Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare’s Method 9781628920475, 9781501317286, 9781501322594, 9781628920499

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1 Horatio and the Pirates
2 Whichever Way the Wind Blows
3 The Theatre of Reality
4 ‘Why, What a King Is This!’
5 Hamlet’s English Madness
Epilogue
Notes
List of Works Cited
Index of Names

Citation preview

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet

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Also by Leon Harold Craig The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear The Platonian Leviathan

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet A Study of Shakespeare’s Method Leon Harold Craig

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Leon Harold Craig, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Craig, Leon Harold. Philosophy and the puzzles of Hamlet : a study of Shakespeare’s method / by Leon Craig. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62892-047-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Hamlet. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Political and social views. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Philosophy. 4. Politics and literature–Great Britain–History–17th century. 5. Politics in literature. I. Title. PR2807.C69 2014 822.3’3–dc23 2014000530 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2047-5 PB: 978-1-5013-1728-6 ePub: 978-1-6289-2048-2 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2049-9 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

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To the memory of my father

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Contents

Acknowledgements Prologue 1 Horatio and the Pirates 2 Whichever Way the Wind Blows 3 The Theatre of Reality 4 ‘Why, What a King Is This!’ 5 Hamlet’s English Madness Epilogue Notes List of Works Cited Index of Names

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Acknowledgements

This book reflects over three decades of studying and teaching Shakespeare’s plays in the same manner as I have Plato’s dialogues. Needless to add, my understanding of these texts owes much to the many gifted students, both graduate and undergraduate, with whom I shared so many gratifying classes and seminars. With respect to this commentary on Hamlet, however, I have more specific debts. To Thomas Pangle and Timothy Burns, whose enthusiasm for it was encouraging. Two of the anonymous assessors for Bloomsbury made numerous helpful suggestions for its improvement; I appreciate their efforts, and especially their strong endorsements for its publication. Sue Colberg, book-designer extraordinaire, provided (as usual) a beautifully fitting cover. An earlier version of a part of Chapter 5 was presented at James Madison College of Michigan State University, likewise a part of an earlier version of Chapter 1 at the Claremont Institute; I profited from the comments and questions on both occasions. I owe a special thanks to my editor, Ally Jane Grossan, and to the entire Bloomsbury production staff, for the accommodating manner in which they dealt with my manuscript. As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, partner and best friend for some four-plus decades; as all our mutual friends know, I’d be lost without her.

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The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daemons, and that the Daemons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought. Shakespeare’s Myth, it may be, describes a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness. It is the story of Hamlet, who saw too great issues everywhere to play the trivial game of life, and of Fortinbras, who came from fighting battles about ‘a little patch of ground’ so poor that one of his Captains would not give ‘six ducats’ to ‘farm it’, and who was yet acclaimed by Hamlet and by all as the only befitting King. W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil I return to Hamlet as one participates in a Mystery – to regain vitality after descending into the depths, to skirt madness with its hero, to find release from anguish with its heroine in her hebephrenia, to slough disillusion with a treacherous world onto a scapegoat who carries the burden to his destruction. I also return to sun in the lines that light the world in beauty, to absorb nurture from genius beyond envy, and to delight in discovery with each rereading. . . . I listen in awe, because here, so much that psychoanalysts have laboriously learned from patients flows in measured profusion – as if the Muses had whispered in the poet’s ear all that Apollo’s Pythoness had learned from her countless suppliants. I also return to Hamlet because of an apprehension that within its elusive ambiguities lies a key that could lead to the secret wellsprings of the human dilemma. Theodore Lidz, Hamlet’s Enemy

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Prologue

[W]e Florentines have liberal ideas about speech, and consider that an instrument which can flatter and promise so cleverly as the tongue, must have been partly made for those purposes; and that truth is a riddle for eyes and wit to discover, which it were a mere spoiling of sport for the tongue to betray. George Eliot, Romola I suspect that my title – ‘Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare’s Method’ – requires some explanation lest it kindle false expectations. Since I have it on impeccable authority that brevity is the soul of wit, I shall keep it as brief as will serve the purpose, though this will still seem tedious to some, and the result not so persuasive as would satisfy others.1 It requires clarifying why I regard Shakespeare as a philosophical writer, what is meant by his ‘method’, and how puzzles figure in this method – indeed, are the very heart of it. But there is a fourth, rather different sort of question to be addressed, for in its case the explanation must serve also as a justification: why Hamlet, surely the most exhaustively (over)studied work in all of literature. Since treating fully any one of these matters might deserve a chapter unto itself, I must hope something more modest may suffice for readers who will trust that the interpretative effort which follows provides sufficient vindication for any claims which at the outset seem mere assertions, and questionable ones at that.

The idea of philosophy employed here is the original one, ‘love of wisdom’, which remains for me the primary sense of the word. On this view, a philosopher is that exceedingly rare sort of person whose way of life is dominated by this love, even if not to the total exclusion of all other loves (for there are some that harmonize tolerably well with it). As such, the philosophical life is one in which

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questions are primary, rather than answers, and in which everything is potentially questionable. Life being too short to answer all questions, a philosopher pursues answers to the most important questions – and knowing which questions are the most important itself amounts to a kind of wisdom – but he does so without assurance that they can ever be finally answered; nor that they cannot. One can learn this, if at all, only by trying, by the activity of seeking knowledge. And if first one does not succeed, one must try again, and yet again. One may eventually reach the conclusion that certain questions can never be answered, having come to see clearly the reasons why such is the case. And surely this also must count as a kind of wisdom. But since a plenitude of apparently answerable questions always remains, the philosophical life is one of ceaseless activity. Alternatively stated, only in the unlikely event of his coming to possess complete wisdom could a philosopher finally rest. Short of that, like the proverbial hausfrau a philosopher’s work is never done. Thus conceived, philosophical activity need not, and probably will not, result in fully developed doctrines; much less does it entail expounding them in treatises. Indeed, there is no necessity that a philosopher commit to writing the results of his philosophical investigations – or the results ‘so far’2 – in any form whatsoever. The Pythagoreans, for example, did not do so; instead, they conveyed their teachings orally to only a carefully selected and prepared few. As a consequence, what little we suppose we know about their beliefs and practices is based on second-hand reports, reputation, and tradition. And Sokrates, who is credited with having founded political philosophy – with having, as Cicero said, called philosophy down from the heavens and brought it into the cities,3 and whom many regard as the very model of a true philosopher – wrote nary a word. We know about him through the writings of others, mainly Plato, who crafted imitations of Sokrates in action, albeit of an ‘idealized’ Sokrates, one ‘made handsome and young’ (or, ‘noble and new’; kalou kai neou).4 Since the philosophical life per se does not entail producing what can only be artefacts of philosophical activity, why any philosophers write at all is itself an important question. What’s in it for them? Moreover, we cannot presume that those who do write intend to tell all they know, or even that communicating any of what they know is their primary purpose in writing. For example, should a philosopher believe that the philosophical life is the best life for the few who are naturally suited for it, and also happen to be philanthropically inclined, he might write in a manner designed primarily to stimulate and encourage

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philosophizing to whatever extent a reader is capable of it. Thus, his own wisdom would be manifest more in how he poses enticing questions, showing why they are important and why they somehow remain questions, than in any putative answers he seems to provide. For challenging questions awaken and activate the mind, whereas persuasive answers sedate and pacify it. As such, questions worthy of being termed ‘philosophical’ do not merely arouse one’s curiosity, the uniquely human desire ‘to know why, and how’.5 They at the same time frustrate that desire insofar as they resist being readily answered. This results in perplexity, what the Greeks called aporia – an effect memorialized by Plato in some dozen so-called aporetic dialogues, each which seems to reach no definite conclusion about the matter examined, but does clarify and deepen one’s understanding of why it poses a worthy question. Why, that is, it is puzzling. If everything a person might wonder about were straightforwardly explicable, if the answers to all questions were obvious, no sooner raised than answered, there would be no philosophy. Nor, consequently, would there be much worth mentioning that would differentiate the few philosophers from the many non-philosophers. But as this is far from the truth, the former are distinguished by their compulsive, relentless inquisitiveness: strange individuals who persist in the dogged effort to answer all the important questions, however difficult the puzzles they pose – who, indeed, make this their lifelong pursuit. Whereas the latter sort give over the quest, more or less immediately, content to ignore such questions, or to rest satisfied with whatever answers are readily available, hence commonly accepted. Sometimes the cause of perplexity is the sheer scale of the question, or the profound obscurity of phenomena, so that one has no notion of where to begin, or how to proceed, or what is and is not pertinent. Understanding ‘the whole world’ in its wholeness would seem the most obvious example, though even just the portion of greatest interest to human beings – namely, ourselves – presents challenges enough for more than one lifetime. However, this cause of perplexity: the daunting vastness and complexity of the whole, is not amenable to being used effectively in writings aimed at stimulating philosophy, though the scale and scope of certain famous works (e.g. Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil) doubtless contribute to the difficulty of adequately interpreting them. More typically, however, the cause of perplexity is one or more apparent inconsistencies in what one is trying to understand, or some apparent incompleteness, some missing piece, or several, that would tie things together. The world is filled with puzzles of this kind.

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With respect to these more particular puzzles that arise in the course of trying to understand the natural world, human life included, one is intuitively sure that there is ‘in principle’ a coherent explanation to be had, however difficult in practice it may be to discover it. And there are countless ways that a philosophical writer can imitate this sort of thing, causing perplexity in a reader – an alert reader, that is, one who notices apparent inconsistencies, or obvious omissions, or curious, seemingly impertinent details, or when ‘things seem not to add up’. But the effectiveness of this mimetic technique only works if the reader has reason to believe that there is a coherent interpretation which will dissipate his puzzlement. It is this latter proviso that a philosophical writer must first ensure, and it is the more difficult part of his task. He must somehow convince the kind of reader he most cares about – the alert, potentially philosophical reader, one naturally akin to the writer – that his written works, properly understood, do ‘add up’, that in this most important respect they ‘mirror Nature’. And that, consequently, the attempt to arrive at a coherent interpretation is not futile. There is another consideration, however, that complicates philosophical writing, as it is implicit in the very distinction between philosophical and nonphilosophical readers.6 For the author must bear in mind that his works may be read by anyone who can read. And readers of the latter sort are not merely much less interested in addressing whatever might be questionable about their existence, they typically lack the wherewithal to do so regardless. If such people are nonetheless made to confront the prospect that their most fundamental beliefs, those which sustain and guide their lives, are actually problematic, they are unlikely to be benefited, and may quite possibly be harmed. For their confidence in those principles and criteria of rightness, goodness and decency – which to serve their purpose should be regarded as practically ‘beyond question’ – will be undermined, while they remain incapable of discovering or crafting more adequate replacements themselves. Moreover, it is the shared faith in such principles that provides the foundation, the real ‘constitution’, of a political community. Thus, insofar as a philosopher is led to question everything, including a polity’s most sacred beliefs, his activity is a potential threat to the integrity of a polity, even to its continued existence, and so ought not be encouraged indiscriminately. A philosopher, aware that such is irremediably the case – that what would be beneficial for his few natural kinfolk (i.e. raising perplexing questions about that which most people take for granted), might well be harmful for the vast

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majority, and for the community as a whole (which, after all, provides an environment which sustains him along with everyone else), and so may rightly bring unwonted sanctions by the established authorities – must write in such a manner, if he wishes to write at all, that he benefits the few while harming no one. Better still were he able to devise a way of being potentially beneficial to everyone, albeit not necessarily in the same way. That is, write in a form that provides some good to the many non-philosophers as well as to the more philosophical few, even if only by offering the former wholesome entertainment which subtly teaches virtue and scorns vice, while leaving the community’s pieties more or less intact, if not strengthened. So, for example, a philosopher endowed with poetic talent might create exciting dramas based upon a nation’s history, overtly glorifying what is truly admirable in its past, embellishing its heroes so far as necessary and darkening its villains, while tactfully censuring its lapses from strictly righteous conduct. He would thereby help instil a proper civic pride in the citizenry, and a complementary resolve to avoid ‘the mistakes of the past’. A thoughtful reader of those same dramas, however, may discover perplexing issues of political philosophy laid bare therein – concerning the basis of political ‘legitimacy’, say, or the tension between justice and mercy – whose more open consideration would pointlessly unsettle citizens and annoy authorities. Or a philosopherpoet could in the course of telling a captivating story, ostensibly about another time and place entirely, gently chastise certain of his own nation’s practices (e.g. a proclivity for excessive drinking), while endorsing moderation in all things.7 As I presume is obvious, the preceding discussion, while cast in formal terms pertinent to the works of other philosophical writers, is especially tailored to an understanding of Shakespeare’s ‘method’. By this I do not mean his own method of enquiry. (How could I know that, beyond presuming it would necessarily be based on what is common to all philosophers: careful observation and rigorous thinking, abetted by dialogue with other thoughtful souls, living and dead?) Rather, I mean his method of inducing philosophical activity in those readers drawn to and capable of it, while simply entertaining the others in a politically salutary way. Indeed, Shakespeare transforms the necessity of the latter requirement from a liability into an advantage. For the ingenuity with which he crafts his stories, manifesting a complexity and integrity that is evident on their very surface, suffices to establish their prima facie coherence – the

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presumption that, properly understood, they are intended to make complete sense, that everything does ‘add up’. But within the context of what for the most part seems a fairly straightforward tale, he weaves inconspicuous but puzzling features as bait for those readers who read carefully and thoughtfully enough to notice them, and who are not satisfied with usual facile ways of dismissing them (especially, the ‘It wouldn’t be noticed in performance’ catch-all – as if the plays were not intended as literature fit to be studied).8 Sometimes, however, a puzzle is made explicit in a play. Who is the mysterious Third Murderer in Macbeth, for example? Or why is the merchant Antonio so sad (as he complains in the first lines of The Merchant of Venice)? What are the ‘moe reasons’ that Duke Vincentio has for returning to Vienna disguised as a friar in Measure for Measure (as he confides to Friar Thomas)? Or what is Richard Gloucester’s ‘secret’ reason for wanting to marry Warwick’s younger daughter? Other times a puzzle may be left lying in plain sight, as it were, but not so conveniently labelled as such; hence, it must first be recognized as perplexing. Why, for example, does Caesar attribute to his wife a dream about a statue of him that spouted blood – an image he obviously concocted himself (since it was no part of what just moments before she told him troubled her)? Why do the Welsh soldiers come to believe that King Richard II is dead, and so disperse before he returns from Ireland, thereby dooming his prospect of defeating Bolingbroke? Or why does Othello provide two very different origins for the embroidered napkin he gives Desdemona? But whether explicit or implicit, the pursuit of an answer to a recognizable puzzle will lead a thoughtful student of the play to notice other curious features which are easily overlooked in a performance, or in initial and superficial readings. Indeed, this is fundamental to Shakespeare’s method, in that nothing so intensifies the care and curiosity with which one will scrutinize his texts as does the search for evidence that might contribute to solving a puzzle. Puzzles focus the mind. Often as a consequence of such scrutiny, one discovers an unsuspected significance in some seemingly superfluous detail, or in the words of some minor character (a clown, say, apparently included for mere ‘comic relief ’). And almost always one detects other oddities, often more puzzling than that with which one began, thereby enlarging the challenge of arriving at a coherent interpretation of the play as a whole. One may be led to notice, for example, patterns of language or behaviour (an unusual density of related terms, say, or various characters engaging in analogically similar actions) which

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challenge the reader to see the peculiar appropriateness of such a feature to the story, or to the problem at its heart. This attempt to resolve puzzles in a play’s plot may lead – if fully explored, invariably do lead – to the recognition of a puzzle in human existence that the play as a whole is crafted to illustrate. However, as one experienced scholar warns, ‘Shakespeare’s anguished interrogation of reality will leave [a sensible reader] no room for slick solutions; it will accommodate neither the abstractions of dogma nor the evasions of dream.’9 Inasmuch as Shakespeare is a Philosopher, that is. But as a humane Poet, he may enwrap his most difficult and dangerous questions in pleasant fantasies which the majority of people are content to take at face value – for as philosophers have taught since antiquity, even so-called tragedies afford a peculiar pleasure.10 In the case of the more sceptical sort of person, however, one who does not so readily accept things at face value, being repeatedly subjected to various sorts of textual surprises leads to a determination to question everything, down to the least detail, asking oneself why is it here, what does it contribute, is it fully consistent with the rest, what might it imply about things left unsaid or undone, or said and done ‘outside’ the text. By means of this focused pursuit, in which answering one question typically leads to another, the various philosophical faculties are trained – for observing, for remembering, for imagining, for analysing wholes into parts, for synthesizing parts into wholes – the same faculties requisite for understanding the larger world mirrored in the plays. Hence, this experience of interpreting the plays amounts to practice for doing likewise with respect to that larger world, in which things also are often not what they first seem. Thus far I have been concerned primarily to establish (first) that Shakespeare is a philosophical poet in the sense that he crafts his plays so as to stimulate philosophical activity in those readers for whom such activity is naturally appealing; and (second) to provide some indication of how he does so: mainly through incorporating various sorts of puzzles which will perplex a thoughtful reader.11 However, all this presumes that Shakespeare is himself a philosopher of such stature as to be capable of cultivating potential philosophers. While this does not necessitate his being a propagator of doctrines – indeed, may actually preclude propagating doctrines insofar as doctrines carry the risk of becoming dogma, which is antithetical to the very essence of philosophy: intellectual openness – his being a philosopher in the full sense does presuppose that he

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has himself acquired a reasonably coherent view of the World, albeit one that necessarily remains provisional, ever subject to revision, refinement and augmentation. Presumedly, then, his view of the whole of things is manifest in the background of the plays, but only partially revealed in a given play insofar as each play has its own particular thematic focus – very much as one would say about Plato’s dialogues: collectively they constitute the Platonic Cosmos, though each dialogue is itself focused on a particular question, or constellation of questions. But for Shakespeare (or Plato, or anyone) to have a coherent understanding of the whole of things requires that his attention not be confined to the human world, nor even to the whole of Nature, to Physis; he must also have given serious thought to that which is ‘beyond Nature’, to Meta-physis – to the questions, that is, of so-called First Philosophy. Thus, treating Shakespeare’s dramatic poems ‘philosophically’ requires that a reader attempts to discern what metaphysical issues (if any) are being explored in the background of the play, and to see how they bear on the foreground story. This foreground story is invariably some entertaining human drama of timeless interest, typically with significant political implications, and as such is all that most people care about, having little or no interest in metaphysical questions per se. But for those who do, the fact remains: what of greatest importance a given play has to teach may quite transcend its plot. Still, one might ask, why study Shakespeare’s plays as a source of philosophical insight, and/or as regimen for strengthening and refining one’s intellectual faculties, when there would seem to be other texts better suited for such work: treatises and discourses, essays and disputations (to say nothing of academic textbooks) that openly profess their philosophical aspirations? As a matter of fact, they are not necessarily better for that very reason, insofar as truths and insights that one discovers for oneself – even if one is merely ‘dis-covering’ what a philosophical author cleverly ‘covered’ – have a deeper, more lasting effect than do the same things openly declaimed, or even logically demonstrated. However, due recognition of this pedagogical principle implies that publishing philosophical interpretations of such works is legitimate only insofar as one respects their authors’ intention. That is, resolving some puzzles is justified for the sake of illustrating an author’s method while exposing still deeper puzzles, thereby proving his works to have more to teach than is evident on their surface. As a practical matter, one need not worry that one’s efforts will vitiate the pedagogical power of Shakespeare’s plays; four centuries

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of criticism have shown them to be inexhaustible – and none more so than the one which is the subject of this monograph.

