, but a despairing lunatic whose conscience has become impaired. Citing Elizabethan dramatic and theological works warning against the sin of suicidal despair,129 he claims that the soliloquy shows Hamlet’s as a demonic madman:

Once again we are faced with the strange phenomenon of Hamlet making what seems to be a poetic statement of what is universally valid, when in fact, in the context of Shakespeare’s age, he is talking nonsense, even blasphemous nonsense. But the very decay of our own religious beliefs brings us closer to Hamlet—suicide is no longer sinful in most people’s eyes, nor does it lead to eternal damnation.130 Reading the speech as a contemplation of suicide leaves McGee without much explanation for Hamlet’s pause. Yet that weakness is hardly unique to him, and he partly rehabilitates Prosser, by showing that even if she is wrong, the speech need not support a

129 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 94-99 130 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 101-2

71 traditional interpretation: “It does not seem helpful to regard Hamlet as uttering philosophical profundities when in dramatic terms Shakespeare’s first audience waited to see whether Hamlet would sink his dagger into Claudius or himself.”131 The speech shows Hamlet in theological despair, as Satanic influence clouds his conscience.

McGee also disagrees with Prosser that Hamlet is saved at the last by his embrace of

Providence, and instead interprets his resignation as spiritual acedia. Like Ophelia drowning “incapable of her own distress,” Hamlet ends his life in religious delusion.

Numbed to his own evil, he comes to the final catastrophe as one strolling to perdition.

He is damned for revenge, for hypocrisy and malice, for sloth, and even for gambling, but chiefly for his Catholicism, which is the root of all these sins. McGee concludes:

I think it is wrong to distort the pattern of motivation in the play by ignoring the Satanic, and Catholic, background which lies behind it. Hamlet is a study in evil, but for the Elizabethan audience he was not Everyman, he was Every-Catholic, who was ipso facto a follower of Satan, whose arch-priest was the Pope himself.132 This is a lively book. If its conclusion sounds alarming, it is more alarming still that of the works reviewed in this chapter, McGee’s stands alongside Sr. Miriam Joseph’s as the most internally consistent, since their theories are perfectly inverse: both view

Hamlet’s story as a progress through the Catholic life, but differ on whether to view it with sympathy or hostility. The consistency of each arises from its religious outlook.

This is not to say McGee is free of other weaknesses. The least of many is that he depends upon generous assumptions. It is simply right to recognize the correctors as gate- keepers to the Elizabethan stage, but to treat them as the normative audience requires additional premises. To justify that step, McGee posits that decades of the Elizabethan regime, cemented by victory against the Spanish Armada, had established nearly uniform

131 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 97 132 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 196-7

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Protestant belief in the English populace.133 This was not a safe assumption when McGee wrote, and is less so now. Because Catholicism was practiced only in secret, the number of Catholics in England during Elizabeth’s reign cannot be determined with certainty, and may have been quite high. At the time, it was a significant matter of speculation throughout Europe and within England, and Shakespeare could have believed any number of things about it.134

McGee’s ascription of Catholicism to both the Danish court and Hamlet is also doubtful if taken in a wholly univocal way. The literal fact of a Catholic court has powerful warrant, such as Ophelia’s Catholic funeral rites, her likening of Hamlet to a lover in the guise of a pilgrim (4.1.23-65, cf. R&J 1.5.92-109), Hamlet’s Catholic oaths like “by St. Patrick” (1.5.135) and “by’r Lady” (2.2.425), and dozens of other details that

McGee documents throughout his book. Yet there is evidence as well that Shakespeare also uses Hamlet’s Elsinore to comment on the Protestant world and even the court in

England. To mention the three most famous examples, first is that Hamlet is a student at

Wittenberg, the university of Martin Luther. Second, there is a major crux in Act IV, when Hamlet, having killed Polonius, seems to identify him as Luther:

King Now Hamlet, where’s Polonius? Ham At supper. King At supper! Where? Ham Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. You worm is your only emperor for diet. (3.6.17-22) The “convocation” is a word play on the Diet of Worms, which condemned Luther under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1521. Third, in addition to

Luther, Shakespeare possibly likens Polonius to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, since

133 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 134 See Asquith, Shadowplay, 5.

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Polonius’s advice to Laertes at 1.3.57-81 may have been to be drawn from a letter of

Burghley to his son.135 Since Burghley was a major architect of Elizabeth’s spy network and propaganda, to put his words into the mouth of Denmark’s chief councilor and spy, who is also identified with Luther, does not obviously square with a Catholic Elsinore.

Of these three examples, the only one McGee answers with a formidable argument is

Hamlet’s study at Wittenberg:

It seems much more likely that for them Wittenberg meant Faustus who in Marlowe’s play is never once associated with Luther or Lutheranism; instead he is, if anything, a schismatic Catholic who uses holy water in his conjuration of Mephistopheles, and who ingratiates himself with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, the very man who presided at the Diet of Worms, at which Luther was excommunicated. Just as Shakespeare seems to have made use of the name ‘Horatio’ to associate his Ghost with that of Don Andrea [the revenge ghost in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy], and so at one stroke made the setting both Satanic and Catholic, it seems at least possible that Shakespeare—or the author of the Ur- Hamlet—having read that Belleforest’s Hamlet had been trained in black magic, naturally picked for him an educational establishment that was famed for such arts. The Faustbook was to hand to make the job easier of him, or the source could have been Marlowe’s play. Certainly a theatre audience would be more likely to associate Hamlet’s Wittenberg with Faustus than with Luther because of the very popularity of the play. It is also to be noted that the pagan background of the original story has become Catholic instead, which in Protestant eyes would be only a slight change.136 This is plausible, but McGee’s response to the pun on the Diet of Worms is less felicitous, and its weakens harms his argument about Wittenberg. He simply writes it off because the Calvinist clergy in England viewed Luther as little better than the papists, and many writers slurred false religions interchangeably, as when Marlowe in The

Massacre at Paris refers to Huguenots as “Lutheran” and “Puritan.” He concludes,

Thus also Hamlet’s punning allusion to the Diet of Worms caused no offence. I cannot therefore see why an Elizabethan audience would associate Wittenberg with a form of Protestantism of which they did not approve.137

135 The parallel to Burghley was first identified by George Russell French in “Notes on Hamlet” in Shakspeareana Genealogica (London: Macmillan & Co., 1869): 303-305. It is questioned by Geoffrey Bullough in Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 8, on the grounds that both texts belong to a common literary tradition, though other scholars have detected a broader range of associations between Polobius and Burghley. See Eddi Jolly, “Dating the Plays: Hamlet” in Great Oxford, Essays on the Life and Work of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, ed. Richard Malim (Kent: Parapress Ltd., 2004): 169-79. 136 McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet, 56 137 McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet, 56

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I cannot see why an audience’s approval or disapproval of Luther is material to whether they should associate him with Wittenberg, since the association comes from the simple fact that Luther taught there. Moreover, the text elsewhere associates Polonius with

Hamlet’s university:

Ham Now, my lord, you played once i’th’ university, you say? Pol That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. Ham And what did you enact? Pol I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me. Ham It was a brute part of him to kill so capitol a calf there. (3.2.96-104) The definite article in “th’ university” may imply that Polonius studied at the same school as Hamlet. The dialogue also foreshadows Hamlet’s murder of Polonius two scenes later, with himself cast as Brutus. The implication is that Hamlet’s murder of Polonius is a shared reenactment of a university play, which figures as well for the Diet of Worms.

Another association between Polonius and Luther casts a long Protestant shadow over

Denmark, however Catholic it may be: Polonius imitates Luther in corrupting the state by endorsing the perversion of marriage. Luther assented to the bigamous marriage of

Phillip of Hesse in 1539, while Polonius represents the Danish court, which, in the incestuous marriage of the king and queen, “have freely gone/With this affair along”

(1.2.15-16). Bigamy of course is a different sin from incest, but because Martin Luther married a nun and encouraged other clergy to do the same, he was charged by Thomas

More for the sacrilegious crime of spiritual incest, since a nun is spiritually a priest’s sister.138 If the parallel between Polonius and Lord Burghly is correct, it suggests, in combination with the other hints, that some ghastly Lutheran perversion has taken hold of

138 St Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, 4.9, in The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 6, part 1, ed. Thomas M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard C. Marius (Yale: Yale University Press, 1981): “Whereas Luther not only teacheth monks, friars, and nuns to ‘marriage,’ but also, being a friar, hath ‘married’ a nun himself… and with her liveth, under the name of wedlock, in open, incestuous lechery, without care or shame… because he hath procured and gotten so many shameful and shameless companions.”

75 the English government and is expressed in the remarriage of Hamlet’s mother. Like

Henry VIII’s divorce, it is an attack on decency that might drive a Catholic citizen to rage, and perhaps bring out the worst in him. McGee might respond that the play would have been banned if it meant such a thing. But that response would only prove that his case depends ondismissing adverse evidence a priori.

The School of Ambiguity

Prosser’s reading has never been widely accepted as a whole, and her name is unknown to casual students of Shakespeare, yet her impact has been seismic. The mere existence of a plausible, calmly reasoned theory as contrarian as hers is a heavy counterweight against any confident interpretation of Hamlet as a hero. It has become commonplace even among critics who espouse the ghost, to consider the passion for revenge as a degenerative influence on Hamlet’s psyche. Yet as this shift has occurred, the theory that has risen to dominance is not the ghost is evil, but that it is intentionally ambiguous. This was already implied by Campbell and Battenhouse and argued explicitly by West before Prosser entered the scene; it has persisted in her wake and been championed by Roland Mushat Frye, Charles and Elaine Hallett, Robert F. Fleissner,

Stephen Greenblatt, Margreta de Grazia, David Scott Kastan and many more.139 It is the most respectable theory among current scholars and is probably what most actors believe.

These critics differ as to how the ghost’s ambiguity functions. For most, it is an

139 See Robert F. Fleissner, “Subjectivity as an Occupational Hazard of ‘Hamlet Ghost’ Critics,” Hamlet Studies, (New Delhi) 1 (1979): 23-33, Charles and Elaine Hallet, The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

76 invitation to relativism and casuistry. As the Halletts put it, “the ghost’s demand, while having a strong element of justice and even necessity about it, has also, in itself and in its effects, a tendency to initiate further injustice. The situation is unavoidably tragic.”140

Stephen Greenblatt, in his influential Hamlet in Purgatory (2002), takes a similar line, but integrates it with a study of Purgatory as a product of poetic imagination, following the analysis of religion in The New Science of Giambattista Vico. He maintains that revenge offers Hamlet a surrogate for the old spirituality of Purgatory. Though the two principles are opposed in their own right, the play combines them under the notion of remembrance, in keeping with its “pervasive pattern, a deliberate forcing together of radically incompatible accounts of almost everything that matters in Hamlet.”141 Others treat the ghost’s ambiguity in a more dualistic manner. De Grazia interprets Hamlet’s madness as Vice-antics in the same way as McGee, and casts the ghost as the Devil to

Hamlet’s Vice, and yet, only pages later, when she examines the important but overlooked eschatological intimations sprinkled through Hamlet, she considers the ghost’s purgation as a prolepsis of God’s kingdom.142 What others smudge, she compartmentalizes. The common thought unifying most of these critics is that the ghost’s duality is the source of crisis in the play precisely because its nature cannot be determined. Its only real answer is the consummation of the tragedy it initiates. Implied by this is a separation of the ghost’s theological status from its dramatic role. As Kastan puts it, “the play transforms theology into tragedy,”143 meaning that for Shakespeare theological categories condition but do not contain drama.

140 Hallett and Hallett, The Revenger’s Madness, 190 141 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 240 142 De Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet, 180-8, 200-1 143 Kastan, A Will to Believe, 143

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Having staked out this range of positions, the time has come adjudicate them by directly engaging the text.

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IV: He That Plays the King

At the heart of the debate about the ghost is the matter of Shakespeare’s religion, because the questions about the ethics of revenge and the truth or falsehood of Purgatory show that the foundation for testing the spirit is first and foremost the Christian confession. This is just what St. John teaches:

Derely beloued, beleue not euerie spirit, but trye spirits whether they are of God: for many false Prophetes are gone out into the worlde. Hereby shal ye knowe the Spirit of God, Euerie spirit that confesseth that Iesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God. And euerie spirit which confesseth not that Iesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God: but this is the spirit of Antichrist, of whome ye have heard, how that he shulde come & now already he is in the worlde. (1 John 4:2-3) A spirit’s confession of Christ is more than a mere verbal acknowledgement, but a confession of Christ’s whole truth. St. Paul adds that it is in the power of the Devil to imitate a spirit of holiness, and seem to affirm some part of gospel in deed and word:

For suche false apostles are deceitful workers, and transforme themselues into the Apostles of Christ. And no marvelle: for Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing, thogh his ministers transform themselues, as though they were the ministers of righteousness, whose end shal be according to their workes. (2 Cor 11:13-15) Shakespeare certainly knew St. Paul’s teaching, because he quotes this text twice, in

Love’s Labour’s Lost, when Berowne says, “Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light” (4.3.257), and in The Comedy of Errors:

Dromio of Syracuse Master, is this mistress Satan? Antipholus of Syracuse It is the devil. Dromio of Syracuse Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; And here she comes in the habit of a light wench, and thereof comes that the wenches say “God damn me,” that’s as much to say, “God make me a light wench.” It is written, they appear to men like angels of light; light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light wenches will burn; come not near her. (4.3.47-55) Far beyond these two allusions, the Devil’s imitations of a spirit of light are foundational to Shakespeare’s way of representing evil. It is typical of his villains, demonic or human, to pretend virtue. As Iago, his most accomplished “demi-devil,”

79 assures us:

When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do at first display with heavenly shows. (3.3.346-6) Even truth itself can be spoken by the devil and his ministers as a lure into sin. Macbeth’s witches engineer his damnation by telling nothing but truths. When he is named Thane of

Cawdor, Banquo poses a fitting question, “What! can the devil speak true?” (1.3.107) followed by a prudent warning:

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s In deepest consequence. (1.3.125-128) The Devil’s trick of hiding behind a mask of truth is repeated through many other plays.

In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio says:

The devil can cite scripture for his purpose,— An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O what a goodly outside falsehood hath! (1.3.93-7) In Measure for Measure, Isabella says:

O, ’tis the cunning livery of hell The damnedst body to invest and cover In precise guards! (3.1.94-6) In Richard III, Lady Anne exclaims, “O wonderful, when devils tell the truth! (1.2.73), while in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena says, “You do advance your cunning more and more/When truth kills truth, O devilish-holy fray” (3.2.131-32).

Shakespeare’s frequent warnings about the Devil’s counterfeits are part of a major theme in his works—that of false appearances. From the hypocritical righteousness of villains like Richard III and Malvolio, to the riddle of the caskets in The Merchant of

Venice, Shakespeare’s plays confirm over and again the words of Antonio in Twelfth

Night:

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Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous evil Are empty trunks o’erflourished by the devil. (3.4.349-50) Hamlet as well contains a similar observation:

Polonius ’Tis too much proved, that with devotion’s visage And pious action we do sugar o’er The devil himself. Claudius O, tis true. [aside] How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience. (3.1.49-50) These warnings about the Devil do not sit well with the idea that Hamlet could adequately test the ghost by confirming a single point of fact that it claims, such as the circumstances of Old Hamlet’s death. Even if it shows signs of Christian virtue, it may still be a devil masking its wiles.

Elizabethans in general knew to be wary of the Devil for just these reasons, which were promoted in the theological literature of the day. That literature is invested in both practical and speculative concerns and filled with precise and definite theological opinions about the nature and activities of ghosts. These views were founded on the scriptures, the experience of witchcraft and heresy prosecutions, and the hearsay of common folklore. Not every audience member, however, believed the same theories about ghosts. Most of Shakespeare’s audience was Protestant in practice, and while they knew that pre-Reformation Catholic legends told of ghostly visitations by spirits from

Purgatory, the Anglican Church had rejected Purgatory dogmatically. In 1571, Parliament enforced of The Thirty Nine Articles, a Protestant statement promulgated by the

Convocation of Canterbury in 1562, and which prefaced all subsequent editions of the

Book of Common Prayer, which said, “The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory… is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture but rather

81 repugnant to the word of God.”144 As Protestants came to reject belief in Purgatory, they came to suppose that past apparitions were, as Calvin put it, “fictitious revelations” or

“the wiles of Satan,”145 who had come to propagate Catholic heresies. Henry Smith,

England’s most popular Puritan preacher, makes this claim firmly in The Pilgrim’s Wish:

The deuill hath many ways to deceive; and this is one and a dangerous one to draw us from Gods word to visions, and dreames and apparitions, upon which many of the doctrines of the Papists are grounded. They had neuer heard of Purgatory but for those spirits that walked in the night, and told them they were the soules of such and such, which suffered in fire, till their Masses, and almes, and Pilgrimages did rensome them out: so these night-spirits began Purgatorie, and Purgatorye begat Trentals, as one Serpent hatcheth another.146 The Protestant rejection of Purgatory gave birth to a deep skepticism about the possibility of any non-demonic apparitions. If, as Protestants reasoned, the soul at death went directly to heaven or hell, then it had little chance of ever returning to earth. A soul that went to hell could not appear again, because the Devil had no power to resurrect the dead in body or soul. John Cotta explained:

As touching the reall raising of the dead, it is impossible unto the limited power of the Divell, either in the substance of body or soule, to reduce or bring the dead back into this world, or life, or sense againe; because in death, by the unchangeable, and unalterable decree of God in his holy Writ, the body returneth into dust from whence it came, and the Soule to God who gave it.147 As for the blessed souls, they were too content in Heaven to have any desire to return to earth, as Sir Thomas Browne wrote:

I believe … that the Souls of the faithful, as they leave Earth, take possession of Heaven: that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of Devils, prompting and suggesting unto us mischief, blood, and villainy; instilling and stealing into our hearts the blessed Spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world.148

144 The Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, art. 22, 1562 145 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, trans. Henry Beveridge (London: James Clark & Co.,1949) Book III, Chap V. 146 Quoted in Joseph Hunter, New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1845) 211-12 147 John Cotta, The Infallible True and Assured Witch, (London : I.L. for R. Higgenbotham, 1624) 54. 148 Sir Thomas Browne. Religio Medici, (London, 1635) 80-1

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Although the souls of the dead could not manifest themselves to the living, devils could appear in their shape to convey messages, including information about how they died. King James I writes in his Daemonologie (1597):

PHI. And what meanes then these kinds of spirits, when they appear in the shadow of a person newly dead, or to die, to his friends? EPI. When they appeare vpon that occasion, they are called Wraithes in our language. Amongst the Gentiles the Deuill vsed that much, to make them beleeue that it was some good spirite that appeared to them then, ether to forewarne them of the death of their friend; or else to discouer vnto them, the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slauchter, as is written in the booke of histories Prodigious. And this way hee easilee deceiued the Gentiles, because they knew not God: And to that same effect is it, that he now appears in that maner to some ignorant Christians. For he dare not so illude anie that knoweth that, neither can the spirite of the defunct returne to his friend, or yet an Angell vse such formes.149 Among the books of witchcraft and demonology written by Shakespeare’s Protestant contemporaries, it is difficult to find any lengthy book that does not promote the view that the Devil could hide his evil designs behind the masks of truth and virtue, and impossible to find one that denies it. George Gyfford, in A Discourse of the Subtill

Practises of Devils by Witches and Sorcerers, said:

When they became divels (even those reprobate angels) their understanding was not taken awaie, but turned into malicious craft and subtiltie. He [The Devil] never doth anything but of an evill purpose, and yet he can set such a colour, that the Apostle saith he doth change himselfe into an angell of light.150 Likewise, Thomas Cooper in Sathan Transformed into an Angell of Light:

And as the wise and mercifull God … doeth … convey his will unto earthen vessells … even so Dealeth Sathan the god of this world, with the children of disobedience. That whereas by reason of Natures guilt and infirmitie, they could not endure his terrible personal prescence: therefore hee tendereth his will unto them, by certaine delightful and Familiar charmes, yea by Witches his vassales insinuateth himself into us, colouring his prescence and sleights by some shew of outward holiness, as by that so hee may the better winne from us an approbation of his help; and so the more dangerously ensnare us in his cruell pawes. 151 Alexander Roberts, in A Treatise of Witchcraft, wrote, concerning the demons that were

149 James I, Daemonologie, 61 150 George Gyfford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devils by Witches and Sorcerers, (London: T. Orwin, 1587) 20 151 Thomas Cooper, Sathan Transformed into an Angell of Light, (London: Barnard Alsop, 1622) 61-62

83 exorcised by Christ:

For the Diuels could speake the name of God, neuerthelesse were still Diuels; and when they said vnto Christ, they knew who he was, the holy one of God, &c. Mar. 1 24.25, their mouthes were stopped, he would no such witnesse, that wee should learne, not to beleeue them when they say the truth: for this is but a bait, that wee might afterward follow their lies.152 Catholic writers were open to the possibility that a ghost might indeed come from

God, since Purgatorial visitations were part of Church tradition. Nevertheless, Catholics knew that evil spirits were afoot in the world, that the sanctity of ghosts always needed to be tested, and that the way to try a spirit was not to see whether it cites the Scripture, but to question the purpose for which the spirit cites it. In 1595, Nicolas Remy, the Catholic

Lieutenant General of Lorraine and foremost prosecutor of witches in that region, reasoned that:

It is not only by assumption … of a fair and goodly appearance that the Devil masks his abominable designs. For again and again it has been proved a false conclusion to argue that a cloak of righteousness is an indication of a godly life; and, as the proverb says, the cowl does not make the monk; and the life of many men is far different from their speech and appearance. Therefore the Devil often uses such conversation as should promote piety, religion, and holiness; and often even declares that he cannot enter into any pact or agreement without many such devout colloquies. Indeed, this is one of his oldest tricks.153 Fr. Pierre Le Loyer, another French Catholic, wrote in 1586 that the Devil sought to deceive men by pretending charity:

Diuels of this kinde, do beare enuy and malice to mankinde. Notwithstanding Festus … seemeth to affirme, That these Lares [a kind of devil] are sometime good … because they were thought to make all things safe, and to keepe and preserue all thinges carefully: and … that they were supposed to driue away enemies. But howsoeuer it bee, certaine it is they were no other then verie Diuels; who if they seemed sometimes to ayde and helpe men, and to doe them some good: yet the same was to the intent they might afterwardes worke them the more and greater harme and damage, aswell inwardly in their Soules and consciences, as outwardly in their bodies and goods.154 The high level of antagonism between Protestants and Catholics amplified this feature of European demon-lore. Since all heretics were agents of the Devil, it followed that the

152 Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft, (London: Nicholas Okes, 1616) prop. 1 153 Nicolas Remy, Demonolatry, trans. Montague Summers, (London: John Rodker, 1930) Bk. 1, ch. 9 154 Pierre Le Loyer, A Treatise of Specters, (London: Val S., 1605) 27-28

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Devil himself was a kind of master heretic, who could manipulate Scripture, Christian doctrine, and words of holiness into deceitful forms to lure men into Hell. Legends sprang up among Catholics in which demons would appear disguised as Protestant ministers.155 In A Treatise of Ghosts (1602), Noel Taillepied, a Catholic priest, gives an account of a devil who, when asked whether the Catholic or Protestant religion were true, began to sing a Huguenot psalm translation by Clément Marot.156 Protestant stories told of the Devil appearing as a Catholic priest, as when Mephistopheles appears to Dr.

Faustus as a Franciscan friar because “that holy shape becomes a devil best” (Faustus

1.3.28). Scot relates a comic tale in which the Devil appears in clerical garb to preach an entire sermon in which a priest who listened could find no error.157 Taillepied illustrates the climate of the debate when he throws the Pauline doctrine back at the Protestant heretics:

[Satan] may … for some dark design seem to applaud and exhort at first, but he will very soon try to tempt men out of the right path and seduce them into error and sin. If he were to show his horns at the first moment, we should be on our guard and flee his wiles. … All the modern sects and heretics—Martinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Adamites, Tritheists, Antitrinitarians, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Sacramentarians, Evangelicals, Puritans, Naturalists, Politiques, Machiavelists, Lucianists, Bodinists, and the rest who have made so much noise and are highly esteemed by the world—one and all began their false teaching by declaring that they were favoured by God, and that they were come to show men the right way and cleanse them from sin. … Satan acts in precisely the same way, and can at first discourse very finely and very religiously to make us think he is an Angel of light, so that we may be led to trust him. … Just as a merchant who wishes to sell off some commodity dresses it to the best advantage and deacons it devisedly, so Satan under show and colour of fairness and truth, envenoms and infects the good with evil, for he has honey indeed in his mouth, but beware the serpent’s fatal sting.158

155 Thomas Spalding, Elizabethan Demonology, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880) 48 156 Noel Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, trans Montague Summers, (London: The Fortune Press, 1933) 157 “On a time the divell went up into a pulpit, and there made a verie Catholike sermon: but a holie preest comming to the good speed , by his holinesse perceived that it was the divell. So he gave good eare unto him, but could find no fault with his doctrine. And therefore as soone as the sermon was doone, he called the divell unto him, demanding the cause of his sincere preaching; who answered: Beholde I speake the truth, knowing that while men be hearers of the word, and not followers, God is the more offended, and my kingdome the more inlarged.” Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 405 158 Noel Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, 165-166

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A view of Shakespeare’s works within their context in the Reformation reveals that his apprehension of the Devil’s “false countersigns” was grounded not merely on his own poetic fancy, but is a universally valid teaching of the Gospel, stitched into on the religious fabric of his age.

The first scene of Hamlet uses elements of Elizabethan ghost lore to evoke the audience’s mistrust of ghosts. The play begins in an unsettling tone, its opening line one of doubtfulness of identity: “Who’s there?” As the dialogue proceeds, the audience hears of the night’s bitter cold, that Francisco is sick at heart, and that Horatio is but a piece of himself. After this disquieting opening, the guards begin to tell of a “dreaded sight” (F1

1.1.24). The cause of the guards’ dread is nebulous at first. They say only that they have seen some “thing” for two nights together, appearing at the stroke of one beneath a certain star of unnamed significance. Then a clock strikes, the ghost enters, and only now does the audience discovers what the dreaded sight is.

To an Elizabethan viewer, the theological perspective of the scene would be

Protestant by presumption, and the ghost’s witnesses avoid claiming that the ghost is in fact the king, saying say only that it is “like the King” (57), that it has the King’s “figure”

(40), “image” (80), and “form” (46). They refrain from the conclusion—which modern viewers tend to make automatically—that the ghost is as it appears. Horatio first assumes that the ghost is a counterfeit, who “usurp’st… that fair and warlike form” (45-6).

When the ghost is banished by a crowing cock, so that it starts away “like a guilty thing/Upon a fearful summons” (129-30), Marcellus interprets the cock as a bird of sanctity, which sings all night at Christmas, and whose note drives off witches, fairies,

86 and evil stars (138-45). Likewise Horatio says that the cock dispels not blessed ghosts, but “the extravagant and erring spirit” when it awakes “the god of day” (130-7; cf. Lear

3.4.112, MSND 3.2.278-407).

By the end of the scene, the ghost’s identity remains uncertain for the witnesses.

Despite Horatio’s reputation as the skeptic of the scene before seeing the ghost, once he has seen it, he is the most credulous character, alone hypothesizing that it may be authentic (114-119), and he later offers Hamlet his hedged opinion that “It think I saw him yesternight” (1.2.186). But the scene’s overall tenor affirms his and the guards’ apprehensiveness of the ghost. The natural effect of making these characters wary is to make the audience wary as well.

The next scene shifts into the court of Claudius, where the character of Hamlet makes his entrance. The scene conveys to the audience that Hamlet is a disconsolate man, whose melancholy could make him susceptible to an evil ghost. Campbell and Prosser both show that Shakespeare was deeply aware of the doctrine of the humors in his composition of Hamlet, and Prosser gives particular clarity to how the passions of melancholy fit to the form of demonic temptations.159 The following study of Hamlet’s melancholy and of the ghost draws from both of them, but follows Prosser’s in its most important lines.

There is, however, a major theoretical difference, emerging early in the ghost’s speeches, about the role of Catholic theology in understanding the ghost. I have also brought in additional primary source material and attempted a closer reading of many details in the text that Prosser glosses past.

The Elizabethans had rational grounds to think melancholics susceptible to demons.

159 See Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 124-42

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Because melancholy is a brooding humor, melancholic imaginations were extraordinarily active, and prone both to natural delusion and to illusions of the Devil. Burton asserts that an overactive imagination is a common trait of the melancholic:

I will now point at the wonderful effects and power of [imagination]; which, as it is eminent in all, so most especially it rages in melancholy persons, in keeping the species of objects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continual and strong meditation, until at length it produceth in some parties real effects.160 By “real effects,” Burton means psychosomatic diseases and phenomena like lycanthropy in which a man’s form could change to resemble an object he had brooded on..

The Elizabethan concept of the melancholy imagination descended from antiquity.

