“Acquire and Beget a Temperance”: The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II and Hamlet By Gillian Chell Hubbard A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2010 Abstract Shakespeare’s Hamlet , like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Book II, is a work systematically concerned with the virtue of temperance. This conclusion is reached partly from comparison between Spenser and Shakespeare. But I also set their works in the context of a range of relevant sources available to the Early Modern period. While comparisons between aspects of FQ II and Hamlet are not unknown, critical attention to their common foundation in temperance has been limited. Like Spenser in FQ II, Shakespeare in Hamlet is concerned with a virtue that has its roots in the interconnected Greek precepts “Know Thyself”, “Nothing in Excess” and “Think Mortal Thoughts.” To be sophron (temperate) is to live in accordance with these precepts. Spenser presents the opposed vice of intemperance through the excesses of avarice and lust in the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Shakespeare portrays a court in Elsinore where excess, irascibility, lust and avarice for power are barely concealed beneath a veneer of Ciceronian social decorum and a didactic commitment to self-control. Comparison with the varied aspects of temperance in FQ II makes clear how constantly and variously Hamlet reflects upon temperance and intemperance. There is an underlying tension in both FQ II and Hamlet between traditional ideals of moderation and self-control on the one hand, and imagery and archetypes of the Fall and tainted human nature on the other. This tension arises naturally in a treatment of a virtue which, although it derives from classical thought, was carefully assimilated into Christian theology by the Church Fathers. As in much Early Modern writing, we find strands of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic thought that privilege reason (on the one hand) intermingled with (on the other) an Augustinian emphasis on the heart, the will, and dependence on Christian grace. In Hamlet Shakespeare portrays Claudius as one intractably intemperate in the Aristotelian sense, a condition made apparent in his inability to repent. Claudius’ apparent rational self-control is based on premises that are ultimately false; his actions therefore derive from “false prudence” as defined by Aquinas. His projection of reasonableness forces his antagonist, Hamlet, into a range of irascible and irrational behaviour, some of which is calculated and some of which is not. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present an anatomy of the processes of rational self-control and their disruption by the passions. Both are also concerned with the metaphysical dimensions of temperance, both Platonic and Pauline. When i Hamlet (like a Greek sophronistes ) sees it as his duty to act against Claudius, “this canker of our nature,” he is expressing a confused mixture of desires--for ethical and spiritual transformation, political reformation, justice, and an irascible lust for vengeance. It is no coincidence that the problematic endings of both FQ II and Hamlet echo the conclusion of the Aeneid and its failure to reconcile justice and temperance. ii Acknowledgements I have often been aware how extraordinarily lucky I have been in the academic calibre of my supervisors. Without Kathryn Wall’s initial rigorous and inspirational teaching of Edmund Spenser, her academic generosity in modelling research approaches and the beacon of her own work, her personal support as a primary supervisor, and much hospitality this study would not have happened. It was invaluable to have Geoff Miles’ perspective on the Shakespeare dimensions, and his feedback when Kathryn was on leave. I have appreciated his temperance and his own careful study of virtue ethics in Shakespeare which was always calming to reread. Marion McLeod is to be thanked for her initial direction; Robert Easting for a lead on Augustine and the fowler; Linda Hardy for the leads on economics; Vincent O’Sullivan for some help with New Testament Greek; Anne Lake Prescott for her affirming suggestions as respondent at Kalamazoo. I have appreciated the academic companionship of other graduate students on level eight of the von Zedlitz building. Thanks to Susan Kaiser for formatting and Peter Morrow for a final editing check. Finally thanks to my sons Ben and Louis for their belief in me and my husband Anthony, specifically for translation help and for too many other things to enumerate. Prefatory note: I was on the point of submission when I encountered Christopher Tilmouth’s monograph Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester . For this reason, I have been unable to engage with this (albeit relevant) work in detail on a continuing basis throughout the thesis. My introductory chapter does, however, take account of Tilmouth’s work. iii Table of Contents Abstract .........................................................................................................................i Chapter One: Introduction: “Acquire and beget a temperance” ................................iii Chapter Two: Modern and Renaissance temperance: issues of definition ............... 26 Chapter Three: Excess and self-knowledge ............................................................... 48 Chapter Four: Archetypes, revenge and original sin.................................................. 68 Chapter Five: Suicide and the unfortified heart ......................................................... 97 Chapter Six: Means, Decorum and Mediocrity........................................................ 114 Chapter Seven: ‘Towering passion,’ rational self-control and conflict in the soul........141 Chapter Eight: The journey of the soul: temperance, assimilation to God and justice . 172 Chapter Nine: Hamlet and the journey towards temperance ................................... 208 Works Cited ............................................................................................................. 228 iv Chapter One: Introduction: “Acquire and beget a temperance” In Act 3 Scene 2 of Hamlet Hamlet famously advises the players to moderate the histrionic nature of their acting, to “use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” (3.2.4-7). They should not “o’erstep…the modesty of nature” (3.2.16), because “anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing” (3.2.17). After both the players and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been dismissed, Hamlet and Horatio are left alone in the eye of the storm, the calm before the uproar of the “Mousetrap” play. Hamlet chooses this moment to praise Horatio, because “blest are those / Whose blood and judgement are so well commeddled / That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger / To sound what stop she please. Give me that man / Who is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay in my heart of heart, / As I do thee” (3.2.58-64). As Philip Edwards comments in his notes to the 2003 New Cambridge edition 1 of Hamlet : “It is notable that both to the players here and to Horatio at 59-65 Hamlet is much concerned about the temperance, self-control and moderation which is so much wanting in his own behaviour” (Shakespeare 164). The importance of “temperance, self-control and moderation” to any treatment of human behaviour in the Early Modern period can scarcely be overestimated. The strongest evidence for its importance to middle to late Elizabethan thinking comes in its selection as the announced theme of the whole second book of Edmund Spenser’s epic allegorical poem The Faerie Queene .2 Spenser’s complex and subtle treatment of temperance follows a book concerned with holiness, and Spenser thus positions temperance in relation to the intellectual debate and discord in the period over the relationship between faith and ethical behaviour. The fault line between faith and ethical behaviour will often become a topic of the study to follow. Temperance, a virtue that as the Latin temperantia derives from the Greek sophrosyne , can be conceptually elusive, because of the long and complex history of its intellectual evolution. An educated late Elizabethan / early Jacobean audience 1 All Hamlet citation is from this edition unless otherwise specified 2 All references to The Faerie Queene are to A.C. Hamilton’s edition 1 would more naturally associate its varied permutations because of the intellectual practice of compilation, seen both in the kinds of compilations used in grammar schools and in the more philosophically unified processes of compilation which underpinned the great philosophical and theological works that contributed to the discourses of the period (of which Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae is the most obvious example). It is in part our distance from such practices of clustering ideas that prevents us from seeing the elements of Hamlet as parts of an exploration of temperance, as an exploration similar in nature to that of Book II of The Faerie Queene ( FQ II). All parts of FQ II draw on elements (elements that may seem in themselves unconnected) previously organised by philosophers or theologians into a category called temperance. All parts of Hamlet , I will argue, can be seen in a similar way. What we have lost is a sense of some of the processes