Why Hamlet? In one respect, the answer is obvious, for as Mathew Arnold observed, ‘ “Hamlet” is a piece which opens, indeed, simply and admirably, and then: “The rest is puzzle!” ’12 Generally acknowledged the richest of Shakespeare tragedies, and widely regarded also as his finest (rivalled only by King Lear),13 it is nonetheless notorious for its plenitude of perplexing features: apparent inconsistencies, confusing details, obscure speeches, historical anachronisms, characters whose motivations and relationships are ambiguous, a ghost whose status is unclear, the whole tapestry dominated by a protagonist who seems a puzzle to everyone, not least of all himself. As one famous authority on the play well expressed it: Hamlet is the greatest of popular dramas, and has held the stage for three centuries just because of that. Yet it is also full of ‘necessary points’ for which ‘barren spectators’ had no use but which its creator was most anxious that clowning and overacting should not be permitted to obscure for the judicious. . . . Hamlet is a dramatic essay in mystery; that is to say it is so constructed that the more it is examined the more there is to discover. The character of the Prince is, of course, the central mystery: Shakespeare expressly dared his critics from the first to ‘pluck out the heart’ of that. But there are points, many points, in the plot also to which the majority of even the original audience probably gave little heed or which they entirely passed over. The main outline is clear enough and sufficed both for them and for their successors down to our own day. But within this framework, binding it together and filling it out with delightful dramatic filigree, lies a whole network of finer effects.14

That the Prince is himself the ‘central mystery’ may suggest why Shakespeare has embedded him in such a perplexing story: ‘Hamlet is the most baffling of the great plays, because it is about baffling: that is the theme: Hamlet is baffled’, and accordingly, so are we.15 Suffice it to say, readers determined to understand its every feature and ‘filigree’ in light of a coherent interpretation of the whole play find plenty to challenge them. Shakespeare’s longest by a wide margin, one might expect for that reason alone that it would be his most difficult to fully comprehend. But clearly there is more to its problematic status than just ‘quantity’ of text. Indeed, the range and

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depth of controversy about Hamlet – without parallel in the canon – has itself been adduced as grounds for suspicion about its coherence. Here is how one critic expressed reservations many others have felt. The most often performed studied, quoted, and parodied of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is for most of us the key to his work. We cannot remain satisfied for long with any reading of it or its author that writes Hamlet off as a failure. . . . And yet we have our doubts. The bulk and intensity of the controversy, the range of critical disagreement, the amount of trouble Hamlet has stirred up nag us. Can a great play that strikes so many of us as the archetypical work of its author create so much confusion without damning him as a maker of confusions and the act of responding to it an irresponsibly subjective gratification?16

Indeed, another critic invokes the endless controversy the play has generated as justification for stipulating a requirement of any adequate interpretation. That Hamlet has – without interruption, although in very different ways – compelled and inspired the western imagination for nearly four centuries is surely a most important fact about the play. . . . This [raises] two leading questions. The first must surely be, What kind of play could so enthrall the western imagination?. . . But then we also have to ask a second, sourer question: How could any work have seemed to submit to so many divergent and incompatible readings, without being in itself flawed and obscure? The second question might be restated as a condition: there can be no convincing reading of Hamlet which does not also explain or suggest why it has been so long in coming.17

As a preliminary response to both questions, I would suggest that they admit of a single answer, and it lies in the sheer ingenuity with which Shakespeare has interwoven his puzzles. Indeed, showing this to be so is the governing purpose of the following chapters, which (along with much else) address several of the most frequently alleged problems and faults with the play – these being, in turn, the basis of various criticisms and interpretative disagreements. For example, some critics contend the play is poorly plotted in that there is such a wholesale reliance on chance, or ‘providence’, as to rob the story of all plausibility. The most significant (not to say, egregious) example would seem to be Hamlet’s being kidnapped by pirates, who thus inadvertently foil the King’s scheme of sending the Prince to his death in England. Other critics claim there

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are ‘many inconsistencies’ in the character of Horatio, and/or in his relationship with the Prince. And the age of each man has generated no end of controversy. It is also charged that the plot is flawed in that the protagonist, about whom the entire play revolves, has insufficient reason for his deep and bitter depression, his (in)famous ‘melancholy’, and so lacks adequate motivation for both his action and his inaction – in particular, for his notorious ‘delay’ in carrying out the revenge that he recognizes to be his obligation. Then there is the question of why Hamlet chooses to ‘put an antic disposition on’, and whether all of his resulting ‘madness’ is in fact feigned. And once Hamlet has finally resolved to kill King Claudius, how does he intend to do so? Is this not a significant loose end in the plot which goes largely unnoticed because Hamlet does finally kill him? Or, is it likely that any sensible person would agree to participate in a ‘friendly’ fencing match with the son of a man whom he has killed, much less a contest arranged by the very King who he knows had already made an attempt on his life? Surely the play’s most complex puzzle, however – hence, not surprisingly, the one that has generated the most controversy – is the central one: how does Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’ work? If, that is, it actually does work. These are some of the oft-cited problems and criticisms that I maintain are actually solvable puzzles, as I intend to show by suggesting their solutions in the chapters which follow. In doing so, I would hope to raise appreciation for the overall coherence of Hamlet: that there is more logical rigour to its plot and psychological plausibility to its characterizations than is generally granted, even by its professed admirers.18 I have no warrant to appraise its poetic qualities, though I, like most lovers of the play, find it to be graced with many beauties. But I can, I believe, make clear why Hamlet, as a work of reason, is far better than is generally recognized, and proves its author to be, not simply the premier poet he is already universally acknowledged to be, but a philosopher in his own right. I do not claim to have solved all of the play’s puzzles, or even to have recognized its most challenging ones. I still have questions about Hamlet, and Hamlet. But by virtue of the puzzles I have found to be soluble, I am that much more confident that those which remain are soluble as well, and that Shakespeare crafted the play with particular solutions in mind. The foremost puzzle, however, is the Prince himself, arguably ‘the most complex character ever to have appeared on an English stage’.19 And nothing I have to offer will change that. For I no more pretend to have plucked out the heart of Hamlet’s

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mysterious fascination for us than could Guildenstern make sumptuous music on a piccolo. For all I know, the heart of Hamlet’s mystery may well be fathomless.

Hamlet’s pre-eminent status in our literary culture entails two consequences, however, that complicate critical responses to it. The first is its overfamiliarity: Indeed, as many commentators have observed, the experience of Hamlet is almost always that of recognition, of recalling, remembering, of identifying some already-known phrase or image. It could be said that in the context of modern culture – global culture as well as Anglophone culture – one never does encounter Hamlet ‘for the first time’. Instead the play provides a resonant cultural echo – turns of speech, types of characters, philosophical ideas – that seem to preexist any single experience of the play, and at the same time be disseminated from it.20

The second consequence is especially daunting to any would-be commentator: Hamlet is already – far and away – the most written about play that Shakespeare (or anyone else) ever produced. Indeed, it would seem that it has been studied to exhaustion many times over. The extant secondary literature on Hamlet would already fill a fair-sized room (if not several), and it continues to accumulate at a prodigious rate. In the Introduction to the Third Arden edition (the text used in the chapters which follow), the editors report, ‘by the 1990s the average number of publications every year on Hamlet . . . was running at well over 400’.21 The famous witticism with which the renowned Shakespearean, Horace Harold Furness, implored his colleagues over a century ago ‘not to write an essay on Hamlet’ had then not a thousandth of the justification it would have today.22 Every person who since has ignored Furness’s adjuration (and they do number in the many thousands) must confront the obvious objection to doing so: ‘How could you possibly have anything to say worth considering that hasn’t been said several times, if not several dozen times, already?’ One rejoinder to this challenge is equally obvious: ‘Well, read what have I written, and then judge for yourself: were you already familiar with everything in the interpretation that I here put forward for consideration? I previously was not, which is why I wrote the book.’ But this justification can

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be persuasive only a posteriori, as it were, and so fails to address the scepticism that must be overcome if a reader is to invest the effort ‘judging for himself ’ would require. Of course, even then the reader could not judge whether the interpretation offered here is not only convincing, but truly original. He could at best recognize what of importance (if anything) was new to him. For in this respect the reader is in the same situation as the writer: he is aware that there exists a mountain of scholarly writing, and that he has firsthand familiarity with but a miniscule amount of it – as must be more or less the case with virtually everyone. The fact that it would be practically impossible for anyone to master the whole of ‘Hamletology’ suggests a modified version of the earlier question: ‘What is the purpose of contributing still more to this already indigestible mass of extant scholarship on the world’s most studied play?’ But the same fact also suggests an answer. For as another ‘contributor’ has suggested, in some respects the very massiveness of this mountain actually lessens the burden of justification on those of us who come later: ‘Obviously, no single commentary could pretend to encompass the subject at this stage, or to decide once for all between alternatives which are conditioned to provoke further debate.’ Moreover, One is released, by these circumstances, from the obligation to be definitive or, on the other hand, from the endeavor to be wholly original. One is also obliged by them to acknowledge a comprehensive, though not always conscious, debt to innumerable predecessors, to all of those who have engaged in the argument up to the point at which we enter it. So much has already been said, so many extremes have been reached, that we cannot do much further harm. Can we add anything helpful to the discussion?23

In any case, whatever interpretative insights and critical analyses remain buried within this mountain of four centuries of commentary, clearly they cannot in their present obscurity contribute to anyone’s current desire to gain a deeper, more complete understanding of Hamlet. True, as a consequence of attempting to mine this mountain – sink an exploratory shaft here or there (to pursue the metaphor) – one is apt to disinter the odd item that proves helpful (as I believe I have), or even retrieve an overall view unrepresented in familiar scholarship but worth reconsideration. The practical question is whether this search for precious nuggets, much less a rich mother lode, is a better investment of one’s time than the further, more intensive study of the original text. Better, that is, from the standpoint of stimulating one’s

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own philosophical activity with an eye towards learning all that the play has to teach. For that remains my governing purpose in consulting a selection of previous scholarship: as the most efficient way to acquaint myself with various perspectives on the play as a whole, and with putative resolutions of its more obvious puzzles, as well as garnering useful observations about textual details. There are, of course, a number of interpretations that have become virtual ‘classics’ of Hamlet criticism, and it is reasonable to presume that most owe this status, at least in part, to their merit. Thus it is only prudent to review these standard works, as I have done (and as my endnotes partially indicate). I have also sampled some of the more recent and/or less wellknown treatments that for one reason or another have been recommended, or somehow recommend themselves. Doubtless in the course of my reading what others have written, I have profited in more ways than I am aware. And I am equally sure that I remain unacquainted with many works that I would find valuable were I to read them – not only ones buried in the mountain, but some lying on its immense surface. That said, I do not cite works simply for the sake of ‘putting on record’ those with which I am in agreement (or, as is more common, disagreement) unless doing so serves to emphasize a point of particular interpretative importance. Consequently, my endnotes and bibliography do not fairly represent the range of scholarship I have consulted, and so may have profited from. I do, of course, cite all the works from which I have found it useful to quote. Otherwise, my notes are restricted to material that contributes to clarifying or augmenting the substance of my arguments. I realize that many of the works to which I do refer would be regarded as ‘antiquated’ by readers who are preoccupied with whatever scholarly controversies currently enjoy pride of place. But as a rule, I find the scholarship and criticism of earlier generations contribute more to my governing purpose – namely, to understand Shakespeare’s plays as he most likely understood them himself – than do analyses and expositions written from any of the so-called post-modern perspectives, or that are inspired by tendentious psychoanalytic theories. Generally, then, if I suspect that a particular piece of criticism would be practically unintelligible to Shakespeare, it’s of little use to me. This all being duly acknowledged, the salient fact remains: the single most important consequence of my sampling of existing interpretations of Hamlet

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is some confirmation that I do indeed have a very different view of the play and its many puzzles than any currently available. And that, consequently, there is sufficient reason to offer this view for the consideration of others who share my interest in furthering their understanding of this perplexing masterpiece.

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1

Horatio and the Pirates

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

Who is Horatio, and what is his relationship to Hamlet? Start with the simple facts. He is a fellow student at Wittenberg, apparently Danish; he speaks repeatedly of the elder Hamlet as ‘our King’, of Denmark and Danes as ‘our climatures and countrymen’ (1.1.79, 83, 90, 124).1 But unlike Hamlet’s childhood playmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (2.2.11–12), Horatio is not from Elsinore. He is not familiar with certain customs of the Danish court (1.2.174; 1.4.12), nor with various persons one would likely encounter there (such as Laertes, or Osric; 5.1.213; 5.2.69–70). He speaks of having seen King Hamlet but ‘once’ (1.2.185). Presumably this would have been somewhere else in the realm, perhaps on a royal progress through his home town; and it must have been fairly recently, as by then the King’s beard, like that of the ghost, was ‘grizzled’ (‘It was as I have seen it in his life: / A sable silvered’; 1.2.237–9). Horatio also recognizes the armour King Hamlet had worn when he achieved his famous victory over King Fortinbras of Norway (1.1.59–60). As this was a memorable event in Danish history – hence, known by practically everyone in the country (1.1.81–94; cf. 5.1.135–9) – we may presume the King’s ‘very armour’ would be prominently on display in the castle’s Great Hall.2 Even prior to his belated meeting with Hamlet, Horatio is received at Elsinore as a gentleman, is accommodated within the royal environs, has made himself known to some of Hamlet’s friends and partisans, and is privy to some court

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gossip (such as the reason for all the feverish military preparations; 1.1.74–9). But again in contrast to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all the textual evidence attests to his being a loyal and trustworthy friend to Hamlet. Moreover, he is viewed as such by others who are similarly loyal, notably the soldiers Marcellus and Barnardo. As for his character and temperament, it is variously indicated that he regards himself, and is recognized by others, as classically learned and philosophically self-conscious. Speaking more precisely, he is apparently some combination of a sceptical empiricist, for whom (accordingly) rationality and perceptual evidence is authoritative, and a moral stoic (‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’; 5.2.325). Indeed, the former is the first thing we learn about him, and the latter is the last. Marcellus tells Barnardo of his recruiting Hamlet’s friend and fellow ‘scholar’ to witness ‘this thing’ that had previously appeared to them: ‘Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy / And will not let belief take hold of him / Touching this dreadful sight twice seen of us.’ But after the Ghost has first come and gone, Barnardo challenges him: ‘How now, Horatio? You tremble and look pale. / Is not this something more than fantasy?’ Horatio affirms as much, citing his own criteria for rational judgements: ‘Before my God, I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes’ (1.1.22–8, 41, 52–7). Moreover, with the existence of such phenomena apparently confirmed, he is readier to credit what he has read in ancient sources about supernatural events attending the death of Caesar. Likewise, having seen for himself the Ghost’s second departure upon the crowing of a cock, he allows that this supports what he has heard about ‘extravagant and erring spirits’ fleeing to their ‘confine’ upon the approach of day. By contrast, he remains more guarded concerning Marcellus’s report of what ‘some say’ about the salubrious qualities of the Christmas season: ‘So I have heard and do in part believe it’ (1.1.147–55, 164).3 Hamlet seems well acquainted with Horatio’s principled scepticism, hence with his corresponding emphasis on dispassionate objectivity in observation and analysis; we see Hamlet appeal to that spirit by way of drafting his friend’s participation in the ‘Mousetrap’ conspiracy. Indeed, given the Prince’s own meditative nature, it is likely that shared philosophical interests is a – if not the – basis of their relationship. What else could it be, given their radically different social and economic circumstances? But while shared philosophical interests imply a degree of philosophical agreement – on the value of pursuing wisdom, if nothing else, though usually much more – it need not imply

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complete accord. Quite the contrary: such a relationship may thrive precisely by virtue of a respectful diversity of perspective. That some such diversity exists is suggested by Hamlet after his own emotionally charged encounter with the Ghost, chiding his friend concerning the limitations implicit in ‘your philosophy’. Horatio is not, however, a really close friend, if by that we mean a person with whom ‘one has all things in common’, whether good or bad4 – the sort of bosom buddy with whom Hamlet shares his innermost thoughts and troubles and intentions, upon whom he relies for guidance or counsel, from whom he keeps no secrets, and to whom he tells no lies.5 Much less is he, as some suggest, Hamlet’s alter superego.6 True, the Prince sometimes speaks as if Horatio were such a soul-mate, most notably in recruiting him to be a second judge of the King’s reaction to the so-called Mousetrap, gushing that Horatio is ‘as just a man’ as Hamlet has ever laid eyes on: Nay, do not think I flatter, For what advancement may I hope from thee That no revenue hast but thy good spirits To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flattered? . . . Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish her election, Sh’ath sealed thee for herself; for thou hast been As one in suffering all that suffers nothing – A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards Hast ta’en with equal thanks. And blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well co-meddled That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That 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. (3.2.52–70)7

All in all, a panegyric worthy of the noble Osric. Well might Horatio express embarrassment. There are, of course, numerous reasons to flatter besides hope of material reward. For example, one may simply wish to please by gratifying a person’s vanity. Especially pleasing is praise of that in which one knows the person takes special pride. One may thereby – not incidentally – gain or strengthen his

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affection. Beyond this, a flatterer may wish to ingratiate, perhaps encouraging the flattered to do one’s bidding, or otherwise seek to please in return, if only by being agreeable. And there are grounds for suspecting that Hamlet has an ulterior purpose in attributing exemplary Stoicism to Horatio, something to do with the service this flattery prefaces. Hence we might see in it more than a touch of irony. So too, then, in what would otherwise pass as a declaration of closest comradeship.7 While certainly cordial beyond mere politeness, one would not presume a deep personal friendship from the manner in which Hamlet greets his schoolfellow upon first encountering him at Elsinore. Horatio, accompanied by Marcellus and Barnardo, has sought out the Prince in order to report the three men’s several encounters with a ghost in the likeness of Hamlet’s father. However, prior to Horatio’s understandably hesitant telling of their implausible story, the following exchange takes place. Horatio. Hamlet. Horatio. Hamlet.

Marcellus. Hamlet. Horatio. Hamlet.

Horatio. Hamlet. Horatio. Hamlet.