Since ancient times, the melancholic’s prodigious imagination had been a staple in the ongoing discussion of the melancholy. Ironically, the popularity of this theory had been fueled by the writings of Skeptics, Epicureans, and others who argued against the existence of ghosts. The usual Epicurean reasoning was that the purported apparitions that certain people had seen were mere tricks of the imagination. Taillepied cites an instance of this argument from Plutarch’s Life of Brutus:

Cassius, who was, as Plutarch tells us, a confirmed member of this [the Epicurean] sect, learning that Brutus had seen a ghost, tried to persuade him that apparitions were clean contrary to the natural law. “‘In our sect, Brutus’, said he, ‘we have an opinion, the we doe not alwayes feele, or see, that which we suppose we doe both see and feele: but that our senses being credulous, and therefore easily abused… are induced to imagine that, which in truth they doe not. … For our imagination doth uppon a small fancie growe from conceit to conceit, altering such formes of thinges imagined. … But yet there is further cause of this in you. For you, being by nature given to melancholick discoursing, and of late continually occupied: your willes and senses having bene overlabored, doe easilier yeelde to such imaginations.’”161 Shakespeare removes Cassius’s argument in Julius Casear, where Cassius abandons

Epicureanism (5.1.84-86), but retains the idea in Messala’s lament of Cassius’s death:

O hateful error, melancholy’s child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men

160 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Mem. 3 Subs. 2 161 Noel Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, 2-3

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The things that are not? (5.3.71-3) If a melancholic’s imagination could conjure false illusions, it made him all the more susceptible to real spirits. The Malleus Maleficarum (1494) of Heinrich Kramer and

James Sprenger, Catholic Europe’s foremost witch-hunting manual, explains that demons can physically influence a melancholic imagination:

For then the exterior senses are deluded and employed by the interior senses. For by the power of Devils,… mental images long retained in the treasury of such images, which is the memory, are drawn out, not from the intellectual understanding in which such images are stored, but from the memory, which is the repository of such images, and is situated at the back of the head, and are presented to the imaginative faculty. And so strongly are they impressed on that faculty that a man has an inevitable impulse to imagine a horse or a beast … when there is actually no such beast to see, but it seems so by reason of the impulsive force of the devil working by means of those things. And it does not seem wonderful that devils can do this, when even a natural defect is able to effect the same result, as is shown by the case of frantics and melancholy men, and maniacs and some drunkards, who are unable to discern truly.162 Le Loyer records the same:

For (as it is most certaine and assured) that the braine of man is the seate of the imagination and the phantasies; and that by the same (by meanes of the organs and instruments proper and fitted therevnto) the conceptions of the soule are vttered and brought foorth: So, if the Divell doe once perceive that the braine is troubled or offended by any maladies or infirmities which are particularly incident therevnto: as the Epilepsie, or Falling evil, Madnesse, Melancholy, Lunatique fittes, and other such like passions: He presently taketh occasion to torment and trouble it the more: And by the permission of God, seizing himselfe of the same, hee dooth trouble the humours, amaze and confound the senses, captivateth the vnderstanding, possesseth the fantasie, darkneth and blindeth the powers of the soule; and speaking through the organs of the body, being then fitted and made apte to bring to light his owne conceipts and devises, he then commeth to shew himselfe in his kind, speaketh strange languages, telleth of things that are chaunced and come to passe in diverse partes of the worlde, prophecieth of things to come … and in briefe, he worketh such marvells and wonders, as no man can beleeve are possibly able to proceed from any body of a humane nature.163 Since man’s diseased imagination is the Devil’s doorway into his soul, and a melancholic had an easily deluded imagination, the Devil would use his imagination as the primary tool to persuade him. Burton writes, with regard to melancholy,

The manner how [the Devil] performs it, Biarmannus, in his oration against Bodine, sufficiently declares. “He begins first with the phantasy and moves that so strongly that

162 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (London: John Rodker, 1928) Part II, chap. 2 163 Le Loyer, A Treatise of Specters, 274

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no reason is able to resist.”164 The Catholic Compendium Maleficarum (1608) of Francesco Maria Guazzo adds,

Touching revelations or visions and as to the character of the person who sees them, much must be taken into consideration if the true are to be distinguished from the false. … If he is … subject to a violent clouding of the imagination, [he is not] to be credited … for the devil easily deludes them, since they eagerly accept and believe the images of false appearances.165 The first thing the audience learns about Hamlet is that the loss of his father has propelled him into excessive grief. Claudius and Gertrude upbraid Hamlet for persisting too long in mourning for his father. Villain that he is, Claudius still speaks reason when he advises Hamlet that “unmanly grief” (92) beyond a normal period of mourning “shows a will most incorrect to heaven” (93) and is a “fault against the dead” (100) in its own right. Campbell shows that Claudius’s counsel is consistent with mainstream Elizabethan moral philosophy, which put a highly Aristotelian emphasis on moderation of the passions.166 She quotes a passage from The French Academie (1594) to explain how excessive grief tied to melancholy can lure a man into despair:

Therefore [the heart in grief] trembleth and languisheth, as a sicke body, who drying up with grief by little and little, in the end dieth, except he have some remedy against his sicknesse. … And… as there is pleasure and rest in joy, so in sorrow there is dolour and torment. For it ingendreth melancholy, and melancholy engedreth it, and increaseth it more. … Now when griefe is in great measure, it bringeth withal a kind of loathing and tediousnes, which causeth a man to hate & to be weary of all things, even in the light of a man’s selfe, so that he shall take pleasure in nothing but in his melancholy, in feeding himselfe therwithal, in plunging himselfe deeper into it, & refusing all joy and consolation. To conclude, some grow so farre as to hate themselves, and so fall to despaire, yea many kill and destroy themselves.167 The immoderation of Hamlet’s grief is most evident when he is alone; his soliloquy is manifestly despondent. His first personal reflection is of his desire to die, as he bemoans the ugliness of the world in the very manner that The French Academie describes. The

164 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1, part 1, Sec. 2 165 Francisco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers, (London: John Rodker, 1929) bk. II, ch xvi. 166 Campbell, Slaves of Passion, 115-8 167 The French Academie, 1594, 253-254, quoted in Campbell, Slaves of Passion, 118

90 force of his imagination is apparent throughout, as he dwells on a gallery of unwholesome images: “an unweeded garden” (133), “things ranks and gross in nature”

(135), and “incestuous sheets” (155). Sadly, Hamlet has no control over his persistent ruminations. When he tries to govern his nagging, oppressive memory saying, “Let me not think on’t,” immediately, “Frailty, thy name is woman” (144) leaps into his throat and his disgusted tirade continues as before. “Heaven and Earth,/Must I remember” (140-1)? he asks. But Hamlet must remember: his imagination is stronger than his will.

Shakespeare elaborates the force of Hamlet’s imagination by having him repeat himself throughout the speech, his mind rotating through a sequence of the same three impressions—his mother’s incest, her past love for Hamlet’s father, and Claudius’s inferiority to the late king. He twice recalls memories of his parents’ love, makes two sarcastic metaphors about Gertrude’s haste to remarry, and twice contrasts Claudius against the late king, each time comparing his father to a mythological figure. He dwells on particular words and phrases like “within a month,” “two,” and “married,” showing that his imagination keeps cycling back on itself, constantly revisiting the same themes.

This continual meditation amplifies the imaginative force of his reflections, giving them a disproportionate stature. Even the haste of Gertrude’s remarriage seems to grow in his mind. As the speech progresses, his words condense the length of time that Gertrude spent in mourning, going first from “but two month’s dead” and then “not two” (135) to

“within a month!” (143, 151). The gravity of Hamlet’s recent loss and shame always wins the audience’s pity. Yet though we sympathize with Hamlet, we must not ignore that his obsessive grief can expose him to moral danger. A man moved by deep grief often finds that the things he once trusted in and loved are either lost or devalued in light of his

91 newfound suffering, and so his heart can become desperate, and he may begin to search for different answers, hoping to find some new thing that he can latch onto to restore meaning and pleasure in his life. The broken heart can believe any lie that promises hope and offers relief from the anguish of truth. It stands to reason, therefore, that the Devil, seeing the void within a sorrowful heart, will know his opportunity. Henry Boguet makes this very point in An Examen of Witches (1603):

The Wicked One is so cunning that he knows how to choose the times and occasion most favorable to his designs. For he takes men when they are alone and in despair or misery because of hunger or some disaster which has befallen them. Eve was alone when she was seduced. Thievenne Paget was watching her cows in the field and lost one; and as she was sorrowing for this, Satan approached her and won her. It was the same with George Gandillon, who was irritated because he could not drive certain oxen…. Furthermore, he makes fair promises. For to some he offers riches, assuring them that they will never lack for anything: to the vengeful he suggests the means to avenge themselves on their enemies: … in short he so well suits himself to the character and humour of each one that he captures them at his will.168 Hamlet’s grief not only tends to despair, but attains it, for he says, “It is not, nor it cannot come to good” (156). Elizabethan consolatory literature understood that the dividing line between excessive grief and full, theological despair is whether the grieving person desires consolation, but Hamlet denies that consolation is possible. Such

“inconsolable grief,” Campbell writes, “may result either in dullness and loss of memory and in the sin of sloth, or in hasty anger and rashness, or in the sin of ire.”169 As the Devil would easily perceive, Hamlet is open to corruption, and the key to corrupting him is to offer the thing he most desires to fill his emptiness. Hamlet’s mother knows exactly what that thing is:

Do not for ever with thy veiled lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. (1.2.68-9) For Hamlet, to see his father again, or even “his like” (185) is the deepest desire of his

168 Henry Boguet, An Examen of Witches, trans. Montague Summers, (London: John Rodker, 1929) 21- 2 169 Campbell, Slaves of Passion, 114

92 soul, and the primary object of his imagination. He tells Horatio in a prophetic exchange:

Hamlet My father, methinks I see my father. Horatio O where, my lord? Hamlet In my mind’s eye, Horatio. (181-2) Alongside this conjured image is an appetite for revenge: “Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven/Or ever I had seen that day” (179-80).

When Horatio tells Hamlet about the ghost, Hamlet quickly becomes willing to speak to it, even if it is the false appearance of a demon:

Hamlet If it assume my noble father’s person, I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape And bid me hold my peace. (241-3) Though the ghost may be a minion of Hell, Hamlet will take the risk—as long as the ghost “seems” to be his father.Hamlet’s earlier claim that “I know not ‘seems’” (1.2.74) has bolstered his reputation for seeing through exteriors, but he belies this idea at the end of the scene, revealing an improper frame of mind to encounter a potentially false appearance. If a devil assumes his father’s person, Hamlet should desire to dispel it.

Catholic tradition prescribed a man who meets a ghost should always bless himself, pray, and say to the spirit: “If thou art of God, speak; if thou art not of God, begone.”170 When

Hamlet first sees the ghost, he correctly blesses himself: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” (1.4.18)! Yet he immediately abandons caution and asks it to speak, even if it is not of God, so long as it has his father’s “shape,” in words as opposite to the Catholic exhortation as possible:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy events wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak with thee. (19-23)

170 Noel Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, 168

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He then addresses the ghost as a “dead corpse, again in complete steel” (31) cast forth from the sepulcher. Whereas the other witnesses have always spoken of it as an

“illusion,” “apparition,” “figure,” “sight,” and “as the air,” his melancholy leads him on a swift, imaginative leap to treat the specter as a real, physical body.

As he rushes madly after the ghost, Horatio warns him against following it, but

Hamlet replies with a fallacious argument that the ghost can do nothing to his soul, which is “a thing immortal as itself” (46). Although this argument stems in part from correct metaphysics—the Devil cannot act directly on a soul—Hamlet’s point is irrelevant, because the Devil can reach a man’s soul through physical intermediates, by perturbing his bodily humors and his imagination, which is physically located in his brain, “at the back of the head.”171 Hamlet’s bad argument dismisses the essence of his danger, and emphasizes how fully under the spell of imagination he has become.

Horatio and Marcellus recognize Hamlet’s peril, warn him of it, and attempt to reason with him—“Think of it” (53)! Horatio cries. But Hamlet, like Lear banishing Cordelia and Kent, draws his sword to slay his friends if they try to keep him from the ghost. He now pursues the ghost with such wildness and violence that Marcellus, an obedient subject to his prince, declares, “’Tis not fit thus to obey him” (63), and Horatio even sees fit to give him an order, treating him as his subject: “Be ruled. You shall not go” (56). At this point, Hamlet’s mental state is exactly as Horatio says it is: “He waxes desperate with imagination” (62), meaning, “desperate,” in its strict sense, “in despair.”

It is typical in works discussing the ghost’s nature to begin with its claim to be

Hamlet’s father from Purgatory, but that is not in fact how the ghost introduces itself:

171 Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, Part II, Chap 2. See also Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, q. 16, a. 2

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Ham Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak! I’ll go no further. Ghost Mark me. Ham I will. Ghost My hour is almost come When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames Must render up myself. Ham Alas, poor ghost. Ghost Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing To what I shall unfold. Ham Speak, I am bound to hear. Ghost So art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear. Ham What? (F1 1.5.1-8) In these first eight, crucial lines, the ghost does not claim to come from Purgatory, or even to be Hamlet’s father. It simply claims to burn in fire, with no reference to purgation. For Protestant theology, this is enough to conclude outright that the ghost is damned. It is also unlikely to prompt Catholics to anticipate Purgatory, because the phrase “sulphurous and tormenting” points to hellfire. Demonologists taught that a smell of sulfur was a telltale sign of a damned spirit,172 and Taillepied denies that Purgatorial fire contains sulphur, because its stench is unsuited to purification. “Tormenting” also evokes Hell, since Catholic discussion of purgatorial fire prefers the language of purification to that of torment. To all appearances, therefore, it is to a damned ghost that

Hamlet says he is “bound”; it is a damned ghost that commands revenge; and it is the revenge of the damned that Hamlet assents to hear. The possibility that the command of revenge proceeds from divine authorization appears to be excluded at its first mention.

The strong first impression that the ghost admits damnation in these opening lines, often noticed by beginning students, until their instructors correct them, is ignored in the critical literature of Hamlet. Long familiarity with the play, and the ingrained expectation that the ghost claims to be from Purgatory dull the effect these lines are to have for fresh ears. This leads even attentive readers to interpret the following passage out of context:

172 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 117

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I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg’d away! (1.5.9-13) The ubiquitous misreading of these lines, committed by every writer reviewed in the last chapter except McGee,173 is to take them as establishing the ghost’s basic claim about its origin; but that purpose was achieved in the preceding passage: the ghost has claimed to be from hell. That is the claim that matters, upon which it exacts a pledge from Hamlet to hear more and then to take revenge. The purpose of the following lines about Purgatory is to give the ghost plausible deniability for what it has just revealed—plausible, that is, to the deranged and melancholy mind of Hamlet, but not to the audience. It gives a reason neither for Protestants to suddenly change their theological perspective to accommodate the ghost nor for Catholics to accept it as a Purgatorial.

Catholic critics nonetheless warm to these lines, repeating Semper’s claim that the ghost’s perfect sanctity is clear when it speaks of its venial sins as “foul crimes,” recognizing sub specie aeternitatis the objective gravity of even minor offenses againt an infinite God.174 There is, however, no reason to assume the sins are venial, because

Purgatorial souls can also suffer for mortal sins they have confessed in life without completing penance. In the Gast of Gy, the longest and most widely circulated account of a Purgatorial spirit in Catholic England, the spirit of Gy suffers in fire for a marital sin with his wife, which both of them confessed without doing penance. It urges her to perform her penance for this mortal sin to avoid Purgatory. In The Trental of St. Gregory, a Pope is visited by his mother’s spirit, who suffers in Purgatory for infanticide.175

173 See McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 63-4 174 Semper, Hamlet Without Tears, 16 175 See Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 128-9

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Semper’s reading is logically possible, but otherwise lacks warrant.

This early proof against the ghost does not, as McGee would have it, obviate a

Catholic perspective on Purgatory, apart from its Protestant caricatures.176 It only means that the text is not addressed to the Catholic imagination in the particular way that Msgr.

Semper and Sr. Miriam Joseph suppose, and not exactly as Prosser does either. Beyond the first lines, the scene presents no per se need to consider Catholic theology as a means to test if the ghost is from Purgatory. That question is answered before it is raised, so there is nothing to test. Catholic standards for testing the ghost remain operative in principle, but not to solve an unknown question, rather to inform our appreciation of its answer. It will be argued that for those in the audience who accept Purgatory, however few or many they may have been, the text is not calculated to sound like a lampoon, because it offers specific grounds for reflection on how the ghost’s dissolution of

Purgatorial sanctity exposes the method of its temptation. This assumes that Purgatory is holy.

The fundamental standard of Purgatorial holiness is explained in St. Catherine of

Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory (1551):

In passing out of this life the soul is fixed for good or evil according to its deliberate purpose at the time; as it is written, “Where shall I find thee (that is, at the hour of death, with a will either to sin or sorry for sin and penitent), there will I judge thee:” and this judgment is final; because after death the will can never again be free, but must remain fixed in the condition in which it was found at the moment of death. The souls in hell having been found at the moment of death with a will to sin, have with them an infinite degree of guilt; and the punishment they suffer, though less than they deserve, is yet, so far as it exists, endless. But the souls in purgatory have only the punishment for sin, and not its guilt; for the guilt was effaced at the moment of death, that they were found then deploring their sins and penitent for having offended the Divine Goodness.177

The souls in Purgatory having their wills conformed to the will of God, and hence partaking of His goodness, remain satisfied with their condition, which is one of entire

176 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 27-41, 73 177 St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, trans. Henry Edward Cardinal manning London: Burnes & Oates, 1848) Chap. 4

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freedom from the guilt of sin. For when they passed out of this life, penitent, with all their sins confessed and resolved to sin no more, God straightway pardoned them; and now they are as pure as when they were created; the rust of sin alone is left, and this they get rid of by the punishment of fire. Cleansed thus from all sin, and united in will with God, they see God clearly according to the degree of light He imparts to them; they are conscious too what a thing it is for them to enjoy God, that for this very end they were created.178 If the ghost were from Purgatory, it would be perfect in charity, pious in penitence, patient in suffering, hopeful of eternal reward, and solicitous for others to be saved. We shall observe the ways in which the ghost undermines these virtues as we proceed.

The ghost continues:

But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porpentine. But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. (13-22) The sufferings of Purgatory are as horrifying as the torments of Hell, but Purgatorial souls always tell tales about what Purgatory is like. English folklore surviving from before the Reformation told that spirits from Purgatory would usually appear for the express purpose of revealing their sufferings.179 The two principle reasons for this were matters of charity: to dissuade men from committing sins, and to ask for prayers so the spirit might quickly enter heaven while the person praying for it could advance in

178 St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, Chap 5 179 The widely circulated revelations of St. Brigid of Sweden give a graphic example: “Than methought that thar was a bande bonden abowte his hede so faste and sore that the forhede and the nodell mete togiddir. The eyne were hingande on the chekes; the eres as thei had bene brent with fire; the brayne braste out at the nesethirles and hys eres; the tonge henge out, and the teth were smetyn togyddir: the bones in the armes were broken and wrethyn as a rope; the skyn was pullid of hys hede and thai were bunden in hys neke; the breste and the wombe were so slongen togiddir, and the ribbes broken, that one might see the herte and the bowelles; the shulders were broken and henge down to the sides; and the bonys were drawen oute as it had bene a thred of clothe.” Quoted in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 339.

98 charity.180 No characteristic was as universal among Purgatorial apparitions as that each would beg for such prayers.181 Yet rather than asking for spiritual aid, the ghost says,

“Pity me not.” This command would astonish St. Thomas More, whose Supplication of

Souls (1529) contains many exhortations by the souls in Purgatory “beseeching your goodness of your tender pity that we may be remembered with your charitable alms and prayer.”182 More thought it a cause for the “the Devil’s glee” that Simon Fish’s tract against Purgatory, A Supplication for the Beggars (1529), caused living men to abandon works of pity for those in Purgatory and turn their attention to needs in present world. Yet insofar as the ghost forbids Hamlet’s pity in favor of a worldly action, it sides with Fish against More.

An additional problem is that a tale of Purgatory is not an “eternal blazon,” because a spirit’s stay in Purgatory is finite. Some editors resolve this by analogizing the sense of

“eternal.” Caldecott reads “eternal blazon” as a “promulgation of the mysteries of eternity,” while Jenkins takes “eternal” to mean, “beyond mortal experience.”183 Neither reading is illogical, but the line does not strike the ear in either way, especially given the demonic overtures that precede it. The plainest sense of “eternal blazon” is eternal punishment. The pun on “blaze” suggests eternal fire (cf. 1.3.117-8; 4.3.162-3), while the heraldic sense of “blazon”184 connotes an eternal allegiance.

The next part reads:

180 See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 338-347. 181 See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 372-373. 182 St. Thomas More, The Supplication of Souls, ed. Sr. Mary Thecla, (Westminster: Newman Press, 1950) 166 183 See Hamlet and As You Like It, ed. Thomas Caldecott (London: John Murray, 1819) 234n95 and Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1982) 217. 184 “To blazon” means primarily, “To describe in proper heraldic language” or “To depict or paint (armorial bearings) according to the rule of heraldry” and secondarily “To describe fully, set forth honorably in words.” (OED)

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Ghost List, Hamlet, O list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love— Hamlet O heaven! Ghost —Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder! (22-5) No one can dispute that Hamlet loved his father, and love between family members was a profound element in the literature of Purgatorial apparitions.185 This does not mean, however, that filial love is a sufficient ethic for revenge. The ghost makes no mention here or elsewhere of sacred or secular duty or right. It is circular to deduce a divine command because it is from Purgatory, and concrete evidence shows the Elizabethans did not think Hamlet had a legal right. A 1620 poem, “Of two euills chuse the least,” by

Samuel Rowlands tells of a scrivener who discovers his cloak stolen and exclaims,

I will not cry Hamlet Reuenge my greeues, But I will call Hang-man Reuenge on theeues. (17-18) This is a striking contrast to Semper’s claim that the ghost’s divine order makes Hamlet

“an executioner akin to the hangman appointed by the State.”186 Rowlands’s scrivener sees a contrast between Hamlet’s revenge and state justice, and rejects of former for that reason.

In the text, the first justification for revenge is affection, just as Claudius later tempts

Laertes asking, “Was your father dear to you” (4.3.90)? and as Lady Macbeth chastises her husband, “From this time/Such do I account thy love” (Mac 1.7.38-9).187 Hamlet’s tragic predicament is that an appeal to love for a father lost speaks to a man’s most natural and noble sentiments. No temptation is more cruel and painful for a good man to resist than If you love me, sin. This moral was not lost on the Elizabethans, but was a staple of their demon-lore. Nashe writes:

Those that catch birds imitate there voices. So he will imitate the voices of God’s

185 See Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 102-150, esp. 130-3. 186 Semper Hamlet Without Tears, 19 187 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 134

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vengeance, to bring us like birds into the net of eternal damnation. … It will be demanded why in the likeness of one’s father or mother, or kinsfolks, he oftentimes presents himself to us. No other reason can be given of it but this, that in those shapes which he supposeth most familiar to us, and that we are inclined to with a natural kind of love, we will sooner harken to him than otherwise. Should he not disguise himself in such subtle forms of affection, we would fly from him as a serpent, and eschew him with that hatred he ought to be eschewed.188 The ghost then expatiates on “Murder most foul—as in the best it is” (27), ironically ignoring how this very phrase critiques revenge. As it resembles justice in its effects, revenge might be called murder “in the best,” but even this is “most foul.” Finding

Hamlet apt, the ghost charges him to action, again not by God, duty, or grace, but by

Hamlet’s pride, for “duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed/That rots itself in ease on

Lethe wharf/Wouldst thou not stir in this” (F1 1.5.32-4). Prosser points out such an emotional, scolding appeal to a vacuous honor is a potent weapon known to Lady

Macbeth.189 The ghost then claims that while the state has been led to believe he was stung sleeping by a serpent in an orchard, “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (38-9). Hamlet apprehends that this means his uncle, but the line is double entendre. The Devil is also a serpent, who stung Adam in the orchard of

Eden—for it is indeed the Devil who stands before Hamlet in his father’s usurped form.

The ghost will return to the Edenic metaphor, but first indulgences in personal invective:

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts— O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen. O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there! From me, whose love was of that dignity That it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage—and to decline Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine! (42-52)

188 Nashe, The Terrours of the Night, 1594. 189 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 136

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Prosser calls attention to the ghost’s complaint against Claudius’s “natural gifts,” which savors more of envy than of righteous offense and which “characteristically, draws our attention to the physical.”190 Boasting of its own spiritual excellence and contrasting that to a poverty of “natural” gifts, irrelevant to the objection to incest, is simply invalid as moral reasoning. In later scenes, Hamlet will ridicule Claudius for his weight and voice disgust to his mother that he has had relations with a fat man (Q2 3.4.180; F1

3.6.23-5). Why such a triviality should interest a just revenger is for the ghost’s defenders to explain.

The importance of the next five lines cannot be overstated:

But Virtue, as it never will be moved, Though Lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So Lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage. (1.5.53-57) “Radiant angel” is a synonym for “spirit of light,” the Devil’s form when tempting; and the appearance of the late king is a “shape of heaven” for Hamlet, who twice compares his father to Hyperion (1.2.138, 3.4.56). The ghost thus describes Claudius’s devilish corruption of Gertrude in terms that ironically reflect how it deceives Hamlet. It is striking that here, where the ghost alludes to its mode of deception, Shakespeare includes the single easiest opportunity for an actor to flaunt its demonism: he can stress the alliteration in “sate itself in a celestial bed,” to produce an audible hiss.

Preying on garbage is a horrid piece of imagery for the ghost to present to a melancholic imagination. The meaning of “garbage” here is not ordinary waste, but entrails, on which a carrion animal might “prey.” This image takes root in Hamlet’s mind, for he later says that “ere this,/I should have fatted all the region kites/With this

190 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 136

102 slaves offal” (2.2.572-4). We will study this critical sentence in its context at a later point.

Let it suffice for the present that its imagery originates in the ghost. Hamlet is implying,

“As he lured my mother into preying on garbage, let the kites prey on his garbage.”

As the ghost proceeds to describe its death, the imagery intensifies, to aggravate

Hamlet’s melancholy and assault his soul at its weakest point, with phrases like “cursed hebenon” (62), “leperous distilment” (64), “most instant tetter barked about” (70), and so forth. Prosser complains that in her time and before, it was common to cut the ghost’s most visceral expressions and pronounce the remainder with a tone of solemnity and distance.191 It is heartening that in recent years an opposite trend has emerged, as actors have discovered that the ghost spends most of its lines devouring the scenery.

The tale of the king’s poisoning expands the Edenic metaphor, specifying that the serpent poisons the man’s ear in an orchard. When it is re-enacted in The Mousetrap, it happens in a “garden” and the poisoner’s name is “Lucianus.” The poison acts as a leaven, or “eager droppings” (69), and causes him die from leprosy, “Most lazar-like, with vile and loathesome crust” (72). Leprosy is a frequent symbol of sin’s effect on human nature in the gospels, while the eager droppings are analogous to the leaven of the

Pharisees (Matt 16:6; Luke 12:1). Hence, Hamlet later describes his father’s sinfulness at death as “full of bread” (3.3.80). There is also an allusion to the Protoeuangelion of Gen

3:15, as the poison’s “effect/Holds such an enmity with blood of man…” (64-65).

As before, the comparison of Claudius to Satan reflects on the ghost, as a corrupter of nature. In Q2, just before the ghost appears, Hamlet remarks on how the drunkenness of the Danes “takes/From our achievement, though performed at height,/The pith and

191 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 135, 141-2

103 marrow of our attribute” (Q2 1.4.20-2). He speaks of a “particular fault” (36) that corrupts virtuous men in language that alludes to original sin, “as in their birth wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin.”192 He calls that fault a “mole of nature” (24) and later addresses the ghost as “old mole” (1.5.161).

The lines concluding the ghost’s account of its death are a favorite of traditional

Catholic commentators:

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand Of life, of crown and queen, at once dispatched Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O horrible, O horrible, most horrible! If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damned incest. (F1 1.5.74-83) The common theme of the ghost’s defenders is that the ghost exudes Catholic piety by lamenting its loss of the last rites. That could be true if it were only a lament, but in context it is a motive for vengeance, as it leads through a bitter, wailing crescendo to the command, “bear it not.” This treats sacramental grace as a thing owed and not as grace, and it provides Hamlet with his explicit motive for wanting Claudius damned (3.3.80-87).

Phrases like “blossoms of my sin” and “No reckoning made” do not suggest a holy death.

No one, after all, would say the king died in the blossoms of his sin of he had been assassinated on his way to church to be shriven. Sins that blossom, “broad blown, as fresh as May” (81), are procreative, not repented. For any in the audience who understood

“foul crimes” plainly as mortal sins, this confirms the ghost’s damnation.

A true purgatorial spirit would, however harsh its punishments, be patient in bearing

192 This is possibly unorthodox, since original sin is guilt precisely because it is in man’s origin. See ST II-I q. 28, a. 4. But Hamlet does not deny original guilt absolutely, and does call it a “fault” (Q2 1.4.36). He likely means only that men are not guilty of choosing the sin that really is in their origin.

104 them and more pleased by God’s justice in inflicting them than proud of its own

“dignity” (1.5.48) in life. One need read no farther than the first paragraph of St.

Catherine of Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory (pub. 1551) to recognize the ghost’s heresy:

The souls who are in Purgatory, as far as I understand the matter, cannot but choose to be there; and this by God’s ordinance; Who has justly decreed it so. They cannot reflect within themselves and say, “I have done such and such sins, for which I deserve to be here;” nor can they say, “Would that I might not have done them, that now I might go to Paradise;” nor yet say, “That soul is going out before me;” nor, “I shall go out before him.” They can remember nothing of themselves or other, whether good or evil, which might increase the pain they ordinarily endure; they are so completely satisfied with what God has ordained for them, that He should be doing all that pleases Him, and in the way it pleases Him, that they are incapable of thinking of themselves even in the midst of their sufferings…. I do not believe it would be possible to find any joy comparable to that of a soul in purgatory, except the joy of the blessed in paradise—a joy which goes on increasing day by day, as God more and more flows in upon the soul, which he does abundantly in proportion as every hindrance to His entrance is consumed away. … As far as their will is concerned, these souls cannot acknowledge the pains as such, so completely are they satisfied with [the] ordinance of God, so entirely is their will one with it in pure charity.193 It is manifest that this does not describe the will of the ghost.

Whereas the ghost originally commanded Hamlet to act out of affection, and then prideful honor, it now invokes nature. Beauregard argues that the ghost’s appeals to nature invoke the natural law, in accordance with Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue- ethics, and opposed to Calvinist notions of total depravity.194 There is certainly a reference to natural law when the ghost describes its murder as “unnatural,” and it is also true that the moral worldview in Shakespeare’s plays is a Christian Aristotelianism amiable to Thomism. Yet “nature” has many, diverse senses in Shakespeare. It can also refer to what St. Thomas calls concupiscentia naturalis, which is rooted in the natural appetite without being formally apprehended by reason.195 Shakespeare speaks of nature

193 St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, trans. H.E. Manning, (London: Burnes & Oates, 1848) 2-8 194 Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays, 92-99 195 See ST II-I q. 30, a. 3.

105 in this sense when Edmund declares “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (Lear 1.2.1), when

Othello speaks of Desdemona’s lust as “nature, erring from itself” (Oth 3.3.231), and when Hamlet calls the vicious mole “Nature’s livery” (Q2 1.4.32). It should also be noted that Laertes, whose revenge is understood by every critic as immoral, speaks of

“nature,/Whose motive in this case should stir me most/To my revenge” (F1 5.2.192-3), and the ghost itself refers to “the foul crimes done in my days of nature” (1.5.12). To understand “If thou hast nature in thee” in a sense rooted in fallen concupiscence is warranted by these uses and the extensive metaphors for fallen nature in the ghost’s discourse. Even if a fresh audience does not notice that subtext, it is still implied by the visceral character of the ghost’s imagery. It speaks to Hamlet’s diseased imagination in terms of emotion and sensuality. The nearest the ghost ever comes to a theological rationale for its vengeance is the curse “damned incest.”

Yet the worst is still to come. The ghost’s seemingly holy injunctions of “Taint not thy mind” (85) and “Leave her to heaven” (86) hide fouler intentions than anything else in the scene, for the very reasons Prosser gives.196 The ghost has done nothing in its speeches but taint Hamlet’s mind, feeding a melancholic imagination with morbid and sensual imagery. The command of “Leave her to heaven” is even more odious, because it indirectly communicates precisely the unholy action that Hamlet is to take against

Claudius: “Do not leave him to Heaven; give him to Hell.” This, I submit, is a surface reading, in the same sense that it is a surface reading to understand Iago’s “But let her live” (Oth 3.3.477) as a suggestion to murder Desdemona. It requires no expertise to understand, and can be obvious in performance if the actor (breaking firm tradition)

196 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 137-9

106 merely reads it as a regular iambic line, stressing the alliterative syllables: “Leave her to heaven.”

Prosser’s plain reading of these lines is globally ignored by defenders of ghost.