Hail to your lordship. I am glad to see you well – Horatio, or I do forget myself. The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever. Sir, my good friend, I’ll change that name with you. And what makes you from Wittenberg, Horatio? Marcellus! My good lord. I am very glad to see you. – [to Barnardo] Good even, sir. – But what in faith make you from Wittenberg? A truant disposition, good my lord. I would not hear your enemy say so. Nor shall you do my ear that violence To make it truster of your own report Against yourself. I know you are no truant; But what is your affair in Elsinore? We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.8 My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student, I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

(1.2.160–80; cf. 3.2.177)

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So, based on this initial conversation, what might we surmise concerning the Hamlet–Horatio relationship? Hamlet is clearly surprised to see Horatio – indeed, seems not even to recognize him at first, displaced from their Wittenberg context. But perhaps the sky is overcast, the light within the castle accordingly dim. Be that as it may, Hamlet finds Horatio’s presence in Elsinore, entailing as it does his absence from school, sufficiently puzzling as to justify his persistent inquiry. Horatio has no chance to respond the first time asked, Hamlet’s attention being diverted to Marcellus, whom he recognizes at once and greets by name (they must be on familiar terms, as the soldier knew where to find the reclusive Prince at this time of day; 1.1.173–4), then by his acknowledging Barnardo, with whom he apparently is not so well acquainted. When Hamlet turns back and asks a second time, Horatio mocks the question with a bit of self-deprecating humour, alleging ‘a truant disposition’. Perhaps he assumes the reason for his presence would be obvious, thus the question a mere formality inviting a light-hearted response. But since Hamlet’s curiosity is genuine, this does not satisfy him, so he inquires yet a third time (and mind the meter): ‘But what is your affair in Elsinore?’ – adding the sort of quip that one might upon welcoming an unexpected first-time guest. Notice, however, for all Hamlet’s puzzlement, he never hints at a possibility that Horatio has been ‘sent for [by] the Good King and Queen’ (whereas Hamlet immediately suspects this of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, having known them since childhood).9 Possibly somewhat abashed, Horatio modestly explains, ‘My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.’ If Hamlet regarded Horatio as a particularly close friend, he would hardly have needed to be told this. A close friend’s presence in these circumstances would be perfectly natural, first as a mark of respect for both father and son, but primarily to offer his condolence and whatever support and comfort he could in the unhappy time. Indeed, this sort of thing practically defines really close friends. Moreover, Horatio has already been at Elsinore at least a month (supposing he arrived in time for the funeral), but Hamlet was unaware of the fact. Evidently he had neither noticed nor been approached by Horatio at the funeral. Even presuming that before and after the solemnities the Prince had kept himself in mournful seclusion, a close and dear friend would ensure that somehow Hamlet was informed of his presence, thus of his availability should Hamlet feel the need of sympathetic companionship. Obviously Marcellus, who knows where the Prince may be found at a given time, would willingly have conveyed such a message. Whereas, were it not for the Ghost, who knows how

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long Horatio might have waited for a suitable occasion to meet with his royal schoolmate.10 However, regarding the mission that he felt justified his intruding on Hamlet’s privacy, there is one feature of the resulting conversation which is a bit puzzling – even more than a bit, perhaps. Having first described the Ghost’s previous visits to the two soldiers on watch ‘In the dead waste and middle of the night / . . . / Armed at point, exactly cap-à-pie’ – a report that includes details we never heard Marcellus or Barnardo recount, though they may have been passed on either before or after the episode we saw – Horatio recounts his own similar experience when he accompanied them on the third night: ‘Where, as they had delivered, both in time, / Form of the thing, each word made true and good, / The apparition comes. I knew your father, / These hands are not more like’ (1.2.208–11). Hamlet first asks where this happened, then whether Horatio spoke to it. Regarding the latter, his friend replies, ‘My lord, I did, / But answer made it none.’ Horatio does not expand on his attempt to query the Ghost, though all three topics he raised prior to its vanishing are of interest, especially the last: If there be any good thing to be done That may to thee do ease and grace to me, Speak to me. If thou art privy to thy country’s fate Which happily foreknowing may avoid O, speak. Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure in the womb of earth – For which they say your spirits oft walk in death – Speak of it, stay and speak. (1.1.129–38)

But thereupon a cock crowed, and the Ghost made as if to depart. The two soldiers, and perhaps Horatio also, presume that it does so because warned of the approaching dawn; and all three immediately thereafter speak as if this were the explanation. There is, however, another possible interpretation of this dumb-show: that the Ghost in the form of the late King left in a huff, offended by Horatio’s suggestion that it might have ‘uphoarded extorted treasure’. Why in the world would it occur to Horatio even to suggest such a possibility? Does its questionable propriety occur to him in the very course of expressing it – thus

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his rather lame parenthesis citing what ‘they say’? Notice, also, the peculiar way Horatio characterized the Ghost’s exit at the time: ‘like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons’ (1.1.147–8). Should one wonder how Horatio the Sceptic actually regards the late King? Not surprisingly, there is no hint of any of this in the report he provides Hamlet, which continues, ‘Yet once methought / It lifted up it head and did address / Itself to motion like as it would speak’ (1.2.213–16; cf. 1.1.146). Hamlet allows, ‘’Tis very strange’, admits that it troubles him, and asks pointedly, ‘Armed, say you?’ This being confirmed (‘From top to toe?’ ‘My lord, from head to foot’), Horatio explains that its face was nonetheless visible because its visor was raised, displaying a ‘countenance more in sorrow than in anger’, and ‘very pale’, its eyes fixed upon Horatio. Now, however, comes the especially curious part. When Hamlet asks, ‘Stayed it long?’ the three witnesses are not in agreement. For Horatio answers, ‘While one might with moderate haste tell a hundred’, whereas the two soldiers insist it was longer; Horatio, however, sticks with his original estimate. What purpose does this dispute serve if not to prompt the reader to return to the scene in question, and thereupon be reminded . . . of what? that the Ghost came twice! So, which visitation are they arguing about? But more to the point, why did Horatio fail to mention this fact initially? It’s practically inconceivable that someone could forget such a thing: that in the midst of the three men’s discussion about the possible meaning of such an apparition, ‘lo and behold, it came again’. And this is all the more unlikely in that Horatio included in his description of what the soldiers had previously witnessed: ‘thrice he [the Ghost] walked / By their oppressed and fear-surprised eyes’ (1.2.201–2). Thus, when Hamlet asked, ‘Did you speak to it?’ Horatio should have replied, ‘Yes, both times. On its first visit, I asked it, “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night / Together with that fair and warlike form” of the late King; but it simply stalked away, as if offended. So, the second time it came, I tried a different tack, and asked it [etc.]’. What is equally curious, however (given that a dispute has arisen about how long it stayed), why do none of the three clarify the matter now? Surely at least one of them would insist on specifying which visitation they are arguing about. Unless, for some reason, they have previously agreed to suppress knowledge of its coming twice. Is it that they do not wish to speak of their aggressive behaviour in trying to prevent the Ghost from departing a second time, though what they learned from their futile attempt is not without interest. If they have

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so agreed, who is most likely to have suggested this, and why? Recall, when the Ghost made as if to leave upon the crowing of a cock, Horatio ordered, ‘Stop it, Marcellus!’ who responds, ‘Shall I strike it with my partisan?’ Horatio: ‘Do, if it will not stand.’ But apparently it flits from here to there and then is quickly gone, eliciting from Marcellus, ‘We do it wrong being so majestical / To offer it the show of violence, / For it is as the air, invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery’ (1.1.138–45). While one can well imagine that the three might be embarrassed to recount this portion of their behaviour towards what they presume was the spirit of the late King, Hamlet’s own father, and so omit any mention of it, this obviously does not account for the trio’s leaving Hamlet with the impression that Ghost came to them only once the previous night. Puzzling. Still, from this first meeting to Hamlet’s death in his presence, Horatio behaves as a loyal, apparently devoted friend, though as someone who continues to regard himself a social inferior – as Hamlet’s ‘poor servant ever’, despite the Prince’s politely disclaiming that description in favour of ‘good friend’.11 That is, Horatio never presumes to enjoy the sort of full moral equality which (according to Aristotle) the highest and closest kind of friendship entails.12 No surprise, then, that his behaviour towards the Prince would be markedly complaisant. For his part, Hamlet clearly likes and values Horatio; but so far as we know, he never confides in him anything of personal consequence beyond what is necessary for the uses to which he puts him. There is no evidence, for example, that Hamlet has opened his heart to him concerning his feelings about Ophelia, or the frustrations and resentments her withdrawal has aroused in him.13 Whereas Horatio’s part in ‘The Mousetrap’ scheme – carefully observing whether the King’s ‘occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech’ – requires his knowing what the Ghost alleged about the death of Hamlet’s father (and only that), which at the time and with much ado Hamlet declined to share with Horatio and Marcellus, while swearing them to secrecy regarding the encounter itself (1.5.117–88).14 The fact that upon his unexpected arrival Horatio is not an intimate friend of long-standing has one all-important consequence for understanding him and his role in the ensuing drama: his view of Hamlet may change in the course of the story, and their relationship change accordingly. The situation into which he has inserted himself is very different from the tranquil academic environment

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they shared at Wittenberg. Consequently, Horatio may be exposed to aspects of the Prince’s character that surprise him.

What is most revealing about Hamlet’s own view of that relationship, however, is also the most perplexing: the fanciful tale he tells Horatio about how was managed his remarkable, almost miraculous, return to Denmark. The charade begins with some ‘seafaring men’ bringing Horatio a letter from Hamlet. It reads: Horatio, when thou shalt have overlooked this, give these fellows some means to the King: they have letters for him. Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy, but they knew what they did: I am to do a turn for them. Let the King have the letters I have sent, and repair thou to me with as much speed as thou wouldest fly death. I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb. Yet they are much too light for the bore of the matter. These good fellows will bring thee where I am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for England. Of them I have much to tell thee. Farewell. He that thou knowest thine. Hamlet. (4.6.13–28)

It is not clear how much time has elapsed between the event described (which transpired within 48 hours of Hamlet’s leaving Elsinore), and Horatio’s receiving this account of it. But it must be several weeks at least: long enough for the royal ship to sail on to England, and for the English Ambassadors to make the return voyage; for word of Polonius’s death (and hugger-mugger burial) to reach Laertes in Paris, and he return to Elsinore, where he finds his sister deranged; for Fortinbras to lead his army across Denmark to Poland, fight a battle there, march his troops back through Denmark, and encamp in the vicinity of Elsinore; and for grief-maddened Ophelia to drown herself. Why did Hamlet wait so long to stage his reappearance? Whatever his reason, throughout this time he may have continued to hone his skill as a swordsman, as he claims, a skill for which he may anticipate a use (5.2.188–9; cf. 3.1.150). And why is Horatio still residing in the Danish capital, rather than back in school at Wittenberg? Must not Hamlet have indicated that such was his wish? Is he responsible for Horatio’s puzzling attendance on the Queen (4.5.0)?

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Be all this as it may, if Hamlet’s letter is at all an accurate description of what transpired, the lads who brought it need career counselling, for they surely have no future in piracy. Consider. They spot a likely prize, pursue and overtake it. Once come alongside, they grapple it. However, instead of they immediately pouring over the gunnels, intent upon subduing (if not butchering) the unfortunate crew of the seized vessel, one of its number not merely offers resistance, but straightaway bounds over the side onto the ‘pirate’ vessel, seemingly determined to carry the fight to them. So discomposed are they by the audacity of this one-man assault, these feckless pretenders promptly ungrapple and speed away, carrying their rash assailant with them (and leaving none of their own number behind). Thieves of mercy indeed! They sound more like Sisters of Mercy. But then again, perhaps these ‘good fellows’ did know what they were doing. And Hamlet admits having promised ‘to do a turn for them’. No doubt. For on the face of it, is not all of this far more plausibly interpreted as a prearranged rescue at sea? Such a possibility is further strengthened by the rest of the tale Hamlet tells, once Horatio comes face to face with him. Acting on Hamlet’s instructions, Horatio arranged for the sailors who brought him his letter to do likewise for that addressed to the King – and, curiously, one for the Queen also, which Hamlet failed to mention in his missive to Horatio, and about which we are left guessing. But we may be sure that it, like that to Horatio, contains nothing compromising if intercepted by the King. Perhaps Hamlet reminds her, in suitably ambiguous terms, of her earlier promise (3.4.195–7), and hints to her (as to Horatio) that he has much more to tell. We do know that she is no longer the obedient wife she once was (compare 3.1.36 with 5.2.273–4). Whatever may be the contents of her letter, we are privy to the King’s reception of his. Upon learning, presumably to his shock and dismay, that it comes from Hamlet, he doubtless would like to question whoever brought it. The sailors, however, ensure that he has no such opportunity. For upon passing his letter (along with the Queen’s) to an underling, who in turn gave them to the King’s message bearer, they promptly skedaddle back to Horatio. If what the King reads aloud in Laertes’s presence is the entirety of Hamlet’s letter, it does not amount to much. But Claudius is understandably puzzled by the little there is: ‘High and mighty. You shall know I am set naked on your kingdom. Tomorrow shall I beg leave to see your kingly eyes. When I shall (first asking your pardon) thereunto recount the occasion of my sudden return.’ Has the entire embassy made a ‘sudden return’ as well, the King wonders? Then he belatedly notices that the letter has a postscript which, whatever else (if

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anything), indicates that Hamlet has returned ‘Alone’ (4.7.43–50). How in the world could the Prince have managed that, he must ask himself, no doubt with some apprehension. Is this all some sort of trick? Claudius also wonders what Hamlet means by ‘naked’; we might wonder too. Is he tacitly, if only ironically, professing himself at the King’s mercy? But first, why has Hamlet written at all, much less in this seemingly obsequious manner? Why not just show up, ‘out of the blue’ as it were? Observing the King’s reaction to a surprise like that might be every bit as interesting as his reaction to ‘The Mousetrap’. Of course, Hamlet at this point has a higher priority than the pleasure of witnessing Claudius’s discomfiture. Determined to kill him, Hamlet probably intends this letter to facilitate his gaining immediate access – that Claudius, hereby mollified, and unaware that Hamlet knows of the plot to have him beheaded, may lower his guard. That King immediately sets about crafting another deadly scheme needn’t mean the letter has not had the desired effect. He may do so doubly mistaken: about his own safety, and about Hamlet’s unsuspecting vulnerability. That is, despite the suspicion aroused by ‘The Mousetrap’, Claudius may still partly believe what he tells Laertes, that Hamlet is ‘remiss, / Most generous, and free from all contriving’ (4.7.132–3). If so, he has gravely misjudged his enemy. ‘Contriving’ is Hamlet’s specialty. The letters delivered, the sailors follow their further instructions to bring Horatio to where Hamlet is – in a graveyard, of all places – for that is where we now find them together. Horatio must have only just arrived, since Hamlet has not yet shared the dumbfounding news for which his letter urged such haste. Two encounters now delay this communication, however. First, their coming upon a saucy Gravedigger plying his trade, who along with his clever cavilling imparts information that leads Hamlet to muse at some length about the transience of human life. This is followed by the arrival of Ophelia’s ‘maimed’ funeral cortege, and Hamlet’s first learning of her death, which occasions an histrionic confrontation between him and Laertes, ending with the Prince storming off and Horatio bidden by the King to follow him. When an indefinite time later the two friends reconvene somewhere in the royal precincts, Hamlet seems to have regained the composure he apparently lost upon learning of his beloved’s death. And so he at last recounts to Horatio the rest of a most unlikely tale – one that, if taken at face value, ‘should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.’15 Whereas it might confirm for a cynic that God helps they that help themselves. Hamlet tells of certain actions as if they were to be the exclusive means

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whereby he hoped to save himself, but it is pretty clear that these amount to a back-up scheme should the kidnap-rescue by his ‘pirate’ friends miscarry – which it might well have, given the unpredictability of sailing the North Sea (as the few survivors of the Spanish Armada could readily attest). But in neither outcome would there be any need for the English reception Hamlet arranged for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Apparently, this ‘hoisting of the engineer with his own petard’ is motivated solely by revenge, though probably on the assumption that the pair were more cognizant of the King’s murderous intentions than in all likelihood was the case. Everything Hamlet now recounts supposedly preceded the amusing piece of pirate theatre. His tale begins with his first night at sea: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay Worse that the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly – And praised be rashness for it – let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall – . . . . . . Up from my cabin, My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark Groped I to find out them, had my desire, Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew To mine own room again, making so bold, My fingers forgetting manners, to unfold Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio, A royal knavery, an exact command (Larded with several many sorts of reasons Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too) With – ho! – such bugs and goblins in my life, That on the supervise, no leisure baited, – No, not to stay the grinding of the axe! – My head should be struck off. (5.2.4–25)

Horatio is as astounded as Hamlet predicted, albeit not literally struck dumb: ‘Is’t possible?’ We know that at least the part about what the ‘grand commission’ commanded is true, not only because Hamlet provides the document for Horatio to read at his leisure (which, after all, could be a forgery of the very kind the Prince avows himself capable), but because we heard the King soliloquize to the same effect (4.3.56–66). But other than the sleeplessness of a troubled

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heart, Hamlet provides no explanation as to why he suspected the contents of the packet in the first place. Most likely we are to presume it was simply his general distrust of the King (so justifiable after the fact) that provoked his ‘rash’, ‘indiscrete’ – and most ‘providential’ – act. It is of interest, however, that Hamlet just happened to have the purloined commission on his very person when he leaped to attack the ‘pirates’. By way of continuing his tale, Hamlet offers to tell how he proceeded to deal with the predicament he claims to have discovered only that night. Horatio, doubtless all ears, begs him to do so. Being thus benetted round with villains, Or I could make a prologue to my brains They had begun the play. [A revealing choice of phrase?] I sat me down, Devised a new commission, wrote it fair – I once did hold it as our statists do, A baseness to write fair and laboured much How to forget that learning, but, sir, now It did me yeoman’s service – wilt thou know Th’effect of what I wrote? (5.2.20–37)

To no one’s surprise, Horatio says ‘Ay’. It is also worth knowing, however, that Hamlet may be understood to be speaking quite literally here, in that a yeoman on a naval vessel is a clerical–secretarial position, roughly equivalent to that of a scrivener on dry land. In either incarnation, it entails a skill: writing ‘fair’ in a so-called secretary hand – a skill which (as Hamlet casually reminds us) most high-ranking political figures do not have, regarding it, like all lackey service, as beneath them. Hence, they employ scriveners to draft their official documents. Hamlet, however, most fortunately possessed this unusual skill, or so he claims. With it, he wrote: An earnest conjuration from the King, As England was his faithful tributary, As love between them like the palm might flourish, . . . And many such-like ‘as’, sir, of great charge, That on the view and knowing of these contents, Without debatement further more or less, He should those bearers put to sudden death, Not shriving-time allowed. (5.2.38–47)

Here again Hamlet’s spirit, more antique Roman than Danish Christian, wants the sweet revenge of imagining his enemies burning in hell upon shuffling off

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their mortal coils, rather than enjoying heavenly bliss because granted absolution (cf. 3.3.73–96). We may suppose that Horatio is shocked by his friend’s heartless attempt on the lives, and perhaps even the immortal souls, of their former school chums.16 But perhaps he holds out hope that Hamlet’s scheme might yet miscarry, for he asks about the substituted commission, ‘How was this sealed?’ – knowing that it would not be regarded as authentic lacking a royal seal. Here too, however, the nimble-witted Prince claims to have been divinely blessed with otherwise unbelievable good luck: Why, even in that was heaven ordinant: I had my father’s signet in my purse – Which was the model of that Danish seal – Folded the writ up in the form of th’other, Subscribed it, gave’t th’impression, placed it safely, The changeling never known. Now the next day Was our sea-fight, and what to this was sequent Thou knowest already. (5.2.48–55)

The fate of the luckless pair apparently ‘sealed’, Horatio now registers what he finds most disquieting in the whole affair (perhaps recognizing its gratuitousness): ‘So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t.’ Hamlet must detect a not altogether approving tone in Horatio’s response, for he immediately replies in justification: ‘They are not near my conscience. Their defeat / Does by their own insinuation grow.’17 And, he might have added, he did warn them that being ‘sponges’ of the King would prove unprofitable in the end (4.2.14– 20). But that sheer callousness lies behind Hamlet’s skimpy justification is shown by what he here adds: ‘’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites’ – an oblique premonition of the tragedy’s finale. Perhaps flabbergasted by the enormity of what he has just been told, Horatio muses aloud, ‘Why, what a king is this!’18 Thereupon Hamlet expands upon his grievances, apparently soliciting Horatio agreement that they amply justify whatever extreme action he has in mind: Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon? He that hath killed my King and whored my mother, Popped in between th’election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life And with such cozenage. Is’t not perfect conscience?19

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The one unanticipated item in Hamlet’s catalogue of offenses is his now affirming, or alleging, a frustrated political ambition. Moreover, if we are to credit the sincerity of his four-count indictment of his uncle, he must have concluded that what the ‘honest Ghost’ alleged regarding the death of his father, the adultery of his mother – and not least of all, about its own status – is true. He must have done so, moreover, before being tempted to kill Claudius at prayer, and before his ruthless castigation of his mother, which is interrupted by the Ghost whom Hamlet treats as unquestionably his father (3.4.103, 133). What are his grounds for doing so? Presumably, it is Claudius’s reaction to the Hamlet-edited version of The Murder of Gonzago. But since this is one of the most puzzling features of the play, with profound implications for its interpretation, a full analysis of the whole episode – along with Hamlet’s declared ambition – will be reserved for a subsequent chapter. As for the matter at hand: what is the reality behind the fairy tale of rescue-by-kidnapping-pirates that Hamlet has provided Horatio? And why has he foisted this fiction upon his supposed friend – a question all the more perplexing in light of Hamlet’s ironic final request of him: ‘Horatio, I am dead, / Thou livest: report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied’ (5.2.322–4). As if he could!