Roland Mushat Frye for instance, who faults Prosser by name for “an over-doctrinaire reading of the play as a whole,”197 is only one of many to cite “Leave her to heaven” as evidence that “the play does not allow us to assert a simple explanation of the Ghost as a devil” without at all interacting with her interpretation:

It is difficult to argue that the Ghost, if it were a devil, would wish to save Gertrude, and yet the Ghost commands the Prince to “taint not thy mind” nor let thy soul contrive/Against they mother aught. Leave her to heaven (I.5.85-86).198 Every premise in this argument is contentious. It is not stipulated that the ghost wishes to save Gertrude, and Prosser argues that in the Closet Scene it actively thwarts Hamlet’s efforts to convert her, by convincing her he is mad.199 Moreover, though Frye’s otherwise excellent book, The Renaissance Hamlet, is a treasury of historical sources for almost every important topic in the play, he gives no evidence for why this particular argument should count as Renaissance thinking. Neither he nor any other writer cites any contemporary source for the unstated, theological premise that the ghost could not be wholly evil if it requested some charitable action—and not surprisingly: we have seen that this premise is foreign to Shakespeare’s mind and the entire thinking of his age. But such is the argumentation from the school of ambiguity. It stands only upon the bland presupposition of relativism. Its proponents obscure this by attributing their own moral vagueness to the text. Greenblatt claims that there is so “much evidence on all sides” that

197 Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, 313n13 198 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 18 199 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 196-9

107 those engaged in the debate “are almost certainly doomed to inconclusiveness.”200 There is in fact no parity in the evidence, but even if there were, it is still a fallacy to conclude the ghost is ambiguous. It is a sufficient refutation, elementary to Elizabethan thinking, that to admit much evidence on all sides is itself a mark of a demonic spirit. The “forcing together of radically incompatible accounts” that the school of ambiguity celebrates in

Hamlet is nothing other than Shakespeare’s way of delineating the Devil. McGee’s verdict on this point is among the truest statements ever penned about Shakespeare: “The ambiguous ghost is a product of our lack of religious belief.”201

Now the ghost takes its leave:

Fare thee well at once. The glow-worm shows the matin to be near And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, Hamlet. Remember me. (1.5.88-91) The claim has been made that “Remember me” is a request for prayers,202 but the phrase is equivocal. It is true that a Purgatorial ghost should say, “Remember me,” to ask for prayers, but this ghost says it as a request for revenge. Hamlet interprets it in that sense throughout the soliloquy that follows, and the ghost confirms it in the Closet Scene, when it says, “Do not forget” (3.4.98)! That the ghost substitutes vengeance for prayer, even as it is banished by the “matin,” should appall, not ingratiate Catholic sensibilities. The ghost’s subversion of Catholicism is extreme. It substitutes demonic hate for Christian

200 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 239 201 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 73 202 Joseph Pearce suggests that because “adieu” is French for “to God,” the ghost is saying “To God, to God, to God! Remember me (in your prayers,)” in Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, 120-1. That such a maximal reading should be hung upon a colloquial salutation is tenuous on face; it is like claiming Polonius and Reynaldo’s plot to spy on Laertes is a pious discourse because Polonius dismisses Reynaldo with “God buy you” (2.1.67). Moreover, the linguistic extravagance of extracting the etymology of a foreign word to give meaning to an English sentence would have struck educated Elizabethans as bad style. Grammarians called it soriasmus, and the young Shakespeare would have been taught to avoid it as a “vice of language.” Shakespeare reserves such usage only for buffoonish characters. See Sr. Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, 64.

108 charity in the very language of the blessed souls. It is understandable that Catholic critics, fearing the anti-Catholic possibilities of an evil ghost, favor accepting the ghost’s references to Purgatory as plain, unironic Catholic teaching. But this play is not safe. The key to understanding Hamlet as a Catholic play is not to tally the ghost’s references to the catechism, but to understand from its perversion of those references that it is Catholicism rather than Protestantism that the Devil wants to defame. Its inversion of “Remember me” exemplifies a pervasive pattern. Consider again “Pity me not.” As an anti-Catholic lampoon, this line is crudely ineffective. A Purgatorial spirit would so obviously never say that, that the line misses its target and fails to provoke. Yet if Purgatory is true, and hated by Satan, the very crudity of the line reveals the Devil’s malice toward truth. Pity, after all, is an incentive to mercy, which runs against revenge, as Hamlet later realizes.

When the ghost appears in Gertrude’s closet—for the sole purpose of promoting revenge:

“but to whet…” (3.4.100)—Hamlet sees that revenge requires him to resist the movement to conversion that could come from pitying the ghost:

Do not look upon me, Lest with this piteous action you convert My stern effects! Then what I have to do Will want true colour, tears perchance for blood. (116-9) Hamlet and the ghost’s exchange in Q1 makes this especially plain:

Ham. O do not glare with looks so pitiful, Lest that my heart of stone yield to compassion And every part that should assist revenge Forgo their proper powers and fall to pity. Ghost Hamlet, I once again appear to thee To put thee in remembrance of my death. Do not neglect nor long time put it off. (Q1 11.62-68) Shakespeare’s point is that pity and prayer must be denied for revenge to root in the soul, and so the ghost denies them. It wants remembrance without pity, and that means the exact opposite of praying for someone’s soul. This is to say, the ghost is an enemy of the

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Purgatory, for its temptation depends on rejecting the salutary power of the doctrine it seems to espouse. It wears Catholicism like a mask that it continually removes and replaces, saying something with a Catholic form, only to transform it into its demonic opposite. This reflects well on Catholicism, and gives greater artistic justification to the ghost’s behavior than McGee’s anti-Catholic reading, which would make the pity of

Purgatory agreeable to the Devil.

The conclusion of the ghost scene is a study in the sin of rash oath-making, as Hamlet swears “by heaven” (104) to obey its “commandment” (102). This oath can be readily identified as immoral from the mere fact that Hamlet has not established that the ghost is from God. Elizabethan doctrine on this point was clear from the first Book of Homilies

(1555), a collection of sermons, edited and principally authored by Thomas Cranmer under Edward VI. The Thirty-nine Articles not only endorsed this book and its sequel to

“contain a godly and wholesome doctrine and necessary for these times,” but prescribed the sermons as standard texts, “to be read in Churches by the ministers diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.”203 Contained in the book is a homily Against Swearing and Periury, which provides three conditions for a just oath, founded on the Biblical command, “thou shalt sweare, The Lord liueth in trueth, in iudgement, and in righteousnes” (Jer. 4:2):

First, he that sweareth, may sweare truly, that is, hee must (setting a part any fauour and affection to the parties) haue trueth onely before his eyes, and for loue thereof, say and speake that which he knoweth to be trueth, and no further. The second is, he that taketh an oath, must doe it with iudgement, not rashly and vnaduisedly, but soberly, considering what an oath is. The third is, hee that Sweareth, must sweare in righteousnesse: that is,

203 The Thirty-nine Articles, art. 35. Beauregard provides evidence of Shakespeare’s disagreements with the homilies in favor of Catholic sacramentology. See Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays, 24- 39. This does not affect their teaching about oath-making, which is generically Christian. The Catechism of the Council of Trent (1564) contains an identical doctrine with the same list of three conditions in its treatment of the Second Commandment.

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for the very zeale and loue which hee beareth to the defence of innocencie, to the maintenance of the trueth, and of the righteousness of the matter or cause…204 If it were granted, for the sake of argument, that the ghost is ambiguous, it would follow that Hamlet cannot lawfully swear to obey it, since such an oath violates all three conditions. It fails the first, because whether the ghost is his father and his uncle is guilty goes beyond what he knows to be truth; the second, because Hamlet swears in the heat of passion, and his antic behavior while swearing in Horatio and Marcellus is hardly

“sober”; the third, because there is no righteousness in the matter or cause of revenge.

When Hamlet first attempts to swear, he remembers the teaching of Christ:

Sweare not at all, nether by heaven, for it is ye throne of God: Nor yet by the earth: for it is his fotestole… But let your communication be, Yeah, yea: Nay, nay. For whatsoever is more then these, commeth of ye euil. (Matt 6:34-5, 37) At first this teaching restrains him. Seeking for something to swear by, he thinks first of

“you host of heaven,” and then “O earth!” but the Sermon on the Mount forbids him to swear by these, so he asks, “What else” (92)? and searches for the third thing, under the earth, and asks “shall I couple hell?” He reacts at once against this, shocked by what has come from his mouth: “O, fie” (93)! He then turns to the biblical recommendation of

“Yeah, yea,” saying, “Ay, thou poor ghost…” (96) and, “Yeah, from the table of my memory…” (98).205 Yet even these affirmations are unwise; as they grow in his soul, he swiftly degenerates into denouncing all the fruits of education and culture to replace the new commandment of the Sermon on the Mount with an even newer one:

Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory, I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live

204 “Against Swearing and Perjurie” in The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, ed. John Griffiths, (Oxford: The University Press, 1855) 74-5 205 On Hamlet’s oath and the Sermon on the Mount see James Black, “Hamlet’s Vows,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, New Series/Nouvelle Série, v. 2, no. 1 (1978): 33-48.

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Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, yes, by heaven! (97-104) He does not get past a third and fourth “yeah” without adding, “by heaven,” sealing himself by oath to the blasphemous command:

It is ‘Adieu, adieu. remember me.’ I have sworn’t. (111-2) With this oath, Hamlet’s madness begins. His friends enter, and he commands them to swear as well. That Horatio and Marcellus should swear at their prince’s request is in itself permissible, since God is pleased “when Subiects doe sweare to be true and faithfull to their King and Souveraigne Lord,”206 but Hamlet works to vitiate the oath. When he at first proposes a simple oath, they take it, but it is not enough. He demands an extravagant oath on his sword. Marcellus sensibly objects, “We have sworn, my lord, already” (147); having testified sufficiently, he need say no more, since “whatsoeuer is more then these, commeth of ye euil” (Matt 6:37). Yet the ghost objects to this good theology, commanding further swearing from below the stage. The terrible voice of the foul collier juxtaposed with the levity of Hamlet’s “wild and hurling words” (132)—like Shylock proposing his “merry bond” (Merch 1.3.169)—bends them to take the triple oath. Then, like the biblical hero on whom God in his providence also saw fit to unleash Satan,

Hamlet concludes by cursing the day:

Oh cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! (F1 1.5.188-9)

206 “Against Swearing and Periurie,” 73

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V: Fortune’s Fingers

The second act moves through three basic sections. The first, comprising the first scene and beginning of the second, is about the court inquiring into Hamlet’s changed behavior. The second, beginning with Hamlet’s entrance, is about how he foils the court’s efforts to understand his transformation. The third, beginning with the entrance of the players, is about Hamlet’s first confrontation with his conscience.

The first section of Act II serves two main purposes: to inform the audience of what

Hamlet has been doing, and to establish what the other characters intend to do about it.

All indications are that Hamlet has been busy, and there is little to suggest that a significant amount of time has passed. Polonius and Reynaldo’s conspiracy in the first scene seems to follow directly upon Laertes’s departure, perhaps even the next day or soon after.207 As soon as Reynaldo exits, the audience learns from Ophelia that Hamlet has run frighteningly mad, appearing “As if he had been loosed out of hell/To speak of horrors” (2.2.81-2). Polonius takes Ophelia immediately to see Claudius, to let him know about the situation. In the next scene, the audience’s perception that Hamlet has gone quickly to work is strengthened by the intrigues he has raised at court, as other characters inquire into the cause of his distemper: Claudius suspects it is his father’s death, but orders Rosincrance and Guildensterne to spy on him to learn if there is another reason;

207 Prosser believes that the perception of a passage of time originates in the later stage convention of inserting long intermissions between acts. For Shakespeare’s audience there was “no interval.” See Hamlet and Revenge, 143-44. In fact, Elizabethan performances often included a short intermission, with music, at an early point in the play. Since the break between Acts I and II is the only act division noted in F1, it is likely that the intermission occurred at that point. See Martin Holmes, The Guns of Elsinore, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964) 82. The intermission, nonetheless, was brief, and the beginning of Act II in media res undercuts any sense of lapsed time.

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Polonius theorizes that he has gone mad for love; Polonius and Claudius contrive to use

Ophelia as bait for more spying. The question that dominates the scene is not “Why has

Hamlet done nothing?” but “What is Hamlet up to?”

The theory that Hamlet has let a great deal of time slip by without action has only a small set of evidences to point to a greater passage of time, and none to show inactivity in the interim. The first is that Cornelius and Voltemand have returned from their embassy, while Rosincrance and Guildensterne have arrived in answer to the King’s summons.

These cases are not telling, because the audience easily overlooks them, and Shakespeare admits similar time incongruities in other plays, as in Othello when Lodovico’s embassy travels from Venice to Cyprus in apparently one day.208 Hamlet itself contains another such incongruity within the Fortinbras plotline itself. Just as Cornelius and Voltemand return swiftly from their embassy, Fortinbras in Q2, who had been arrested in Norway during the embassy (Q2 2.2.67-71), still transports an army of twenty thousand men to march past Elsinore arriving only two days behind the ambassadors, even though his expedition follows upon receipt of a “license” (4.4.2) that Claudius issues only after the ambassadors’ return (2.2.76-80).209

Another evidence that a long time has passed is in the Play Scene when Ophelia says,

208 The time indications in Othello are notoriously difficult to harmonize, and there appear to be two distinct timelines, each consistent with itself but not with the other, but both apparently deliberate. On one set of indications, Othello kills Desdemona on the night after they arrive in Cyprus, while the other set shows they live in Cypress for at least a week. See Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 391-7. 209 This anomaly occurs only in Q2. Although both Q1 and F1 contain texts establishing the timeline of Fortinbras’s arrest (Q1 7.38-42; F1 2.2.66-70), his request for a license (Q1 7.47-51; F12.2.75-81), and his receipt of it (Q1 12.3-4, F1 3.7.2), they exclude Hamlet’s entrance and soliloquy after encountering Fortinbras’s army, so that Fortinbras could be arriving at any time after Hamlet leaves for England. Yet the problem in Q2 is sufficient to show that Shakespeare was not very concerned to harmonize the timelines of the plot at Elsinore and the plot in Norway. Even on Prosser’s thesis that Hamlet’s appearance in the scene is a remnant of a discarded draft, the central point remains intact: at whatever stage in Hamlet’s drafting the Fortinbras Speech was still included, Shakespeare intended Fortinbras to arrive almost immediately after the license was issued.

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“’tis twice two months” (3.2.124) since Old Hamlet died, whereas Hamlet said at the beginning that he was “But two months dead” (1.2.136). That line occurs too late in the play to influence the audience’s impressions in Act II,210 and is ambiguous. Ophelia is arguing with Hamlet, who replies that his father died “two months ago” (3.2.126-7). Her line establishes a lapse of two months only if she and not Hamlet is correct in 3.2, and also if Hamlet was correct in 1.2 that his father was “But two months’ dead” (1.2.136).

Yet Hamlet is not trustworthy on this point, since he steadily contracts the time from two months to “Within a month” (151), exaggerating his mother’s haste. In the Play Scene, he prompts Ophelia’s line by going even further: “look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours” (3.2.122-3). In the face of Hamlet’s exaggeration, Ophelia’s line could plausibly show that Hamlet was wrong from the start, and it has been four months all along.

Within the first part of Act II, the most germane text relating the passage of time to

Hamlet’s activities, rather than to other characters’, is Polonius’s account of his descent into madness:

And then I precepts gave her That she should lock herself from his resort, Admit no messengers, receive no tokens. Which done, she took the fruits of my advice, And he repulsed, a short tale to make, Fell into a sadness, then into a fast, Thence into a watch, thence into a weakness, Thence to a lightness, and by his declension, Into the madness wherein now he raves, And all we wail for. (2.2.139-148)

210 Prosser puts it aptly: “Our only other clue, over an act later, is Ophelia’s reference during the Play Scene to the passage of four months since the death of Hamlet’s father. Surely no first night spectator would detach himself from the dramatic action, recall Hamlet’s earlier reference to an interval of less than two months, compare the conflicting figure, and think ‘Aha! Then Hamlet must have been brooding for two months.’” Hamlet and Revenge, 144. This point is not overlooked in all traditional criticism, and is made also in Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 94-5.

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The timespan this suggests is long enough for Hamlet to move through an observable sequence of moods and behaviors, but it is still “a short tale to make.” or as Ofelia says in

Q1, “What a quick change is this! (7.195). However long it has been, there is a solid chain of events from Act I to Act II defined by Hamlet’s activity, as he goes through an elaborate transformation.211

The purpose of reviewing these time indicators is not to deny that Hamlet pauses in pursuing revenge, but to situate the question of when he pauses. Traditional criticism tends to stipulate a long passage of time between the first two acts, so that “we must imagine him during this period sunk for the most part in ‘bestial oblivion’ or fruitless broodings, and falling deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.”212 The beginning of Act II, however, gives an opposite impression, and that is the starting point for understanding Hamlet’s pause. For while he does indeed hesitate, he does not do so between the acts. At the start of Act II, Hamlet’s pause is not in evidence, because it has not yet happened. This chapter and the two following will show that Hamlet’s pause is a single, unified event, with a beginning, middle, and end, which happen entirely in view of the audience. We shall look for its origin as we move through the play, and find that it occurs very late in Act II. The present chapter concerns only events that precede

Hamlet’s pause.

The second part of Act II contains Hamlet’s dialogues with Polonius and with

Rosincrance and Guildensterne. The central action of this part is straightforward.

211 Wilson takes the same passage in an opposite way, as evidence of Hamlet’s lethargy. This depends, however, on Wilson’s tenuously supported opinion that the passage “is meant to give us a medical history of Hamlet’s condition since the revelation of the ghost.” What Happens in Hamlet, 211. 212 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 130

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Polonius tries to sound Hamlet with questions about what he is doing, but Hamlet defeats him with ridicule. Rosincrance and Guildensterne attempt to sound him with their remembered friendship. Hamlet discerns they were summoned by the King and Queen and reveals no new information. Within this outline, Shakespeare develops four important themes pertaining to Hamlet’s state of mind, two in each dialogue, which will come to bear on his soliloquies and later decisions. They are: Love, Time, Fortune, and

Place. The characterization of Hamlet that emerges through these themes is of a man spiritually imprisoned by evil fortune but lacking the consolation of philosophy to endure it. Like Boethius at the beginning of De Consolatione Philosophiae, Hamlet finds himself in a jail cell, for “Denmark’s a prison” (2.2.242). He has not, however, been visited by

Lady Philosophy and finds his predicament as a motive to wrath rather than consolation.

Since it will be argued that Shakespeare derives his four themes from the Boethian tradition, and that there is a direct literary dependence of Hamlet upon De Consolatione, a few preliminary words are needed about the Elizabethan reception of this work and its apparent influence on Shakespeare. De Consolatione enjoyed considerable vogue in

England throughout the middle ages, was frequently copied, and was translated into

English by King Alfred I and Chaucer. Its popularity continued in Elizabethan times and it was even privately translated by Queen Elizabeth in 1593. For the Elizabethans, De

Consolatione was a work of Christian mysticism, not a merely philosophical text.213 The translation of George Colville, published first under Queen Mary (1556), and again under

Elizabeth (1556), takes pains to draw specific connections between Lady Philosophy’s

213 See Joseph B. Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age: With its Background in Mystical Methodology, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1934) 88-93.

117 discourse and Christian theology, while at the same time distinguishing her teaching from that of the gentiles. Colville, a Catholic, esteems Boethius as a defender of the faith, and advances a solidly Christian interpretation of De Consolatione through margin notes and a mildly slanted translation..

Boethius’s influence on Shakespeare is most visible in his high tragic period, when he wrote Hamlet and King Lear. Robert K. Presson’s study of Boethius in Lear shows a clear line of Boethian thinking throughout the play, particularly in its discussions of

Fortune’s wheel, of the debasement of evil men as a transmutation into animals, and of love as the ordering principle of the cosmos. Presson also finds allusions to specific texts in De Consolatione.214 One representative example, which we shall see has significant bearing on Hamlet, is when Edgar, in the role of Poor Tom, describes his sins:

Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and, in woman, out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. (Lear 3.4.88-92) The Boethian antecedent to this text is when Lady Philosophy, explaining to Boethius that vice reduces a person to an existence that is less than human, gives a catalogue of

214 See Robert K. Presson “Boethius, King Lear, and ‘Maystresse Philosophie,’” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Jul., 1965): 406-424. Among the more striking and explanatory textual associations between Lear and De Consolatione that Presson finds is his interpretation of the Fool’s prophecy: Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, That going shall be used with feet. (3.2.93-4) This text, Presson explains, alludes to Lady Philosophy’s analogy in De Consolatione 4.p.2 that the difference between seeking the good by natural means and disordered, concupiscent means is like the difference between walking on one’s feet and trying to walk on one’s hands. Since the Fool’s prophesy is the restoration of order in Albion, “In Boethian terms, the right and natural order, and therefore the stronger fundamentally (going by feet), will return. Nature will assert herself. Meanwhile the natural order is counterpointed as in Boethius with the unnatural, the evil which has dominion” (412). The central case that Presson makes, however, is not to establish textual correspondence, but to understand Lear as a study in the the Boethian probems of variable fortune and the existence of evil. He does not maintain that Lear’s allusions to De Consolatione convey Shakespeare’s acceptance of Boethius’s conclusions, but only that “The same problems and questions that troubled Boethius are raised in Shakespeare’s play, but many of the answers that satisfied Boethius no longer satisfy Shakespeare” (424).

118 vicious human types, comparing each to lower animals:

Therefore it happeth that if thou seist anye man turned into vices or wickednes, thou thou mayest not thinke that he is a man. If any man brenneth in couitous and is a violente extercioner or rauener of other mennes goodes, thou mayst saye that he is lyke a woulfe. And if a man be cruel, and troubelous, and exercyseth hys tongue wth chydyng he may be lykened to a dogge. Also he that is a pryuye lyer in a waye, and reioyseth to stele by craft and soteltie, he may be compared to yong foxes, or yong coubbes. And a man that is distempryd, and wexeth wode for anger, it semeth that he do beare the stomake of a lyon. If a man be fearefull and fleynge, and feareth thynges that he ought not to fere he is counted lyke vnto hertes. And if a man be slow, astonyed and waxeth dull, he lyueth as an asse. If a man be lyght inconstant and often chaungeth his mynd and thought, he differith no thynge from byrdes. And he that is drowned in foule and fylthy plesures, of lechery, is wrapped in the delight of te fylthybsow or hogge. So then it foloweth, that he that forsaketh his goodnes, is no man. And when he cannot passe and turne into the condytyon of God, he is turnyd by his wycked condicions into a beste.215 Edgar omits three animals, and attributes sloth to the pig rather than lechery. Otherwise, his matching of animals to sins follows Boethius exactly.

We shall see that a strand of Boethian thought connects all four of the themes around which Hamlet’s second act is structured, though the evidence for this is concentrated in the last two sections. The division into four sections is strict but not absolute, that is, there are precise transition points in the dialogues where each theme comes to prominence, yet the themes also recur in different sections.

Love (168-188)

In the first section, Hamlet makes a series of bawdy jokes about Ophelia’s fertility, which confirms to Polonius that her rejection of his love has driven him mad. First, he calls Polonius a “fishmonger” (F1 2.2.171), because the effect of sea salt on fishmongers’ wives and daughters was thought to make them beautiful, wanton, and fertile. Ophelia is like a “a good kissing carrion,” because if she were let out of the house, she would be as

215 Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, 4.p.3; Colville trans., 97

119 apt as carrion in the sun to produce the effect of “good kissing,” namely, breeding.216

Whereas Ophelia has said that Hamlet “hath importuned me with love/In honorable fashion” (1.3.110-11), his jibes following her rejection of him reveal the dishonorable bitterness of a jilted lover. Between terrifying Ophelia in her chamber and mocking her to her father, Hamlet prepares the audience to agree with her when she later tells him, “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind” (3.1.101). Yet the primary target of Hamlet’s mockery is Polonius, who is chiefly responsible for interfering with their love. Hamlet’s advice to “let her not walk i’ th’ sun” (2.2.181) mocks Polonius’s efforts to separate them. The story of Polonius’s reaction against their courtship provides the edge for

Hamlet’s jests. At first, Polonius advises Ophelia to “Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence” (1.3.121), assuming Hamlet has evil intentions:

In few, Ophelia, Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers, Not of the eye which their investments show, But mere implorators of unholy suits, Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds The better to beguile. (126-131) Yet when Polonius hears of Hamlet’s mad behavior to Ophelia he recants:

I am sorry that with better speed and judgement I had not quoted him. I feared he did but trifle And meant to wrack thee. But beshrew my jealousy— It seems it is as proper to our age To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions As it is common for the younger sort To lack discretion. (2.1.111-115) Hamlet’s madness convinces Polonius that he was mistaken to think he courted Ophelia

216 The once common gloss that “fishmonger” means “procurer” or “fleshmonger” lacks historical support, and is an editorial invention. M.A. Shaaber traces its origin to a note in the 1894 Warwick edition of Hamlet, ed. E.K. Chambers, which provides no citation, but came to be repeated in other editions without scrutiny. Dover Wilson is alone among major editors in attempting to document this usage, but even he only shows that “fishmonger” can connote a wencher, not a procurer. See Shaaber, “Polonius as Fishmonger,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1971): 179-181. For the correct account of “fishmonger” and “good kissing carrion” see Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, 464-67nn.

120 dishonestly. This does not prevent Polonius from later justifying his actions to the King and Queen, but he polishes the story to escape blame. He omits any mention that he impugned Hamlet’s motives, and says the reason was only “Lord Hamlet is a Prince, out of thy star./This must not be” (2.2.138-39). In spite of this sorry retreat, Polonius boldly stakes his life on his own infallibility:

Pol. Hath there ever been such a time—I’d fain know that— That I have positively said ’tis so When it proved otherwise? King Not that I know. Pol. Take this from this, if this be otherwise. (150-153) That he swears away his life on such grounds, the day before his actual death, reinforces the theme of rash oath-making, and casts a sobering pall over his comic dialogue:

“Nether shalt thou sweare by thine head” (Matt 6:36).

In view of this, Hamlet’s advice to “let her not walk i’ th’ sun” is barbed with irony,

Hamlet simultaneously confirms two incompatible understandings of his love that

Polonius has taken at different times. Hamlet’s madness has convinced Polonius he is truly in love (since he never considers Hamlet could be mad for lust), yet Hamlet demonstrates his love-madness only by implying that Polonius was right about lust, for exposure to Hamlet is a danger to Ophelia’s virtue: “Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive” (2.2.181-2).

Subtly underlying the low humor and logical bludgeoning that Hamlet serves

Polonius is a moral affinity between the two men, who are separated only by time. In treating love solely as a threat to virtue, Hamlet is reasoning just as Polonius did. He shifts the brunt of his aspersions from male lust to female fecundity, but otherwise one need only turn back the clock a few hours to find Polonius thinking the same way. If one turns back the clock several years, one can find him just as mad for love as Hamlet: “And

121 truly, in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this” (2.2.186-8). This affinity in theirs views of love, along with their penchant for rash swearing, is the first ripple of a much larger motif that will develop a greater significance later, namely that every jibe Hamlet throws at Polonius eventually comes to be true of himself.

As the first section reveals an affinity between Hamlet and Polonius in regards to love, the subject of the next section is the factor that separates them.

Time (188-217)

Holmes notes that Ophelia’s report of Hamlet’s wildness and the lengthy buildup before his entrance prompts the audience to expect him to appear as a raving lunatic; that he finally enters doing something as tame as reading a book “may have come as a shock to the original spectators.”217 Yet the book Hamlet is reading is not tame. It is a work of

“slanders” (2.2.194), or “most vile heresy” (Q1 7.217). Hamlet calls the author in the different versions a “satirical satyr” (Q1 7.217-8), “satirical rogue” (Q2 2.2.193), and

“satirical slave” (F1 2.2.217-18). Scarcely has he renounced “All saws of books” (F1

1.5.100) when he is found castigating a book—yet not for its falsity, but because “I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down” (2.2.199-200). Truth has the value of heresy if it works evil on the mind. In this case, the heresy is that writing the truth about old age prompts Hamlet to mock the hoary head:

For the satirical slave says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber or plumtree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with weak hams (2.2.194-198). Whereas Hamlet’s opening jests strike at Polonius through the medium of Ophelia’s

217 Martin Holmes, The Guns of Elsinore, 87. See also Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 147.

122 youthful fertility, the satirist now directs Hamlet’s aim at Polonius’s opposite condition, since the “weak hams” that supply Hamlet’s punchline likely allude to the incapacity of old men in the act of procreation. Young Hamlet, by contrast, is full of procreative power, like Ophelia, since he believes his author “potently” (199) and is “delivered of”

(209) “pregnant” (207) replies.

While in the section on love Polonius saw a common link between himself and

Hamlet, in the section on time, it is now Hamlet who says, “For you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward” (200-2). Corson points out that

Hamlet does not say “young as I am” but “old as I am,” so that “It would seem that ‘old’ is used, not as opposed to ‘young,’ but as denoting age in general.”218 For both the young and the old, time is a common border that both divides and unifies their states: the old were once young, the young are in the process of aging. This should be an incentive to mutual charity, and Polonius takes it that way, for after his initial condescension to

Ophelia he has come to express only sympathy for the young. Hamlet, however, is less generous, and finally quips, “These tedious old fools” (217).

Time, of course, does not only distinguish the young from the old, the fertile from the barren, but also the living from the dead. And so Hamlet’s colloquy with Polonius concludes in a confrontation between the bride bed and the grave:

Pol. Will you walk out of the air, my lord? Ham. Into my grave? Pol. [aside] Indeed, that is out o’th’ air. How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of. I will leave him and suddenly contrive the means of meeting between him and my daughter.—My honourable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you. Ham. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—

218 Quoted in Hamlet: The New Variorum Edition, ed. H.H. Furness , vol. 1, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1877) 151n

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except my life, my life. (204-215) Hamlet’s desire for death in this passage is often seen as prologue to his suicidal ideation in “To be or not to be.” But the passage in fact points away from self-slaughter towards death from age or external violence. Recalling that “go” in Elizabethan usage primarily means to walk or amble,219 for Hamlet to “walk out of the air” and Polonius to “go backward” are in juxtaposition as opposite motions of the same type. While Polonius’s

“going” is reverse aging, Hamlet’s “walking” is a slow, forward pacing to death through time and decrepitude. Hamlet’s alternative to this prospect is not self-slaughter, but the opposite: he leaves it to Polonius to “take [my life] from me” (2.2.213). He has violent encounter in mind, a possibility Shakespeare suggests at the beginning of the section.

When Polonius asks Hamlet about his book, “What is the matter, my lord?” Hamlet takes the question to be about a quarrel, replying, “Between who” (2.2.191-2)? The dialogue on time and the “calamity of so long life” (3.1.69) is bookended by hints at interpersonal violence, concluding with Hamlet’s death at another’s hand.220

Fortune (219-238)

As the old man exits, two young men enter, Rosincrance and Guildensterne, who are

“of so young days brought up” with Hamlet and “neighbored to his youth and humor”

219 A clear example is in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Launce warns Speed, “Thou must run to him; for thou hast staid so long, that going will scarce serve the turn” (3.1.366-7). 220 Some actors invent physical ways to express a suicidal desire despite the contrary indication in the text. This is done arrestingly in the films starring Sir Derek Jacobi (1980) and Adrian Lester (2002), in which Hamlet invites Polonius to assist in his suicide. Jacobi points a blade at his torso and seems to invite Polonius to push it in, while Lester exposes his wrists to Polonius. Such staging saves the logical possibility of reading a suicidal desire in the line, and yet its extravagance as an acting choice also shows why that reading is arbitrary. It is equally possible, for instance, for Hamlet to step back, draw his sword in a fencing posture, and gesture to Polonius to enter in a duel. Since the dialogue already involves a suggestion of quarreling, and Ophelia is viable grounds for quarrel between Hamlet and Polonius, this staging would be more warranted.

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(2.2.11-12) that there is no separation of time among the speakers in their dialogue. The discussion accordingly turns to fortune, which does distinguish them. Rosincrance and

Guildensterne have thoroughly middling fortunes, while Hamlet, presumably blessed by fortune as a prince, views himself as a prisoner and a beggar. The discussion of fortune here and throughout the play borrows its imagery from common Medieval and

Renaissance depictions of Lady Fortune, which are ultimately based on Lady

Philosophy’s account of Fortune in Boethius’s De Consolatione.

The foremost of these images, reviewed in detail by Frye,221 is the Rota Fortunae.

The metaphor of Fortune’s Wheel originates in De Consolatione, when Lady Philosophy uses it to demonstrate to Boethius the inconstancy and indifference of Lady Fortune:

When yt Fortune with her proude ryght hande, causyth mutatyon aswel of aduersytie a of prosperytye. And when she is caryed aboute as the boylynge floud named eurype. Then she beynge cruell deposyth kynges, that sometyme were fearfull to other: & exalteth the pore & simple, that were subdued and ouercome. She regarith not the carefull that wepythe, nor heryth the wretched that wantith. She is so hard hartid that she laughith at the mourninges, of uch as she hath made carefull. Suche is her pastyme, thus she proueth her power and strȇgth. She sheweth a great bost or fayre face to her seruañtes that gapeth for worldye thinges, when a man is sene ouerthrowen and exaltyd in one howre. These be the wonderous workes of fortune, when a man shalbe vp and doune in a shorte tyme, that is not in auctorytie and nowe not estemed or abiecte.222 Beginning in the twelfth century, medieval artists seized upon this image as a motif, and developed an iconic tradition that combined Boethius’s basic image with additional, allegorical stock elements.223 Common depictions of Lady Fortune from the middle ages and Renaissance show her turning a large wheel with various persons clinging to its edge.

221 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 113-131 222 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. George Colville, (London: David Nutt, 1556) Book II M. I, p. 31. All English references to Boethius’s De Consolatione are to Colville translation; since his version does not include divisions of prose and verse sections, his page numbers are given in addition to the the section headings in the Latin text. 223 On the Boethian origin of the tradition of the Rota Fortunae and its translation into artistic depiction, see Jerold Frakes, The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition, (Leiden: Brill, 1988), also Charles M. Radding, “Fortune and her Wheel: The Meaning of a Medieval Symbol,” Mediaevistic, Vol. 5 (1992): 127-138.

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The most prominent form of this image shows four persons, at the top, bottom, left, and right, often with a caption for each: at the top is a king with the caption Regno; for the man on the left, rising clockwise toward Regno’s position, is the caption Regnabo, for the man descending on the right, Regnavi, and for the man on the bottom, Sum Sine Regno.

In some depictions, the three lesser figures are identical, but they are often dressed differently according to their stations. Regnabo can be somewhat well dressed, or even be in the process of crowning himself. Regnavi can be dressed much better, but with a crown falling off his head, as he descends towards Sum Sine Regno, who is garbed as a pauper.

Fortune typically turns the wheel with a crank, but sometimes sits on the hub of the wheel, so that Regno is seated above her crown, while Sum Sine Regno is under her feet.224 (An image of this type from Codex Buranus is included in the Appendix, Fig. 1.)

With the image of the Rota Fortunae in mind, it is possible to read the Boethian content in the following exchange:

Guild. On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button. Ham. Nor the soles of her shoes? Ros. Neither, my lord. Ham. Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favour! Guild. Faith, her privates we. Ham. In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true—she is a strumpet. (2.2.227-234) If Fortune is seated in the middle of the wheel, then Regno is the button on her cap while the soles of her shoes press down on Sum Sine Regno. Her waist is at the mid-line of the wheel at the level of Regnabo and Regnavi. Hamlet’s assertion that Fortune is a strumpet merges Lady Philosophy’s contempt for Fortune with her verdict that the poetic muses

224 Examples of these and other images may be found with commentary in Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 111-131. Some additional images sampling the Regno motif are included in the appendix.

126 are “crafty harlottes.”225

But Hamlet is not content to dismiss evil fortune as Philosophy would counsel.

Fortune has made Denmark a prison to him, and although he is a prince at the top of the wheel, he speaks of himself as a “beggar” (270, cf. 1.5.184), at the bottom. This accords with Philosophy’s teaching to Boethius that even rich men, if they depend on Fortune, are truly poor:

Soo he that fearyth that he shall lacke, and is not contented with what he hath, but sorroweth for more, accompting him selfe hpore, hath neuer enough, and so is not ryche, but poore.226 Since he is a beggar, Hamlet considers it an evil fortune to Rosincrance and

Guildensterne that they have come to join him in “prison” (241-2). Again this refers to

Boethius, whose evil fortune in De Consolatione is to be in prison. It also characterizes changes in fortune and rank as changes of location, and so introduces the theme of place.

Before explicating the next section, it is worth mentioning several other motifs in the iconography of Fortune, which do not figure into the present dialogues but come to bear later in the text. The first of these is Fortuna Bifrons. It depicts Fortune as a two-faced deity like Janus, with a smile on the right side of her head and a scowl on the left. From each hand, she dispenses gifts; on her smiling side, she hands a fortunate man radiant goods, often a scepter, crown, crosier, or cornucopia, while her hand on the scowling side dispenses to the unfortunate man, who grovels as a suppliant, implements of pain such as a mace, scourge, flail, or bolts of lightning. Frye suggests that these two types of gifts are

“visual counterparts to what Hamlet derisively calls ‘fortunes buffets and rewards,’” and that the evil objects in Fortune’s left hand are equivalent to “the slings and arrows of

225 Boethius, De Consolatione, 1.p.1; Colville, 13 226 Boethius, De Consolatione, 2.m.2, Colville 32-3

127 outrageous fortune.”227 (See Appendix, Fig. 2.) In King Lear, Kent also alludes to the faces of Fortuna Bifrons when he prays to Fortune to “smile once more” (Lear 2.2.171).

Again, the ultimate source for this image is Boethius. While he does not use the phrase Fortuna Bifrons, Philosophy tells Boethius of the blind goddess’s “ambiguos vultus,” which Colville renders, “doubtfull countenaunce.” 228 Lady Philosophy speaks of

Fortune’s opposite gifts, saying,

Hast thou not learyd (when thou were a younge man) that there laye at the entrye at Jupyters house two tunnes of wyne, the one full of good wine, thother ful of euil wine, of the whyche euery man (that entred) must nedes tast? What cause hast thou to complayne, if thou hast taken more parte of the good (that is to say) of prosperitie then of aduersitye?229 Another image of good and evil fortune is calm and stormy seas, a metaphor Boethius uses six times, for “It is lawfull for the sea, (in a caulme) to be playne and smothe, and in tyme of tepeste, to be roughe and raginge, with floudes and stormes.”230 This theme is sometimes integrated into images of Fortuna Bifrons, in which a storm wracks a ship on one side of the background, while on the other a calm sea leads a ship to harbor.231

One additional image of Fortune that Frye identifies in Hamlet is a wheel at the top

227 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 117 228 Boethius, De Consolatione, 2.p.1; Colville, 30. 229 Boethius, De Consolatione, 2.p.2, Colville, 33 230 Boethius, De Consolatione, 1.p.2, Colville, 32; also “He that is virtuous and sober I hys lyvynge, and hathe trodden downe vner his fete, and ouercome th proude fortune…: the ragynge floudes of the sea yt the heate of the on sterreth vp & causyth to boile from the very bottom of the same, not the vnstable hyll call Vesenus… can moue that mȃ.” 1.m.4, Colville 17; “O god what soever thou art that knyttest to gether th bondes of things in due order, look upȏ wretched people dwellynge on the earth that be not the vilest parte of thy worke, sore troubled with the bytternes of fortune, with draw the great assaults (fluctus) thereof….” 2.m.5, Colville, 24; “The sea is ofte smothe and calme when the floudes be not mouyd. And oft the stormye wynde Aquilo, stereth horrible tempests, and ouerturnythe the sea, If the forme of thys wrolde be so seldom stedefast, and turnythe wyth so many alteracions & chaunges: why then wylte thou put confydence in the vnstedefast fortunes of men?” 2.m.3, Colville 36; “Therefore nowe wype thy eyes and wepe no more, for fortune is not all agaynste the, nor the stronge tempest of aduersitie hath yet touchyd the….” 2.p.4, Colville 37; “Whosoeuer is wyse and stedefast, and would appoynt hymselfe a firme and suer ete or house that wyll not be ouerthrowen wyth the trobolous blastes of the winde named Euras, and careth howe to auoyde the sea threatnyng with his floudes. Let hym forsake and not buylde vpon the toppe of an high hyll, nor vpon the moyst gravel or sandes. 2.m.4 Colville 39. 231 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 117, 120-121, 123

128 of a hill (F1 3.3.15-22) or rolling down it (2.2.489-93). Frye remarks upon the rarity of hills in both the literature and iconography of Fortune, but gives a striking account of two pieces, consonant with Shakespeare’s idea:

There was a visual parallel in an emblem (now lost) embroidered by Mary Queen of Scots during her long imprisonment, when the exiled monarch used her needle for diversion. The emblem shows a “wheel rolled from the mountain in[to] the sea,” with a motto suggesting a fall without hope, senza speranza. It all fits with Mary’s situation, and also with Shakespeare’s general allusion, and I suspect that other visual examples will come to light from time to time, but for the moment this is all I have found of the hill as such, with a wheel of ill fortune plunging down it. An engraving by an unnamed sixteenth-century monogrammatist illustrates a related conception (Fig. IV. 17). Instead of a hill, this print gives Fortune a tower or castle, at the top of which she stands, enticing her devotees to hazard the ascent. And hazard it they do, using siege ladders, ropes, and bare hands. As each seeks to “climb his happiness,” many tumble down head-over-heels to destruction or despair on the plain below. And among the aspiring climbers, no one shows the slightest concern for the fallen. All such images focus our attention upon segments of humanity entirely and madly given over to the pursuit of Fortune’s meretricious favors, and thus entirely devoid of wisdom and grace.232 All of these depictions convey a moral critique of Fortune in agreement with Book II of De Consolatione: Fortune is a false goddess, changeable and indifferent. Since her mutability proves her vanity, the wise man does not seek her favors, but rises above them through wisdom, while the fool who seeks her gifts become a slave to depravity.

Place (238-420)

The dialogue on place moves through three phases, each considering a different case of displacement by the hand of Fortune, two physical and one mental. The physical cases are: at the beginning, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s arrival in Elsinore; at the end, the players’ displacement from the city stage. In the center, bracketed by these, is Hamlet’s mental displacement from the world.

The first phase begins when Hamlet asks, “What have you, my good friends, deserved

232 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 128-9. In the image of the tower Frye describes, Fortune is not turning a wheel, but standing on a ball, a related motif that also represents Fortune’s instability, and so is roughly interchangeable with a wheel. See pp. 116-117.

129 at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither” (238-40)? The question is surprising, since Hamlet as a prince is presumably in a fortunate place. He should judge his schoolmates fortunate to join him, but for him “Denmark is a prison.” (241). This immediately shifts the dialogue to Hamlet’s mental displacement, as he professes he

“could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams” (252-4). Rosincrance interprets this as ambition, a desire for the wheel to raise Hamlet to its top, since the world is “too narrow for your mind” (251). He is perhaps fishing for a clue if Hamlet is a threat to the king, but Hamlet rejects the bait, and replies that it is not the world’s narrowness, but its expanse that is his prison:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave, o’erhanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (294-302) There is no hint here that Shakespeare or Hamlet is endorsing relativism. While Hamlet’s initial claim that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” may sound like a relativist claim that good and evil are subjective, his discourse on the heavens, earth, and man (292-309) says more precisely that good is objective in things but can be nullified in thought. Hamlet knows the firmament really is brave and majestical, apart from how “appears” to him; man really is “the beauty of the world” (305-6), but “seems” to him otherwise. He knows not “is.” Rosincrance recounts later that “He does confess he feels himself distracted” (3.1.5)—his subjective judgments are at odds with manifest reality. Hamlet is not speaking as a philosopher, but as a slave of Fortune.233

233 De Consolatione contains no single text that plainly corresponds to Hamlet’s speech about his distraction, but fits well with it thematically in its own contemplation of the glory of the heavens and the beauty of man. For instance, when Philosophy first recounts Boethius’s decline into misery, she laments that he had once “was wonte to goo into the heuenly ways by science of astronomy… And also he was

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The third phase begins when Hamlet learns that the “tragedians of the city” (2.2.327) are coming to Elsinore. He is surprised they have become a traveling company, since they had been thriving at their permanent venue. They have, however, been displaced by the turn of Fortune’s wheel. Rosincrance explains that they have lost their business in the city to competition from the “late innovation” (331) of clamorous children’s companies, whose poets inveigh against the “common stages” of adult actors with such intimidating vigor that “many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills, and dare scarce come thither”

(340-2). This has left the tragedians without an audience. The Rota Fortunae has carried them down to the position of Regnavi, while the eyases have been lifted to the position of

Regno, are hence are “most tyrannically clapped” (338-9).

The circumstance of the players’ misfortune revisits the theme of time, because the old have lost their place for being ridiculed by the young. It is ironic that Hamlet, who has been reading slanders against the old criticizes the child actors for doing the same:

What, are they children? Who maintains ’em? How are they escotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players—as it is most like, if their means are no better— their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession? (343-9) A question of staging bears upon these lines. What, during the scene, has become of

Hamlet’s book? Actors, by practical necessity, have explored possible answers more than critics. Most find some way for Hamlet to get rid of the book soon after he stops talking

wont to serche out the natural causes, why the great wyndes do trouble the plaine waters of the sea… And also thys mã was wont to declare the secret causes of natural thynges, and now he lyeth ouerthrowne as a man that hath no intelligence or wytte, hauynge his necke thrust downe with heuye chaynes, that is to say: with passions and vexacyons of the mind berynge hys face downeward with great wayte or heuynes, for the losse of temporall goodes.” (1.m.2; Colville, 14). In 2.p.5, Philosophy argues that since the rational nature gives man a superior beauty over other created things, it is beneath human dignity to overvalue them. These passages do not, as in Hamlet, speak precisely of the mind failing to see the objective goodness of heavenly, earthly, and human natures, but they do present these natures as high, aesthetic values from which the mind oppressed by sorrow declines.

131 about it: tossing it over his shoulder; dropping it off a ledge; setting it on a table; handing it to Polonius, who sets it on a table; setting it on a table, then standing on the table and kicking it off; tearing out the pages and discarding the cover—every device has been tried.234 Yet for all the creative choices available, the least creative is probably the right one: Hamlet keeps the book for the whole scene. An actor who does this assumes the burden of carrying a prop through many lines of dialogue, but in return he wins an opportunity to show how the excursus on child actors ironically comments upon Hamlet’s behavior. Only minutes before, Hamlet ridiculed “tedious old fools” at the prompting of a book. That is to say, Hamlet’s writer does him wrong to make him exclaim against his own succession. If Hamlet is still carrying the book, the actor need only gesticulate prominently with the hand that is holding it to demonstrate this hypocrisy to the audience.

From Hamlet’s own mouth comes a judgment against him, but he misses the point and uses the boys only to mock his uncle’s elevation by fortune (361-6). He then ends his discussion of fortune and place by dropping the name of Boethius’s pedagogue: “There’s something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out” (364-6).

Having shown now what the parts of Hamlet’s dialogue are, and the joints that connect them, it remains to synthesize their meaning as a whole. The four themes manifest Hamlet’s anger at evil fortune by way of a structured chiasm. At the center are

Time and Fortune, the principles of change and inconstancy in life. All fortunes come to be and are destroyed by the course of Time, while Time is the arena of Fortune and the measure of change. At the outside are Love and Place, the primary subjects of Fortune,

234 See respectively the films starring Sir Laurence Olivier (1948), Mel Gibson (1990), David Tennant (2009), Sir Kenneth Branagh (1996), Richard Burton (1964), and Campbell Scott (2000).

132 which have become matters of grief for Hamlet, the former by Ophelia’s rejection of him, and the latter by his uncle’s usurpation. The outside themes are proximate to the middle terms that most condition them: Love fades with Time, and Place is changed by Fortune.

The inner unity of these very themes is represented in Jean Cousin’s emblem book

Liber Fortunae (1568), which, amidst dozens of allegorical depictions of Fortune, presents one with the caption Fortuna, Amor, Tempus, et Locus. (See Appendix, Fig 3.) It is too much to believe that Shakespeare traveled to France and saw this exact image, which existed in only one manuscript, but he may have seen something comparable, and in any event, Cousin apprehends the same relation of the motifs that Shakespeare does.

The emblem shows Fortuna seated on a ball, a variant of the wheel, which represents her instability in terms of motion in Loco. Her hand holds the clock of Tempus, which the

Cupid Amor uses to lead her forward, yet both gaze backward, the blind leading the blind.

The image is balanced like Hamlet’s chiasm, with Fortuna and Tempus in the middle and

Amor and Locus on the outside; only the order is reversed. Another emblem of Cousin’s does follow Shakespeare’s order, with a blindfolded Fortuna leading a blindfolded Amor, but without the ball and clock. (See Appendix, Fig. 4.) Had Cousin merely inserted

Tempus and Locus into that image, he would have produced the same sequence as

Shakespeare. Hamlet alludes to the possibility of either sequence when Gonzago frames his question about love and fortune within the finitude of Tempus and Locus:

This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange That even our loves should with our fortunes change, For ’tis a question left for us to prove, Whether love lead fortune or else fortune love. (3.2.194-7)235

235 The relationship of Cousin’s images to these lines is pointed out by Frye in The Elizabethan Hamlet, 121, though he does not consider the presence of Locus and Tempus in the same passage or as themes in Act II.

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The coda to Hamlet’s dialogues on the four themes is a declaration of his own subservience to Fortune. As Polonius enters to introduce the players, Hamlet riddles to

Rosincrance and Guildenstern, “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw” (2.2.376-7). Commentators have traditionally explained the line in reference to fortune: Hamlet’s madness changes with the winds.

This agrees with imagery in Boethius describing changes of fortune as shifting winds.

But that is not its sole meaning. “North-north-west” is not only a geographical direction, but an astronomical coordinate. Jesting later in the graveyard at “How absolute the knave is,” Hamlet tells Horatio, “We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us”

(5.1.135-6). A “card” in this context means a star-chart (cf. Mac 1.3.17); it is a clue that when Hamlet says “north-north-west,” he is himself “speaking by the card,” for the source of the wind that makes him mad also corresponds to the star that heralds the ghost’s appearance, as Bernardo reports:

Last night of all, When yond same star that’s westward from the pole Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven Where now it burns… (1.1.34-37) The source then of Hamlet’s grief with fortune, and lack of consolation, is the ghost.

North-north-west may also have a more specific connotation, since in classical astronomy, the brightest circumpolar star on the westernmost ordinate of the celestial sphere is Etamin. It is the brightest star in the head of Draco the Dragon, which fills the north-north-west sector. It is a dark and perilous sign,236 and has a Satanic suggestion if,

236 In King Lear, Edmund mentions the dragon’s tail as a sign of evil passions to the gulls of astrology: “My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous” (1.2.128-131). Although “the dragon’s tail” is not Draco, but the descending node of the moon, the important point is that a dragon is an evil astrological sign.

134 among other apocalyptic references in the play,237 Shakespeare is alluding to the dragon of Rev 13:11-8, which in a different sense also appears on the “last night of all.”

The implications of this clue that Hamlet’s madness is demonic will be explored in a later chapter. For the moment, Shakespeare does not let the audience dwell upon it.

Hamlet merely tosses out the hint, then promptly turns his attention to a new type of locus: stage space.

237 See Milward, Shakespeare’s Apocalypse, (Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, 2000) 17-22, de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet, 196-204

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VI: A Silence in the Heavens

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. -Julius Caesar, Act II, scene i

It is commonplace when speaking about Hamlet to refer to The Mousetrap as “the play within the play.” It would be more accurate to call it one of the plays within the play, since The Mousetrap is in fact the second occasion in which a play is performed in

Hamlet, with the effect of charging the conscience of its auditor. Soon after the players’ entrance, Hamlet and the first player share a recitation about the slaughter of Priam by

Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles; or more precisely, each enacts the role of Aeneas telling

Dido the tale. Even as Hamlet says the players are “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.520), the Pyrrhus Speech is just such a chronicle, an image of hoary revenge by a mourning son. It paints the revenger as gruesome and “hellish” (460).

Prior to Prosser, comparisons between Hamlet and Pyrrhus commonly, if not universally, alleged a fundamental contrast between them. Pyrrhus was supposed to be bold and vigorous, horrible but effectual, whereas Hamlet is thinking and hesitant.

Pyrrhus’ resemblance to Hamlet is confined to the brief moment when he pauses before killing Priam: “It is only during this uncharacteristic standstill that Pyrrhus, the unthinking avenger, shows any likeness to his polar opposite, Hamlet.”238 Prosser,

238 Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) 151

136 however, finds a broad similarity between the characters, from the color of their garments to the nature of their wrath. Pyrrhus is meant to hold the mirror up to Hamlet, showing what he is, not what he is not.239

The opening words of the portion Hamlet enacts support Prosser’s view. He begins with a telling slip of the tongue, saying first, “The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’Hyrcanian beast” (447), and then realizing this is the wrong line. Since the speech is based on the

Aeneid, “th’Hyrcanian beast” should refer not to Pyrrhus but to Aeneas, whom Dido charges, when he abandons her, for being suckled by the Tigers of Hyrcania.240 Since the speaker in the play is Aeneas, his slip implies a similitude in role between the speaker and his subject. In the person of Aeneas, Hamlet has said, “The rugged Pyrrhus, like myself.” Then when Hamlet begins again with the correct line, it establishes a similitude of Pyrrhus to Hamlet’s own person, since Pyrrhus also wears a “nightly color” (1.2.66):

The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble… (2.2.449-50) The chief contrast between Hamlet and Pyrrhus is that only the latter is presented in sensational, mythic proportions. The greater similarity is their common storyline: each pursues revenge for his father, temporarily pauses, but having resumed his revenge, enlarges it to a sacrilegious wrath that extends beyond the victim’s death. Pyrrhus’s pause occurs as his sword is “declining on the on the milky head of reverend Priam” (475-75).

This pause, however, is brief, as “a silence in the heavens” (480) soon broken by new thunder:

So, after Pyrrhus’ pause Aroused vengeance sets him new a-work; And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall

239 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 151-4 240 Virgil, Aeneid, 4.367

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On Mars his armours, forged for proof eterne, With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword Now falls on Priam. (483-488) It has yet to be shown that Hamlet’s pause is likewise brief; let it suffice for now that

Shakespeare has foreshadowed it.

Pyrrhus’ revenge persists beyond death in his desecration of Priam’s body.

Surpassing his father Achilles, who dragged Hector’s corpse, denying him funeral rites,

Pyrrhus proceeds the chop Priam’s body to pieces on an altar (509-10). Shakespeare does not explicitly mention the altar, but may have assumed his audience knew about it from the Aeneid and other ancient sources, such as Euripedes’ Hecuba,241 the most popular

Greek play in Renaissance Europe,242 or from Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of

Carthage.243 In any case, Shakespeare alludes to the altar later when Laertes vows in his revenge to “cut his throat i’th’church” (4.3.99).

Joseph Westlund has argued against Prosser that an insistent comparison of Hamlet to

Pyrrhus oversimplifies, because Aeneas’ speech admits ambivalence in its imagery, corresponding to the moral ambiguity of Hamlet’s revenge.244 Westlund argues along

Freudian lines that Hamlet chooses Aeneas’ speech for the player to externalize his own inner conflict and prompt himself to action though creative representation. But the results

241 Euripedes Hecuba, 21-22 242 On the widspread reception of Hecuba in Renaissance, and of Hecuba as an archetype of human suffering, see Tanya Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Hamlet?” Renaissance Quarterly, vol, 65, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 1060-1093. 243 Marlowe and Nashe use the setting “at Joves Altar” (1.2.225) to demonstrate divine displeasure at Pyrrhus’ deed: And with the wind thereof the King fell downe: Then from the navell to the throat at once, He ript old Priam: at whose latter gaspe Joves marble statue gan to bend the brow, As lothing Pirrhus for this wicked act… (254-8) 244 Joseph Westlund, Ambivalence in the Player’s Speech in Hamlet,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 18 no. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1978): 245-56

138 are mixed, since the speech cuts two ways:

The speech can provide incentive, for Priam is “a dear father murder’d” like his own, and Pyrrhus the cruel avenger that Hamlet feels he ought to be. On the other hand, the speech makes revenge monstrous and leads to passivity; Hamlet can see himself as a savage killer like Pyrrhus—perhaps even like Claudius, his own father’s murderer. … The speech reveals the ambivalence so characteristic of Hamlet.245 Taking the speech as a posteriori evidence of Hamlet’s ambivalence, Westlund claims that “Critics who attempt a precise logical definition of the play’s attitude toward revenge work contrary to the uncertainty, mystery and ambivalence which pervade Hamlet.”246

Westlund is right that the speech’s imagery is ambivalent, but his explanation of why is misguided. Assuming that Pyrrhus as Hamlet or as Claudius are contradictory, he presents to a false choice: “Rather than try to decide on one or another set of responses it seems best to explore their contradictory nature.”247 He does not consider that the alternative between deciding between one or the other could be to explore their harmony, and a straightforward harmony is available. The tendency of revenge is to produce a cycle of violence, as the revenger comes to resemble the thing he hates by returning evil for evil. Hamlet illustrates this aspect of revenge at other points—in the play scene where the poisoner becomes the king’s nephew rather than brother, and in Laertes’s revenge against Hamlet, for crimes similar to those of Claudius (5.2.77-8). From this critique of revenge, there is fittingness that Pyrrhus figures for both Claudius and Hamlet, Priam for both Old Hamlet and Claudius. Further, Priam most strikingly resembles Polonius as

245 Westlund, “Ambivalence,” 246. Westlund adds, “Another motive in requesting the Players speech and for putting on the Gonzago play, my be that Hamlet tries to master the fact of his father’s murder by repeating it. By repeating the painful loss in fictional analogies Hamlet attempts to move from being the passive sufferer to the active creator—much as a child, to use Sigmund Freud’s example, will create a game out of a distressing event like visiting the doctor in an effort to master it. Hamlet’s attempts are of limited success.” (247-8) 246 Westlund, “Ambivalence,” 249 247 Westlund, “Ambivalence,” 246

139 well, both in his elderly infirmity, and in Pyrrhus killing him before Hecuba’s eyes. Only

Hamlet and never Claudius goes to this extreme.

So outrageous is the murder of Priam that it prompts from Aeneas the only mention of divine revenge in Hamlet:

Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods In general synod take away her power; Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven As low as to the fiends. (489-93) Aeneas’ call for justice is not directly against Pyrrhus, but Fortune, for whom he has the same contempt as Hamlet. Lacking the possibility of Christian consolation, Aeneas prays for a justice devoid of mercy, casting Fortuna hellward, “As low as to the fiends.” This desire for another’s damnation comes in response to an act that figures both for those of

Claudius and Hamlet. The image of the wheel’s nave, however, is directly associated with the King. “Round nave” is likely a pun, as Hamlet calls Claudius an “errant knave.”

To take “errant” in the literal sense of straying in place, it indicates the “nave” toppling from on the summit. Hamlet also ridicules Claudius for corpulence (Q2 3.4.180; F1

3.6.23-5), implying a “round knave.” A more evident association of the wheel with

Claudius is Rosincrance’s later comparison of the King to a “massy wheel”:

The cease of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What’s near with it. It is a massy wheel Fixed on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoined; which when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone Did the King sigh, but with a general groan. (3.3.15-23) Frye notes the dual identity of the wheel with both Fortune and Claudius’ kingship, commenting on Rosincrance’s speech:

140

There is a double irony in this flattery of Claudius: in the first place, his own murder of his brother has already brought the realm close to “boist’rous ruin,” and in the second place there is an unmistakable association of the wheel of Claudius’ majesty with the wheel of Fortune. Whatever the mediocre Rosencrantz may have intended to convey in this pompous compliment, the shrewd Claudius may be expected to have caught the allusion to a wheel of Fortune on which ambitious majesty revolves, to its ultimate loss. Like the jettisoned king who drew his sword against the wheel from which he fell in Burgkmair’s engraving, Claudius responds decisively with “We will put fetters on this fear” (3.3.15-26).248 This deft reading illustrates the fruitfulness of Frye’s research into the Rota Fortunae; and yet, despite this, and despite Frye’s recognition of a “great reversal” moments after

Rosincrance’s speech, when Hamlet and Claudius change roles as villain and hero in the

Prayer Scene,249 he never observes that bowling the nave “to the fiends” foreshadows

Hamlet’s desire for Claudius’ damnation. This oversight seems pervasive in the literature; even Prosser and McGee overlook it. Yet it is among the most telling lines in the play. It gives Shakespeare’s reason for constructing the second act as he has—to present a disconsolate response to evil Fortune as an incentive to eternal rage. Pagan Aeneas thinks of this as pious anger, but the Christian revelation known in Hamlet understands it as altogether godless.

The Hecuba Soliloquy

When the players have gone, Hamlet, who has been guarding his secrets for the whole scene, can finally reveal his mind directly to the audience, and begins his soliloquy on a sigh of relief: “Now am I alone” (2.2.546). Two beats of the meter pass in silence. Then

Hamlet breaks the calm with a surprising self-reproach: “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (544)! Nothing that has gone before suggests to the audience why Hamlet

248 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 129-131 249 Frye, Renaissance Hamlet, 94-97

141 would rebuke himself in this way, but the next lines dispel the mystery. He is ashamed that the player has a passionate voice for Hecuba, a fictional character in a play, while he has missed “the motive and the cue for passion” (555) in his own performance.

The ensuing soliloquy contains the play’s first discussion of Hamlet’s pause, and care must be taken to understand how it is introduced. An essential observation that must be made at the outset is that for all of the first twenty-six lines—nearly half the speech, and all but the last eight lines of the section where Hamlet upbraids himself for dullness—he does not fault himself for inaction, but for silence. He does not say, “I can do nothing,” but “I… can say nothing” (560, 63), and his “cue for passion” refers to “a passionate speech” (431; cf. 3.2.9). Hence, before the play asks, “Why Hamlet’s delay?” it asks,

“Why Hamlet’s silence?”

One explanation is that Hamlet has difficulty navigating the distinction between representation and reality, “seems” from “is,” and is continually side-tracked into substituting role-playing for real action. Theatrical devices prime his incentives for action, and yet distance him from it by substituting mimesis for real activity. By faulting his silence, he subconsciously avoids confronting his inaction. As Westlund puts it:

His frustration with himself—and with his role as avenger—leads him to use extraordinarily forceful verbs in the following lines (drown, cleave, make mad, appall, confound, amaze), but he continues to express what he would do in theatrical terms as action on a stage (544-550). He blames himself because he simply mopes “unpregnant of [his] cause,/And can say nothing.” He confirms his remoteness from taking action by condemning himself for “saying” nothing whereas his problem is “doing” nothing. The confusion partly arises from his identification with the Player who “says” rather than “does.”250 This theory contains a ponderable insight into human nature, but it does not describe what happens in the text. Nothing at this stage “confirms his remoteness from taking

250 Westlund, “Ambivalence,” 245-256

142 action” because no such remoteness has been posited to be confirmed. That claim will soon emerge, but for now an audience with no preconception that Hamlet is inactive hears nothing of the kind, because he says nothing of the kind. The text is about silence, and delay has yet to be mentioned.