Intimations of the truth are to be found in the Queen’s closet. There, having killed Polonius and reduced his mother to shamed submission, Hamlet asks her, ‘I must to England – you know that?’20 She replies, ‘Alack, I had forgot; ’tis so concluded on.’ How does she know? Presumably the King has told her. But how does the Prince know? Evidently not from the Queen. Nor has the King yet informed him; we witness his later doing so, and Hamlet responding with feigned surprise: ‘For England?’ (4.3.39–45). Polonius knew that England was a possibility, since in the wake of his and the King’s eavesdropping on Hamlet’s confrontation with Ophelia, the King – sceptical that love-sickness is the Prince’s problem – declared, ‘I have in quick determination / Thus set it down. He shall with speed to England / For the demand of our neglected tribute.’ Though he has already decided to ensure Hamlet never returns (before, that is, his viewing ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, but having registered the threatening conclusion of Hamlet’s tirade: ‘Those that are married already – all but one – shall live’), he cynically professes a hope that this voyage and change of scene will cure what he judges to be the Prince’s dangerous melancholy (3.1.161–74). He may use

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the same bogus rationale when informing the Queen of his intention to send Hamlet away. It may be relevant that Ophelia remained present, and so heard the King voice his intention (cf. 3.1.177–9). Polonius approves (naturally) of the King’s decision to send the Prince away, but suggests that he be allowed one more opportunity to establish whether or not Hamlet’s condition does, as he still prefers to believe, spring ‘from neglected love’. After all, he rhetorically staked his life on this diagnosis (2.2.150–4) – ironically, as it turns out. Moreover, he has in the meantime learned that the Prince may not be ‘out of his daughter’s star’, for the Queen seems to look kindly on the possibility of such a match (3.1.37–41; cf. 5.1.232–5). Thus Polonius would prefer Hamlet be restored to both sanity and royal favour, and so he proposes his fatal secreting in the Queen’s closet while she in this false privacy entreats Hamlet to show the true cause of ‘his grief ’ (3.1.180–6). The King, though having already decided on the safer course of Hamlet’s elimination, sees no harm in letting Polonius, none the wiser, engage in his usual tricks. However, to return to the question: the royal couple and Polonius eliminated as Hamlet’s source of information, who else had prior knowledge of the King’s intention to send him to England? So far as anything we’re shown, only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. We witness the King’s informing them that they are to accompany the Prince thereto: I like him not, nor stands it safe with us To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you. I your commission will forthwith dispatch, And he to England shall along with you. The terms of our estate will not endure Hazard so near us as doth hourly grow Out of his brows. (3.3.1–7)

(Notice, this is prior to Claudius’s learning that Hamlet has killed Polonius, prompting his, ‘O heavy deed! / It had been so with us had we been there’ – as if there were no impropriety in a king skulking behind an arras.) Rosecrown and Goldenstar make suitably sycophantic replies, whereupon the King sends them on their way: ‘Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage / For we will fetters put about this fear / Which now goes too free-footed’ (3.3.24–6). Polonius then enters to inform the King that Hamlet is going to the Queen’s

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closet, and promises to report back directly whatever he overhears from behind the arras. When finally left alone, the King attempts to pray, without success – and unaware that Hamlet on his way to the Queen has come upon him in that posture, contemplated killing him then and there, but decided to await ‘a more horrid hent . . . that has no relish of salvation in’t’ (3.3.88–92). The material points are these. There is no opportunity for Rosencrantz or Guildenstern to speak to Hamlet in the short time between their learning of their mission and Hamlet’s indication that he already knows of it. Second, the commission they are to carry must already be drafted; as the King says after informing Hamlet that he is being dispatched to England, and so has taken his leave: ‘Follow him at foot. / Tempt him with speed aboard. / Delay it not – I’ll have him hence tonight. / Away, for everything is sealed and done / That else leans on th’affair’ (4.3.51–5). In order to appreciate the practical timeline of these events – and in particular the implication of the King’s assertion that ‘everything is sealed and done’ – it is useful to recall here a brief scene from Richard III. It consists entirely of a Scrivener’s soliloquy: Here is the indictment of the good Lord Hastings, Which in a set hand fairly is engross’d, That it may be today read o’er in Paul’s. And mark how well the sequel hangs together: Eleven hours I have spent to write it over, For yesternight by Catesby was it sent me; The precedent was full as long a-doing And yet within these five hours Hastings liv’d, Untainted, unexamin’d, free, at liberty. Here’s a good world the while! Who is so gross That cannot see this palpable device? (3.6.1–11)

The Scrivener’s point being, given the time it takes for such documents to be ‘fairly engrossed’ by even a skilled professional, Hastings’s fate was necessarily premeditated well before the council meeting in which Richard stages his accusation of treason (3.4.59–79). Similar reasoning must determine the timing of Claudius’s decision regarding Hamlet’s fate.

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To uncover the truth of how and why ‘th’affair’ turned out as it did, one must trace out the implications of what Hamlet tells his mother after learning that she knows he’s being sent to England: There’s letters sealed and my two schoolfellows – Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged – They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way And marshal me to knavery. Let it work. For ’tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard, and’t shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet When in one line two crafts directly meet. (3.4.200–8)

Clearly, Hamlet knows much more than that he’s being sent to England. He knows that a royal commission has already been drafted and sealed; and that he, though Crown Prince, will not be the bearer of it. For it is being entrusted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – whom Hamlet regards not only as proven sycophants and tools of the King (e.g. 2.2.234–61; 3.2.289–363; 4.2.4–28), but now as poisonous vipers. These companions of his childhood are to be his wardens in the guise of mere travelling attendants, for they are actually marshalling him ‘to knavery’. He knows this, . . . because he knows the contents of the commission! So, how has he come by this knowledge? How else could he, but by having been told, either directly or through a third party, by the scrivener who drafted the commission? For as Shakespeare has had Hamlet inform us en passant, highranking political figures as a rule no more have the skill to inscribe a fair copy of their own documents than to shoe their own horses. Such ‘base’ jobs are turned over to underlings. Given that he has been in office barely four months, we may presume that most members of the present King’s servitor class are hold-overs from those that similarly served his predecessor – and who expected to do likewise, not for Claudius, but for the Prince who grew up among them, much as he gambolled with Yorick the Court Jester so countless many times. Imagine the effect on someone who had been a loyal, admiring servant of the heroic warrior father, and who felt a similar loyalty and affection for the son, upon being required to engross a commission to the effect of that which Hamlet tells Horatio. Would he not likely be appalled? Indeed, so appalled that he would secretly endeavour to

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get word to the Prince of the mortal danger in which he stands. We know that Hamlet does, somehow, receive this timely warning. And there is ample evidence that he is popular with the Danish people – more so than is the King, as his Highness tacitly admits to Laertes in explaining why he cannot openly deal with the threat the Prince presents: The other motive Why to a public count I might not go Is the great love the general gender bear him, Who, dipping all his faults in their affection, Work like the spring that turneth wood to stone, Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows, Too slightly timbered for so loud a wind, Would have reverted to my bow again But not where I had aimed them. (4.7.17–25)21

Is not something like this pretty much what happens? For Hamlet is not merely popular, but greatly loved. Some Danish subjects manifest more loyalty to him than to the present occupier of the throne (not for nothing has Claudius chosen to be guarded by mercenary ‘Switzers’; 4.5.97). The play virtually begins with proof that Hamlet retains a loyalty among rank-and-file Danes. Barnardo and Marcellus, the on-duty soldiers who first see what appears to be the ghost of the late King, do not report their experience to the Captain of the Guard, or to any higher official. Instead, they seek out Hamlet’s gentleman friend and fellow scholar with whom they have become acquainted in the month that he’s been residing at Elsinore, indeed, well enough acquainted to trust him with this intelligence. And after sceptical Horatio has himself twice seen the apparition come and go, he also does not propose that they report the encounter to any officers of the Crown – and this despite his expressed worry, ‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’ (1.1.72). He suggests instead: Let us impart what we have seen tonight Unto young Hamlet, for upon my life This spirit dumb to us will speak to him. Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?

Marcellus, though a serving officer, emphatically agrees that this fits with both their love and their duty – that their first allegiance, at least in this

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instance, is to the Crown Prince – adding that he knows where to find him during the day (1.1.168–74). This would seem to imply some sort of personal relationship. Nor would that be surprising, presuming the Prince, in anticipation of his one day being the King, had made a point of cultivating the loyalty and affection of Denmark’s military class. Horatio’s later reference to the ‘dreadful secrecy’ with which the two soldiers first confided in him what they had experienced while officially on watch tacitly acknowledges that their doing so would normally be regarded as dereliction of duty by the relevant officials (1.2.206). Suffice it to say, there must be any number of people in Elsinore who would be willing and able to assist the Prince in these circumstances, even if there – like almost anywhere – most people tack with the prevailing wind.22 Consequently, one can presume that Hamlet may draw upon an ample pool of potential allies, ranging from lowly grave-diggers to seasoned soldiers and sailors. Obviously he has recruited some, since the ‘sport’ he has in mind requires a team, specifically of seamen who will act as pirates. They station themselves and their nimble craft in some cove near whence the royal ship will depart, keep hull down as they trail it out onto the North Sea, and – lest they lose contact with their target in the event of foul weather – strike ‘ere they are two days old at sea’. With all the appearance of making a fi erce assault, they grapple onto the King’s vessel, whereupon Hamlet with great show of martial valour leaps to attack the attackers,23 who immediately ungrapple and speed away, the rescued Prince their ‘prisoner’ – proving themselves ‘thieves of mercy’ for sure, having stolen Hamlet from agents transporting him to his death. Since the ‘pirate ship’ so easily chased down ‘the too slow of sail’ royal craft, pursuit is pointless; nor is there anything to be gained by the latter returning immediately to Elsinore to report the abduction. Presuming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are ignorant of the contents of the commission they bear (as they seem to be), and so believe that it involves other royal business – perhaps a demand that England pay its overdue tribute – they have reason enough to continue the voyage. Moreover, if they accept that the King’s sole purpose in sending Hamlet to England is to get him out of Denmark (cf. 3.3.1–7), they may reasonably conclude his being kidnapped by pirates will serve equally well, perhaps even better. In any event, Hamlet’s letter assures Horatio that the perfidious pair ‘hold their course for England’ – as evidently was true, since we witness the English Ambassadors report that, in accordance with Hamlet’s vengeful forgery, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’ (5.2.355).

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And so is realized the cleverest pronouncement that Shakespeare has provided his Hamlet, turning as it does on the double meaning of ‘craft’: ‘O, ’tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet.’24 But there is more to the success of Hamlet’s superior craftiness than simply his arranging the ‘direct meeting’ of two sailing craft, which plan (as previously noted) is vulnerable to the vagaries of sea and storm. Thus Hamlet provided a back-up scheme: the substituting of a forged royal commission for the one that the King had drafted (note that the King likewise provides for ‘a back or second’ should Hamlet’s plotted death at the hands of Laertes miscarry: a poisoned drink; 4.7.150–2). The account Hamlet gave Horatio of how this substitution was accomplished strains credulity – to put it mildly. Recall its several elements. First, as chance would have it, he could not sleep that initial night at sea, feeling himself worse off than a shackled mutineer. So, for lack of other occupation, he ‘rashly’ decided to investigate the contents of the packet his warders had been entrusted with. Luckily, he managed to find it in the dark without waking its sleeping guardians, and took it back to his own compartment, where he broke open the royal commission and read his death-warrant. So he immediately sat himself down, ‘Devised a new commission’ – and here’s the best part – ‘wrote it fair’ (the North Sea being glassy smooth for the hours it would take a professional scrivener to complete this task, and Hamlet just happening to have that very skill, as well as spare parchment, pen and ink). As for the problem of providing this forgery with a royal seal, that was solved by the happy coincidence of his carrying his father’s signet in his purse, which happened to be the very model of the Danish seal. But he also must have had some sealing wax, perhaps in that same purse. All this being so much humbug, what is the likely truth of the matter? Knowing for sometime of the King’s plot (at least several hours before his confronting his mother in her closet), Hamlet goes to sea fully prepared to counter such ‘royal knavery’. At a minimum, he carries with him the substitute commission, which he may have drafted himself (if there is any truth to his implausible claim of possessing such skill), but more likely it was done by the same ‘cherub’ who was charged with penning the King’s original. In either case, all Hamlet has to do at sea is manage to switch documents in the packet. Better still, he might even have somehow arranged to make the switch before setting sail. Be that as it may, recall that upon the King’s telling him to prepare himself for being dispatched ‘with fiery quickness’ to England, Hamlet bluntly responds, ‘Good’. The King, doubtless smiling inwardly, replies, ‘So is it, if thou

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knew’st our purposes.’ Which draws from Hamlet, ‘I see a cherub that sees them’ (4.3.39–47). Here one should bear in mind that God’s ‘Scrivener’, the so-called Recording Angel, as well as the guardian angels which are presumed to keep a complete record of each person’s life, were usually depicted in the paintings and frescoes of Shakespeare’s day as cherubs holding quill pens.25

The major question remains, however: why has Hamlet spun this elaborate fiction – which, upon reflection, is scarcely believable – rather than tell his friend Horatio the plain truth. And does not his dissembling in this matter raise some doubt about his other dealings with Horatio, and about his veracity in general? Is the purpose of Hamlet’s tale merely to impose upon Horatio – presumably for his benefit, and that of anyone else who might credit it – the belief that ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’? That Hamlet’s near-miraculous abduction-rescue was heavenly ordained? Indeed, that we are to see the hand of God in everything, that ‘There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (5.2.198–9)?26 Or has it more to do with what is revealed in the dying Hamlet’s final plea to Horatio, who, professing himself ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’, is threatening suicide: O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. (5.2.328–33)

Is that it? That Hamlet tells his friend this story-book version of events because, in anticipation of his death – whenever this should be, and however brought about, but all too likely as a result of his intended assault upon the King – it is what he wishes retailed to a world as credulous as he must presume Horatio to be, and perhaps is? But why should he wish that? Why would he care about his ‘wounded name’ – about, that is, how he is remembered? Why does anyone? Difficult though it may be to account for in strictly rational terms, the simple fact is, almost everyone prefers to be remembered after he dies – more precisely, remembered fondly, and/or admiringly, and/or gratefully, but even grudgingly

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rather than be immediately forgotten. And preferably remembered by more people than by less, and for a longer than a shorter time. No doubt some would trade quantity for quality, and so prefer being well remembered by a judicious few than by the many unskilful. But in any case, it seems the thought that one might head for the undiscovered country and be neither missed nor remembered reduces the felt significance of one’s present life, along with all of one’s accomplishments and labours, sufferings and sacrifices. It is at least partly to counteract the notion that human lives have no more intrinsic importance than those of beasts – indeed of insects – that peoples virtually everywhere have instituted funeral ceremonies and rites of mourning. Whatever else, these serve as wardings against the spectre of their own possible meaninglessness. The Living eulogize the Dead, not least in the hope of being praised in their turn. For the same reason, speaking ill of the Dead is bad manners, if not strictly banned. But ascribing importance to all human lives need not imply that each be granted equal importance. Thus, the respective importance accorded a given person upon ‘passing through nature to eternity’ may be acknowledged proportionally by the scale of ceremonial recognition, the funerals of Kings being grander, and the prescribed period of mourning longer, than that of clowns. But to be clear, the rituals and ceremonies are to be distinguished from grief – the rites of mourning, ‘the trappings and the suits of woe’, from mourning itself – which (as Hamlet reminds us) is something ‘within’, and may, or may not, animate the public ceremonies. Nor, needless to add, is grieving confined to whatever is displayed in ceremonies. With his dying breath, the play’s eponym expresses a special concern for how he will be remembered. Presumably, this explains, at least in part, the subtle emphasis on memory – on remembering, on not forgetting – that pervades the drama from beginning to end. Laertes exhorts his sister, ‘remember well / What I have said to you’, who assures him, ‘’Tis in my memory locked’ (1.3.83–4); Gertrude promises Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ‘such thanks / As fits a king’s remembrance’ (2.2.25–6); Hamlet requests the leading Player recite a certain speech, ‘If it live in your memory’ (2.2.385–6); and when, as her father arranged, Ophelia meets the Prince, she insists, ‘I have remembrances of yours / That I have longed long to redeliver’ (3.1.92–3); the Player King reminds us of one allimportant truth about human intentions: ‘Purpose is but the slave to memory’ (3.2.182); and the play concludes with Prince Fortinbras asserting, ‘I have some

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rights of memory in this kingdom / Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me’ (5.2.373–4). But, of course, it is the Ghost’s insistent ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me’ that haunts Hamlet from the moment it is uttered, and so determines the unfolding of his tragedy: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, . . . And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. . . . Now to my word. It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me.’ I have sworn’t. (1.5.95–112)

It is Claudius, however, who first mentions ‘memory’, doing so – ironically – in the very context of discounting the period of mourning due his predecessor: Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death The memory be green, and that it us befitted To bear our heart in grief, and our whole kingdom To be contracted in one brow of woe Yet . . . we with wisest sorrow think on him Together with remembrance of ourselves. (1.2.1–7)

Even before his encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet is absorbed by the compound travesty of his royal father’s mourning period being so outrageously truncated, and his mother’s hasty, incestuous marriage: ‘ “But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two” . . . “Heaven and earth, / Must I remember” . . . “a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” ’ (1.2.138–51). It is a plaint that recurs in Hamlet’s bitter sarcasm to Ophelia prior to the performance of his ‘Mousetrap’: ‘O heavens – die two months ago and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year’ (3.2.123–5). Remembering, not forgetting, especially not being forgotten, are thematic strands running throughout the play. Consequently, the importance of observing proper obsequies also has a peculiar prominence, emphasized mainly by the repeated violations of proprieties – that is, by the number of ‘maimed rites’.