This returns us to the original problem of why he faults himself for silence. I submit that a precise moment in the scene exists when Hamlet fails to speak, and which triggers his self-rebuke. It is when he stops reciting Aeneas’ speech and hands the remainder over to the player. The text does not indicate why Hamlet leaves off at the point he does. In F1 he simply stops speaking, while in Q2 he merely adds “So proceed you” (2.2.403). The reason Hamlet pauses is only implied by the significant junction point where it occurs in

Aeneas’ speech, after the line, “The rugged Pyrrhus old grandsire Priam seeks” (Q1

2.2.461). The recitation up to this point is about Pyrrhus seeking, not completing his revenge. As a seeker, he is already a monster, but Hamlet is able, eager in fact, to utter him. The seeking revenger is the part he has already been playing, yet he knows the next line, “Anon he finds him,” (464) and the transition from seeking to finding, to facing and destroying the object of his hate confronts him for the first time in its concreteness as a horror.251 Stunned by what he is about to say, Hamlet breaks off, and hands the speech to

251 Westlund also sees the break-off point as motivated by the encounter wih Priam: “When Hamlet turns the speech over to the Player he stops at the very point where ‘the hellish Pyrrhus/Old grandsire Priam seeks.’ Hamlet hands the narrative to the Player at the exact moment when the action is to begin. (Levin finds the moment “appropriate” but does not say why, p. 150.) Shakespeare could hardly have chosen a better place, for the break emphasizes Hamlet’s tendency to stop just short of doing the deed. Even in this fictional representation of revenge Hamlet stresses that it is only play-acting by putting it at a further remove as a Player’s uninvolved re-creation of a role.” “Ambivalence,” 251. This comes near to being correct, since handing the speech over is indeed a way to put the action at greater remove, but Westlund also repeats the standard error of presupposing Hamlet has been delaying. The break cannot “emphasize Hamlet’s tendency to stop short” because no such tendency has been established. Rather, the break is the first instance in which Hamlet ever pauses.

143 another, who follows him with a bravura performance. This is the first time Hamlet finds himself hesitant, and he discovers it in the experience of speechlessness. The soliloquy follows suit.

Now, it is widely accepted that part of the rationale for Hamlet’s delay is that he perceives a need to verify the ghost’s story. The merits of this reason are the subject of perennial debate. Students are taught to ask whether “this sudden doubt… is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay—and for its continuance,”252 or if “Hamlet is healthily skeptical” of the ghost, so that his “procrastination and inability to take decisive action… are born of virtuous circumspection.”253 From what has been said so far, the reader might expect me to argue the latter position. In fact, I reject both, for the question they attempt to answer is grounded on a false premise: it is untrue that Hamlet hesitates for doubting the ghost’s story. To the contrary, Hamlet’s doubt manifests itself exclusively as an incentive to action, while his puzzlement in speech and action derives entirely from taking the ghost at its word.

Every line of the Hecuba Soliloquy bears this out. The reason Hamlet castigates himself is that he assumes, at every point, that Claudius is guilty. When he says, “No, not for a king,/Upon whose property and most dear life/A damned defeat was made,” (563-

5), he uses an indicative verb. He claims the “cue for passion” is something “I have”

(555). It is precisely because Hamlet admits no doubt about the objective grounds of his cause that he attributes his silence to his subjective failings. Now, the ghost has already suggested such reasons to him:

And duller should’st thou be than the fat weed

252 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 129 253 Joseph Pearce, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, 123

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That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf Wouldst thou not stir in this. (1.5.32-35) Hamlet accepts this verdict outright, and in line after line finds only recriminatory explanations for his silence, such as dullness, cowardice, and lack of virility. He thus works himself into a violent rage, and, falling cursing to the floor, makes the first of three mentions in F1 of his hesitance to act:

Ha? Why, I should take it. For it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should ha’ fatted all the region kites With this slave’s offal, bloody—a bawdy villain, Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! O vengeance! 254 (2.2.570-576) A passage that starts with a major curse (“‘Swounds!” rather than “Why,” in Q2) and then proceeds to find fault in not hastening to desecrate a corpse is neither a favorable picture of revenge nor an unfavorable picture of hesitation. The image of feeding offal to kites is an essential expression of the revenger’s rage. It is the speech’s sole allusion to

Priam, as Hecuba watches Pyrrhus “make malicious sport/In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs” (519-10). The idea of feeding those limbs to animals derives from the oldest source of the Hamlet story, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (c. 1100), where

Amleth dispatches a spy, equivalent to Polonius, in the same unsavory way:

Now the counselor went quietly to the room where Amleth was closed in with his mother, and lay hidden beneath the straw. But Amleth had a remedy for the treachery: since he feared to be overheard by some spy, he fell at first to his usual inept practices: he began crowing like a loud rooster, beat his arms like the flapping of wings, climbed up on the straw, and began to fling his body, leaping around, testing whether anything lay hidden there. And when he felt a heap beneath his feet, he stabbed the place with his sword and skewered the concealed man. Then he dragged him from his hiding place, killed him, cut his body into pieces, cooked it in boiling water, and hurled it into the open sewer to be

254 Q2 omits F1’s “O vengeance!” which Jenkins notes, “has all the marks of an actor’s addition.” Hamlet, 270n. This is a prime example of a suspect text providing a valuable gloss. An actor rehearsing the speech understood that the passion of revenge is driving Hamlet’s degeneration, though it was not explicit in the text he was using. He added what he thought was an appropriate embellishment.

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devoured by the hogs, strewing the rotten mud with his miserable limbs.255 Shakespeare changes the animal from pigs to kites, and later, when Polonius’s time comes, worms. While Aeneas designates no animal to devour Priam, Shakespeare slips in the culinary term “mincing.” This community of images is as obvious as disturbing.

Other Shakespearean texts that contemplate feeding the dead to birds or other animals use it to connote a denial of burial rites, leaving “carrion men, groaning for burial” (JC

3.1.264). In the closing lines of Titus Andronicus, Lucius orders the body of Tamora— who personifies “Revenge, sent from th’infernal kingdom” “to ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind” (5.2.30-1)—to be fed in revenge to vultures herself, while Lucius honors his beloved dead with funeral rites:

Some loving friends convey the emperor hence, And give him burial in his father’s grave: My father and Lavinia shall forthwith Be closed in our household’s monument. As for that heinous tiger, Tamora, No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weeds, No mournful bell shall ring her burial; But throw her forth to beasts and birds of prey: Her life was beast-like, and devoid of pity; And, being so, shall have like want of pity. (5.3.190-199) In contrast to these vengeful acts, the virtuous farmer in The Winter’s Tale decides to bury a man partly eaten by a bear as a “good deed” (3.3.131-136), and Shakespeare underscores the merit of that deed by naming the mauled man Antigonus. The consistent meaning in these cases is that feeding a body to animals opposes the dignity of burial, while the rites of mourning are noble acts of mercy. It follows from this pattern that

Hamlet’s desire to feed Claudius to birds implies a hatred beyond death that refuses prayer for his soul.

255 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum III.vi, in “The Revenge of Amleth,” The Norse Hamlet, ed. and trans. Søren Filipski (Hythloday Press, 2013) 22

146

There are darker implications yet. Another mention of kite-feeding, in the Banquet

Scene in Macbeth, supports a fouler sense in Hamlet’s words. Macbeth tells the ghost:

If charnel houses and our graves must send Those that we bury, back, our monuments Shall be the maws of kites. (Mac. 3.4.71-3) Prior to Wilson, the usual interpretation of these strange lines was that Macbeth refers to a traditional belief that birds who had overeaten would disgorge some of their food, and so Macbeth imagines the grave spitting Banquo back up. In a note to his edition of

Macbeth, however, Wilson gives a more likely explanation. Macbeth is referring to the medieval legend of Evil-merodach’s desecration of his father Nebuchadnezzar’s body.

Citing Reginald Scot’s report that “Some write that after the death of Nabuchadnezzar his sonne Eilumorodath, gave his bodie to the ravens to be devoured, least afterwards his father should arise from death,”256 Wilson interprets Macbeth to mean, “the only safe way with corpses is to let vultures eat them.”257

The story Scot mentions derives from a Rabbinic tradition, first attested in St.

Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah, that after assuming the throne, Nebuchadnezzar’s son,

Evil-merodach, exhumed his father’s corpse to prove his claim to the throne of Babylon and to satisfy sceptics that his father would not return to depose him.258 This mildly gruesome story grew over time into a hoary potboiler, in which Evil-merodach

256 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 81 257 Macbeth ed. John Dover Wilson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947) 140. 258 St. Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, V.32: “The Hebrews tell the following story. Evil-merodach, [cf. 2 Kings25:27-30; Jer 52:31], who had reigned earlier while his father Nebuchadnezzar was living for seven years among wild beasts [cf. Dan 4:32], after that one was restored in his kingdom, was in chains with Jehoiachin (Joachim), King of Judah, until the death of his father. When Nebuchadnezzar died, he again succeeded in the kingdom but was not accepted by the princes. They were afraid that he who was said to be deceased was still alive. In order to offer proof that his father was dead, he opened the grave and dragged out the corpse with a grappling iron and ropes.” Trans. Thomas P. Scheck (New Tork: The Newman Press, 2015).

147 guarantees Nebuchadnezzar could not return by feeding pieces of his body to one hundred vultures so that it could not be resurrected. Peter Comestor records this version of the story in his Historia Scholastica (1173), the most widely copied Biblical paraphrase in England in the late middle ages259:

Once he began to rule, he raised up Joachim, who had been his companion in prison, and since he feared his father, who had reverted from being an animal to a man, would resurrect, he consulted with Joachim, and at his advice exhumed the corpse of his father, divided it into three hundred parts, and gave them to three hundred vultures. And Joachim said to him, “Your father will not resurrect until these vultures reunite.”260 Reading Macbeth’s lines in light of this story is preferable for reasons of both language and character. Macbeth responds to the ghost throughout the scene with defiance and vain threats, so that it is natural to read “if… shall be the maws of kites” as a conditional imperative. Macbeth is threatening (more forcibly than Wilson claims) to order dead bodies fed to birds to stop the dead from returning. It also fits Macbeth’s motivation of maintaining his kingship. Just as Evil-merodach fears his father will repossess his kingship through resurrection, Macbeth sees Banquo’s appearance as an attempt to “push us from our stools” (3.4.81). The only way Macbeth imagines to secure his throne from other victims arising like Banquo is to exhume them as bird fodder, exchanging their monuments for the maws of kites.

If the image of feeding corpses to kites has in Macbeth the significance it appears to

259 Comestor’s use of Rabbinic tradition in his reading of the Old Testament is documented in a survey of Comsetor’s sources by James H. Morey, who points out that Comestor taught in Reyes at the same time as Rabbi Rashi. The Historia was widely disseminated in England in the late Middle Ages. Its study was required of all readers of theology at Oxford, while its glosses and paraphrases of biblical histories became the oral basis of a “popular bible,” informing English sermons, folklore, verse, and historiography until the Reformation. See “Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible,” Speculum, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan., 1993): 6-35. 260 “Cumque regnare coepisset, elevavit Ioachim, quem socium habuerat in carcere, timensque ne resurgeret pater suus, qui de bestia redierat in hominem, consuluit Ioachim. Ad cuius consilium cadaver patris sui effossum, divisit in trecentas partes, et dedit eas trecentis vulturibus. Et ait ad eum Ioachim: ‘Non resurget pater tuus, nisi redeant vultures in unum.’” Petrus Comestor, Historia Scholastica Daniel, (The Perfect Library, 2014) 10.

148 have, it is a modest hypothesis that it has the same value in Hamlet. Already in the

Hecuba Soliloquy, three scenes before he explicitly plans to kill Claudius’s soul, he desires such a vengeance upon his body as to thwart the body’s spiritual destiny. These words are among the blackest lines in all of Shakespeare.

It cannot be overemphasized that this is not only the first passage where Hamlet wishes his revenge on Claudius to go beyond the grave, but also the first time he accuses himself of delay. It has never to my knowledge been recognized as either; readers are taught to assume that the whole soliloquy is about delay, which has dogged Hamlet from the beginning, and that his interest in Claudius’s soul is a late-hatched idea, which emerges only in the prayer scene in “a baffling mixture of coincidence and compunction, where fate tempts and will is puzzled.”261 But the opposite is true. The seed of immortal vengeance is planted early, germinates, and shows its first growth here, in the accusation of delay. To construe Hamlet’s desires for haste and for eternal vengeance as opposing forces is a radical error.262 Both impulses arise in the same sentence, because they are born of the same spirit and are mutually interpreting. The wickedness of what Hamlet

261 Levin, The Question of Hamlet, 89 262 Frye gives a model example of this error, in commenting on Hamlet’s pause in the Prayer Scene: “A stereotyped revenger—and Hamlet’s most recent soliloquy makes him sound just like that—might have killed Claudius here without compunction. Shakespeare tantalizes his audience with the possibility that Hamlet will implacably slice Claudius into bits, just as the ‘baked and impasted’ Pyrrhus had done with helpless old Priam in the play for which Hamlet has earlier expressed such great admiration (2.2.440-506). But although Pyrrhus, after a moment of frozen indecision, again and again slashes away at his victim, Hamlet does not. If Hamlet had been allowed to re-enact Pyrrhus here, Shakespeare would thereby have killed not only his villain but also his hero and his play: the fascinating complexity of Hamlet’s characterization would have been negated, and the Prince reduced to a simple thing. And the play would have ended halfway through.” Frye does not recognize that Hamlet’s decision to wait and damn Claudius is not a withdrawal from the fantastic excess of Pyrrhus, but an enlargement of it. Hamlet moves beyond Pyrrhus’s hatred of the body after death to hatred for the soul. Frye is aware that “The depravity of the Prince at this point would have seemed evident from every point of view in 1600,” and yet he still takes Hamlet’s will to damn as a contrary principle to the mutilative revenge of Pyrrhus. He treats Hamlet’s blasphemy as a punctiliar error, “interjecting a false or temporary peripety in the character of the Prince” rather than expressing the culmination of his development. See Renaissance Hamlet, 194-6.

149 intends instantly impeaches his claim that he has not done it soon enough, while his insistence upon haste magnifies the terror of what he wants to do. There is irony that his desire for revenge beyond death later becomes a new, malicious reason for delay, but it is a dark irony indeed.

Recognizing the motive of eternal revenge within the Hecuba Soliloquy undermines the plot structure assumed in every traditional reading that finds that desire only in the

Prayer Scene. It is particularly fatal to Sr. Miriam Joseph’s reading, because her account of Hamlet’s sin depends on him failing in heroic charity only after he has fulfilled his duty in discerning the ghost. In fact, he rages against charity before he ever thinks to test the ghost at all. A complete absence of the discretio spirituum is the condition in which he first devises immortal revenge. The story is not that he succeeds in discretio but then fails in caritas, but that his failure in caritas poisons his discretio. When he does at last question the ghost, he can only do so through a distorted insight into his own conscience.

And the conscience of Hamlet is the true reason for his pause. He does not yet understand it explicitly, and he attempts to explain it away through self-vituperation.

Hamlet’s traditional interpreters take him at this word, repeat his error, and end in the same bafflement that he does; yet for an audience that knows Hamlet has been asked to do something evil, his contention with himself presents no special mystery. Hamlet feels put upon by filial affection and manly honor, yet even in his subjective certainty of

Claudius’ guilt, he cannot justify the morality of the demanded action. Even when he claims he is prompted “by heaven,” he immediately undermines it, adding, “and hell”

150

(580),263 repeating the confused blasphemy of his oath to take revenge “by heaven”

(1.5.93, 104), for which he now fears being given the lie (2.2.568-9). And so, in the face of a passionate desire to act from wrath, he feels, as anyone might, a good impulse to refrain; human nature forces him to acknowledge this impulse, but he does not want to acknowledge it as good. In short, he is thinking and acting exactly like a person who deeply longs to do what he knows is wrong.

Only after Hamlet “fall[s] a-cursing” (581) does his abjectness become so plain to him that he rebounds by turning to self-reflection. The text is thick with irony:

Whoa! What an ass am I! Ay, sure, this is most brave, That I, the son of a dear murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion! (2.2.576-582) The speech that began with Hamlet lambasting himself for not unpacking his heart with words ends with him to rebuking himself for achieving this goal, since the words once spoken prove base and terrible.

Now he begins to put his passions in check and to reason about his situation, saying,

“About, my brain” (582)! The moment he does so, he concocts the test of the play, and realizes that perhaps the Devil “abuses me to damn me” (598)! From the evidence of the first act and Hamlet’s degeneration throughout the soliloquy, this is no digression, but a belated observation of a truth so blatant that the line might even be meant to fetch a

263 In regards to “heaven and hell,” Kastan writes that “The copulative does not double the authorizing pressure; it cancels the essential difference between moral alternatives that is necessary for him to fulfill the ghost’s command.” A Will to Believe, 133-4. This is correct as to the meaning of the phrase, but it inverts the point of the line: that the essential difference between moral alternatives is necessary for Hamlet to deny the ghost’s command. The contradiction of heaven and hell is heard by the audience, but not Hamlet, who speaks as if it really were a double authorization, and moves in that confusion towards action. The source of Hamlet’s confusion is not an essential ambiguity in the nature of revenge, but his illicit oath to obey hell “by heaven.”

151 laugh. This delayed approach to reason leads directly to a concrete plan of action that

Hamlet can effect in the course of a day; and it prompts a clear resolution to act: “If he but blench,/I know my course” (593-94). The text provides no warrant that Hamlet’s need to test the ghost is either an antecedent or consequent justification for delay.264 It is a new train of thought, which partly rehabilitates Hamlet, moving his cause forward only.

Doubting the ghost is in itself an improvement, but his failure is to admit the doubt only halfway. He limits his testing of the ghost to establishing Claudius’s guilt, continuing to look away from the moral danger that his soliloquy has coarsely exposed.

From this, more ironies follow. First, Hamlet plots to “catch the conscience of the king” (601) with a play, yet he has himself just participated in a performance that mirrors his own revenge, been struck to the soul, and yet ultimately failed to confess. Second, by uttering the word “conscience” in the final line, Hamlet names, but fails to notice, the very reason for his pause that has lain implicit throughout the speech. That reason will become explicit in the following scene.

To Be or Not to Be

“To be, or not to be” is continuous with the Hecuba Soliloquy and functions as its second half. It occurs on the following day,265 but what chiefly separates it from the preceding speech is not the passage of time or a shift in Hamlet’s mood, turning from

264 Hanmer, who first posed the question of why Hamlet delays, also dismissed his need to test the ghost as a reason: “The Prince’s design of confirming by the Play, the Truth of what the Ghost told him is certainly well imagin’d; but as the coming of these Players is supposed to be accidental, it could not be a Reason for his Delay.” Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, 36-37. Hanmer does not consider that Hamlet’s pause actually begins after the players’ entrance, yet he rightly understands that the need to test the ghost in general has not been pressing on Hamlet’s mind, but occurs only after he has paused. 265 This can be deduced from the scheduling of The Mousetrap. Hamlet tells the player before the Hecuba Soliloquy, “We’ll ha’t tomorrow night” (2.2.535), while Rosincrance tells Claudius that the players “have already order/This night to play before him” (3.1.20-21).

152 revenge to reflection upon suicide, but a change in external circumstance: in the Hecuba

Soliloquy Hamlet is alone, while in “To be or not to be” he is overheard. Shakespeare breaks what could have been one speech into two, at a natural division point, to position

Claudius, Polonius, and Ophelia for the climactic confrontation.

Part of that positioning is Claudius’s aside that reveals his burdened conscience, strongly implying he is guilty of the murder (3.1.49-54). To include this aside is a surprising decision by Shakespeare, because it would seem more exciting theatrically to maintain suspense and let the audience discover the truth along with Hamlet in the following scene. Shakespeare’s choice is justified, however, because revealing Claudius’s guilt at this point makes inescapable the question of what Hamlet will do about it. In that respect, it increases the dramatic tension, and prepares the audience to hear the importance in Hamlet’s meditation as he enters. For while the soliloquy never specifically raises or resolves the question of revenge, it clarifies the conditions of the question and Hamlet’s answer. The audience has seen Hamlet tempted to kill, knows that his motive involves a grudge with fortune, and that Hamlet has resisted contemplating the moral danger of revenge. This prepares them to hear clearly in the speech what the spies onstage can only guess at, as Hamlet realizes, against his conclusion in the previous soliloquy, that more is at stake than the facticity of the ghost’s story:

To be, or not to be—that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. (3.1.56-60) It is not self-evident that “To be, or not to be” is about suicide, or even life and death per se, since neither the worldview of the play nor the argument of the soliloquy equates death with non-being; it is also not obviously about revenge. Rather, the question’s

153 meaning, and dramatic power, lies in its indefiniteness. On its own, “To be” carries no finite specification, whether of revenge, suicide, theft, or almsgiving; it does not even specify that the subject of “to be” is human. Being embraces all things, and is not reducible to any finite case. Hamlet’s act in the first line is to bring the ultimacy of his own predicament into resolution by taking an intellectual step away from himself, from all particularities and passions, to be confronted by unrestricted being in itself, and its negation, as the universal, formal principles of anything about which a double question might be asked.266 Only as he then argues his way forward through the speech does he introduce layers of determinacy, bringing himself by grades closer to his own, particular temptation.

This unqualified character of the question, in contrast to the greater definiteness of the speech it introduces, was first correctly explained in 1885 by the Scottish minister and fantasist George MacDonald:

Neither in its first verse, then, nor in it anywhere else, do I find even an allusion to suicide. What Hamlet is referring to in the said first verse, it is not possible with certainty to determine, for it is but the vanishing ripple of a preceding ocean of thought, from which he is just stepping out upon the shore of the articulate. He may have been plunged in some profound depth of the metaphysics of existence, or he may have been occupied with the one practical question, that of the slaying of his uncle, which has, now in one form, now in another, haunted his spirit for weeks. Perhaps, from the message he has just received, he expects to meet the king, and conscience, confronting temptation, has been urging the necessity of proof; perhaps a righteous consideration of consequences, which sometimes have share in the primary duty, has been making him shrink afresh from the

266 A “double question” is the Elizabethan term for what Aristotle called a “dialectical question,” which sets a thesis against its antithesis. Thomas Wilson explains that “Every Question is either Single or double. A single question resteth in a single word, as thus, What is friendship? What is philosophy? A doble question standeth not in one word, but in ii severall sentences, as thus, Is the study of Philosophy praise worthy, or is it not?” See The rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arts of Logique (London: John Kingston, 1561) 19, cf. Aristotle Topica, 104b1-105b9, 105a32-105b36. Wilson might not have approved of the indeterminacy of “To be or not to be,” as rhetoric since “the definite question (as the which concerneth some one person) is most agreeing to the purpose of an Orator,” while it belongs to the Logician to begin with the general. He would nonetheless have granted that “a generall question agreeth well to an Orators profession, and ought well to bee knowne for the better furtheraunce of his matter, notwithstanding the particular question is euer called in contouersie.” See The Arte of Rhetorique (1560), (Hiidenkirja, 2012) 21; cf. Aristotle Rhetorica, 1358b22-1360b3.

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shedding of blood, for every thoughtful mind recoils from the irrevocable, and that is an awful form of the irrevocable. But whatever thought, general or special, this first verse may be dismissing, we come at once thereafter into the light of a definite question: ‘Which is nobler—to endure evil fortune, or to oppose it à outrance; to bear in passivity, or to resist where resistance is hopeless—resist to the last—to the death which is its unavoidable end?’267 MacDonald’s explanation is not first because no one before him saw that Hamlet considers death from retaliation for taking arms. That reading dates at least to Samuel

Johnson in 1765 and has as old a pedigree as the suicidal interpretation;268 scholars were divided between those two theories for over a century before MacDonald; and published articles throughout that time show majority support for Johnson’s view.269 What makes

MacDonald first is that the framing of the debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries always assumed that Hamlet’s “To be” needed to be understood in terms of some determining predicate. The school of suicide took it to mean “To be alive or not to be alive,” while the school of revenge read it as “To be resisting wrong or not to be resisting wrong.”270 MacDonald uniquely realizes that the question is multivalent,

267 George MacDonald, The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A study with the text of the folio of 1623 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885) 124 268 This explanation goes at least as far back as Samuel Johnson, who writes that “Hamlet, knowing himself injured in the most enormous and atrocious degree, and seeing no means of redress, but such as must expose him to the extremity of hazard, meditates on his situation in this manner: Before I can form any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress, it is necessary to decide whether, after our present state, we are to be or not to be. That is the question, which, as it shall be answered, will determine, whether ’tis nobler, and more suitable to the dignity of reason, to suffer the outrages of fortune patiently, or to take arms against them. And by opposing end them, though perhaps with the loss of life.” The Plays of William Shakespeare: in eight volumes: with the corrections and illustration of various commentators, v. 8 (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1765) 207. Johnson’s edition is almost contemporary with William Guthrie’s An Essay on English Tragedy, (London, 1747), which is the first text to promote the suicide interpretation. 269 N.B. Allen provides a bibliography of the different critical positions on “To be or not to be” up to 1938 in “Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Soliloquy,” The Shakespeare Association Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 4 (October, 1938): 195-207. He divides commentators into two camps: “It appears to one group that ‘opposing’ is figurative and means ‘committing suicide’; and that ‘To die’ is in apposition with ‘end.’ The other group believes that ‘opposing’ indicates a literal conflict to end our troubles; and that ‘To die’ follows in Hamlet’s thought, because death usually comes to one who wages such a conflict.” Allen notes that the “active resistance” interpretation is more commonly taken by authors who argue directly for one or the other reading, while suicide holds the majority if one includes commentators who merely assume it and “have felt that the fact needs no demonstration” (195). 270 Allen, “To Be or Not to Be,” 195-6.

155 precisely because it intends no such determination. Certainly, Hamlet has a very particular problem before him, but his approach to it is universal: all he says at first is

“To be or not to be.” That is all that the audience hears, and all that the line means.

Prosser is more bold than MacDonald in finding a specific metaphysical doctrine in

“To be, or not to be.” In view of Hamlet’s question in the Fortinbras Speech, “What is a man?” (Q2 4.4.32), she takes “To be or not to be” as a Boethian inquiry into what perfections are entailed by human nature. From the contrast of “to take arms” and “in the mind to suffer,” she situates that inquiry within the conflict between the medieval,

Augustinian preference for the contemplative life and the voluntarism of the humanists:

To medieval theology, rooted in Augustine, man had no being in and of himself; man only is because he is created by God in His own image. Thus man defined himself in terms of what he believed; his proper function according to his “nature” was obedience to divine law. But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries new voices were raised, notably those of the Florentine humanists. Can man fulfill his given nature, can he attain true nobility, solely by withdrawal and contemplation? The focus of the attack was a statement, traditionally ascribed to Anaxagoras, that man was born to contemplate divine works. On the contrary, said Salutati and Alberti, among others: man is born to be useful to man. He fulfils his nature by thinking, choosing, and acting usefully in the world. … If moreover, the will is superior to the intellect, as Salutati and Charron asserted, then man’s dignity depends on the freedom of that will. His very “being” depends on his exercising the freedom to choose. But can a man “be” if he retreats into passive resignation, if he refuses to struggle with issues, to make his free choices, and to act on his own initiative? The medieval mind, of course, would answer that man finds his self- identity, his “being,” only in obedience to divine law. Those who “wittingly and willingly forsake goodnesse” cease “even to be at all. For they which leave the common end of all things which are, leave also being.” Thus it follows that a man who refuses to follow the dictates of virtue “ceaseth to be a man, since he cannot be partaker of the Divine condition, [and] is turned into a beast.”271 Prosser’s reading leans on the assumption that “in the mind” modifies “to suffer,” as opposed, or in addition to, the usual view that it modifies “nobler.” She gives no special defense for this reading, but is probably correct. Douglas Bruster makes a case for it with a schema that coordinates the distinct clauses in the speech’s first lines:

whether ’tis nobler

271 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 162

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in the mind to suffer to take arms against a the slings and arrows or sea of troubles, and by of outrageous fortune opposing, end them.272 The tension between the halves of the schema is striking. It poises “arms” against “mind” and “take arms against” to “suffer.” “Slings and arrows,” and “sea of troubles” are paired as symbols of Fortune; “outrage” is the object that Fortune makes us suffer, while the alliterative “opposing” is the motive to take arms against her.

If “in the mind” modifies “suffer,” it supports an argument over the primacy of intellect or will, but it does not rule out attributing “in the mind” to “nobler” as well. That reading is also acceptable, but requires a caveat. If “nobler in the mind” is intended, it does not follow that the question is about subjective value. More likely, “in” means “on the part of,” as when Claudius says, “’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature…”

(1.2.85). Hamlet is asking if a mind that favors sufferance is nobler than one that wills opposition. In the same scene, Ophelia also considers the nobility in the mind as the foundation of its judgments, saying, “to the noble mind/Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind,” and at last lamenting, “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown”

(3.1,151)! Nobility as a quality of mind, not a construct of it, is at issue. If we accept the full range of likely meanings in the second question, Hamlet is asking: “In the face of evil fortune, does the noble mind judge it nobler to suffer in the mind or oppose with the arm?”

Prosser’s account of the underlying metaphysics is correct in one crucial respect, but mistaken in another. She is correct that Hamlet appeals to the identity of being and the good. “To be” is an unqualified notion, but not a brute datum incapable of analysis. It is

272 Douglas Bruster, To Be Or Not To Be, (New York: Continuum, 2007) 17

157 existence taken as the actuality of an essence, and the perfections demanded by that essence. That Shakespeare knew the distinction of esse and essentia is clear from The

Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Valentine casts them as male and female lovers:

Unless I look on Sylvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon; She is my essence, and I leave to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster’d, illumin’d, cherish’d, kept alive. I fly not death, to fly this deadly doom: Tarry I here, I but attend on death: But, fly I hence, I fly away from life. (2 Gent. 3.1.181-188) Valentine like Hamlet sees his existence as the act of an essence. A hint of the same thinking occurs in Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio says, “Now art thou sociable; now art thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature” (R&J 2.4.89-91), implying that Romeo’s accidents, possessed by art, are perfective of him in terms of quiddity, when they coincide with the right operations of his nature. In other places,

Shakespeare is even more direct, using non-being simply to denote evil, as when Iago declares his villainy saying, “I am not what I am” (Oth 1.1.64). Even more plainly coincident with “To be or not to be,” as Prosser observes,273 is Macbeth’s aside after meeting the Weïrd Sisters:

Macbeth This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good; if ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart to knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is but what is not. (Mac.1.3.143-55)

273 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 164n

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St. Thomas teaches that Ipsum … esse habet rationem boni,274 and Valentine’s use of

“to be” to denote esse, suggests Shakespeare may have known his metaphysics from

Latin sources. But the most proximate influence for Hamlet’s metaphysics, available to

Shakespeare in English and Latin, is certainly Boethius. The central argument Lady

Philosophy makes in De Consolatione, to overcome Boethius’s despair at outrageous fortune, is that goodness is identical with being and the one, and therefore superior in all respects to evil, particularly in its power, even when evil appears to thrive. In the passage of De Consolatione immediately following the very text Edgar quotes in King Lear,

Philosophy concludes from the convertibly of being and the good that wicked men fall below their nature:

For thou hast learne a litle before that every thyng that is, is one. And the same one, is good, so the consequence of the same is, that everything that is certes the same semethe to be good. Therefore by this means, what soeuer thynge fayleth and is not good, it cessyth to be, or it is not. Whereby it comethe to passe that euyll folke cesseth to be the same that they were. But the same other fourme of manes body sheweth yet that wycked folke, haue been men, and certes beyng turnyd into malyce of wyckednes, they haue lost the nature of man.275 This is precisely the reading of “What is a man?” and Hamlet’s fear of becoming “a beast, no more” (Q2 4.4.32-34) that Prosser finds explicitly in the Fortinbras Speech, and implicitly in “To be or not be.”