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For that disrespecting the late King is only the first instance. There is also the ‘hugger-mugger’ manner in which old Polonius is interred, which according to Claudius have left ‘the people muddied, / Thick and unwholesome in thoughts and whispers’ (4.5.81–2). And clearly the conditions of his father’s burial intensifies the spirit of outrage with which Laertes returns to Elsinore: ‘His means of death, his obscure funeral – / No trophy, sword nor hatchment o’er his bones, / No noble rite, nor formal ostentation – / Cry to be heard as ’twere from heaven to earth’ (4.5.205–8). After all, this would normally imply that the old councillor had died in deep disgrace. As for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, one can only presume the worst with respect to their disposal, the tributary English Sovereign having been conjured to put them ‘to sudden death, / Not shriving time allowed.’ For a finale, there is the funeral of sweet Ophelia, whose ‘laying to rest’ is the only burial service we actually observe. The cortege of the young woman,27 although it includes the royal couple, is otherwise so meagre as to cause Hamlet, accidentally present, to wonder, ‘Who is this they follow? / And with such maimed rites?’ As he expressly notes, this sort of irregularity would suggest a death by suicide (5.1.207–10). Brother Laertes is not happy with the proceeding: ‘What ceremony else?’ he twice challenges the presiding priest, who testily replies, ‘Her death was doubtful; / And but that great command o’er sways the order / She should in ground unsanctified have been lodged [etc.]’, adding, ‘We should profane the service of the dead / To sing a requiem and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls.’ Everything omitted in her case – charitable prayers, flower-bedecked coffins and grave-sites, bells and candles, choral requiems, and not least their publicity – remind us of the (sometimes lavish) ceremonies with which the dead are buried, attesting to the importance of their having lived. The point of all this is easily summarized: people, and not necessarily only those personally related, care that whenever a person of even minor consequence dies, he be suitably remembered, memorialized. And so they have instituted more or less elaborate rituals and ceremonies designed to serve that purpose. For a person to receive no such acknowledgement upon his death is to imply that his life was of no consequence. Hence, the scanting of such ceremonies erodes the significance people are apt to feel regarding their own lives. Nor, of course, does the concern that a person ‘not be forgotten’ end with the funeral. For grave markers, sepulchres, and even grand monuments are erected, ostensibly dedicated to the memory of whoever’s grave they mark

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(cf. 1.4.47–51; 4.5.206; 5.1.286), thereby providing a location where those still living may pay a periodic tribute, keeping ‘alive’ that memory. This is the context in which Hamlet expresses his dying request to Horatio, who proclaims his intention to comply, whereupon Prince Fortinbras – as his first act of Sovereignty – commands, ‘Let four captains / Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage’, and in recognition of his passing let ‘The soldiers’ music and rite of war / Speak loudly for him’, along with a volley of ordnance. Then it will be Horatio’s turn to speak. Since Hamlet’s request was made expressly out of a concern for his ‘wounded name’, Horatio has been tacitly enjoined to ‘tell a story’ such as would heal the injuries to the Prince’s reputation. Whatever else, presumably it would include how he single-handedly attacked a boatload of pirates, who were so alarmed by his bold ferocity that they immediately broke off their attack and sped away with him still aboard. And far from being angry with their captive for his having frustrated their seizing of a rich prize (to say nothing of causing them professional embarrassment), they treated him kindly and thereafter did his bidding. And that, in retrospect, he attributed to divine Providence his thereby evading the King’s attempt on his life. Whether he would wish Horatio to include as well the part about arranging Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be blown at the moon is, perhaps, doubtful. As for the serious side of this: it would seem that Hamlet has at last imposed some order on the moral conflict which was so disturbing his soul in the aftermath of his encounter with the Ghost. Yielding to the insistent promptings of his own spirit, he has finally taken his stand with the ancient pagan view of man in relation to the world, rejecting the modern Christian view in which he was imperfectly nurtured. The decisive moment comes upon his witnessing Prince Strong-arm lead his Norwegians to attack Poland – ‘to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name’ (or so believes the Norwegian Captain that Hamlet queries). The sight, or rather the idea behind it, brings an epiphany of self-knowledge and resolution: How all occasions do inform against me And spur my dull revenge. What is a man If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast – no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason

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To fust in us unused. Now whether it be Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on th’event (A thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward) – (4.4.31–42)

Whereas beasts exist in a timeless ‘present’, preoccupied with the bodily requirements of mere life – and upon dying are as if they never were – man is aware that he ‘lives in Time’, and only ‘for a time’ (‘Thou knowst ’tis common all that lives must die’). But by virtue of his rational imagination, he entertains speculations about what may lie ‘before’ him, possible Futures; and by virtue of a rational memory, he has a continuing awareness of what he has left ‘after’ him, an incorrigible Past. Though he may experience episodic stints of forgetfulness in moments of high passion or excitement, he cannot ultimately suppress his temporal awareness, nor what is implicit in it: awareness of a rational capability whereby, day in and day out, he decides what to do, how to act, what tasks to perform, while knowing that whatever he does, or fails to do, is not isolated in the moment but has consequences for an uncertain future that will after ‘th’event’ become a past, to be remembered with pride or shame, gratitude or regret. Any person worth considering has enough ‘godlike reason’ to understand that this is the human condition: neither that of an oblivious beast nor of an omniscient god, but a mortal being denied eternity in the only world he can be sure of, yet capable of memorable achievements for both good and ill. A man may evade the responsibility for timely action, either by surrendering to the inherently lethargic bestial side of his nature, or by insisting upon godlike certitude before acting, weighing the pros and cons endlessly (often more a cover for moral cowardice than evidence of laudable prudence). Viewed in that light, what then must a man of Hamlet’s probity admit about himself? – I do not know Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do, Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me – Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed Makes mouths at the invisible event Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare Even for an eggshell. (4.4.42–55)

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At this point, one might be inclined to respond: ‘Too late. Granted you have cause, as you have strength, and now at last (fired by the example of Fortinbras) perhaps you also have the will. But you no longer have the means. You let slip the opportunity: you’re on your way to England with little prospect of seeing Denmark ever again, thus leaving King Claudius to die there of old age. In short, yours is a cautionary tale about the evils of procrastination.’ But this fails to reckon with what Hamlet’s superior craftiness has prepared by way of a speedy return. Not incidentally, the Prince also provides here at least part of the reason for Prince Fortinbras’ having his ‘dying voice’ in the forthcoming election of Claudius’s successor. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then That have a father killed, a mother stained, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep; while to my shame I see The eminent death of twenty thousand men That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hid the slain?28 O, from this time forth My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth. (4.4.52–65)29

‘From this time forth’, Hamlet’s soul is no longer disturbed by an irreconcilable conflict between a natural pride in manly virtue, and a nurtured sense of incorrigible sinfulness; or between competing pieties, that of a pagan’s duty to revenge the murder of one’s father, and that of a Christian’s obligation to forgive one’s enemies; or between love of honour, and its disparagement as the vanity of vanities. And what is most important, he now has a clear idea of wherein greatness lies – that is, distinctly human greatness – namely, in refusing to be ruled exclusively by utilitarian calculi, and demanding instead the respect, the honour due noble aspirations and sacrifices, regardless of whether crowned with success or doomed to failure. Moreover, now he may court death with a clear conscience, even regard it as a ‘felicity’ – a consummation devoutly to be wished, his world being what it has

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become – no longer recognizing a divine canon fixed ’gainst self-slaughter. True to both his antique morality and the implication of his incipient materialism,30 the only ‘immortality’ Hamlet now believes in is that which subsists in the memories of the living, of a fame that transcends death. Thus, Hamlet cares how he is to be remembered: rather as Horatio knew him at Wittenberg, and as Ophelia knew him at Elsinore before his noble mind was o’erthrown, when he was still th’expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mould of form – not as the deranged son of a shameless mother, a despised object of fear and pity. And thus his final request of his friend to tell a story that will heal his ‘wounded name’, things otherwise ‘standing thus unknown’, and to his discredit. For his own part, Hamlet’s exit line might fittingly have been the same as that of the Ghost: ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me.’

A second, and related question also remains: is Horatio – this sceptically minded Empiricist and conscientious Stoic – really as credulous as he appears? And what does he know, or rather, presume he knows, that would cure the wounds he supposes Hamlet regards as having most injured his reputation? What story could he tell that would restore health to Hamlet’s name and lend beauty to his memory? Such light as to be had on this matter must be gathered from whatever is implicit in Horatio’s penultimate speech, wherein he announces his intention to honour Hamlet’s last request. The Norwegian Prince, having parked his victorious army at the gates of Elsinore, and surveying the scene of ‘so many princes [dead] at a shot’, has asked for an accounting of what he sees. And the Ambassadors just arrived from England, having reported ‘That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’, wonder whence they shall receive thanks as would befit a king’s remembrance for what they presume would be welcome news. Horatio – surprisingly assertive amidst the disorder of the royal family’s extinction (surprising, that is, given how pliant and even self-effacing he seemed heretofore, and bearing in mind that he has no official standing in Elsinore) – responds, first to the latter: Not from his mouth, Had it th’ability of life to thank you. He never gave commandment for their death. But, since so jump upon this bloody question, You from the Polack wars and you from England Are here arrived, give order that these bodies

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet High on the stage be placed to the view, And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world How these things came about. So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning, and for no cause, And in this upshot purposes mistook Fallen on th’inventor’s heads. All this can I Truly deliver. (5.2.356–69)

The ‘things’ he proposes to explain include, whatever else, how four corpses came to litter the royal hall – meaning, not how each victim died (any number of eyewitnesses could inform the yet unknowing world of that), but what concatenation of causes led up to this bloody finale. As we are not privy to the actual story he will tell, we are left to surmise what ‘carnal’ and/or ‘bloody’ and/ or ‘unnatural’ acts he intends to speak of, and committed by whom; similarly, what accidental judgements; what casual slaughters; what deaths by cunning but for no cause; and whose mistook purposes fell upon their own heads. In each particular, we’re left to speculate what, and who, he has in mind. But at the same time, we surely may doubt whether he can make good his claim to ‘truly deliver’ what he only presumes to know. Or even to the extent that he can, whether he is willing fully to do so. However, what is first of all striking about Horatio’s catalogue of promised revelations is that they do not all seem to pertain exclusively to the crimes and machinations of the King or his minions. We have no difficulty assigning ‘bloody and unnatural acts’ to Claudius’s fratricide and attempt on his nephew’s life; or ‘carnal’, and perhaps also ‘unnatural’, acts to his adulterous relationship with his brother’s wife. Both Claudius’s poisoning of the wine and Laertes’s poisoning of his rapier might qualify as ‘mistaken purposes turned against their inventors’. But whose ‘accidental misjudgment’ if not Hamlet’s should we suppose Horatio believes led to the ‘casual slaughter’ of old Polonius (and Laertes’s consequent thirst for vengeance). Presuming, that is, Horatio believes the killing of Polonius was unintentional, Hamlet never having confided to him otherwise. And whose deaths does Horatio know were successfully brought about by cunning, deaths he judges to have been without ‘cause’, if not those of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, engineered by Hamlet. If Horatio means to ‘truly deliver’ an account of their fates, it would ease the puzzlement his initial response doubtless induced in the English Ambassadors, but hardly burnish

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Hamlet’s name. However, perhaps here he intends to beautify somehow the episode in the Prince’s favour. Having agreed to tell his friend’s story and ‘report [his] cause aright’ to the world’s unsatisfied, Horatio may prefer to interpret ‘aright’ in this case as meaning ‘whatever will rehabilitate Hamlet’s reputation and honour his memory’. A second point: there are major elements of this saga that contributed to its tragic denouement, but which seem wholly unrepresented in Horatio’s preface to the story he intends to tell. There is no indication that he will weave the death of Ophelia into this tragic tapestry – indeed, that he even knew anything about the Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia prior to his eruption at her graveside.31 True, there is Horatio’s somewhat mysterious attendance on the Queen when the deranged Ophelia comes calling. As noted before, we can only presume that the exiled Prince urged this service on his friend, and wonder to what purpose. Horatio’s one contribution on that occasion was to advise the reluctant Queen to admit the girl: ‘’Twere good she were spoken with, for she may strew / Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds’ (5.4.14–15).32 Presuming that he is unaware of Ophelia’s frustrated love for Hamlet, he may attribute her madness solely to the death of her father (as everyone else seems to), ignoring the fairly clear suggestiveness of her sad songs. By contrast, it is hardly surprising that Horatio’s announcement gives no hint of revealing the Ghost’s role in precipitating the entire sequence of events. As we know, Hamlet was resigned to a passive acceptance of Claudius’s election to the kingship, of his mother’s o’erhasty and incestuous remarriage, of the scanting of his father mourning rites – ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue’ (1.2.158–9) – until, that is, his encounter with the Ghost. If, however, Horatio wishes to apologize for the Prince in such manner as would restore to health his reputation, he can scarce avoid revealing that Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’, all his seemingly wayward behaviour and whirling words, all his madness and morosity, was merely feigned, an act that he ‘put on’. But can Horatio plausibly explain why Hamlet should think it ‘meet / To put an antic disposition on’? Indeed, does Horatio even know himself?

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The spiritual haughtiness and disgust of every human who has suffered profoundly – just how profoundly humans can suffer almost determines their order of rank – the harrowing certainty, which thoroughly permeates and colours him, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than even the cleverest and wisest can know, that he was once acquainted with and ‘at home’ in many distant, terrifying worlds of which ‘you know nothing’ . . . this silent spiritual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the ‘initiated’, of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with obtrusive and pitying hands, and in general against everything that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering ennobles; it separates. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 270

Why does Hamlet adopt an on-again, off-again ‘antic disposition’?1 Why does he suggest that he might (‘perchance’) find it somehow appropriate (‘meet’) to do so? To what purpose feign – this intense young man who had publicly proclaimed ‘I know not seems’? And why only ‘perchance’? Has he not yet made up his mind how to proceed? Or does he intend to sow a seed of dubiety regarding his future behaviour? It is tempting to regard this severalsided question as the interpretative problem posed by the play. For, to be sure, it is difficult to answer convincingly, presuming one recognizes its various facets to be problems that pervade the play. One can dismiss without further ado the superficial explanation that it is simply an element of the plot which Shakespeare has carried forward from some source material, presumably the story of Amleth found in Saxo Grammaticus’s tales of medieval Denmark as

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reworked in Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques. The idea of a young prince feigning madness in order to pursue vengeance on the uncle who killed the youth’s father and then married his mother, along with other details of Saxo’s story, may have struck Shakespeare as ‘having possibilities’ for an effective tragedy. But the use to which he put such raw material has almost nothing in common with the original. To mention only the most obvious difference: in the Saxo-Belleforest tale, it is publicly known that this uncle murdered his brother to usurp the throne and the wife, and would readily kill the son as well; so Amleth feigns madness, hoping to be spared as a harmless idiot while he awaits his chance for revenge. But in Shakespeare’s reworking, Hamlet’s antic disposition serves no such purpose. Quite the contrary. Claudius, having committed a seemingly perfect crime – namely, that in which not only the perpetrator but the crime itself is unknown – initially has no reason to suspect Hamlet of seeking revenge, and some reason to conciliate him (given that ‘The Queen his mother / Lives almost by his looks’, as Claudius claims to by hers; 4.7.12–17). Whereas, Hamlet’s irrational behaviour is precisely what early on makes the King suspect that the Prince poses a serious threat, as is implicit in his quizzing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘And can you by no drift of conference / Get from him why he puts on this confusion, / Grating so harshly all his days of quiet / With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?’ (3.1.1–4). The terms he uses, ‘puts on’ – the very same Hamlet himself used to describe his planned feigning – suggests that the King may have begun to entertain doubts about Hamlet’s apparent madness. And after spying on the Prince’s frenetic, bizarre confrontation with Ophelia, Claudius openly expresses scepticism about his nephew’s mental status: Love! His affections do not that way tend. Nor what he spake, though it lacked 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 – which for to prevent, I have in quick determination Thus set it down. He shall with speed to England. . . .

(3.1.161–8)

The King may be indifferent whether Hamlet’s derangement be real or feigned, since as a matter of prudence, ‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’ (3.1.187). And so he resolves that the Prince be permanently removed, though again in some way that Claudius himself not be blamed.

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Clearly, then, Hamlet’s adoption of an ‘antic’ strategy presents a problem. Would it not have made more sense simply to behave normally, secure in his companions having sworn never to reveal that he has conversed with a Ghost claiming to be his father’s spirit? Why draw attention to himself by acting crazy? But perhaps his mooting the possibility of ‘putting an antic disposition on’ is so puzzling because the reason for his doing so is not, after all, the primary question. Rather, it is strictly secondary to the question that is primary: why has he informed his night-time companions of this intention, while at the same time insisting that they swear in no way ever to reveal it? If he doesn’t want anyone to know about it, why tell them? Why not just do it? He doesn’t have to tell them in order to tell us; there are soliloquies for such purposes. But from the point at which he raises the possibility of feigning dementia, the problem of ‘Hamlet’s madness’ dominates the play, certainly for the other characters within it, but also for we readers and viewers of it. True, aware as we are of his intention, we find intelligible – and often as amusing as the Prince does – much of what other characters regard as bizarre or crazy. Much of it for sure, though just as surely not all of it. In any event, the point remains: if one cannot provide a convincing explanation for both his informing Horatio and Marcellus (who drops out of the story, but not entirely if we presume he is still in Elsinore) that ‘perchance’ he may find it ‘meet to put an antic disposition on’, and his emphatic, elaborate insistence that they swear to in no way, whether by word or gesture or posture, reveal his doing so – if one cannot explain this, then there is no possibility of the play as a whole being coherent, much less any likelihood that one might ‘pluck out the heart of [Hamlet’s] mystery’ (as Shakespeare implicitly challenges us to do).

In addressing this puzzle, it is useful to assemble all the evidence that could possibly bear on it; that is, all the instances, whether directly observed or merely reported, of ‘Hamlet’s transformation’ (as the King refers to it in briefing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Doing so makes manifest just how extensively the effects of his apparent madness pervade the play. But such a survey has another consequence which might easily be overlooked: that of highlighting the consistent lucidity of his soliloquies, despite whatever anger, disgust, and/or melancholia is expressed therein. Actually, the Prince’s altered state becomes noticeable even before he has informed his friends of his antic intention. His interview with the Ghost ended, his anxious comrades rejoin him. Horatio inquires, ‘What news, my lord?’