Where Prosser is mistaken is that she does not realize with MacDonald that “To be” is unrestricted in the opening line. She transfers “What is a man?” into “To be or not to be” in a restrictive way, which excludes other meaning and possibilities. She firmly pronounces that “‘To be or not to be’ cannot be suicide.”276 This implicitly assumes that

274 Aquinas, De veritate, q. 21, a. 2, co.; cf. ST I, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1; De malo, q.1, a. 1, Summa contra gentiles, I, 37 275 Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, 4.p.3; Colville, 96-97 276 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 159

159 the logical relationship between the first line and the following four is that the latter explain the former by defining it univocally. In effect, Hamlet is reformulating the same question, first in obscure terms and then more plainly. But Hamlet does something subtly different, and profoundly better. The pair of questions he poses in the first five lines is not univocally one, but analogous. Their coordination implies an analogy of proper proportionality, whereby “to be” is predicated proportionally of “to suffer,” with the negation of “to be” predicated proportionately of “to oppose.”277 The metaphysical proportion that underwrites Hamlet’s proportionate naming is that as absolute esse is to itself, so pati to its own act, because being founds sufferance, while the denial of that foundation is the basis of opposition. Provided that the analogy is true, then as applied to mental natures, including human, it yields the moral metaphysics of Prosser’s Boethian reading. Yet it does not compromise the unlimited concept of “to be” in the first line, and instead depends upon it. The true direction of Hamlet’s logic is that “To be or not to be” explains “To suffer or to oppose,” not the other way around. It is the question, because it is the prime analogate and regulative principle into which every question resolves. “We

277 On the analogy of being as an analogy of proper proportionality, see Steven Long, Analogia Entis, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) 39-95. There is a famous controversy among Thomists as to whether analogy in St. Thomas is primarily, or exclusively, a logical doctrine or a metaphysical one. Central to the debate is a systematic elision of the logical and metaphysical orders in Cajetan’s interpretation of St. Thomas in his Analogia Nominum. Cajetan claims that only the analogy of proper proportionality is analogy in its proper sense, for only in such analogy does the order of naming correspond to the order of existence—defining a term of logic by its relation to metaphysics. My own position in this debate follows that of John Mortensen in Understanding St. Thomas on Analogy, (CreateSpace 2010). He argues that the simple, lexical meaning of “analogy” in St. Thomas’s usage is nothing more or less than “proportion,” a valid concept in both logic and metaphysics. On this basis, Mortensen distinguishes the analogia nominum from the analogia entis, but says that while both doctrines are taught by St. Thomas, he only uses the word “analogy” in reference to the former. Although the principles of logic derive from an apprehension of being, it is an error to confuse proportion in logic and proportion in metaphysics. Proportion itself is found distinctly in either science, although the order of an analogy in speech can follow the order of real, metaphysical proportion. That is what happens in Hamlet. This does not tell us, of course, how Shakespeare understood analogy, but it does tell us why “To be or not to be” rings true.

160 are all in a drama of existence,” Hamlet tells us, “and being itself is at stake.” The question for him, just as for Valentine, is not between life and death, but between the way of life and the way of death. The difference between them is as great as to be or not to be.

Hamlet’s inquiry throughout the soliloquy is entirely speculative, but it entails a practical problem, because the way of death lives up to its name. Opposing troubles as vast as a sea is a doomed enterprise, and it is also implicit, as a genre assumption in revenge tragedy, that “a shedder of blood must not live.”278 This implication is not obvious to all modern ears, but may have been to Elizabethans. Most modern Westerners have not seen and pondered the oceanic depictions of Fortune in European art, and very few have seen a public hanging. But an audience for whom these were familiar things may have had a more immediate apprehension of death as the price of violence.

Shakespeare seems to assume such an apprehension in a passage from Romeo and Juliet:

Mer. Come, come, thou art as hot as a Jack in the mood as any in Italy; and as soon moved to be moody, and as soon moody to be moved. Ben. And what to? Mer. Ay, and there were two such, we should have none shortly for one would kill the other. (R&J 3.1.11-16) At first hearing, the final line may seem confusing, because if one fellow kills the other, we should have one shortly, not none. The joke depends on assuming the killer will be executed without mentioning it. In “To be or not to be,” Shakespeare may be counting on the same audience, who could understand Mercutio’s joke quickly enough to laugh on the punchline, to make the same inference. It may have seemed natural to him, and preferable to weighing down the speech with an unnecessarily direct statement, which might,

278 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 94. Bowers cites Gen 9:6, Exod 21:12 as sources for the theatrical tradition that “no revenger, no matter how just, ever wholly escapes the penalty for shedding blood even in error.”

161 moreover, reveal too much to Claudius.

The prospect of imminent death prompts a third question, about the consequences of moral acts in eternity: to sleep, no more, or perchance to dream. This question is also analogous to the first, predicating “to be” of the sleep of the blessed and “not to be” of the nightmares of the damned. It is unlikely that Hamlet is pondering whether the mind exists after death. If he were, “perchance to dream” would be an infelicitous choice of words, since it could not be a question of chance, but of necessity.279 For chance to differentiate the two possible states, they must both be real, contingent possibilities, both compatible with the nature of death. Hamlet is not considering whether death is quiet and whether death is dreams, but when death is quiet and when death is dreams.

He begins with mere sleep:

To die: to sleep— No more. And by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. (60-64) There is no suggestion here that death is annihilation, and the text would have caused no theological discomfort for Elizabethans. Such language aligns with Biblical descriptions of death as rest, and was a staple of Elizabethan sermons.280 Kastan cites one sermon by

John Jewell as particularly illustrative of what Hamlet is saying:

But why may not christians mourn, and continue in heaviness? Because it is no new thing for a man to die, because he goeth the way of all flesh. Again, they that leave this life are not dead; they are not gone for ever, as the heathen imagined; they are laid down to take rest quietly for a time. The death of a godly man is nothing else but a sleep. So saith our Saviour of Lazarus, John xi. Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; howbeit Jesus spake of his death. So it is said of Stephen, Acts vii. And they stoned Stephen, who called on God, and said, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud

279 Aristotle, Physica, 196b10-13: “First then we observe that some things always come to pass in the same way, and others for the most part. It is clearly of neither of these that chance is said to be the cause, nor can the ‘effect of chance’ be identified with any of these things that come to pass by necessity and always, or for the most part.” 280 Kastan, A Will to Believe, 125, 138.

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voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge; and when he had thus spoken, he slept. Whosoever dieth in peace of conscience, he may say, I will lie down and take my rest. Thus doth the man of God repose himself; for Christ is advantage unto him, both in life and in death. He saith with the Apostle, John xiv. Whether we live we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord; whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. He goeth into his grave as into a bed; he forsaketh his life, as if he lay down to sleep. He shall shake off his sleep, rouse himself, and rise again.281 “Nothing else but a sleep” is not far removed from “to sleep,/No more,” but the sleep

Jewell means is not dreamless in the sense of being mindless, but of being untroubled, because of a clear conscience. It is Macbeth’s “innocent Sleep;/Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care” (Mac. 2.2.35-6), which he murders and comes to suffer “these horrible dreams that shake us nightly” (3.2.18-19). Macbeth’s conscience is even haunted by the same three words as Hamlet, reversed in their meaning by different punctuation, but in service of the same theme: “Sleep no more” (2.2.34-5, 40-42)!282

The usual reading of this passage is that if death’s nature were merely sleep, it would be highly desirable; this implies that Hamlet would desire it. Hamlet, however, is saying that when death chances to be sleep, it is relief from the burdens that flesh inherits from

Adam—but only for the pious, that is, those who will “to be” in a spirit of conscientious sufferance; this implies that Hamlet does not rightly desire it. The decisive word is

“devoutly.” Kastan rightly objects to The Oxford English Dictionary listing this line as the first known occurrence of “devoutly” to mean “ardently,” apart from the specifically religious sense of devotion.283 If that were true, it is a hapax legomenon not only for

281 John Jewell, “On the First Epistle to the Thessalonians,” in Writings of John Jewell, Bishop of Salisbury, (London: W. Clowes, 18-?) 152-3 282 On the role of conscience in sleeping, dreaming, and haunting in Shakespeare and in Hamlet, see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 164-95. 283 Kastan, A Will to Believe,

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Shakespeare,284 but for the recorded English language prior to his writing,285 and so a secular interpretation of the term requires weighty substantiation from its context. Yet the overarching religious concerns of the play, the discussion of life after death, the Adamic suggestion of flesh as “heir” to worldly suffering, and the proximity of “devoutly” to a theologically provocative word like “consummation” point to it having a theological meaning. Kastan, though he takes the speech to be about suicide, comes close to pinning down why the word is crucial. He says that since the Everlasting has “fixed/his canon

’gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.130), there is something distinctly non-devout in wishing for such a consummation. Fascinated as he is by religious ambiguities in Shakespeare, especially those that seem insoluble, Kastan does not attempt to rectify this problem, but allows it to stand as one of the play’s paradoxes:

In committing himself to the Ghost—“thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain”—Hamlet claims to be free of the binding nature of the sixth commandment. But in the soliloquy the ambiguous adverb, “devoutly,” must prompt an unnerving flicker of thought that such a consummation might not be so devoutly wished, and so Hamlet turns back to the exercise, returning to the equation: “To die: to sleep.”286

284 Shakespeare uses “devout” or “devoutly” in ten other instances. Seven refer unambiguously to religious persons and actions (Rich III, 3.7.92, Hen V. 1.1.9, R&J, 1.2.91, Troilus 2.3.29, Oth. 3.4.42, Hen. VIII 4.1.100) including one reference to “devout desires” as preparation for a holy death (K. John 5.4.49). The other three are figurative references to cowardice (TwN. 3.4.369) and doting (MND 1.1.111), and a negative expression distinguishing devout behavior from merriment (LLL 5.2.821), all of which presuppose the theological sense of “devout” as matter for hyperbole or contrast. 285 OED lists one other example contemporary to Shakespeare, the italicized portion of this text from William Camden’s Remaines Concerning Britain, 1605, p.458: “His devout minde to his Lady he devoutly, though not religiously shewed, which under Venus in a cloud changed the usual prayer into SALVA ME DOMINA.” The text refers to Sir Philip Sidney’s courtly habit of making devices and impresses for Queen Elizabeth, to keep in her bedroom or on her person. One of these, whether by Sidney or another, depicted her as Venus seated on a cloud with the caption, “Salva me Domina.” (Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, July 3, 1852, 11-12) It is to this quasi-cultic attitude towards the Queen that “devoutly, though not religiously” refers. This is a better example of the secular sense of “devoutly” than in Hamlet, yet even here the text plays upon a presumed religious meaning, by first repeating “devout[ly]” twice, building it up to deflate it afterwards by saying that Sydney was pious to his Lady only in outward form (devout), but this did not involve the substance of Christian worship (religion). OED gives no other example until 1796. 286 Kastan, A Will to Believe, 138. Baldwin as well sees “perchance to dream” as prompted by fear of damnation for suicide, though he does not see how “devoutly” functions in the transition. See Small Latine, vol. 2, 601-8.

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Kastan falls short by using the term “ambiguous” and limiting its effects to an unnerving flicker. If it were ambiguous, Hamlet could brush past it; the clarity of the word is what erects the barrier. Whatever general appeal the idea of death as peaceful sleep may have, once it leads him to specify devoutness as the requirement to will this rest, he recognizes an impediment. One who wishes ardently for peaceful sleep while performing deeds of blood does not wish for it devoutly, and so this rest is not for him. So Hamlet turns to consider another potential fortune, of which he predicates “not to be”:

To die: to sleep— To sleep: perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life. (3.1.64-69) If one believes that the speech is about suicide, it is easy to take “mortal coil” to mean the body, especially if one reads in a Platonic dualism in which the body is a fetter for the soul. Most editors take it to mean the body, but Jenkins breaks ranks to point out that the literal, nautical meaning of “coil”—a rope tied around something, or in this case someone—suggests a metaphor for “all the appurtenances, occupations, and experiences of mortal life,” and not “anything so simple as the body.”287 In addition to the metaphor,

Hamlet’s argument supports Jenkins, since his contention is with the external predicaments of outrageous, strumpet fortune, and with “The whips and scorns of time.”

This does not exclude the body, since “heartache,” “shocks,” “pangs,” and the inheritance of “flesh” are all bodily, but Hamlet refers the body’s pangs to their external causes, which “coil” around a man. Flesh is the term, but external contingencies are the principle of human suffering; man suffers in Adam’s flesh, but from without. Hamlet, therefore,

287 Jenkins, Hamlet, 278-9 n67

165 has more reason to consider taking arms against the external circumstances of the flesh than against the flesh itself, as the suicidal reading would prefer.

The word “pause,” following the pattern of the Hecuba Soliloquy, refers immediately not to hesitance in acting, but in speaking. The speech from which Hamlet says we must pause is “To say we end the heartache,” for the sleep of dreams is the exact opposite.

Following the inability to say this, comes an inability to act in the face of death:

There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life, For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely , The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? (68-76) To read the final clause (75-6) as a contemplation of suicide is possible upon—but not necessitated by—two assumptions: that quietus means death; and that “who” (70) is the antecedent to the pronouns, “he himself” and “his” (75). The first assumption is the safer of the two. “Quietus” is an accounting term derived from “quietus est” or “he is quit.” It means literally “a discharge or acquittance given on payment of sums due, or clearing of accounts.”288 In the transaction of bonds, the debtor receives his quietus from a creditor or exchequer upon payment of accounts. Since death itself is a clearing of accounts, “the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries” (5.1.104-5), a man might indeed make his settlement by killing himself. Yet he might also do it by killing his creditor and taking the consequences. Such a metaphor could work in two ways. Hamlet might simply mean that shortening one’s life by killing one’s creditor is a quittance from

288 OED

166 one’s debt. On the other hand, he might mean it is the creditor who gets his quietus. This is possible if the pronouns “he himself” and “his” have different antecedents, namely,

“patient merit” and “the unworthy.” The mere inclusion in the speech of the phrase

“patient merit,” with its Latin root of pati, signals that Shakespeare views sufferance rather than opposition as the true moral value constituted by “to be.” Hamlet’s list of life’s troubles, with differing degrees of proximity to his own condition, ends by personifying the very virtue the soliloquy aims to evaluate. Perhaps that personification extends into the text line, since a debtor in need of a quietus must suffer to make payment to an unworthy. Hamlet is saying that if patient merit did not fear death, he would not

“take” spurns of the unworthy, but “make” a quietus for him. By treating the act of opposing fortune as a reversal of the expected relationship between debtor and creditor,

Hamlet echoes Macbeth when he says, “I’ll… take a bond of fate” (4.1.82-3).

But “the dread of something after death” (F1 3.1.78) hinders this from happening. As patient merit’s fear results in a puzzled will that would “rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of” (82), Hamlet realizes and directly states the true, underlying reason for his pause:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. (83-8) These are not the lines of a man whose mind is wandering disgustedly into oblivion. This is the dawning of an understanding that has evaded Hamlet throughout the play. For

Hamlet to murder Claudius in revenge is to do the very thing that Laertes will declare that he does in his own revenge, to “dare damnation” (4.1.130).

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A question that must not be avoided is how far Shakespeare approves of the theology in “To be or not to be,” and how far we should as well. The soliloquy has become so hallowed in the Western canon, that it seems almost impolite even to raise this question.

McGee is uniquely cavalier in both raising it and in rejecting the speech entirely: that

Hamlet contemplates damnable acts at all renders the soliloquy vicious.289 This is overly harsh, since it is difficult to dramatize any temptation without allowing the character to consider it. Prosser gives a reason to judge the soliloquy more favorably, contrasting it to the speeches of other stage revengers:

Hamlet is facing the moral question that has too long been thought irrelevant to the play: whether or not he should effect private revenge. This fact has been obscured only because Shakespeare delves below the familiar platitudes. Hamlet does not ask the more obvious question: “Should I defy Heaven’s injunction?” Instead he asks, “Can a man find his true self-identity by obeying an ethic of passivity?” To lesser playwrights the ethical issue had been obvious. Revenge was immoral and therefore their revengers openly choose to defy morality. Shakespeare creates in Hamlet a man who questions the familiar assumption. He does not ask, “Shall I or shall I not do an evil act?” but “Is this act truly evil?” The question is much more profound than that posed by Heironimo or Titus.290 The excellence of Hamlet’s question is not, however, an imprimatur for the entire speech. The purpose of “To be or not to be” is not to show the audience that conscience is restraining Hamlet. The Hecuba Soliloquy has already done that. The speech is to show

Hamlet alone discovering this fact, and much of its interest lies in how his personal way of coming to know it departs from authentic, Christian discernment. For that purpose, the most revealing word in the concluding section is not “conscience” but “cowards.” That

Hamlet attributes cowardice, a moral vice, to conscience itself reveals that something dreadfully wrong has happened in the soliloquy, and this must be investigated.

A missing element in the eschatology of “To be or not to be” is the theological virtue

289 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 97-103 290 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 160

168 of hope. There is a glimmer of it only in “devoutly to be wished.” Otherwise the controlling attitude to divine judgment is fear. This is not an oversight, and Shakespeare probably wrestled with it, since the Q1 version actually does make hope the centerpiece:

For in that dream of death, when we’re awaked And borne before an everlasting judge From whence no traveler ever returned,— The undiscovered country, at whose sight The happy smile and the accursed damned. But for this, the joyful hope of this, Who’d bear the scorns and flattery of the world—… Who would this endure But for the hope of something after death Which puzzles the brain and doth confound the sense Which makes us rather bear those evils that we have Than fly to others which we know not of? (Q1 7.118-124, 131-133) Between this and the Q2 and F1 versions is a seismic shift, which could not have been made lightly. In the first is an expansive hope, which comprehends even the fear of damnation. In the later versions, the failure to wish devoutly for rest leads to an incomplete servile fear directed at punishment only,291 but without turning a man to God, since at last it excludes hope: “but that the dread…” (F1 3.1.78). The result of the change is to depict Hamlet emphatically as a man in despair. It is, after all, his initial despair that

“It is not nor it cannot come to good” (1.2.156) that makes him a slave to his melancholy passions and a victim of a ghost. The same despair emerges in “To be or not to be” to mar his discernment of his conscience.

Unable to accept that the “sterile promontory” (2.2.298) of the earth is ordered intelligibly to the good, Hamlet perceives himself in strife not with the will of God, but with blind Fortune, with chance. Without hope, the world to come signifies only fear, and

291 St. Thomas distinguishes servile fear from filial fear in ST II-II, q. 19, a. 2, co. as a fear of punishment which turns a man to God: “Si igitur aliquis convertatur ad Deum et ei inheareat propter timor poenae erit timor servilix. Si autem propter timorem culpae, erit timor filialis, nam filiorum est timere offensam patris.” See also q 22, a. 2.

169 since he shrinks from this fear, he judges every man of conscience, heretically, to be a coward. If hope in heaven were the controlling principle, if the ghost had taught the joys of Purgatory, he might not have reached this verdict. He might have concluded that suffering is heroic. Instead, he vituperates conscience on the same grounds as Richard III:

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls. Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe. Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law. (RIII 5.3.324-7) Thus the path is paved from “obstinate condolement” (F1 1.2.91) to villainy.

The discovery of conscience and the claim that it makes us all cowards bring Hamlet to the doorway of decision, but he still judges in universal terms, with no particular determination about himself. His conclusion implicitly argues for action, but a fully particular decision will not come before he is interrupted by an opportunity for grace.

Realizing he has spoken too loudly—according to the vehemence of the closing lines—he hushes himself: “Soft you now,/The fair Ophelia” (3.1.88-9)!

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VII: The Judge of Israel

I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. -Macbeth 1.7.55-60

Before proceeding to Hamlet’s dialogue with Ophelia, a question raised about the previous scene must here be repeated. What has become of Hamlet’s book? There is evidence that he is still holding it. In Q1, Hamlet gives “To be or not to be” at his entrance in Scene 7 (equivalent to 2.2 in F1 and Q2); it is followed by his scene with

Ofelia, and only then by his dialogues with Corambis (Q1’s Polonius) and with

Rossencraft and Gilderstone. This alternate order creates difficulties for the development of Hamlet’s character, but the continuity of the three interviews gives a clue for reading his conversation with Ophelia. With all the dialogues in a single scene, the book must be present for all of them; and so, as Hamlet enters to deliver “To be or not to be,” the King says, “See where he comes, poring upon a book” (Q1 7.110), making explicit that the

“most vile heresy” (217) he reads to Corambis is also in his hand when he meets Ofelia.

The audience is not given to know what, if any, real book Hamlet is reading,292 but

292 The most likely candidates for what book Hamlet might be reading are the Satires of Juvenal or a rhetoric textbook containing set topics for academic dispute, among which he finds “To be or not to be.” Both are reasonable, neither compelling. The case for Juvenal is that the author is a “satirical rogue,” while Juvenal’s Satire X contains a passage about elderly infirmity that Hamlet could be summarizing for Polonius. See Baldwin, Small Latine, vol. 2, 526-8. Leaving aside the problem that the Hamlet’s reading only vaguely resembles Juvenal, there is little reason Hamlet should dub him a slanderer, since Juvenal was a serious moralist; the passage about old men is not written to ridicule them, but to prove the folly of the young. He argues that youths who ask the gods for long life do not know if they are praying well. The rhetoric book seems likely, because it accounts for the either/or form of the question, as well as the soliloquy’s structured rhetorical form as a disputatio in utram partem: “The speech begins by an explicit

171

Hamlet reveals enough about its character by calling it a work of slanders. In Elizabethan thought, slander is a preeminently demonic sin. It is the speech of envy, and almost a synonym for it, since both are malice against another’s good. Envy, which like “Etna in a man, that continually burns itself, intus et extra,”293 hate beholding some good person and so rejoices by harming that person’s name. For instance, Iago’s inner envy of Cassio, for “a daily beauty in his life/That makes me ugly” (Oth 5.1.19-20), motivates him to wound his reputation. Cassio’s lament that when he loses his reputation he has lost “the immortal part of myself” (2.3.259-60) is not the vanity of a boastful soldier, but sound moral philosophy, for this reason: Elizabethan moralists had highly aesthetic sensibilities about honor. They understood the loss of the glory proper to virtue as a wound to virtue itself, and thus to the soul. Spenser’s personification of Sclaunder represents the standard view:

Her words were not, as common words are ment, T’expresse the meaning of the inward mind, But noysome breath, and poysnous spirit sent From inward parts, with cancred malice lind, And breathed forth with blast of bitter wind; Which passing through the eares, would pierce the hart, And wound the soule it selfe with griefe vnkind: For like the stings of Aspes, that kill with smart, Her spightfull words did pricke, & wound the inner part.294

statement of its general idea, stated in both the affirmative and the negative as, according to Aristotle, a proper question should be. It represents the res or subject matter upon which Shakespeare will works his variations, in terms of both affinity and opposition.” Martion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 58. But Hamlet does not need a book to pose the question in this way, and the theory fails like the other to account for why Hamlet deems it a book of satire and slander. It is also incongruous that after Hamlet swears to the ghost to “wipe away all saws of books” he then takes up an old academic text from Wittenberg. In his frame of mind, we should expect him to favor a novel and unorthodox work, as the text gives every indication he does. The same objections obtain for the theory that he is reading Cicero’s Disputationes Tusculanae or a related work of consolatory literature such as Cardan’s Comforte. 293 Thomas Middleton, The Peacemaker, quoted in Joyce H. Sexton The Slandered Woman in Shakespeare, (Victoria: ELS Editions, 1978) 25. 294 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1590, 4.8.26. On Spenser’s treatment of slander, see M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 34-63, also Sexton, Slandered Woman, 27-39

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This account of slander was a major theme in Renaissance moral allegory. Long before Spenser, writers would personify slander, envy, detraction, ill report, and so forth, as evil demons and Vices.295 At the same time, a whole genre of narrative and dramatic literature emerged exploring the same truth through stories of slandered women. A common plot type, modeled on Susana and the Elders in Daniel 13,296 would tell of a noble, Christ-like woman, who is slandered to her lover for unchastity by a diabolical villain, but later vindicated. The Satanic slanders in the Faerie Queen, committed by

Archimago, Ate and Duessa, and the Blatant Beast exemplify this formula.297

Shakespeare’s own contributions to the genre are substantial. It is was “the only type- story that he used as the main plot of four different plays”298: Much Ado About Nothing,

Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. The plots in these plays follow a distinct pattern, in which the female protagonist is slandered by a villain, dies or appears to die as a result, but is then exonerated, and returns to life. Whether the resurrections are figurative (Hero, Imogen) or literal (Hermione, Desdemona, though the latter has only a brief revival), the poet’s languages treats them as real. As Hero is seemingly “Done to death by slanderous tongues” (Much Ado 5.3.3), Leonato interprets her return from hiding as an actual resurrection: “She died, my lord, but whiles her slander liv’d”

(5.4.69). Imogen interprets herself simply as one who “was dead” (Cym 5.5.259). These resurrections have a clearly Christian connotation, since Jesus himself died under false accusations inspired by the devil, and “slanderer” is among the primary meanings of the

295 Sexton, Slandered Woman, 16-27 296 Sexton shows significant parallels in plot and theme between Shakespeare’s Much Ado and Thomas Garter’s Susanna (1578). See Slandered Woman, 39-49. 297 Sexton surveys these and other works on the subject of slander in Slandered Woman, 11-38. 298 Sexton, Slandered Woman, 11

173

Greek διαβολός.

The significance this holds for the dialogue with Ophelia begins with a simple, visual juxtaposition: Ophelia appears holding a book of prayers, while Hamlet carries slanders.

Their opposite texts, charity in her hand and “cancred malice” in his, bespeak a difference in their souls, and imply a danger to her. When Laertes cautions Ophelia about Hamlet’s love, his chief concern is not to protect her from a loss of virtue, but to guard her reputation. “Virtue itself,” he tells her, “’scapes not calumnious strokes” (F1 1.3.38). The prudence of this counsel is demonstrated when Ophelia’s first on-stage meeting with

Hamlet finds him holding a book of calumnies.

The threat Hamlet presents to Ophelia is counterpoised by the hope she offers to him.

The soliloquy has brought him to a crisis, but not a decision. He is at a persuadable moment, when he might receive an offer of grace, and the sight of Ophelia praying in the beauty of holiness is just such an offer, to him who needs it de profundis. And so he greets her with a request for her intercession:

Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered. (3.1.87-89) The concluding line of “To be or not to be” is not, as Prosser claims, a decision to act, but a motion towards salvation. It is the abject, plaintive cry for help of a man on the brink of damning himself. For the right actor, it would not excessive for Hamlet to grovel before

Ophelia, like a supplicant at the feet of Lady Fortune.

But his cry goes unanswered; for Ophelia is not as she appears, and the prayer book is a ruse. She is not reading it for devotion, but because her father gave it to her to make

Hamlet believe their meeting is by chance. Polonius himself compares it to a trick of the

Devil, in the very line that prompts Claudius’s confessional aside. He laments that such a

174 trick is often blameworthy even as he instructs Ophelia to perform it:

Read on this book That show of such an exercise may colour Your loneliness. We are oft too blame in this— ’Tis too much proved that with devotion’s visage And pious action we do sugar o’er The devil himself. (44-49) Now when Claudius and Gertrude encourage Ophelia to help overhear Hamlet, they claim it is an honorable action for charitable reasons (28-42), with the King and Polonius acting as “lawful espials” (32). The traditional verdict that Ophelia is a pure innocent would be defensible on that basis, were it not that Polonius goes further to involve her in a lie. While the play has credited Ophelia’s virtue of obedience to her father (1.3.136,

2.2.106), her obedience in this sin is her hamartia. Since her “exercise” is a “show,” she is not prepared for Hamlet’s request for prayer, and her canned response fails to even register his need: “Good my lord,/How does your honor for this many a day” (3.1.90-91)?

Rebuffed, Hamlet conceals what he was beginning to disclose with a lie of his own: “I humbly thank you, well, well, well” (92). She then gives him no blessings from the hand holding the prayer book, but like Fortuna bifrons gives him buffets from the other hand:

Oph. My lord, I have remembrances of yours That I have longed long to redeliver. I pray you now receive them. Ham. No, no. I never gave you aught. Oph. My honoured lord, I know right well you did, And with them words of so sweet breath composed As made the things more rich. Then, perfume lost, Take these again, for to the noble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. (3.1.93-101) Ophelia indeed “remembers” Hamlet’s sins, but not in the sense he requested, and not as he expects from a person at true devotion. The “remembrances” she gives him are instead a rebuke, which she “prays” him to receive. Snubbed by the face of a saint, Hamlet’s response grows from denial to suspicion. He questions Ophelia about her beauty and her

175

“honesty,” in the double sense of truthfulness and chastity. Since her failure to pray has revealed a deception, he now finds a rift between these attributes:

For the power of Beauty will sooner transform Honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of Honesty can translate Beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. (111-115) The superior power of beauty to corrupt honesty “was sometime a paradox.” This invites a question seldom asked: when was it a paradox? “Sometime” gives little information, but the book in Hamlet’s hand supplies the answer. The term “paradox” in

Elizabethan usage means not only a fallacy in logic, but any proposition “contrary to received opinion or expectation.”299 In this sense, Hamlet’s book of slanders or heresies is a book of paradoxes.300 He is saying—as an actor holding the book could indicate by gesture—that the opposition of beauty and honesty is among the slanders he has read from the satirical slave. Hamlet first held this teaching to be “not honesty,” but now finds it proven in experience.

When the exposure of Ophelia’s false appearance confirms the slanders, Hamlet rejects intercessory grace and asserts the supremacy of unredeemed original sin:

You should not have believed me. For virtue cannot so innoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved you not. (117-119) The “old stock” inherited from Adam is so powerful that it invalidates the fruits of human love, and so he tells Ophelia, “Get thee to nunnery!” (121) to avoid having children who are sinners like Hamlet, who is “very proud, revengeful, ambitious” (124-5). With the

299 OED 300 Shakespeare uses “paradox” in this sense and in a very similar context in Othello, when Desdemona derides Iago’s aspersions on women as “old fond paradoxes” (Oth 2.1.138). Like Hamlet’s opposition between beauty and honesty, Iago’s paradoxes derides women through infelicitous pairings of attributes, as “black and witty” (131) or “fair and foolish”(135). Iago also denies the compatibility of two feminine virtues: “ever fair and never proud” (148). These paradoxes confirm Desdemona’s dispraise of Iago as a “slanderer” (113).

176 offer of grace rejected, the power of sin becomes a force of necessity.

He then asks Ophelia a fateful question: “Where’s your father” (130)? Hamlet’s motivation for this line is a famous crux. Theatrical tradition has historically handled it with awkward staging devices to establish that Hamlet knows Polonius is overhearing him, making the question a test of Ophelia’s loyalty.301 Yet a simple motivation is apparent from the text on its own once we see that Hamlet has come to distrust Ophelia for false piety. Polonius’s purpose in giving her the prayer book is to “color your loneliness” (45-46), that is, to allay possible suspicion because she is unaccompanied.

Since Polonius has been keeping her apart from Hamlet, she must not appear to be seeking him out by herself. Yet once Hamlet realizes that Ophelia is not at prayer, the book loses its illusion, and her loneliness becomes uncolored. He concludes that without a true reason to be out alone, she has not been obedient to her father. He therefore asks where he is, not to test if she is deceiving him, but if she has deceived Polonius. In obedience to her father, she lies that he is “At home, my lord” (131)—and Hamlet believes her, but concludes she has disobeyed. His mock of Polonius in the next line

301 For more than a century, the most common method has been for Polonius to partly emerge from his hiding place, to be spotted from the corner of Hamlet’s eye; Hamlet then asks the question to test if Ophelia is colluding with him. This staging, while plausible, is awkward and unparsimonious for four reasons. First, there is no easily established motivation for Polonius to reveal himself, except as an accident. Second, for Hamlet to see Polonius is not sufficient reason to deduce that Ophelia is in a conspiracy, since she might also be unaware of being overheard. Hamlet would need some other indication as, first instance, if Ophelia saw Polonius as well. Yet this would render Hamlet’s question absurd rather than explain it. Third, Hamlet’s discovery of Polonius must be seen by the audience but not by Ophelia, for then her answer would be absurd. Fourth, if Hamlet discovers Polonius spying on him with Ophelia, his surprise to find him behind the arras in the Closet Scene is unlikely. He should expect Polonius, rather than the king to be the “rat.” A staging that could merely avoid the second and third difficulties would be farcically complex. Assuming a minimal motivation for Ophelia’s lie, to pretend innocence rather than convince Hamlet there is no spy, a logical blocking would require the following elements: when Polonius appears, Hamlet and Ophelia each see him, Hamlet sees that Ophelia sees him, but Ophelia does not see Hamlet seeing her see Polonius. In that case, Hamlet’s question would be a valid test, and Ophelia’s answer would be motivated. .

177 follows then with perfect logic:

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house. Farewell (3.1.132-3). Hamlet now leaps into a venomous verbal assault of Ophelia, having heard in her deception of Polonius the same warning that Brabantio states to Othello:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: She has deceived her father, and may thee. (Oth 1.4.293-4) False piety, the very image he could not see through in the demon who hates him, he recognizes instead in the woman who loves him. He turns then in anger to the demon’s revenge, and that is the tragedy of Hamlet.

Recognizing her disastrous error, Ophelia only now begins to pray in truth, “O help him you sweet heavens” (134)! and “O heavenly powers restore him” (142). These are not rhetorical expressions of distress, but earnest prayers to make amends. But Hamlet is not interested in amends. In exchange for her prayers, he curses her to be slandered:

If thou dost marry, I give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. (F1 3.1.135-137) This is no ordinary curse, but an archetypally demonic one, which imitates the Devil’s envy of Christ, in the same way as well Iago’s scheme to slander Desdemona:

Thus credulous fools are caught, And many worthy and chaste dames even thus, All guiltless, meet reproach. (Oth 4.1.45-47) And more than a curse, it is a threat, which Hamlet carries out in the following scene, where he baits Ophelia in public with tawdry sexual humor, bordering on solicitation

(3.2.109-117, 239-42). When Gertrude later fears that Ophelia’s words in her madness might also strew “Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds” (4.1.15), the fruits of slander are taking hold.

Contemporary evidence attests to the presence in Hamlet of demonic envy and

178 slander arising from the ghost in Wit’s Miserie, and the World’s Madnesse (1596), by

Thomas Lodge, whose novel Rosalynde was the basis of As You Like It. Lodge writes an allegorical account of various Vices thriving in London, which contains a contemporary reaction to a performance of either Q1 or the ur-Hamlet:

The first by Sathan (his grandsire) was called HATE-VERTUE, or (in words of more circumstance, Sorrow for another mans good successe) … though this fiend be begotten of his fathers blood, yet is he different fro his nature, & were he not sure yt IEALOUSIE could not make him a cuckold, he had long since published him for a bastard: you shall know him by this, he is a foule lubber, his tongue tipt with lying, his heart stéeled against charity, he walks for the most in black vnder the colour of grauity, & looks pale as the Visard of ye ghost which cried so miserally at ye Theator, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet reuenge, he is full of infamy & slander, insomuch as if he ease not his stomack in detracting somewhat or some man before noontide, he fals into a feuer that holds him while supper time: he is always deuising of Epigrams and scoffes, and grumbles, murmures continually, although nothing crosse him, he never laughes but at other mens harms, briefly in being a tyrant ouer mens fames, he is a very TITIUS (as VERGIL saith) to his owne thoughts.302 On the present reading, it is little wonder why Lodge would have used Hamlet’s ghost to visualize this exemplar Vice.

Hamlet’s evils do not end in slander: he also forswears himself. Because modern ears are poorly attuned to the moral weight of oaths, we scarcely notice, and quickly forget, that Ophelia’s defense to Polonius of Hamlet’s virtue is to cite his oaths as evidence:

Oph. My lord, he hath importuned me with love In honourable fashion. Pol. Ay, ‘fashion’ you may call it. Go to, go to. Oph. And hath given countenance to his speech, My lord, with all the vows of heaven. (1.3.110-114) Polonius’s invective response against the credibility of vows by lustful youths (1.3.115-

117, 126-131) is answered in Hamlet’s love poem which urges faithful trust, asking

Ophelia to “never doubt I love” (2.2.117), and “that I love thee best, oh, most, most best, believe it” (119-20). Yet he now prevaricates about whether he ever loved her, first

302 Thomas Lodge, Wit’s Miserie and the World’s Madnesse: Discouering the Deuils Incarnat of this Age (London:Adam Islip 1596), 55-6

179 admitting “I did love you once” (3.1.115) but then firmly disclaiming that “You should not have believed me” (117), “I loved you not” (119), and “We are arrant knaves all— believe none of us” (118-19). He rejects the virtue of belief to strike her heart precisely by repudiating the faith of his sworn love. However natural it feels for audiences today to hear in Hamlet’s denials the plight of a frustrated lover confused about his emotions, and to sympathize, what Hamlet actually puts at stake in the scene is not how he interprets his feelings, but whether his oath can be trusted. Ophelia clearly understands him in that way, lamenting after he departs that she “suck’d the honey of his music vows” (157).

His abuse of Ophelia culminates with a renunciation not only of his own vow, but of the most holy vow love can make, as he announces his decision to take revenge:

I say we will have no mo marriage. Those that are married already—all but one—shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go! (3.1.148-50) This is Hamlet’s moment of knowing decision, which brings his pause to a conclusion.

The oath Hamlet breaks, and the whole category of oaths that he nullifies, are counterpoint to the one he obeys. At the expense of all love-vows, and in knowing opposition to conscience, Hamlet will keep his vow to the ghost. That oath has haunted him, as the Hecuba Soliloquy shows, when he imagines himself given “the lie i’th’ throat” (2.2.568) because of his silence. Since lying is a form of speech, this is an illogical accusation, unless Hamlet conceives his silence as perjuring himself by abandoning his vow. It is likely as well that when Hamlet claims to be prompted to revenge “by heaven and hell” (579), Shakespeare is not suggesting that the act of revenge admits moral duality in its object, but is instead exposing the contradiction Hamlet has created for himself by taking an evil oath in holy terms. Now at one throw, Hamlet takes

God’s name in vain on two counts, according to the doctrine of the sermon Against

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Swearing and Periury that “aswell they vse the name of GOD in vaine, that by an oath make vnlawfull promises of good and honest things, and performe them not: as they which doe promise euill and vnlawfull things, and do performe the same.”303

Reading Hamlet’s encounter with Ophelia as a tragedy of keeping an evil oath at the expense of a holy one provides a solution to another famous crux, in Act II. When

Polonius enters to introduce the players, Hamlet calls him “Jephthah” and recites part of a ballad about how Jephthah loved his daughter:

Ham. O, Jephthah judge of Israel, What a treasure hadst thou? Pol. What a treasure had he, my lord? Ham. Why, One fair daughter and no more, The which he loved passing well. (2.2.401-6) The purpose of this passage has proven elusive to critics, who have found few apparent points of comparison between Polonius and Jephthah beyond the bare fact that each has a daughter. The solution lies in the theme of rash oath-making. The norm for preaching in the Church of England, contained in the sermon Against Swearing and Periury, viewed

Jephthah as a type of all those who make evil vows, alongside Herod Antipas swearing to

Salome (Matt 14:6-11) and the “vicious Jews” who swear not to eat or drink until they kill St. Paul (Acts 23:12-15). The homilist’s critique is harsh:

And of them that make wicked promises by an oath, and will performe the same, wee haue example in the Scriptures, chiefely of Herod, of the wicked Iewes, and of Iephtah…. Iephtah when GOD had giuen to him victorie of the children of Ammon, promised (of a foolish deuotion) vnto GOD, to offer for a sacrifice vnto him, that person which of his owne house should first meete with him after his returne home. By force of which fonde and vnaduised oath, hee did slay his owne and onely daughter, which came out of his house with mirth and ioy to welcome him home. Thus the promise which hee made (most foolishly) to GOD, against GODS euerlasting will, and the law of nature, most cruelly hee performed, so committing against GOD a double offence. Therefore, whosoeuer maketh any promise, binding himselfe thereunto by an oath: let him foresee that the thing which hee promiseth, bee good, and honest, and not against the commandement of GOD, and that it bee in his owne power to performe it iustly. And such good promises must all men

303 “Against Swearing and Perjury,” 77

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keepe euermore assuredly. But if a man at any time shall, either of ignorance, or of malice, promise and sweare to doe any thing which is either against the law of Almighty GOD, or not in his power to performe: let him take it for an vnlawfull and vngodly oath.304 The homilist’s reading of Judges 11 is historically controversial, but Shakespeare assumes an exegesis in alignment with it in Henry VI, Part III, when Clarence renounces his vow of defection to the Lancastrians because it would require him to make war on his brother:

Perhaps thou wilt object my holy oath: To keep that oath were more impiety Than Jephthah’s, when he sacrificed his daughter. I am so sorry of that trespass made… (5.1.90-7) For Clarence, the impiety into which his oath would lead him shows the oath itself to have been a “trespass made,” and an “infamy” (83). It does not matter that he did not anticipate the evil event it brings about. When the event occurs, it proves his oath lacked foresight, and he judges Warwick for persuading him to swear as “foul misleading me”

(98). Of course, Clarence’s vow is in fact licit and binding, and his violation of it haunts his soul until death (RIII 1.4.48-63); but it is not his interpretation of Jephthah but its specious application to his own case that the Elizabethans would have found fallacious.

Placing this view of Jephthah alongside the principle that Hamlet exclaims against his own succession when mocking Polonius, the following hypothesis is warranted: for

Shakespeare, Jephthah is not only Polonius, but Hamlet as well, since each contributes to

Ophelia’s doom by keeping a rash oath. Polonius’s oath is to his certainty that love has caused Hamlet’s madness (F1 153), and he puts Ophelia into the fatal situation to prove his sworn claim (161-4).305 Hamlet’s mock of “Let the doors be shut upon him,” is

304 “Against Swearing and Perjury,” 78-9 305 James Black appears to be alone in identifying Jephthah with both Hamlet and Polonius because of their rash oaths, and for recognizing that the Nunnery Scene brings Hamlet’s oath of revenge into collision

182 therefore poignant because its inverts the biblical image of Jephthah meeting his daughter at the door to his home. But with Polonius shut inside, as it were, it is Hamlet who is “out o’doors” (2.1.97, cf. 2.2.204) to carry out the rest of the role. Even as Jephthah loves his daughter “passing well” (2.2.406), Hamlet loves Ophelia “best, O most best” (19), the double superlative literally “passing” the absolute. But in his moment of crisis, she is the first live creature that he sees, coming out of her father’s home, so he keeps his oath by sacrificing her, not with a pyre, but with slander. Even as Jephthah’s daughter begs him to “suffer me two monethes, that I may go to the moũtains, and bewaile my virginitie, I and my fellowes” (Jud 11:37), Hamlet commands, “Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.121, 129-

30, 136, 140,150), and his last word before exiting is the final word that Jephthah speaks to his daughter in the biblical account: “Go” (150, Jud 11:38).

With this word, Hamlet’s pause completes its passage. He has discovered the impulse to hesitate, questioned and then defined it, and at last decided in speech to act, knowing now what it means for his soul. Hamlet’s pause is over and is no longer a functioning element in the play. Unflinching and unyielding, he will continue his course of revenge, keeping due on until the final minutes of his life. For Hamlet is no ditherer; he is a wrath.

with his vows of love. See “Hamlet’s Vows.” Black, however, fails to draw a morally coherent conclusion from this because he believes in the ambiguous ghost, whose function for him is “dramatic” rather than “moral” (p. 39). With this false dichotomy in hand, he finds Hamlet’s difficulties with oath-making resolved psychologically in the leveling power of death. Hamlet’s experience in the Graveyard Scene allows him to “look back not just in frustration and anger at broken vows and faithless oaths, but in tender affection,” and learns that “to be true to the Ghost exclusively is to be less than true to others, including himself” (p. 47). But surely Shakespeare’s point is that Hamlet should not have sworn at all, not that he does so one-sidedly. Jephthah’s fault, on the Elizabethan reading, is making and keeping an evil oath, not following his oath too absolutely. Black’s conclusion entails a laxity about oaths inimical to the Elizabethan sources on which his interpretation depends.

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VIII: To Define True Madness

But Vices in Stage plaies, When theyr matter is gon, They laugh out to rest To the lookers-on. -The Contention between Churches and Counsell, 1560

With the present reading of “To be or not to be” and its outcome in place, it is possible to propose an explanation of Hamlet’s madness. Of the two central questions that have dogged interpreters of Hamlet, the cause of his delay and the nature of his madness, the first is solved by recognizing how the transcendental unity of being and the good operates in that soliloquy. This prompts us to ask if the second could yield to a similar explanation. The present chapter will answer this question in the affirmative, by studying Hamlet’s madness in terms of the transcendentals, following Balthasar’s order of inquiry into pulchrum first, then bonum and verum. The first question shall be if

Hamlet’s madness is beautiful or ugly, second if it is good or evil, and only then, whether and how it is real. One reason for following this order is admittedly to corroborate

Balthasar’s theological method, but it is also likely, as I hope this chapter will show, that

Shakespeare himself, having the soul of a poet and a dramatist, may have been inclined to think of pulchrum and bonum first, with the result that Hamlet’s madness happens to be most naturally and simply explicated from that direction.

This pathway has not been taken in traditional criticism. The standard way of framing the problem, especially for students first coming to the play, considers verum alone, without reference to bonum or pulchrum: “Is Hamlet’s madness real or feigned?” The question is of course inevitable, but when posed without a concept of the real that

184 explicitly embraces the aesthetic and dramatic character of existence, it is also unanswerable. Without these concepts, the question of “real or feigned” reduces to the problem of weighing empirical evidence; and yet, as is well known, the evidence is deeply conflicting. In some places, Hamlet’s madness seems explicitly feigned. He contrives to “put an antic disposition on” (1.5.171) and later tells Gertrude that he is

“mad in craft” (3.4.172), while his interlocutors discern a “crafty madness” (3.1.8) with

“method in’t” (2.2.204). Hamlet can also switch from sanity to madness at will. Speaking lucidly in a private conversation with Horatio, he says, as soon as witnesses enter, “I must be idle” (3.2.88-89), and resumes his act. Conversely, he twice delivers lucid soliloquies immediately after the exit of other characters for whom he has been playing the madman

(2.2.543-600, 3.2.376-389). In other places, however, the madness seems all too real.

Hamlet speaks of his “distracted globe” (1.5.97) even before he plots to assume madness.

When he apologizes to Laertes, he says plainly, “I am punished with a sore distraction”

(5.2.176). His ludicrous antics always seems to move with his actual passions, while his wildest and worst behavior occurs when he is not putting on an act at all: no one is ever more convinced of his madness than Gertrude after the Closet Scene (3.4.197-202), where Hamlet makes an effort to prove his sanity (130-140, 171-2). These difficulties are compounded by the absence of any practical motivation for the charade. Even if the audience might assume it is a strategy to avoid suspicion and spy, Hamlet never claims such motives, but correctly anticipates that his madness will call attention to himself

(1.5.172-178).

Within the “real or feigned” paradigm, the most plausible and time-worn answer is that Hamlet treads a line between sanity and madness. As attractive as this answer is for

185 many people, the text never points to any such thing. Its only real warrant is that it seems to rectify contradictions. Yet even in this is it unimpressive, because it only delays the problem by attributing the contradictions to the character’s psychology rather than to the things he says. Because people are more complicated and less known than words, this allows us to squint at the problem until it smudges into unity. It is not a satisfying explanation but a palatable way to abandon explanation.

This is not to imply that no critic has ever considered Hamlet’s madness in terms of aesthetics or dramatics. Bradley for instance, introduces an aesthetic dimension when he theorizes that Hamlet assumes madness “to give some utterance to the load that presses on his heart and brain.”306 Moreover, the centrality of play-acting in Hamlet’s plot has prompted many scholars to consider his madness as a form of role-playing. Most important among these are those who have traced the antic form of Hamlet’s behavior to the theatrical tradition of the medieval Vice. This theory, suggested in passing by Prosser, and developed in detail by Robert Weimann, Arthur McGee, and Margreta de Grazia,307 is a crucial insight. All of these writers come much closer to the mark than many others, because they seize on the beautiful or the good as a principle, but none situates either principle within a synthesis of how Shakespeare considers all three of the transcendentals convertible with the One. Even where correct, they draw an unfinished picture, which the following study intends to complete.

306 This account is shrewd but only imperfectly aesthetic, because Bradley considers even the expressive aspect of Hamlet’s madness as a form of concealment. He believes Hamlet’s chooses it to prevent himself from disclosing his burdens in some other, unmistakable way that would result in discovery. Shakespearean Tragedy, 120-1. 307 See Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 202, Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 120-160, McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet, 75-103, and de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 180-8.

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Aesthetic Madness

If asked whether Hamlet’s madness is beautiful, few would affirm it. The formal diminishment of his speech, marked by his use of prose, his rambling and obscene discourse, the cruelty of his jokes, and his maligning of Ophelia are evidently grotesque.

And yet I am unaware of anyone who has argued that ugliness is a first principle of

Hamlet’s madness in the sense that to be ugly as such is part of its purpose. The text, however, is laced with evidence of exactly this, coming only just short of stating it explicitly. The reason Hamlet gives for his madness at its first mention is:

(As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on)— (1.5.170-1). “Meet” has of course the general meaning of fittingness, but its primary sense refers to dimensive proportion,308 as in a well-tailored suit that is “put on.” Because “antic” refers to a grotesque theatrical role,309 Hamlet is saying that his madness is a costume suited to that part. The costume then is “meet” because it supplies the revenger with his proper

Gestalt, or rather Ungestalt, of chaos and disorder.

Hamlet’s costume is aesthetic not only in the bare sense of being visible, but in the sense of revealing an inner depth. Shakespeare implies this by his repeated use of the word “habit,” particularly in Q2, to signify both an exterior garment and an inner disposition of soul. For instance, Hamlet uses “habit” to describe the opposite clothing worn by the interior “habits” of vice and virtue when he tells Gertrude,

That monster Custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, That to the use of actions fair and good, He likewise gives a frock or livery that aptly

308 OED 309 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 76

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Is put on. (Q2 159-163) This is a bouquet of synonyms for the language Hamlet has used for his antic disposition, but with the major difference that he advises Gertrude to put on clothing opposite to his own. He is himself wearing “habits devil,” proportioned to the “custom” of evil acts, indeed “some habit that too much o’erleavens/The form of plausive manners” (Q2 1.4.29-

30) even as he proffers this advice.

Hamlet is not alone in attributing an aesthetic dimension to his madness. He is joined by Ophelia and Claudius. Ophelia interprets the decline of Hamlet’s reason as a loss of beauty. He who was “the glass of fashion and the mould of form/Th’observed of all observers” (3.1.154-5) and “that unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth” (160) has exchanged the splendor of his “music vows” (157) for the discord of “sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh” (159), no longer governed by “sovereign reason” (158).

Ophelia’s musical imagery is apt, because Hamlet’s discord is a decline from his former self due to the perverted music of the ghost. When it first appears, Hamlet addresses it with musical puns, willing to hear “airs from heaven or blasts from hell”

(1.4.20).310 As the ghost brings with it the latter, Hamlet submits to a fierce and monstrous mode of music, becoming in his madness “blasted with ecstasy” (3.1.161). In the face of this aesthetic catastrophe, Ophelia rightly pairs her initial, ethical lament, “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” (151)! with a final, aesthetic lament, “O, woe is me/T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see.” (161-62).

Claudius’ account of Hamlet’s madness is likewise aesthetic, seeing that “not

310 Jenkins explains in Hamlet, 211n, that evil spirits sometimes bring with them an “ill wind.” An “air,” however, is also a piece of light and lovely music (MSND 1.1.183; Much Ado 2.3.55; TN 2.4.5 Mer 5.1. 84; Cym 2.3.15; Per 3.2.103, Tem 3.2.132), while a “blast” is a hard and warlike blow of a horn (2 Hen VI 5.2.44; Hen V 3.1.5; Ant 4.8.40; Cor 1.4.15;). “Blast” probably also connotes damnation.

188 th’exterior nor the inward man/Resembles that it was” (2.1.6-7). While Hamlet’s shallow schoolfellows fail to discern any reason in his madness, Claudius’ superior insight sees the expression of Hamlet’s “inward man” through his outer form; his aesthetic insight later enables him to correctly interpret Hamlet’s madness when he views it directly:

Nor what he spake, though it lack’d form a little, Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul O’er which his melancholy sits on brood And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose Will be some danger… (3.1.164-168) Claudius also describes Hamlet’s lack of form as an outer garment fitting his interior:

This something settled matter in his heart Whereon his brain still beating puts him thus From fashion with himself. (174-6) Claudius’ perception of Hamlet’s soul is, ironically, not a true failure of Hamlet’s madness to disguise his purpose, but a success in meetly externalizing his heart.

Because Hamlet’s intentional ugliness reveals him as inwardly deformed, his madness is a costume but not a disguise, “put on,” rather than “feigned.” Because “The apparel oft proclaims the man” (Q1 1.3.72), Claudius and Ophelia judge Hamlet’s form correctly. But the aesthetic of a costume is not merely static: costumes are for plays, and

Hamlet’s way of dressing is wrapped up in an ethically conditioned performance. Its counter-aesthetic implies and contains a dramatic dimension.

Dramatic Madness

Scholars have recognized Hamlet’s madness as a dramatic role more often than they have perceived its aesthetic meaning, because role-playing and stage craft is discussed more extensively in the text. The term “antic” in “antic disposition” directly denotes a theatrical role, and in particular a comic grotesque. The tradition of Elizabethan antics

189 contains forms as varied as the charming but subversive Feste or a demoniac punished for his lust with madness like Tom o’ Bedlam.311 But of all the different antic conventions,

Hamlet assumes a single one—that of the medieval Vice, a rowdy and clownish stock character in English morality plays, who persisted as a popular figure in Shakespeare’s time, “very much kept alive on the Elizabethan stage by the celebrated clown Richard

Tarlton.”312 He was a servant of the Devil and a tempter who sought to ruin souls through plots and intrigue. The Vice was given to “knavish speech” (3.5.24), wordplay, cynical irony, and hypocritical sermonizing,313 and together with the devil he was an antecedent of the demonic revenger of the Elizabethan stage.314

The principal evidence for identifying Hamlet as a Vice is the wickedness of his revenge, his service to the Devil, and his plan to damn his enemy. It is perhaps because

Lodge recognized these elements in an early production of Hamlet that he compares the ghost to the “the devil HATE-VERTUE,” an allegorically personified vice.315 A wide range of stage conventions regarding the Vice further supports Lodge’s likely understanding.

One major convention was to perform the Vice with boisterous and even lurid physical stylization, and Hamlet’s lines provide numerous cues for an actor to do so. De Grazia gives a resumè of just some examples:

Hamlet’s lines often invite a correspondent gesture, especially in the movement of his limbs so exaggerated that they throw the body off its stately vertical axis. For example, to

311 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 75-91 312 De Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 180 313 Weimann, Popular Tradition, 127-130, de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 183-5. 314 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 36 315 Lodge’s witness provides a corrective to Weimann, who, despite arguing strongly that Hamlet’s antics are rooted in the tradition of the Vice, insists that “Hamlet, of course, is no Vice figure” (Theatrical Tradition, 128-9); for Weimann, his madness shows instead how deeply rooted the popular tradition of the Vice was in the whole Elizabethan notion of antics that it governed even Shakespeare’s delineation of Hamlet. De Grazia objects that Weimann rules out the most crucial fact about the Vice, that “As the adversary of virtue in the perennial contest over men’s souls, the Vice is vicious” (Hamlet without Hamlet, 186). As the best contemporary witness to Hamlet’s Vice-role, Lodge seems to side wholly with de Grazia.

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illustrate the difference between a hawk and a handsaw, Hamlet might gesticulate wildly (flapping his arms for the former and “saw[ing] the air to much” for the latter, 3.2.4); or to ridicule women’s jigging and ambling (“you jig and amble,” 3.1.146) he might mimic their fancy footwork; his satirical description of old men with “weak hams” (2.2.200) invites him to splay out both arms and legs in imitation of a crab which, unlike old men, can “go backward” (2.2.203-4); his claim to still love Rosencrantz “by these pickers and stealers” (3.2.327) would seem to call for some kind of groping or snatching gesture, perhaps in the private area of Rosencrantz’s purse. So, too, before the Murder of Gonzago, it is hard to imagine that, from his reclining position in Ophelia’s lap, he would have resisted the infamously lewd motions of the hobby-horse (“For o, for o, the Hobby- horse is forgot,” 3.2.133), the equestrian figure banned from the Morris dancing of the May Games for its obscene cavorting.316 De Grazia also finds Vice-like physicality in Hamlet’s penchant for dashing wildly about the stage: his shifting of ground during the cellarage scene, corresponding to his “wild and whirling words”; his leap into Ophelia’ grave; his frenzied exit after seeing the ghost; his bizarre exit in his reported meeting with Ophelia (2.1.94-98); and the trick he plays on

Rosencrance and Guildenstern, when he appears willing to go with them to the King but then forces them to give chase, crying in a phrase from a children’s game, “Hide fox and all after” (3.5.31-2). De Grazia explains that in these scenes Hamlet is literally “running mad,” to convey his mania as an “Antic-Vice.”317

Other conventions are more esoteric to modern audiences, but telling when seen. For instance, it was traditional for clowns in the Vice-tradition to sing and dance a jig after a tragedy, as Hamlet does following The Mousetrap (3.2.262-5, 271-5); these clowns would often play recorders, the instrument Hamlet calls for (282-5). 318 Hamlet’s exclamation “A ha” (1.5.150) is also a common stock expression of the Vice.319 This phrase, addressed to the ghost in the cellarage after Hamlet’s demonic oath and just before his plan to assume madness, may well be a prompt for the audience to understand

316 De Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 182-3 317 De Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 183 318 See McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 89 319 See McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 89

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“antic disposition” immediately as a Vice-role.

Further evidences that Hamlet is a Vice can be multiplied at length, and are by the writers cited above. Our next concern is to show that Hamlet’s role as a Vice is a hermeneutical key to the moral judgements and dramatic analogy in his discourse to the player on acting (3.2.1-45). There is evident irony that a man who is involved in demonic role-playing should advise another actor about observing “the modesty of nature”

(3.2.19), and this is just Shakespeare’s point. As a Vice, Hamlet personally violates every rule for acting that he gives to the player, so that the entire passage works to his discredit.

A first step for showing this, and for appreciating its theological significance, is to ascertain, where possible, how much of Hamlet’s discourse reflects Shakespeare’s actual philosophy of acting. We will, therefore, first examine some texts in other plays where

Shakespeare speaks of acting, particularly within his prologues and epilogues, where the author is most likely to speak for himself. He does this in three plays, Henry V, A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest. A common theme in these plays is that the audience is a creative partner in the actor’s work, necessary participants, who the actor needs to supply for his own deficiencies. In The Tempest especially, Shakespeare interprets this principle as an analogy of intercessory grace.

The recurring argument of Henry V’s choric sections is that the players are inadequate to show life as it is, and so require the mercy of the audience. Not only do the port of Mars, the field of Agincourt, and the battle array of a full army defy reproduction in a theater, but so does a mere person, “the warlike Harry, like himself” (Hen V 1.pro.5). Since the play inevitably falls short of its subject, the Chorus confesses his reliance on the

192 audience, asking, “Let us on your imaginary forces work” (18). Since the audience hears with “fair minds” (5.epi.14), their imagination can supply what is lacking in the performance. To do so, however, requires mercy upon the actors, and so the Chorus asks,

“Pardon, gentles all” (1.pro.8). By “gentles,” he acknowledges the dignity of nobility in all members of the audience—a moral that events in the play confirm, when :Henry answers the Chorus’s need for the audience “gently to hear, kindly to judge” (1.pro.34) by conferring on his subjects a “gentle” condition; he also makes them “kindly” by calling them brothers (4.3.63-66). The commoners on whom he confers these dignities are like the people who populate most of the playhouse. If one were to sketch this scenario as a section of the Chain of Being, the king would be at the top, the common soldiers/audience in the middle, and the players at the bottom. The nobility of the actor is received ultimately from the king, but mediated by the audience. The king bestows dignity first upon the commoners, and their imagination in turn gives “acceptance”

(5.epi.14) to the players’ inadequate representations.

The same conceit recurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but is seen from the standpoint of a king in the audience rather than the actors. When in the final scene

Theseus chooses to hear the mechanicals’ play, he overcomes Hippolyta’s objections by claiming that an eye fit to discern true duty can find in the meanest efforts of a servant a love and devotion worthy of dignity. It is a matter of his own graciousness as a lord to respect this. “The kinder we,” he says, “to give them thanks for nothing” (MSND 5.1.89).

He still intends at the same time to laugh at their expense, but even that laughter, he says, is a form of acceptance: “Our sport shall be to take what they mistake” (90). Accordingly, even while lampooning the play, Theseus continues to take the mechanicals’ part:

193

Hip This is the silliest stuff that e’er I heard. The The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worse are no worse, if imagination mend them. Hip It must be your imagination then, and not theirs. The If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. (207-212) The mercy that the mechanicals need from their audience is the same in kind as what the Chorus requests in Henry V. Having put the Chorus’s philosophy to the hard test of applying it to a bad performance, Theseus’ final verdict is that “it is truly and very notably discharged” (346-7).

The philosophy of imagination at work here hints at a theo-dramatic analogy of grace, in that the audience performs its own creative act, similar to the poet’s, in conjuring greater sights than they are shown, “as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown” (14-15). They mediate a dignity conferred on them by another, more proximate to God, from Henry V or from Theseus. It would seem easy to anticipate from this a highly extrinsic notion of grace, since the “creativity” involved in bare imagination produces nothing in truth. The audience’s approval of an actor would then be comparable to a purely imputed righteousness. Shakespeare, however, takes the thought a few steps farther, by remembering that the actor does not body forth the poet’s thoughts for his own sake; his toil is for the audience, so that their reception of his works is the real perfection of his art, and congruous to the “simpleness and duty” that produce the art. There are good actors and bad ones, but a generous audience makes either a true success, by taking even what they mistake.