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Hamlet’s reply (‘O, wonderful’) could only excite eager anticipation. This interest he immediately frustrates, however, protesting that they might reveal it, then fobbing them off with a cliché and the suggestion that they politely part, each going his separate way. Hence Horatio’s protest: ‘These are but wild and whirling words, my lord’, and Hamlet’s distracted reply, ‘I am sorry they offend you – heartily, / Yes, faith, heartily.’ When Horatio replies, ‘There’s no offense’, Hamlet assures him to the contrary, but about something else entirely: And much offense too. Touching this vision here It is an honest ghost – that let me tell you. For your desire to know what is between us O’ermaster it as you may. And now, good friends, As you are friends, scholars and soldiers, Give me one poor request. (1.5.136–41)

Assured by Horatio that he has only to ask, Hamlet pleads, ‘Never make known what you have seen tonight.’ But he is not content to leave it at that. They must swear to it, repeatedly, as Hamlet moves from place to place, hearing the Ghost second his urgings. Whether his companions also ‘hear this fellow in the cellarage’ is not clear. But when Hamlet bids them to move and swear still once more, Horatio understandably exclaims, ‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.’ Almost surely he is referring to Hamlet’s manic behaviour. The Prince, however – master of intentional ‘misinterpretation’ (cf. 1.2.75–6; 2.2.188–91; 3.2.88–91) – chooses to regard Horatio’s exclamation as pertaining to the subterranean voice, thus licensing the famous rejoinder: ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome: / There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.166–7). Then follows his insistence that, no matter ‘How strange or odd some’er’ he may conduct himself – as ‘perchance’ he shall hereafter think it meet ‘To put an antic disposition on’ – they also swear to in no way indicate that they ‘know aught’ of him. It would seem they have already had a taste of what he means by ‘antic’ behaviour. And that Hamlet is well aware that they have. Two months pass, during which instances of such behaviour presumably accumulate. The first we hear of anything definite, however, is from a distraught Ophelia reporting to her father the visit moments before of a dishevelled Hamlet to her closet. Polonius had those two months ago forbad his daughter to ‘so slander any moment leisure / As to give words or talk with

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the Lord Hamlet’ (1.3.132–3). This prohibition of all dalliance had come on the heels of a similar warning from her brother prior to his departure for France. We have no indication whether Hamlet was in any way informed of the injunction that had been placed upon the girl, but it seems unlikely, as she subsequently avows, ‘I did repel his letters and denied / His access to me’ (which implies he sought to communicate with her, unsuccessfully). Her description of his appearance and conduct during this surprising intrusion into the privacy of her closet would certainly suggest that something is wrong with the Prince: clothing all awry, his face ‘Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other’, with so piteous an expression one might imagine he’d been abiding in hell. He said nothing, but seized her, held her at arms length for some time while he scrutinized her face, finally nodded thrice, sighed deeply as he released her, and awkwardly exited without taking his eyes off her (2.1.74–97).2 Polonius interprets this as ‘the very ecstasy of love’, and both blames and excuses himself for instituting the overly jealous policy towards Hamlet ‘That hath made him mad.’ He decides then and there to inform the King of his discovery. The next reference to Hamlet’s condition comes from the King himself in his disingenuous welcome to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Moreover that we much did long to see you The need we have to use you did provoke Our hasty sending. Something have you heard Of Hamlet’s transformation – so call it Sith nor th’exterior nor the inward man Resembles that it was. What it should be More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him So much from th’understanding of himself I cannot dream of. (2.2.2–10)

No dreaming is necessary to suggest other possibilities. Though Claudius gives no hint of it, he would suspect that the Prince is resentful at being passed over for the kingship. And, beyond doubt, Claudius would prefer to avoid any reference to his obscenely hasty and incestuous marriage to Hamlet’s widowed mother. Almost surely it was her inspiration to have her son’s two childhood companions summoned back to Elsinore in the hope that they might, as the King puts it, ‘draw him on to pleasures and to gather / So much as from occasion you may glean, / Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus.’

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The trusty pair no sooner leaves in search of their quarry than old Polonius arrives, brimming with the news that he is sure he has found ‘The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy’ (2.2.49).3 To heighten the drama of his announcement, however, he suggests that the King first receive the report of the just-returned Ambassadors to Norway. That done, the loquacious Councillor delivers his hypothesis that for frustrated love of daughter Ophelia – evidenced by a confiscated love letter – Hamlet, ‘a short tale to make, / Fell into a sadness, then into a fast, / [etc.] and by this declension / Into the madness wherein now he raves, / And we all mourn for’ (2.2.143–8). Having heard the case, the Queen agrees: ‘It may be, very like.’ Polonius offers to stake his life on it. Then, when the King asks how it might be further confirmed, Polonius suggests that the two of them eavesdrop on a private meeting he will arrange between Ophelia and Hamlet, who has of late taken to walking ‘four hours together / Here in the lobby.’ The Queen no sooner confirms such to be the case than ‘sadly the poor wretch comes reading.’ Polonius proposes to ‘board him’ then and there (2.2.165–7). The result is one of those amusing conversations in which Hamlet’s contributions seem, for the most part, more intelligible and sane to us than to his immediate interlocutor. Polon. Hamlet. Polon. Hamlet. Polon. Hamlet. Polon. Hamlet. Polon.

How does my good lord Hamlet? Well, God-a-mercy. Do you know me, my lord? Excellent well, you are a fishmonger. Not I, my lord. Then I would you were so honest a man. Honest, my lord? Ay, sir, to be honest as this world goes is to be one man picked out of ten thousand. That’s very true, my lord.

So far, so good. But as the conversation continues, even we ‘in the know’ about his put-on ‘anticity’ have trouble understanding what the Prince is up to. Hamlet. Polon.

For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion – have you a daughter? I have, my lord.

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Let her not walk I’th’sun: conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend – look to’t. [aside] How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter. Yet he knew me not at first, ’a said I was a fishmonger! ’A is far gone; and truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this. I’ll speak to him again. What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words. What is the matter, my lord? Between who? I mean the matter that you read, my lord. (2.2.168–92)

Whereupon Hamlet concocts a fiction that he is reading a treatise by some ‘satirical rogue’ about various ugly attributes of old men – which we may be sure are nothing but taunts coined by Hamlet himself to express his disdain for old Polonius.4 But who would know what to make of the enigmatic non sequitur with which he concludes: ‘For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if, like a crab, you could go backwards’ (2.2.199–201)? One may nonetheless suspect that, ironically, Polonius is more right than he could know in musing to himself, ‘Though this be madness yet there is method in’t.’ Likewise, ‘How pregnant sometimes his replies are – a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.’5 At last concluding there is nothing more to be gained by their continuing to converse at cross purposes, Polonius announces he will take his leave of the Prince, who replies with a characteristic touch of morbidity, ‘You cannot take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal – except my life, except my life, except my life’ (2.2.210–12). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive as Polonius departs. Hamlet greets them warmly enough, and their subsequent conversation shows no sign of madness, real or feigned (in marked contrast to that just concluded with Polonius). It begins with light-hearted, slightly ribald banter, but soon turns serious as Hamlet queries their presence: ‘But in the beaten way of friendship, what make you in Elsinore?’ He brushes aside their claim to have come of their own volition for no other reason than to visit him, then quickly worms out what he suspected all along: they have been sent for by ‘the good King and Queen’. Upon their admitting as much, Hamlet offers to tell them ‘why so’. It is a decidely different report of his condition than anyone else of the Court would likely offer, being not in the least a description of madness, much less a

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manifestation of it – though he knows that this is what they have been told to expect. It is instead a dissembling admission of melancholia: I have of late, but wherefore I know not [!], lost all my mirth, foregone 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 firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is a man – how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. (2.2.261–76)6

The final dozen words not only lighten the mood, they also suggest that these two schoolmates are not likely soul-mates. Easy-going hedonists, philosophy delights not them, though one suspects women do. Challenged, Rosencrantz claims he laughed only to think that the theatrical troupe which he and his partner overtook on the way to Elsinore will not receive much of a welcome if it’s true that Hamlet takes no delight in man. This would seem to be so, given what theatre is all about. But Hamlet assures him that the various players will gain their respective satisfactions, and so the conversation turns to questions about the troupe, which arrives more or less on cue. The very eloquence of Hamlet’s melancholy confession, however – praising man per se in such glowing terms, with nary a hint of the various detractions that misanthropic natures dwell upon (e.g. the prevalence of ingratitude, disloyalty, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and such) – makes his failure to delight in man the more puzzling. Is it simply a consequence of his greater seriousness and finer sensitivity, that he feels so much more acutely the discrepancy whose acknowledgement is practically a truism: that most people, oneself included, fall far short of realizing their ‘full potential’? Or does he suffer excessively from a far rarer recognition: awareness of the enormous gulf between man at his finest – the paragons of humanity, the scarce few who actually measure up to Hamlet’s glowing description – and the vast herds of ordinary people, such as those who made faces at Claudius when King Hamlet reigned but now give small fortunes for a little picture of his successor. These latter sort are blissfully ignorant of an excellence

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in rational powers, in creative faculties, in angelic magnanimity, in almost godlike apprehension that is not merely far above their own, but altogether beyond their understanding or appreciation. For someone who has seen this incorrigible truth, ‘there is no hell but other people’. They make one nauseous.7 Indeed, were every such person to be treated as he deserves, who would ’scape whipping? In Hamlet’s judgement, apparently very few. And so to share the otherwise excellent canopy of air in which this sort exhale their tainted breath – people whose chief good and market of their time be but to sleep and feed and copulate, and who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise – becomes a foul and pestilent congregations of vapours characteristic of a cave. Dwelling on such thoughts might well cost a man all his mirth, leaving him melancholy, even to the point of seeing death as a consummation devoutly to be wished. Still, as noted, Hamlet’s private conversation with these two school chums, who obviously have a superficial familiarity with the Prince and his tastes, and perhaps some fondness for him as well, shows no clear evidence of madness, real or feigned, or even any reference to it. Until, that is, Hamlet brings their greeting to a close upon spotting the approach of Polonius: ‘You are welcome. But my uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived.’ When Guildenstern, predictably puzzled, asks, ‘In what, my dear lord?’ Hamlet cryptically responds, ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw’ (2.2.315–16).8 Thus does Denmark’s geographical location take on symbolic significance:9 to the North, barbarous, pagan, warlike Norway; to the South, Christianity; to the East, Poland, another potentially hostile place that in the future will bear a certain Mikotaij Kopernik, the Polack whose revolutionary cosmology caused such a stir in Shakespeare’s day;10 and to the West, England, Denmark’s tributary and final resting place for the Prince if the King has his way, and where (according to a local gravedigger) Hamlet’s mental condition would not be conspicuous.11 In Denmark, however, stand out he does, the unsteady state of his mind being subject to the prevailing winds, or so he archly claims. Polonius’s return provides an opportunity for Hamlet to engage in some antic behaviour, which he seems especially to enjoy when it is at the old man’s expense. First, he involves Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a mock conversation which he obliges Polonius to interrupt with a claim to have news that Hamlet first pretends mockingly to dismiss. Then, when Polonius persists,

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praising the arriving actors as the best in the world for a whole catalogue of pure and mongrel genres, Hamlet abruptly changes tack, addressing him with ‘O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou.’12 Polonius, understandably puzzled, inquires as to what treasure the Prince refers, which draws from Hamlet two lines of song: ‘One fair daughter and no more, / The which he loved passing well.’ Polonius, ever on the lookout for evidence supporting his thesis on Hamlet’s madness, muses to himself, ‘Still on my daughter.’ When he confirms that he has such a daughter, Hamlet continues to toy with him until interrupted by the entry of the anticipated Players, whom he greets with fond familiarity. There is nothing madcap in the course of his extended dealings with them – quite the contrary: he displays a prodigious memory and a sharp, ready intelligence, especially evident as their meeting concludes with his privately arranging for the performance of a play to which he may choose to contribute some dozen or sixteen lines (2.2.476–8). Thereafter left alone, he gives voice to a mind profoundly at odds with itself, but not noticeably deranged. He begins with an extended selfcastigation (‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’) that presumes his being convinced of Claudius’s guilt, hence of the veracity of the Ghost. At this point, however, Hamlet has only the Ghost’s allegations of the King’s treachery and lechery, no proof that what it says about itself or the present King is true. Apparently this realization now once more occurs to him, for within seconds he leaves off his ranting and begins to contrive a scheme that presupposes these very issues are still in doubt. It builds upon his having already arranged for the performance of, not just any play, but a (possibly) modified version of The Murder of Gonzago, initially chosen simply for its including dialogue that would embarrass the royal couple with a public reminder of their sacrilegious marriage. But he now reveals a more ambitious plan, one whereby he means both to ‘catch the conscience of the King’, and (accordingly) determine the status of the problematic Ghost. Moreover, it is precisely because he is acutely aware of his fragile mental state that the latter issue is such a priority: The spirit that I have seen May be a de’il, and the de’il 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! (2.2.533–8)

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The devil in a pleasing shape! To how many souls, tormented by the constant struggle between a world-despising piety and the recurrent urges of their own erotic natures, has such an idea occurred?13 The next reference to Hamlet’s ‘antic’ behaviour comes the day after Hamlet has met with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are being quizzed by the King and Queen as to what they may have learned about the Prince’s apparent lunacy. In the course of their reports, one may detect a difference in their respective dispositions towards Hamlet, Rosencrantz fairly positive, Guildenstern more disparaging, even inventively so (or perhaps merely more sycophantic): Rosen. Guild.

Queen Rosen. Guild. Rosen.

He does confess he feels himself distracted But from what cause ’a will by no means speak. Nor do we find him forward to be sounded But with a crafty madness keeps aloof When we would bring him to some confession Of his true state. Did he receive you well? Most like a gentleman. But with much forcing of his disposition. Niggard of question [i.e. himself], but of our demands Most free in his reply. (3.1.5–14)

Neither man mentions that Hamlet more or less immediately saw through the pretense that their visit was serendipitous, and that he wrung out of them confirmation of what he suspected: that they had been sent for by the King or Queen, hence is aware of whose interests they primarily serve. Rosencrantz, however, does have some news he is pleased to report. Hamlet seemed to cheer up upon learning that a theatrical troupe was arriving in Elsinore, and in fact has arranged for a performance this very night. Polonius confirms this, adding, ‘he beseeched me to entreat your majesties / To hear and see the matter.’ The King professes himself glad to learn of this, and dismisses the schoolmates with the mission of encouraging Hamlet to pursue further such ‘delights’. This brief and inconclusive conversation about Hamlet’s mental state is immediately followed by what is arguably the most crucial exhibition of it: the prearranged ‘chance’ meeting between he and Ophelia, with Claudius and

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Polonius secretly positioned to overhear ‘If ’t be th’affliction of his love or no / That thus he suffers for.’ The encounter is immediately preceded, however, by Hamlet’s famous ‘To be, or not’ soliloquy. This central of the seven such windows on his mind gives no indication of mental derangement. Nor is there any of the self-loathing expressed in his previous soliloquy. Perhaps his earlier self-disgust has been temporarily quieted by his realization that he has no proof of the Ghost’s veracity, and by his hatching of a scheme to settle the matter. To be sure, taken as a whole, Hamlet’s meditation on the human condition is not exactly upbeat, for he speaks as if there were nothing making up a man’s life but ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, nothing but ‘heartache’ and a ‘thousand natural shocks’ to be endured, and human existence one long sequence of scorn, oppression, contempt, love disappointed, merit unrewarded, and so on. In pondering the two alternative postures one may take towards this ‘calamity’ called life – the patient suffering of a model Christian, passively awaiting death; or the heroic but probably futile resistance of a noble pagan, rushing towards it – the latter seems clearly preferable. If, that is, to die were nothing more than a dreamless sleep.14 But there’s the rub: perchance it be not dreamless. And ‘in that sleep of death what dreams may come, . . . must give us pause.’ Why so? Mightn’t they be sweet dreams? Must they be nightmares? One can only suspect the worst about Hamlet’s dreams. Notice, however, the issue of whether or not to continue being is no longer decided for him a priori by some Christian canon prohibiting self-slaughter, but by a rational objection based on the irreversibility of one’s decision and self-conscious ignorance about what one may be letting oneself in for. Yet soft now, comes the obedient Ophelia, obliged to pretend to read a book as she trolls for Hamlet – her father’s thought being ‘That show of such an exercise may colour [her] loneliness’ (3.1.43–5). Apparently, however, Ophelia intended from the outset to exploit the ruse for her own purpose, since after a polite exchange of greetings she announces, ‘My lord, I have remembrances of yours / That I have longed long to redeliver.’ It is unlikely that either Polonius or the King were aware of her intention since her having have such ‘remembrances’ on her person would seem to compromise the supposedly accidental quality of their meeting (3.1.29–30). Be that as it may, Hamlet’s assertions grow increasingly abrasive and strident as well as perplexing: denying that he gave her the things she now wishes to return; taunting her with some confusing paradox involving honesty and beauty; claiming that he did love her once, then upbraiding her

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for ever believing that he did, since he did not; ordering her to a nunnery in preference to becoming a breeder of sinners, of arrant knaves such as himself; chiding her for being false in appearance and behaviour, for pretending naïveté as cloak for wantonness; finally, ranting as he exits, ‘Go to, I’ll no more on’t. It hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already – all but one – shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go!’ (3.1.145–8). Complicating the interpretation of this episode, however, is the possibility of there being a point in Hamlet’s harangue when he discovers, or perhaps simply comes to suspect, that their conversation is being overheard (he may hear a muffled sound, or see the arras move, or find Ophelia’s demeanour stilted, some such thing; or the possibility may just suddenly dawn on him). We know the Prince has been ‘closely sent for’ by the King, though presumably without his knowing why (or perhaps even by whom), so that he, ‘as ’twere by accident, may here / Affront Ophelia’ (3.1.29–31). He certainly gives the poor girl reason enough to be ‘affronted’. Having just warned her, ‘We are arrant knaves – believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery’, he suddenly asks, ‘Where’s your father?’ She lies, ‘At home, my lord.’ Why this question ‘out of the blue’, as it were? Notice, it is only from this point (i.e. 3.1.129) that he becomes openly abusive of her, her father, women in general, and the whole institution of marriage. (Small wonder that the King concludes, ‘Love! His affections do not that way tend’; 3.1.161.) But might this abusive turn be because it suddenly occurs to the Prince that there are, or may be, eavesdroppers – and that Ophelia, ‘fair’ but not ‘honest’, is a party to a supposed chance encounter which is actually an ambush for an ulterior purpose. Needless to add, such a notion would hardly restore his equanimity.15 Whatever the case, it is no surprise that Ophelia, now left alone, should lament, ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ And given only this exhibition to go by, one could hardly disagree. His was not the behaviour of a rational man, but of one seriously unbalanced. Moreover, it is practically impossible to believe that his agitation and frenetic stream of shotgun accusations, while ignoring her pathetic rejoinders and pleas to heaven, is merely the feigning of an antic’s disposition. For in this context what purpose would it serve? If his diatribe could be said to have a theme, it is a clearly jaundiced view of human sexuality, castigating it as essentially bestial in nature, and so pervaded with falsity that it makes a mockery of man’s higher professions. As if beauty – all too often a false, that is, artificial beauty – were nothing but a snare; as if women were put on this earth simply to cuckold men; and any man who trusts

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them necessarily a fool.16 While these are not the ravings of an utter madman, they surely bespeak an obsessive, lopsided view of sexual relations. But also, his loosing such an ugly harangue upon this gentle, loving girl would suggest the existence of a cruel, even sadistic streak in Hamlet’s nature – unless one concedes that, on this occasion at least, ‘Hamlet from himself be ta’en away.’ If so, was this ‘alienation’ brought on by the sudden sight of fair Ophelia? Is Polonius, that tedious old fool, right after all – that despite himself, Hamlet is violently in love with her (as later he so emphatically proclaims at her grave)? Here we should recall that this is not the first time he has looked and acted deranged in her presence: there is her report of the exceedingly strange dumbshow he staged in her closet. Moreover, pertinent to both of these episodes is the fact that, so far as we know, Ophelia provided him no explanation for her sudden inaccessibility. Did, then, this unexpected encounter in the lobby so catch him off guard that, almost without thinking, he gave expression to the unresolved conflict within him between his head and his heart? From meditating (brooding, really) on what has happened of late – first, the scandalous marriage of his mother, its offensiveness infinitely amplified by the allegations of the Ghost; then the apparently capricious behaviour of Ophelia (‘Frailty, thy name is woman’) – he disavows love ‘on principle’: it’s a sham, doesn’t last, vows mean nothing, appearances are deceiving. But still, he feels what he feels, and it is the frustration of those suppressed feelings that fuel outbursts which, understandably, do not appear to the eavesdropping King to be evidence of love. Be all this as it may, the most relevant point for Claudius is the veiled threat implicit in ‘Those that are married already – all but one – shall live’. After all, whom else could Hamlet mean? Thus the King decides to arrange a one-way ticket to England for his dangerous stepson (3.1.167–9). When we next see Hamlet some hours later, he is instructing three of the Players on the purpose of playing. Here he seems, once again, a model of sanity and self-possession, coolly insisting that even ‘in the very torrent, tempest, and . . . whirlwind of . . . passion’ they should exercise restraint of language and gesture so as to ‘beget a temperance that may give it smoothness’ (3.2.4–8) – an ironic prescription, to be sure, given what we witnessed in his ‘affronting’ Ophelia. Hamlet likewise behaves soberly and sensibly when Horatio joins him, first eulogizing his friend’s stoical virtues (‘As one in suffering all that suffers nothing’ – again, ironic praise, since all Horatio ‘suffers’ is nothing, so far as we know, in marked contrast to the

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Prince), followed by the specifics of his mission for the evening. There is no further instance of Hamlet’s antic behaviour until the King enters and asks, ‘How fares our cousin Hamlet?’ The Prince’s quick-witted reply (‘Excellent, i’faith! Of the chameleon’s dish – I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so’) seems merely so much nonsense to the King, whereas to us it is obviously ‘put on’ anticity (3.2.88–91). From this point forward, Hamlet displays his gift for clever repartee, first a bit at Polonius’s expense, then in risqué bantering with Ophelia, all of which seems fully intelligible. His debriefing of Horatio in the wake of the King’s abrupt departure from ‘The Mousetrap’ is certainly exuberant, but perhaps not much beyond a typical celebration of some special success. Similarly, his serio-comical-farcical toying with obtuse Guildenstern, then with Rosencrantz, displays to us nothing more than high-spirited amusement at their expense, however annoyingly impertinent it strikes them – as Guildenstern complains: ‘Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame and start not so wildly from my affair’; and ‘If it please you to make me a wholesome answer.’ When Hamlet responds that he cannot because his ‘wit’s diseased’ but implies he will nonetheless do his best, Rosencrantz reports that the Prince’s behaviour has struck his mother ‘into amazement and admiration [here meaning ‘astonishment’].’ This draws from Hamlet the macabre pun, ‘O wonderful son that can so ’stonish a mother!’ – stoning being the Old Testament punishment for adultery. Finally, an exasperated Rosencrantz warns, ‘Good my lord, what is the cause of your distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to your friend.’ Given that the Prince has been publicly acknowledged by the King to be his chosen successor, Rosencrantz is baffled by Hamlet’s apparently sober explanation: ‘Sir, I lack advancement’ (3.2.328–31). On the chance that he is speaking ironically – as often he so clearly does – we also might be mystified. Does he have in mind some other kind of ‘advancement’? Then follows his insistent pleading that Guildenstern play upon a recorder, the latter protesting he does not know how, Hamlet assuring him that ‘It is as easy as lying.’ Guildenstern’s persistent refusal draws from Hamlet a scathing, but perfectly lucid declaration: Why, look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would play upon me! You would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to my compass. And there

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Whereupon Polonius arrives. He bears a second summons from the Queen bidding Hamlet attend upon her at once. Not inclined to pass up any opportunity to harass the old Councillor, the comedy continues, with Hamlet obliging him to pretend to see a variously animal-shaped cloud (indoors, no less) before finally consenting to attend his mother ‘by and by’. Then, with everyone having been dismissed from his presence, there follows a brief soliloquy notable mainly for its bloodthirsty tone, and for his admission of a tension between what he feels like doing to his mother, and a determination to resist: ‘Let me be cruel, not unnatural: / I will speak daggers to her but use none. / My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites’ (3.2.385–7; cf. 3.4.93). It is in this homicidal mood that Hamlet proceeds towards the Queen’s ‘closet’.17 Along the way, he chances upon Claudius at prayer, but rejects killing him on the spot under the mistaken impression that the King would be in a state of Grace:18 ‘A villain kills my father, and for that / I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven. / Why, this is base and silly, not revenge’ (3.3.76–9).19 Concluding that he must delay the deed until his victim is flush with such sin as will damn his soul to hell, he hurries on to the closet wherein waits not only his mother, but Polonius concealed behind an arras. What we are allowed to observe there constitutes the most problematic evidence of the Prince’s mental state. For it turns on what we are to make of his conversing with the Ghost, which he both sees and hears – as do we20 – whereas his mother does not. Though, because she is sure she sees and hears all there is to see and hear, his bending his eye on vacancy and holding discourse with th’incorporal air confirms for her, ‘Alas, he’s mad!’ Apart from the Ghost, however, what Hamlet says and does in no way confutes what he insists to his mother: ‘My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time / And makes as healthful music. It is not madness / That I have uttered’ (3.4.138–40). True, he behaves in a violent manner almost from the moment he enters her chamber. But has he not justification for doing so? The fact that she fears for her life when he forcibly sits her down, insisting that she

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not leave until he has laid bare her soul, is at least partly due to her antecedent presumption that he is really and truly deranged. And her belief, in turn, is mainly because of his having feigned an antic disposition. The fact that her call for help results in the death of Polonius is not evidence that Hamlet is dangerously unbalanced. To understand why he so precipitously stabs through the arras upon hearing the voice of the person secreted behind it, one must appreciate that Hamlet does not merely despise Polonius as a sententious, hypocritical windbag; he positively hates him. Why is this – what has Polonius done? Or more cautiously expressed, what does Hamlet believe he has done? Presumably, the Prince holds Polonius responsible both for engineering Claudius’s succession to the Kingship – for his having ‘Popped in between the election and [Hamlet’s] hopes’ – and for cajoling the rest of the Court to ‘freely’ accept the blasphemous royal marriage (1.2.15–16). As the fate he prepared for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attests, the Prince feels no compunction over dealing death to his enemies. Thus, Hamlet welcomes the opportunity to kill this ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’, then contemptuously ignore the still warm body while he verbally punishes his mother for ten or twelve minutes, and finally drag the corpse of this ‘foolish prating knave’ to some obscure place where he can become as physically noisome in death as he was morally in life. The material point is this: when Hamlet hears a voice cry out from behind the arras (a voice which he very well may recognize), and stabs at the ‘rat’, he surely knows it’s not the King. He just left the King on his knees at prayer, having declined to kill him then and there for reasons that would still pertain these few moments later. And when the Queen exclaims, ‘O what a rash and bloody deed is this’, Hamlet only agrees to its being bloody (3.4.25–6).21 His pretend query (‘Is it the King?’) serves mainly to warn her that he couldn’t care less if it was – as he proceeds to make most painfully clear to her: ‘a mildewed ear / Blasting his wholesome brother’; ‘A murderer and a villain / A slave . . . a vice of kings, / A cutpurse of the empire’; ‘a king of shreds and patches’ – that is what she’s been bedding down with, to her eternal shame. But knowing it could not possibly be the villainous King, who else could it be but his trusty right-hand man, the one who set up this conference in the Queen’s chamber. In light of Hamlet’s deep animosity, we can understand his veiled warning to Ophelia, who falsely claimed that her eavesdropping father was at home: ‘Let the doors be shut upon him that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house’ (3.1.131–2).

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The problem remains, what are we to make of the centrepiece of the scene in Gertrude’s closet: Hamlet’s conversation with the Ghost? Whatever else, we may be practically certain this is not an instance of Hamlet feigning an antic disposition. For, among other reasons, it threatens to undercut the effectiveness of his remonstrance of his mother, allowing her to dismiss it as raving. Either he does see and hear a real Ghost, or the Queen is right to warn him: ‘This is the very coinage of your brain. / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very cunning in’ (3.4.135–7). In the latter case, one must attribute our also being privy to the Ghost’s appearance as simply theatrical license whereby we are made aware of the hauntings to which Hamlet in his present distress is subject. And the fact that in this instance, unlike the Ghost’s previous visits, Hamlet’s perceptions are not ratified by independent witnesses lends credence to the possibility that on this occasion Hamlet is merely ‘seeing things’ and ‘hearing voices’. That said, however, those previous corroborated visits establish the possible reality of this one as well (whether it be the suffering spirit of the elder Hamlet, as his son is now apparently convinced, or a Satanic conjuration). Likewise, the fact that the Ghost is not accoutred cap-à-pie in armour as before, but instead dressed like Hamlet’s father ‘in his habit as he lived’, may cut either way. Since nothing has materially changed that would bear on its condition, this would seem to imply that it ought to appear as before. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it would choose to appear clothed in a manner that suited the context: in armour prowling the battlements, in a dressing gown in his widow’s closet.22 Moreover, reflecting on the whole of what the Ghost says on this later occasion, it does not seem likely to be an hallucination generated by disturbances of Hamlet’s mind; nor, if I am any judge, of a Satan-inspired vision: Do not forget! This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. But look, amazement on thy mother sits! O step between her and her fighting soul. Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Speak to her, Hamlet. (3.4.106–11)

Even apart from the solicitude the Ghost shows for the distraught Queen, the fifth line seems especially curious as either hallucinatory or diabolical impersonation – though, admittedly, this may simply show how cunning Satan can be. In summary, no clear implications about the state of Hamlet’s mind can be drawn from this episode with the Ghost.23

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Despite his suspect sanity in her eyes, the Prince nonetheless regains sufficient credibility with his mother that she acknowledges the moral effect upon her of his violent upbraiding (‘O Hamlet, thou has cleft my heart in twain’), and even seeks his counsel (‘What shall I do’). She also affirms, most emphatically, that she will not let the King ‘ravel all this matter out / That [the Prince] essentially [is] not in madness / But mad in craft’ (which she may not entirely believe, in any case): ‘Be thou assured, if words be made of breath / And breath of life, I have no life to breathe / What thou has said to me’ (3.4.195–7). She is as good as her word, for after Hamlet has for the fourth time wished her ‘goodnight’24 and lugged away the remains of Polonius – prefaced by his sardonic assessment of the old Councillor’s altered status – the King arrives in her chamber asking after her son. Whereupon she invents an account of what has just transpired. Queen King Queen

Ah, mine own lord, what I have seen tonight! What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet? Mad as the sea and wind when both contend Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit, Behind the arras hearing something stir, Whips out his rapier, cries ‘A rat, a rat!’ And in this brainish apprehension kills The unseen good old man. (4.1.5–12)

The King, professedly appalled, and expressing concern both for everyone’s safety and for the blame that will be visited upon him for allowing ‘this mad young man’ to range free, asks where he has gone. The Queen’s dissembling continues: ‘to draw apart the body he hath killed, / O’er whom – his very madness like some ore / Among a mineral of metals base / Shows itself pure –’a weeps for what is done.’ With one possible exception, from this point on all of Hamlet’s antic behaviour, however baffling or nonsensical it strikes others, is easily seen by us to be ‘put on’. For example, his coy dealings with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom the King has dispatched to find Hamlet and Polonius’s body. Invoking his Princely status, he refuses to answer the demand of a mere ‘sponge’ to reveal where the corpse is hidden; instead, he explains clearly enough what he means by that image, and the risk they run, though Rosencrantz pretends otherwise. Continuing to frustrate their inquiries with riddles, he abruptly demands to be

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taken to the King. Claudius, meantime, is conferring with a few of his Courtiers, explaining why he cannot use the law to deal with the popular Prince, despite ‘how dangerous is it that this man goes loose!’ Brought into the royal presence, Hamlet continues to enjoy the liberties of his madcap persona as he responds to Claudius’s interrogation, doubtless confirming for the Courtiers the King’s diagnosis: King Ham. King Ham.

King Ham.

Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius? At supper. At supper! Where? Not where he eats but where ’a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. . . . A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. What dost thou mean by this? Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. (4.3.16–30)

While we may find this highly amusing – and far from being evidence that Hamlet’s wit is diseased, quite the contrary – Claudius no doubt detects the undercurrent of threat in the idea of a king becoming the food of worms. For having viewed ‘The Mousetrap’, he fears Hamlet’s sanity more than his cagey madness. When the Prince finally reveals where he has stowed the body, Claudius informs him that, for his ‘especial safety’, he is being immediately dispatched to England. Hamlet professes himself pleased, and in parting offers one final joke: ‘Farewell, dear mother.’ Claudius corrects him, ‘Thy loving father, Hamlet.’ But the stepson is not to be denied this last twist of the knife: ‘My mother. Father and mother is man and wife. Man and wife is one flesh. So – my mother’ (4.3.48–50). The Prince presents no further display of mental derangement, whether genuine or feigned, until he intrudes upon the funeral service for pathetic Ophelia, who has died during his absence, apparently the victim of her own very real madness. Surprisingly, no one seems surprised by Hamlet’s sudden appearance at the funeral. Granted, his letters to the King and the Queen confirmed that he had returned to Denmark, and perhaps his so immediately affronting Laertes (who vigorously reacts with a physical assault) leaves no time for any response other than to account for his boisterous behaviour. Both

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King and Queen explain it as due to his insanity, the King quite simply (‘O, he is mad, Laertes’), the Queen more prolix (and puzzling): ‘This is mere madness, / And thus awhile the fit will work upon him. / Anon, as patient as the female dove [etc.]’ (5.1.2273–7).25 Hamlet continues to rant, professing to know no reason why Laertes should be the least bit upset with him, then throws out a threatening epigram as he storms off: ‘Let Hercules himself do what he may, / The cat will mew and dog will have his day.’ Claudius bids Horatio to follow his friend, then whispers assurance to Laertes that their scheme to kill the Prince is still on, and instructs the Queen, ‘set some watch over your son’ – not ‘our son’, notice (cf. 1.2.117), much less ‘my son’ (cf. 1.2.64); that façade lapsed with the onset of Hamlet’s ‘distemper’ (cf. 2.2.55). It is not clear how one should interpret his behaviour on this occasion. It is extreme, to be sure, but perhaps understandable in light of his having just learned that the young lady he claims to have loved – indeed, to have loved beyond the capacity of ‘forty thousand brothers’ – is dead. What seems at odds with his claim, however, is the fact that we never hear Hamlet refer to her again, much less give any indication that he grieves for her (as he so clearly did for his father).26 Unless, that is, grief – contributing to a complete despair with life – is behind the apparent spirit of resignation with which he approaches the fencing match the King has arranged with Laertes. But no such mood is evident when we next see Hamlet, apparently once again within the palace precincts, telling Horatio the rest of his amusing tale about a ‘providential’ abduction by pirates. And even less is there any trace of dejection when he toys with the courtier Osric, sent to solicit his participation in the arranged contest. To the contrary, Hamlet seems rather light-hearted as he teases this obsequious ‘water-fly’ (in much the same disdainful spirit as he had old Polonius) – obliging Osric, incidentally, to agree (if only for a moment) that the day is ‘indifferent cold’ because ‘the wind is northerly’ (5.2.81–2). Once the wealthy ‘lapwing’ has been dispatched to inform the King that the challenge is accepted, Hamlet expresses confidence that he will win the match, given the favourable odds. He nonetheless admits to Horatio, ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart – but it is no matter.’27 His friend protests, ‘If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit.’ Hamlet refuses the offer, sententiously proclaiming: Not a wit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows not what is’t to leave betimes. Let be. (5.2.187–202)

Whatever else, here seems a tone of fatalism that was not evident previously.

There it is: with one exception, all of the (very considerable) textual material that would seem to bear on the question of Hamlet’s antic disposition, most of which is manifested in speech that others find impertinent, or riddling, or over-passionate, or simply nonsensical. So, what is one to make of it all? More precisely, what light does it throw on the questions with which I began: why does Hamlet insist that Horatio and Marcellus swear, just as they swore never to reveal his and their encounter with the Ghost, likewise: Here as before: never – so help you mercy, How strange or odd some’er I bear myself (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on) – That you at such times seeing me never shall With arms encumbered thus, or this headshake, Or by pronouncing some doubtful phrase As ‘Well, well, we know’, or ‘We could an if we would’, Or ‘If we list to speak’, or ‘There be an if we might’, Or such ambiguous giving out to note That you know aught of me. This do swear, So grace and mercy at your most need help you. (1.5.167–78)

Having seen events play out, the first thing that can be affirmed categorically is that there is no ‘maybe’ – no ‘perchance’ – to worry over: as just documented, Hamlet’s antic behaviour is displayed in abundance. Whether in fact it is all merely ‘put on’, however, is doubtful. But this question – which has so bedevilled interpreters of the play, both theatrical and scholarly, whether amateur or professional – would not even arise had Hamlet not confided to his comrades his intention ‘perchance’ to feign madness. Unaware of that possibility, hence accepting all his words and actions at face value, one would surely conclude that the Prince is subject to frequent psychotic episodes. As reviewing the relevant textual material was meant to establish, Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is practically the spine of this drama, each instance of aberrant behaviour implicitly offering a challenge: is it real, or merely feigned. It is easy to become so beguiled with this set of problems, intertwined as it is

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with Hamlet’s notorious ‘delay’ in carrying out the promised revenge on his uncle, that one fails to notice, hence to address, more basic questions. The first being: why would he ‘put on’ any craziness; what purpose is served by his resorting to such a tactic? But as I noted at the outset, behind this puzzle is another still more fundamental: why has he informed his night-time companions of the possibility (the ‘perchance’) of his behaving ‘anticly’, given that he also insists – quite elaborately – that they swear to maintain absolute secrecy about it? He provides them no explanation either for the tactic, or for the importance of maintaining the strictest secrecy regarding it. Notice also, although neither Horatio nor Marcellus make any verbal response to Hamlet’s insistence that they swear, we may suppose they gesture agreement, else he would have repeated his injunction (as he did – needlessly – with respect to their maintaining secrecy about having seen a Ghost in the form of the elder Hamlet). Perhaps they are simply left speechless by this final turn of Hamlet’s frenetic behaviour after conversing with the Ghost, baffled by still more of his ‘wild and whirling words’. One might begin unravelling this puzzle by noting what purposes acting ‘anticly’ does not serve. As a means of pursuing either the Truth (e.g. about his father’s death, hence about status of the Ghost), or Revenge, this device seems singularly inappropriate, since it complicates rather than facilitates both endeavours. As mentioned earlier, Hamlet’s erratic speech and behaviour arouses, rather than allays, Claudius’s suspicion – indeed, predictably so! Moreover, we never see Hamlet learning or doing anything that would further either purpose as a consequence of feigning an antic disposition. The one time Hamlet might be said to profit from it – as a mitigating excuse for his spontaneous killing of eavesdropping Polonius – it actually better serves Claudius’s purpose of justifying his prompt dispatch of the Prince. In any event, this obviously could not have figured in Hamlet’s original rationale for resorting to bizarre behaviour. A second point to bear in mind: the only two people who could conceivably be influenced by Hamlet’s announcing the possibility of his feigning an antic disposition are the same two who he insists swear that they never in any way reveal this possibility – the same two who saw what appeared to be the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, and who know that the Prince privately conversed with it, but know nothing as to what he was told. It is immediately after this that Hamlet, highly agitated, began to speak evasively and cryptically, and to act in a manner that his friend finds ‘wondrous strange’. Doubtless Horatio means Hamlet’s