This theological suggestion takes a more definite form in Prospero’s Epilogue to The

Tempest, which treats the audience’s applause as an indulgence for the actor. Prospero speaks, in the convention of epilogues, to prompt the audience to clap before the actor

194 can exit. The stage for Prospero is his island, which he, stripped now of his mortal art, cannot leave on his own. He needs the audience to “release me from my bands/With the help of your goods hands” (Tem Epi.9-10). Since the audience’s hands come together to clap in the same shape as to pray, his request for applause doubles as a request for prayer:

Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. (11-18) This is probably a metaphor for Purgatory, and Prospero’s home on the island is even called a “cell” throughout the play. The actor, the character, and the poet, whose arts have shaped the action, each requires his faults to be mended by the audience’s favor, expressed as prayer for his deliverance from sin, lest he be left waiting, locked up still in his cell. The value of the audience’s prayer brings grace upon themselves:

As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (19-20) The language of “indulgence” is unmistakably Catholic and ecclesial, bringing forgiveness both the soul and to those who pray for him.

This is both a humbling and exalting conception of the actor: humbling, because it presupposes his imperfections and need for gratuitous addition; exalting, because the indulgence is available, to the plenary extent of filling Prospero’s sails. All this comes about from the audience hearing gently and judging kindly, mediating Christ’s gratuity by giving a congruous perfection to a dutiful work of imperfect merit. This, it seems, is

Shakespeare’s conception; it remains to discover if it is also Hamlet’s.

A first observation to be made about Hamlet’s discourse on acting is that he is

195 consistently ungracious, and peppers his speeches with invective against imperfect actors.

In the first section alone (3.2.1-14), we hear, “I would as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines,” “Oh, it offends me to the soul,” “I could have such a fellow whipped,” and “it out-

Herods Herod” (13-14). He speaks in this way in defiance of one his own proverbs, which advises generosity to undeserving players:

Pol. My lord, I will use them according to their desert. Ham. God’s bodikins, man, better! Use every man after his desert and who should scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity—the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in. (2.2.523-28) Hamlet’s moralizing here is so reminiscent of Theseus that it has been used to prove he is generous to the players. Harold C. Goddard, despite his strong reservations about revenge, finds in these lines a flash of redemption in the wilderness of Hamlet’s soul:

That clinches it—proves how utterly the Prince’s evil spirit is exorcised. For once, Hamlet can treat even Polonius as a man. This is God’s Hamlet.320 This reading is appealing but overlooks two words in the text that seem perfectly calibrated to undermine it: “God’s bodikins”—a major blasphemy. Rather than treating

Polonius as a man, Hamlet curses him, even as he advises him to use the players in accordance with his own dignity. In keeping with the impassioned nature of a curse like

“God’s bodikins,” an actor playing Hamlet should address Polonius in an angry, scolding voice, and then command the players to “mock him not” (539-40), in a high-handed manner, oblivious to his own insolence to Polonius throughout the scene. By performing the lines in this way, the actor would illustrate Hamlet’s impiety and hypocrisy, and would prepare the audience to hear the disdain for the players that actually characterizes

Hamlet’s discourse. For all he has said to Polonius, Hamlet has no interest in personally

320 Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 361

196 using the players after his own desert, so as to ’scape whipping himself. Rather, he specifically recommends that “I could have such a fellow”—(not a “gentle”)—“whipped for o’er doing Termagant” (F1 3.2.12-3). He insults the audience as well, by mocking the taste of “the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise” (10-12). McGee observes that this line “is not calculated to do other than rouse the hostility of Shakespeare’s own groundlings, who no doubt showed their disapproval.”321

If Prospero is a theologian of grace, Hamlet is a dour Pelagian, expecting unaided perfection from others while holding himself up as a model for performance, saying,

“Speak the speech I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue” (1-2).

He also takes himself as a superior audience, whose judgments “o’erweigh a whole theatre of others” (28). This prince keeps his graces to himself.

The irony of all this is that Hamlet is, by his own doctrine, a definitively bad actor. In his Vice-role, his revenge and usurpation of a divine prerogative, he violates the central precept to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (19). Hamlet’s own language exposes this when he defines the purpose of playing as “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature, to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (21-24). The words “form” and “pressure” recall his oath to the ghost:

Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there (1.5.99-100). The mind’s act, like the theater’s, is to mirror nature; this consists in the reception of

321 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 109

197 form through “pressure,” as in Aristotle’s signant ring. Shakespeare also hints at an analogy between mind and stage as Hamlet’s “distracted globe” (97), compares the shape of his skull to the name of Shakespeare’s theater. As Hamlet prepares to assume his role as Vice, he wipes from his mind the mirroring faculty necessary to virtue in acting.

Shakespeare also targets Hamlet’s rash oath-making. Black suggests that “out-Herods

Herod” does not refer only to overwrought performances of Herod the Great in mystery plays, but to Herod Antipas’s oath to Salome, for which the First Book of Homilies ranks him with Jephthah for rash swearing.322 It may also be to criticize Hamlet’s jocularity while swearing in Horatio and Marcellus that Shakespeare gives him these lines:

…and let those who play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some barren quantity of spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it (38-44). I propose that the necessary “question” of the play which “be then to be considered” is none other than “To be or not to be.” A pair of variants in Q1 supports this. In that version Hamlet does not say “that is the question,” but “Ay, there’s the point” (Q1

7.115); he likewise says not, “some necessary question” but “some necessary point”

(9.26-7). The parallel variants are a clue that the lines are coordinate; when Shakespeare revised one, he revised the other to match. The implication is that upon making a rash oath Hamlet becomes a clown and a Vice. He then uses his clownish antics to encourage two other men to a “laugh” with him, that is, to make a light oath, even in the presence of the Devil. Hamlet’s folly is to leap into this flurry of oath-making without establishing its propriety by first asking “To be or not to be.” When the question finally comes to him, he

322 Black, “Hamlet’s Oaths,” 42

198 has already bound his soul to evil, and suffers the fate of Jephthah and Herod.

By far the darkest of Hamlet’s lines to the player contains what I take to be

Shakespeare’s estimation of the ghost:

O, there be players that I have seen play and heard others praise—and that highly—not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan nor no man have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeyman had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. (3.2.28-35) Taken literally, the exclusion of “Christian, pagan nor no man” requires some nature other than human. If “Nature’s” is an objective genitive, then “Nature’s journeymen indicates an angelic nature, since the angels govern corporeal nature as a more universal cause, and can control local motion.323 The poor imitation of a man is the evil angel’s appearance as Hamlet’s father, who wins the prince’s high praise for a bad performance:

“He that plays the King shall be welcome—his majesty shall have tribute of me”

(2.2.318-9). As a critique of the Devil, it seems appropriate to understand “abominably” not as a hyperbole, but in the strong, Biblical sense of to’evah.

Hamlet is soon punished for his misuse of the players within the same scene. McGee points out that they enrage Hamlet in performance by including a dumb-show despite his inveighing against it, and infers that they defy his order in requital for his verbal abuse.

Their revenge is to deliver Hamlet something far worse than a bad epitaph. Their ill report of him while he lives is that the poisoner Lucianus is the king’s nephew, not his brother. Hamlet is confronted by himself, cast as a devil and Vice making “damnable

323 ST I q. 100, a1 & 3. See also Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus: Faustus. But tell me, hath every sphere a dominion or intelligentia? Meph. Ay (2.2.55-8).

199 faces” (3.2.244),324 in his own play. The court notices and interprets it as a revelation of

Hamlet’s intent to murder the king for ambition, and this initiates his demise.325 In this way, he is not merely “punished with a sore distraction” (5.2.176), but punished for it.

The dramatic form of Hamlet’s madness carries entailments regarding both beauty and truth. As Hamlet’s inner ugliness translates into a costume, it extends into visible action, as a grotesque dramatic role. The aesthetic and dramatic sides of Hamlet’s lunacy disclose a real sickness in his soul, ugly and evil, but it is a moral rather than clinical madness. Once this is recognized, the conflicting texts about whether his madness is real or feigned can be reconciled by a single principle: sin is a true madness, which a person voluntarily assumes. By putting on his antic disposition, Hamlet chooses to be genuinely mad in craft, for the craft itself is a madness.

Shakespeare’s conception, however, does not terminate in Hamlet’s role only, but proceeds into the ontology of the role. “To be or not to be” is both the necessary question of metaphysics, and “of the play.” Hamlet comes to evil by choosing a role that distracts him from the question of being, which belongs to the play as such. Thus for Shakespeare, to ask if Hamlet’s madness is real—or better, if it is “true” (2.2.97,)—is to ask what mode

324 On the Vice’s habit of mugging and “night-faces” see McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 113. For other marks of Lucianus as a Vice, see pp. 114-15 and de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 188. 325 McGee, Elizabethan Hamlet, 112-123. McGee goes even farther in judging the The Mousetrap to be a total failure. He gives a version of an argument, first posed by Greg in “Hamlet’s Hallucination,” 397- 407, that Hamlet’s test fails to expose the King’s guilt. Were it a success, the King would have found himself accused in the dumb-show and reacted. But he does not, proving that the representation of his crime is not effective in catching his conscience. He in fact runs from the play in fear of Hamlet’s threats, which interrupt and ruin the performance. Similar arguments are also made in John Wain, The Living World of Shakespeare, (Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1966) 172-3 and Harold Skulsky, Spirits Finely Touched, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976) 33-4. The problem of the dumb-show, however, is more elegantly explained on a thematic consideration. In Hamlet, poison always enters through the ear, so Hamlet’s wormwood does not take hold until the spoken performance. See Mary Anderson, “Hamlet, The Dialectic Between Ear and Eye, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, New Series/Nouvelle Série, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Fall/automne 1991): 299-313. Moreover, the King’s exclamation, “Give me some light, away!” (3.2.260) is obviously an unkenneling of his guilt.

200 of existence his role has. The answer to that question is at the bottom of everything.

True Madness

The essence of Hamlet’s madness, like the reason for his pause and the identity of the ghost, is hidden in plain sight. It differs, however, in that Shakespeare may have intended it to be a riddle, because he gives his most explicit answer in a preposterous context, easy to dismiss. The formal definition of Hamlet’s madness is correctly stated by Polonius:

My leige, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. Mad call I it, for to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad? (2.2.86-94) The final sentence requires parsing. “To be nothing else but” rings with the sound of a scholastic definition: nihil aliud est quam. It is of course parodic, but even as a spoof it indicates an intention to define in the formal manner of excluding whatever is contrary to the definition. Polonius seems to fail in this because he includes “mad” in its own definition, yielding a tautology. Yet this apparent failure hides a second layer of irony that justifies it, because the form of the definition itself introduces to “mad” an additional concept that tells its nature: “to be nothing.” Madness is intelligible only as a negation of esse. As nonbeing, madness cannot be defined by a specific difference of its own, but only by reference to the substance in which it is a privation, or as Polonius puts it, an

“effect defective” (103). Madness is not nonbeing absolutely, but is qualified relative to whatever is aliud, or “else but mad.” As Hamlet discovers in “To be or not to be,” that

“else” is the perfection proper to human nature, to suffer outrageous fortune, while its

201 negation, framed as opposition, is self-annihilation, realized eschatologically as damnation. In short, to be mad is “not to be.” Hamlet’s role makeshim exactly what he says the king is: “a thing… of nothing” (3.5.29-31).

The identification of madness and “nothing” occurs in other plays, and with related meanings,326 though it is only in Hamlet that Shakespeare uses it as a hinge in the story.

Hamlet’s choice to take revenge renders him “nothing” (3.2.117), “naught” (143), and

“not himself” (5.1.182), terms that become identified with Hamlet’s very character.

Ophelia’s decline into madness, follows the same pattern, and has the same turning point.

Before Hamlet meets the ghost, when she believes yet doubts his love-vows, she tells

Polonius, “I do not know, my lord, what I should think” (1.3.104), but after seeing his ugliness in the Nunnery Scene, she can tell Hamlet only, “I think nothing, my lord”

(3.2.114). When she then as well becomes “divided from herself and her fair judgment”

(4.1.84), the nothingness of Hamlet has overcome her thought and deranges her speech so that even as the King tells Hamlet, “I have nothing with this answer” (3.2.94), Laertes says of Ophelia’s songs, “This nothing’s more than matter” (171, cf. 3.2.94-5).

Hamlet’s madness, therefore, is true, not in the sense that it has a real being or form, but in the sense that it detracts from the good of Hamlet’s real, determinate nature, and makes this detraction visible in deed. Shakespeare’s achievement is to dramatize evil according to its negative ontological status, by creating a role that negates each of the

326 When King Lear first feels himself declining into madness, the Fool’s diagnosis is “thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides and left nothing i’the middle” (Lear 1.4.177-79). When Edgar, puts on Poor Tom, he declares “Edgar I nothing am” (2.2.192). Macbeth’s “poor player,” whose strutting and fretting upon the stage evokes an image of the Vice, tells “a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing” (5.2.25-7). In Othello, Iago declares, “I am not what I am” (1.1.64) only moments before leaping into Vice- like antics at Brabantio’s window.

202 transcendentals. Hamlet’s madness can be formally defined as non-being, visibly expressed as a role.

203

Conclusion

The remainder of Hamlet’s plot unfolds for the most part as Prosser claims, and I defer to her at this point, but holding off the question of Hamlet’s salvation, to return to the problems raised in the introduction. It was stipulated there that a successful Christian response to Hegel’s use of Hamlet should explain how the play relates the individual character to the universal. For that purpose, Hamlet is amply suited to undermine the very theory Hegel uses it to show. One way we can begin to see this is to compare the underlying metaphysics of the Absolute and the world that Hegel finds in Greek tragedy to that of the Christian God and creation assumed in Hamlet.

The Greeks lacked a doctrine of creation, thinking the material world to be eternal, and Hegel accordingly interprets the tragic side of their worldview in terms that savor of

Neoplatonic emanation. This is apparent in one of his most evocative passages:

The substance of ethical life, as a concrete unity, is an ensemble of different relations and powers which only in a situation of inactivity, like that of the blessed gods, accomplish the work of the spirit in the enjoyment of an undisturbed life. But the very nature of this ensemble implies its transfer from its at first purely abstract ideality into its actualization in reality and its appearance in the mundane sphere. Owing to the nature of the real world, the mere difference of the constituents of this ensemble becomes perverted into opposition and collision, once individual characters seize upon them on the territory of specific circumstances. Only from this point of view can we be really serious about those gods who dwell in their peaceful tranquillity and unity solely on Olympus and in the heaven of imagination and religious ideas, but who, when they now come actually to life as a specific ‘pathos’ in a human individual, lead, despite all their justification, to guilt and wrong owing to their particular specification and the opposition to which this leads.327 The tranquility of divine unity, as it descends into the diversity of the world, leads to conflict because of the finitude of the world as such, by “the very nature of this

327 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1196

204 ensemble.” Christianity, however, does not see the world in this way, because it was created wholly good in its very diversity and finitude (Gen 1:31). When St. Thomas asks whether the diversity of things comes from God, he answers that

…the distinction and multitude of things come from the intention of the first agent, who is God. For He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever.328 This is such an emphatically aesthetic account of the universe that it is counterintuitive to suppose it would yield a less dramatic worldview, since the potential for action towards diverse ends that represent the Divine is pervasive in creation. While it is true that limitation and composition do make creation susceptible to sin, and drama in the fallen world concentrates on the conflicts sin creates between separate human ends, conflict and evil do not originate from diversity and finitude per se. Whereas Christianity sees finitude as a necessary condition for conflict and guilt, and hence a source of tragedy, the view

Hegel finds in the Greek plays makes it a sufficient condition.

Now we have seen that original sin, the “unweeded garden/That grows to seed”

(1.2.133-4), is a pervasive topic in Hamlet. It is figured in the poisoning and seen as the cause of the “particular fault.” This “vicious mole of nature” (Q2 1.4.24) weakens Hamlet against the temptation to revenge, is the source of the sufferings he catalogues in “To be or not to be,” and provides the grounds of his despair in the Nunnery Scene. Because

328 ST I, q. 47, a. 1, co.

205 revenge is a one-sided claim upon justice, it presupposes finitude, but it is original sin that brings finite multiplicity into conflict, separating the creature from its created good.

There is theological propriety in this, because one entailment of God’s simplicity is that it is not possible to grasp him as he is one-sidedly, because in himself he has no sides, or every side is all of him. The limits of the creature’s knowledge, however, make this difficult to see, and it is very easy for the Christian to be pulled, or crushed, by opposed moral demands much like the characters in a Greek tragedy. Balthasar values theater for exploring and clarifying the ambiguities of life because they are emphatically real, but so too is clarification. And clarification comes in Hamlet through the analogical question of “To be or not to be.” Since God is Being Itself, the logical proportion of an individual creature to universal being aligns with the metaphysical proportion of the creature to the Creator: the most universal predicate and the most universal cause are both called esse. By asking whether to be, Hamlet is confronted with the term by which the

God who made all beings judges them, and the soliloquy proceeds from that assumption.

In this situation, “To be or not to be” reveals that the one-sidedness of Hamlet’s grasp actually masks a simple failure to grasp at all. “To be or not to be” reduces the ambiguity to a firm “either/or.”

The act of proportioning the particular question to that of universal being places the character in contact with the Absolute, but not in a one-sided grasp. The man who asks,

“To be or not to be” might be challenged materially to relent of a one-sided claim, but the more formal demand is it is to recognize which side is which, and then to will the good simply. The light of the question of being reveals one-sidedness essentially as falsehood when it arises from a perverse will. The form of finitude that makes a Christian tragedy

206 then is sin, and by recognizing that finitude, Hamlet discovers existence as a simultaneously theological and dramatic question, at once universal and imminent in the individual. There is no division in Shakespeare, as Kastan theorizes, between the theological and the dramatic, such that the play “transforms theology into tragedy.”329

Instead, it is a theological tragedy simply. The theological and the dramatic are united in a single form and interpenetrate so completely that the question of being is “of the play,” and embraces the universal drama of eschatology and the personal identity of each

Christian and sinner. That Hamlet answers the question with a “no” and lets the mystery of iniquity have its way with him is his tragedy. His guilt is that after descending in steps from the universal to the particular, forging the connections at each point and discovering the universal imminent in each person, he willfully asserts the particular in defiance of the universal: “all but one—shall live” (F1 3.1.149). In this defiance, he destroys himself more thoroughly than Antigone or even Creon, for he abandons the entire ground of his existence for a madness than must “shatter all his bulk/And end his being” (2.1.92-3).

Hamlet’s exploration of sin answers Hegel’s objection that drama after Christ cannot fulfill the highest vocation of art: because Hamlet puts the individuality of the hero, his deeds, and his conflicts in a direct, morally conditioned relation to the divine as the grounds of his existence in the drama, it proves that doing so is not unique to the classical kairos.

Yet the presentation of sin alone discloses the divine only through a negative image: we understand the gospel as the truth that the ghost and Hamlet deny. This is adequate to justify Hamlet as a Christian tragedy, but unsatisfying. One feels a need for the play to

329 Kastan, The Will to Believe, 143

207 give some positive image of goodness, which even a tragedy a dark as Macbeth often does. There is such a positive image in the play, but to uncover and appreciate it requires a move from the theology of creation and the fall into the territory of Christology. Here,

Hamlet comes to bear on two of Balthasar’s crucial theological categories, person and role, which also figure decisively into his debate with Hegel.

We have mentioned that “God is spirit” (John 4:24) is Hegel’s favored text to show why the Christian God defies objective representation in art, but we have not explained the Christology behind his exegesis. Hegel defines Spirit as “the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining its self-identity in its otherness.”330 When the Absolute externalizes itself by incarnation it obviates the purpose of art, rather than provides an analogy to instill art with meaning. The death of

Christ also hollows out the possibility of representation through role-playing, for the renunciation of self that he makes in this passion amounts to a stripping away of all particularity and individuality through death: he rises again by identifying entirely with generalized spirit.331 The sending of the Holy Spirit then incorporates man into universal spirit, in the sense that individual persons lose themselves entirely in the universal.

Balthasar explains:

Thus self-knowledge can only come about in a perfect integration—to be progressively demonstrated in thought—of the particular individual into the totality of the spirit (as his truth); for Hegel, the step-by-step journey toward this is a ruthless process whereby all that is particular is stripped of its illusion of being able to reach truth in an for itself.332 Even the hope of individual immortality is seen by Hegel as presumptuous, a “a refusal of the ‘incomplete spirit’ to be integrated into that totality in which alone it can become

330 Hegel, Phenomenology, 439 331 See Balthasar Theo-Drama I, 579-589 332 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 578-9

208 concrete spirit.”333 From this it follows that playing a role as a member of the Church is essentially self-alienating, for the imposition of a role on an individual, finite “I” requires it to become something other than itself, subordinated to a universal claim opposed to its particularity rather than perfective of it.334 On this account, losing oneself in order to find oneself amounts to merely losing oneself, and a theatrical analogy of role is entirely denied.

Balthasar’s first objection to this is that it posits identity in the place of analogy:

In the end, therefore, the difference between tragedy as play and the Christian Passion as seriousness is abolished: analogy, which is essential to a theory of theo-drama, is absorbed in identity. The impersonality of destiny or of “moral substance” in tragedy predominates over the personalism of Passion and Resurrection; the “spirits of the race” (the biblical and Pauline “angelic powers”) ultimately integrate into the total world spirit Whereas, theologically speaking, the Christian person has risen above all these powers.335 Moreover, Balthasar argues, incorporation in the Spirit of Christ is fundamentally affirming of the individual. The very fact of Christian prayer, which puts the believer in dialogue with the Spirit as an “I,” is overlooked entirely by Hegel. The diversity of missions and charisms in the Church confirm the believer as a “theological person” in the dramatic act of integrating him into the universal body.

Precisely because each Christian mission always has a universal content and yet in itself is particular (hence the body/members metaphor in Paul), when they meet there arise a genuine and unlimited richness of dramatic tensions, conflicts and collisions both inside and outside the Church.336 Balthasar’s ultimate solution is that “I” and “role” are unified in the Christian life by mission, which is the foundation of personal identity as a Christian. As the Person of the

Son assumes the role of God-Man by undertaking a kenotic mission, Christians play a

333 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 67 334 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 559-89 335 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 67 336 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 68

209 part in Christ’s role by incorporation in the Church, and receive a mission of their own, which constitutes each as an individual in a “theological role” as an “I.” This unification is fundamental to theological dramatics:

Our path’s direction gave us the question “Who am I?”: we needed to get away from the arbitrariness of a “role” that was simply thrown over a colorless “I” like some coat that happened to be to hand and could at any time be exchanged for another to arrive at an “I” that was irreplaceable as such and thus could not be enabled to take on a genuinely dramatic role in the realm, not of the theatre, but of life. If we had not discovered this unique “name” (Rosenzweig) of the individual addressed by God and endowed with his personal name, the irreplaceable human being, the “absolute, unique existence,” (Ebner), we would not have been justified in attempting a theory of theo-drama, for the unique God would have lacked a partner.337 Hamlet adds to this line of thought a material foundation within the phenomenon of

Christian theater that substantially anticipates it. Hamlet does not delve directly into the theology of Church and charism, and its only treatment of prayer is the non-prayer of

Claudius. It does, however, take up the relation of mission and role in the basic vocation of Christian conversion, and uses it to resolve the rift of sin between man and God.

The explanation of Hamlet’s madness offered here implies a dramatic analogy between life and role-playing which sees the integration of “I” and “role” as a property of a man’s relationship to God. Hamlet plays many parts: he is Aeneas and Brutus, Jephthah and the Vice. He sees himself mirrored as well in other roles, as Pyrrhus, the poisoner

Lucianus, and as the skull of a clown. None of these are theological roles, and in fact disintegrate him into “not to be.” To seek a positive theology of role to counterbalance these is to ask in dramatic terms if Hamlet ever plays himself. This question turns on

Prosser and McGee’s disagreement about Hamlet’s salvation.

To read Prosser and McGee’s chapters on the final act is to be struck that both are

337 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 645

210 very reasonable. Prosser is moved by Hamlet’s acceptance of Providence, and traces from his entrance in the graveyard various marks of moral improvement which culminate in that acceptance. Yet McGee, with the total absence of sentimentality that distinguishes his reading, rejects every noble-sounding word from Hamlet’s mouth as religious delusion, and charges him for killing his uncle at a moment when he is sure to damned, and so fulfilling his evil plan. Theology matters more than sentiment, and McGee has a somewhat better argument as far as they each pursue it. Nonetheless, I believe Prosser is right, because of two crucial points that both overlook.

The first is that the “forced cause” (5.2.338) in which Hamlet kills Claudius may be legally justified. Prosser considers it technically illegal, but forgivable, claiming that an

English court would likely be lenient to him.338 That may be, but it may also be that the court would exonerate him outright because of the murder of his mother. In English common law, an attempted murder that misfires and kills the wrong person was rightly defined as murder with malice aforethought, just as if the victim were intended. This makes Claudius legally guilty of murdering Gertrude.339 Now Saxo and Belleforest report that Hamlet’s father and uncle claimed the throne not by inheritance from their father, but by marriage to Gertrude, the daughter of the previous king. Hence in Hamlet, Claudius secures the election by wedding “Th’imperial jointress of this warlike state” (1.2.9). His murder of her then is regicide, and he loses his ius uxoris, which made him eligible for election, just as Philip II would have lost his had he murdered Mary Tudor, and effectively did for abandoning her. With the throne vacated, Hamlet as heir apparent is

338 Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 234-5 339 Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 8-9

211

Regent of Denmark and kills Claudius with right. This explains why Hamlet, having heard the lords cry, “Treason, treason” (276)! when he kills the king, expects Horatio’s report to vindicate his wounded name. He knows what he did is not treason.

The second point comes nearer to the state of Hamlet’s soul. If Hamlet finds redemption in the fifth act, it cannot be complete at any point prior to him saying that

Rosincrance and Guildenstern “are not near my conscience” (5.2.58), whatever signs of moral improvement he might otherwise show. A conversion must happen after that point or he is damned, and the story also seems to necessitate that he must the recognize the ghost for what it is and turn away from it. I propose that both conditions are met in

Hamlet’s dialogue with Osricke, who is in fact a parody of the ghost.

Osricke’s name, occasionally spelled “Ostricke” in Q2, may be derived from “ghost,” and in Der Bestrafte Brudermord, a German adaptation of Hamlet (c. 1608), he is a Vice named Phantasmo. Osricke is possibly to be played by the same actor as the ghost or to have a costume reminiscent of it. McGee suggests that perhaps his “bonnet” is a Vice’s cap, or that Hamlet’s comparisons of him to a bird allude to the “forest of feathers”

(3.2.266) worn by some Vices, since after all “’tis a vice to know him” (5.2.87-8).340 The northerly wind blowing in the scene corresponds to the north-north-west star, and to the wind that makes Hamlet mad and the air cold when the ghost appears (1.4.1). But unlike the ghost, Hamlet sees through Osricke, interrogating him and exposing his flatteries and contradictions. When Osricke makes his sorry exit, Horatio and Hamlet’s jokes at his expense double as puns about the ghost. Horatio says, “This lapwing runs away with a shell on his head” (5.2.148-9), but half a shell is a “crown” (cf. Lear 1.4.148-152), as

340 McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet, 164-5

212 could be worn by someone pretending to be king. Hamlet says people like Osricke have

“only got the tune of the time” like the ghost’s blasts from hell, which reveal that the time is out of joint; their “outward habit of encounter” (152-3) plays on the ghost’s armor, in the sense of a martial “encounter.” Their “yeasty collection” (153-4) is the leaven that poisons the ear. Hamlet concludes his judgment against men like Osric by alluding to the discretio spirituum: “do but blow them to their trials—the bubbles are out” (155-6).

Testing and discretion, required by 1 John 4:2-3, dispel the “bubbles” of the Devil’s leaven of hypocrisy. As Hamlet says this, a light comes over his face, and he knows.

It is with this knowledge that he almost immediately discovers the answer to outrageous fortune. When he feels a misgiving about the fencing match, Horatio advises him not to play, but Hamlet accepts the king’s command:

Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? This allusion to Matt 10:29-31 contains the consolation of philosophy. The last book of

De Consolatione is an argument for the goodness of Providence, God’s knowledge of the future, which transcends foresight, or “augury,” because it looks from outside of time.

The hour of Hamlet’s death is unknown to him, even when it is minutes away, but for him it is no longer a matter of fortune or the time, because it is seen and cared for by the divine mind. Opposing that mind is not only futile, but undesirable, so Hamlet suffers the water to come to him, and follows the king’s pleasure.

It is interesting to note that in Q1 Hamlet closes his reflection on Providence with an extra sentence: “Let be” (Q2 5.2.201-2). Perhaps he says this only to break off the conversation as the king enters, but it is difficult to escape the thought that “Let be” is

213 meant as a formal answer to “To be or not to be.” It is the fiat of Mary spoken in response to her own visitation from a good angel.

It is stated in Hamlet that man is “In action, how like angel” (2.2.304-5)! and there is a forest of angelic metaphors throughout the play, the most obvious being Claudius who poisons in the person of Satan and then like the devil “cannot repent” (3.3.66). The literal angel who appears in the first act is motivated by a desire to make others like himself in their rejection of God, and perhaps the reason Hamlet says “in the mind” is address his question to the part of man that is most angelic. There is even a precedent for “To be or not to be” is the angelology of St. Thomas Aquinas, who teaches that the dolor daemonum “nihil est aliud quam renisus voluntatis ad id quod est, vel non est,”341 This eternal opposition to being enters the ghost’s command that a denial of the fiat: “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be…” (1.5.82), but Hamlet now negates this imperative in the

“Let be” of Mary. It is an openness to being whereby she plays her theological role, and

Hamlet now does the same. His oath to the Devil began his madness, but his Marian assent returns him to the mind of the good angel. He then can ask forgiveness of Laertes simply as Hamlet, rather than in the role he played when he was not himself, and he can forgive Laertes as well. Thus the grief of Hamlet ends in consolation, and his revenge gives way to justice. With his acceptance of Providence, Hamlet fulfills the good of his nature and plays his part. He walks with God, and that is what it is “to be.”

While it cannot be said that the present reading of Hamlet is necessary to Balthasar’s answer to Hegel per se, it is nonetheless helpful, because of the nature of his project. One

341 ST I q.64, a. 3, co.

214 could argue against Hegel directly at the level of biblical exegesis, and win the debate on those grounds, but Balthasar intends to enrich the theological concepts involved in that debate by bringing the categories of theater into play from drama as it actually exists. For this prolegomenal purpose, Hamlet is of great value, because it exemplifies the highest notions of theological drama and shows that foundational ideas in Balthasar’s dramatics—the World Stage, person and role, drama as disclosure of existence, dramatics as the link between the beautiful and the good—are already stitched into Christian drama itself, and appear even to be understood in roughly Balthasarian terms, in the most famous play of the Christian era.

215

Appendix

Fig 1 Rota Fortunae From Codex Buranus (1230)

http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00085130/image_5 Bavarian State Library, Munich, Codex Buranus (Carmina Burana) Clm 4660; fol. 1r with the Wheel of Fortune

Fig 2 Alia Bifrontis fort: Descriptio From Liber Fortunae (1568) Jean Cousin

Plate 27

216

Fig 3 Fortuna: Amor: Tempus et Locus From Liber Fortunae (1568) Jean Cousin Plate 69

Fig 4 Fortuna et Amor From Liber Fortunae (1568) Jean Cousin Plate 67

217

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