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behaviour, whereas the Prince chooses to regard the remark as pertaining to the Ghost whose voice he hears beneath their feet. So, the primary puzzle focuses on his two companions, one of whom we neither see nor hear of again, though we must presume he remains present in Elsinore, hence aware of whatever rumours may be circulating within its precincts, and available should Hamlet have reason to send for him. It is not difficult to understand why Hamlet would so emphatically insist that Horatio and Marcellus not reveal their and his encounters with the Ghost. The remotest likelihood of any such thing would immediately alert Claudius to the possibility, however remote, that he is in grave danger from a nephew who has learned through this supernatural agency the truth about the death of his father – or, rather, the material point: that Claudius killed him. For we know from his own abortive attempt to pray for forgiveness that he committed this ‘Murder most foul’ (3.5.36–44), though not whether he accomplished the ‘accursed deed’ in precisely the manner the Ghost described. Still, it must have been in some way that the publicized version of his having been stung by a serpent while sleeping in his orchard is credible (1.5.35–8).28 And since Claudius later proves he is of a ‘better safe than sorry’ disposition, he would find a discrete way to eliminate Hamlet more or less immediately were he to learn of the Ghost. As was noted in the course of reviewing the various instances of Hamlet’s antic behaviour, much of it – but not all of it – can plausibly be interpreted as feigned. Ignoring for purposes of this assessment the problematic conversation with the Ghost in the Queen’s closet, the two episodes directly involving Ophelia (his dumb-show in her chamber; and his disjointed, abusive verbal assault when he encounters her in the lobby) seem proofs of Hamlet’s being subject to genuine mental instability.29 That being the case, other instances may be seen as borderline; for example, his exuberance in the wake of the King’s angry departure from The Murder of Gonzago; or, his not merely removing Polonius body from the Queen’s closet, but hiding it; or, his frenetic confrontation with Laertes at Ophelia’s grave-site. However, even if one credits him in all other instances with actually maintaining self-control, one may suspect he is able to do so only because this amusing madcap persona offers him an outlet for pent-up frustrations, perplexities and hostilities – that otherwise he would not always be able to hold himself together.30 It would seem a dangerous indulgence, however, for someone whose grip on reality is tenuous at best. His exhortation to his mother invoking the power of

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‘custom’ to shape behaviour has a reflexive pertinence to his own situation: ‘For use almost can change the stamp of nature’ (3.4.166). Of course, if he is aware of this danger, aware of his fragile mental state, that he is teetering on the outer edge of sanity – aware that his mind was a chaotic jumble of conflicting views, of overturned assumptions, of violated proprieties, disappointed expectations, of grief and shame and anger, that he was sick of life to the point of suicidal even before conversing with a ghost that claimed to be the spirit of his murdered father – then well might he wish to provide the only two people privy to that dangerous fact with a plausible explanation for the possibility that he may occasionally fall over the edge: they are free to suppose he is merely feigning. Consequently, Hamlet often does feign an antic disposition in order to establish mad speaking and acting as his new ‘normal’, such that any occasions when real madness might actually get the better of him will not be conspicuous. However, it is imperative that Horatio and Marcellus not reveal what they think they know, since then they would have to explain why he has adopted this mad persona, and one way or another the business with the Ghost would come out. And since it is equally imperative that this not happen, we can begin to see why Hamlet resorts to what is actually a ruse over his friends, assuring them that no matter ‘How strange or odd some’er’ he may behave, they need not be alarmed: he is merely acting, putting ‘an antic disposition on’ (for reasons he prefers not to go into). For if they are not provided with this reassuring explanation of any flagrant lapses from sanity that he is by no means sure he can avoid, what will they be tempted to do, especially if Hamlet’s very liberty is put in jeopardy (cf. 3.2.329–30)? Believing that they know the real cause of his derangement – that he has visited with a ghost in the guise of his father, quite possibly a Satanic conjuration, that perhaps he has even become possessed (a real possibility within the received cosmology of the day, to them all the more credible having just seen the Ghost) – they will regard themselves as justified in breaking their word never to reveal what they saw that night. Recall, when Hamlet left in the company of the Ghost, ordering them to stay away, Marcellus urged Horatio, ‘Let’s follow. ’Tis not fit to obey him’ (1.4.88). And Horatio was at the time much more sceptical of the Ghost’s wholesomeness than was Hamlet, and accordingly implored him not to go with it: What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet That beetle o’er his base into the sea, And there assume some other horrible form Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness? (1.4.69–74)

Without Hamlet’s assurance that he is merely feigning madness, hence supposing instead that he requires medical attention for a derangement brought on by his encounter with this ghost in the figure of his father – even fearing demonic possession, which would require the services of a professional exorcist31 – they almost certainly would reveal what they know. And Claudius, acutely aware of the reason that the spirit of his departed brother might visit his son, will treat their revelation as a warning to take immediate preventive action. Thus, Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is a cover story, but serving an entirely different purpose than any that one might initially suppose. There is, however, one final reference to Hamlet’s antic behaviour not yet considered, namely, his own acknowledgement of it in his curious apology to Laertes when they meet for what is supposedly a friendly fencing match, but about which the Prince – no fool – would necessarily have the deepest suspicions. Hamlet’s apology has an importance beyond its immediate context, however, for it points to the larger philosophical issue Shakespeare uses this tragedy to explore. Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong, But pardon’t as you are a gentleman. This presence knows, and you must needs have heard, How I am punished with a sore distraction. What I have done That might your nature, honour and exception Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away And when he is not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness. If ’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged – His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. (5.2.204–17)

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It is hard – I think, practically impossible – to credit Hamlet with sincerity here. What he has done that Laertes might find offensive? Such as murder his father, which Laertes presumes led to the madness and death of his sister? As previously argued, it is most unlikely that the killing of Polonius, the spying ‘rat’ secreted behind an arras in the Queen’s closet, was a rash act that Hamlet could honestly blame upon ‘his madness’ – rather than him exploiting the opportunity to settle a score: ‘Take thy fortune; / Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger’ (3.4.30–1). But the larger question involves the claimed defence: whatever Laertes might take exception to, Hamlet didn’t do it; his ‘madness’ did it. What is, and what is not, ‘Hamlet’? What is the reality in this case?

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3

The Theatre of Reality

I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces. Melville’s Ishmael in Moby-Dick

The question of whether, or rather, to what extent Hamlet’s ‘madness’ is merely ‘put on’ – that is, when what he does is in truth ‘merely’ an act or a performance – points to the (literally) central philosophical problem posed by this play: conceiving a valid idea of Reality. Much as an adequate conception of Nature must accommodate the complexity of human nature – which encompasses both the Conventional and the Artificial, since the invention and use of conventions and arts are natural expressions of man’s rational powers1 – so too must an adequate conception of Reality allow for all the ways that humans ‘act’.

The problem is ironically enfolded within Hamlet’s instructions to the visiting Players: Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance – that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it makes the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.2 O, there be players that I have seen play and heard others praised – and that highly – not to speak it profanely, that neither having th’accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan nor man have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.3 (3.2.17–34)

This famous passage requires careful unpacking. The portion of Nature to be ‘modestly mirrored’ in virtually any theatre is, of course, almost exclusively human. The qualification ‘almost’ is required, since human life presupposes a material environment of some sort, whose particulars to a greater or lesser extent circumscribe thought and action. In the case of a theatrical performance of Hamlet, however, there is an additional – and quite different – reason for a qualification: the play includes a ghost, which poses a far more serious problem for the doctrine of ‘dramatic realism’ supposedly being advocated. Or at least it should for anyone convinced that no such things exist, whether as the spirits of departed persons or as Satanic illusions, since then the play fails to meet the purpose prescribed by its eponym: to hold a mirror up to Nature.4 Moreover, in seeking to impose ‘the modesty of nature’ upon actors, Hamlet is urging an ethic of drama than runs directly counter to that inherent in theatrical acting, which generally thrives upon behavioural exaggeration, especially of passions.5 For this very reason, a person who behaves in everyday life the way actors do on stage is apt to be criticized for being ‘histrionic’, or given to ‘dramatizing’.6 What it is crucial to recognize, however, is the profoundly metaphorical status of Hamlet’s claim regarding the purpose of playing: that of ‘holding a mirror up to nature’, faithfully imitating humanity, especially as regards both virtue and vice. For all that could be literally shown in a mirror would be ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’, excluding everything dependent upon the human use of speech (which is almost everything of human importance).7 Since this fact is dramatically illustrated several times in the course of the play, along with various of its consequences (in particular, of mistakes in interpretation), we must presume it to have some special importance for an understanding of whatever Shakespeare intends herein to teach. Indeed, the play practically begins with an instance, in that the initial appearance of the Ghost remains

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a dumb-show, despite the nervous insistence of its harrowed audience that it speak to them. Marcel. Barnard. Marcel. Horatio.

Marcel. Barnard. Horatio Marcel.

Thou art a scholar – speak to it, Horatio . . . It would be spoke to. Speak to it, Horatio. What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, Together with that fair and warlike form In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee speak. It is offended. See, it stalks away. Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak. ’Tis gone and will not answer. (1.1.41–51)

Consequently, the three men are left to their own speculations as to what they have witnessed, and what in particular its appearance on the battlements in the dead of night, accoutred all in armour, might signify. In light of their country’s feverish military preparations to fend off an anticipated Norwegian assault to recover lands earlier lost to the late King Hamlet, they not unreasonably conclude the Ghost’s visitation is somehow connected with the threat of war. As Barnardo puts it: ‘Well may it sort that this portentous figure / Comes armed through our watch so like the King / That was and is the question of these wars’ (1.1.112–14). Within moments the Ghost again appears, and again Horatio’s efforts to elicit information from it – ‘Stay, illusion. / If thou hast any sound or use of voice, / Speak to me’ (1.1.126–8) – are unavailing. Nonetheless, Horatio is sure, ‘This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to [Hamlet]’ (1.1.170). He’s proved right on that score. But when on the subsequent night the Ghost does speak, we learn that the trio’s interpretation of its earlier mute visitations is quite mistaken – at least, nothing in what the Ghost tells young Hamlet about its purpose would confirm their supposition. As for its appearance in full armour, that remains as puzzling as ever. The Prince himself is the performer of a second dumb-show, according to the description of the only witness to it, an affrighted Ophelia. His clothing dishevelled and his countenance ‘so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors’ (2.1.79–80), Hamlet had come unannounced to her closet while she was sewing. And though he held her firmly at arm’s length as he studied her face, and thrice nodded in some apparent agreement with himself,

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he spoke to her neither of horrors nor of anything else. He was not entirely mute throughout the visit, however, for prior to his awkward exit, ‘He raised a sigh so piteous and profound / As it did seem to shatter all of his bulk / And end his being’ (2.1.91–3). But since this bestial expression of a passionate state is a far cry from articulate speech – forgive the pun – Ophelia and her father (and we) are left guessing as to what Hamlet’s ‘antic behaviour’ on this occasion might mean. Hamlet’s happening upon a distraught Claudius apparently at prayer is in effect a dumb-show for him (though not for us), since he views the King from such a distance as to preclude his hearing the abortive character of Claudius’s effort (cf. 3.3.97–8).8 Misconstruing what he sees because he can only imagine words that would suit Claudius’s action, rather than hear those actually spoken (which must be of a piece with those we hear prior to Hamlet’s arrival), the Prince wrongly supposes the King to be in a state of Grace, his sins forgiven. And since Claudius would then go to Heaven (presumably) were he to be killed on the spot – the thought of which is far from the perfect vengeance the Prince desires – he decides to await ‘a more horrid hent’ for settling accounts with his uncle (3.3.88).9 Notice, in at least two of these instances, the observers are mistaken about what they have witnessed, precisely because their judgement is restricted to just whatever might be reflected in an actual mirror. However, the most conspicuous – and famous – dumb-show is that which is explicitly labelled as such (3.2.128). Being immediately paired with a dialogical version of ostensibly the same story, it dramatically demonstrates what a world of difference there can be between the effects of a silent charade, and those of a performance wherein the players may be presumed to ‘suit the action to the word and the word to the action’. Or so it would seem. And yet, this dumbshow figures in one of the play’s most perplexing – and consequential – puzzles: Claudius’s failure to visibly react to the silent depiction of how (according to the Ghost) King Hamlet was murdered, whereas he abruptly storms out of the dialogical version.10 Nor should the differential effects of the two versions upon the Queen go unremarked. One can scarcely imagine her reacting to any pantomime, however skilfully enacted, with ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’ (3.2.224). In reflecting on the possible significance of the play’s inclusion of these several dumb-shows – a plurality unique to Hamlet – one should probably bear in mind the Prince’s caustic observation about the intellectual and aesthetic capacities

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of ‘the groundlings’ (the category to which he might very well relegate a solid majority of people, then and now; cf. 2.2.372–80), that they ‘for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise’ (3.2.10–12). This same aristocratic perspective is evident in his distinguishing ‘the unskilful’ from ‘the judicious’, and in his warning against allowing clowns to extemporize: ‘For there be of them that will of themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered’ (3.2.36–41). So there are plays that, if they are to be rightly understood, require careful consideration of some ‘necessary question’ that might easily be missed, not least in those unguarded moments when people are set to laughing. Surely this is intended as a caution regarding the play in which it is spoken, despite the many all-too-obvious questions it raises. Might this latter plenitude work to the prejudice of questions not so obvious? Be that as it may, the relevant point about dumb-shows would seem to be their ‘inexplicability’, precisely because lacking dialogue. Pratfalls may be funny, but they tickle the spirit without engaging the intellect (unlike, for example, clever repartee, such as that even a melancholic Hamlet clearly enjoys). Hence, they have little if any meaning beyond repeatedly ratifying the vulnerabilities of the human body, regardless of whether a person be virtuous or vicious. And while the silent enactment of some violence may depict its mortal consequences – the skewering of an eavesdropper, say, or the poisoning of a sleeper in his garden – it cannot in itself reveal the motive for the action, the moral status of either perpetrator or victim, their relationship (if any), nor the broader consequences of the action. Ophelia queries Hamlet upon viewing ‘The Mousetrap’s’ dumb-show: ‘What means this, my lord?’ His utterly ambiguous reply (‘It means mischief ’; 3.2.129–30) is about all the pantomime would justify. What is shown by the practical contrast between dumb-shows and dialogical theatre, hence between the visible and the audible, is further emphasized by the plenitude of references to ears and to hearing that pervade the play from first to last. For the tale begins with a changing of the guard in midnight darkness, men reacting only to sounds and voices. The turnover accomplished, Barnardo bids Horatio, ‘Sit down awhile, / And let us once again assail your ears / That are so fortified against our story’ (1.1.29–31). This is the first of some two dozen mentions of ears, more than in any other Shakespeare play. And it ends with the English Ambassador complaining that ‘The ears are senseless that should give

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us a hearing’ (and suitable thanks) – this as he confronts the dismal sight which falls to Horatio to explain, ‘How these things came about. So shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts [etc.]’ – to which Prince Fortinbras responds, ‘Let us haste to hear it’ (5.2.351–70). Appropriately, however, it is the previously silent Ghost who, upon meeting with young Hamlet, is most insistent upon being heard before it must return – or so it says – ‘to sulphurous and tormenting flames’. It rejects Hamlet’s offer of pity, commanding instead, ‘lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold.’ Hamlet urges it to speak, as he is ‘bound to hear’. To which the Ghost responds, ‘So art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear.’ The Ghost claims to be the spirit of Hamlet’s father, ‘Doomed for a certain term to walk the night’, but forbidden ‘To tell the secrets of [its daytime] prison house / . . . / To ears of flesh and blood.’ Pleading that Hamlet ‘List, list, O list’, it relates a tale of ‘Murder most foul’: ‘’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard / A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged process of my death / Rankly abused.’ According to the Ghost, the Prince’s uncle, now the King, stole upon Hamlet’s sleeping father and poured a deadly poison ‘in the porches of [his] ears’ (1.5.63). This poison coursed swiftly through the elder Hamlet’s body, with all the malign consequences that the Ghost urges the son to revenge. The first problem, however – as the Prince comes to realize – is whether the Ghost is to be believed. Or whether it is ‘a damned ghost’ that has hereby poured a poison in the porches of young Hamlet’s ears, mortally infecting not his body, but his soul.11 In short, the various dumb-shows, paired with the manifold references to ears and hearing, serve in their contrasting ways to emphasize the importance of logos, of ‘reason-bearing speech’, and of what only speech can convey: explanation, whereby an understanding of what one sees becomes possible – most notably the thoughts and feelings ‘within’ a person, whereby one may understand his outer behaviour.12 But also misunderstand, and not simply inadvertently (as in misinterpreting a dumb-show), but as an intended effect of someone bent on creating a false appearance, as does Claudius in repeatedly lying about his reason for dispatching Hamlet to England (3.1.168–74; 4.1.13– 32; 4.3.39–46), and as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt with respect to the reason for their sudden arrival in Elsinore (2.2.235–58). Polonius schools Reynaldo on using deceptive speech to get at the reality of Laertes’s behaviour in Paris (so ‘Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth’; 2.1.60). And not

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to be forgotten is the tall tale Hamlet tells Horatio about being kidnapped by pirates. However, between deliberate lying and ruthless honesty there exists a broad spectrum of speech that is neither simply truth nor falsehood, much of it dictated by good manners and proper decorum, some by the wish to flatter or cajole, some to annoy or dissuade – the list of reasons people have for shading and diluting the truth is practically endless. And then there is that special form of speech known as ‘irony’, or more precisely, Sokratic irony: speech that is somehow both true and false, serious while nonetheless humorous, frank and yet dissembling in its effect on whoever does not detect the irony. A master of irony, such as Plato portrays Sokrates, has little need for outright lies. But like all degrees and modes of ‘equivocating’ speech, irony complicates the task of distinguishing the real from the merely apparent in people and their relations. The play compounds this problem still further, however, by the use of rambling, disconnected, apparently impertinent speech to dramatize madness. It is the principal way Hamlet feigns an ‘antic disposition’, speaking words that are intelligible, but seem not to ‘suit’ the action – at least, not in any straightforward way. Thus, as Polonius observes (having just been subjected to a dose of Hamlet’s puzzling verbiage): ‘though this be madness yet there is method in’t’ (2.2.202–8). This is usually quite evident to us, who can see not only the (often ironic) suitability of Hamlet’s words, but also why, given his situation, ‘reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of ’. Similarly, when Ophelia goes genuinely, consistently mad, a gentleman reports: ‘[She] speaks things in doubt / That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing, / Yet the unshaped use of it doth move / The hearers to collection’ (4.5.6–11). Whatever of interest can be ‘collected’ from the substance of her (and Hamlet’s) examples, one wonders whether Shakespeare intends to suggest some larger significance through his depicting madness as manifested in speech. Rarely if ever do the words and actions of anyone much agitated by passion manifest pure reason, hence sanity. The very equivocality in our use of ‘mad’ – sometimes meaning ‘quite crazy’, other times merely ‘very angry’ – attests to the blurred demarcation between these psychic states. The utterances of an enraged person might well be a mix of sense, half-sense, and sputtering nonsense, but we would presume that he is not truly insane, that the fit will pass and he return to sober self-control, even if not to the patience of a female dove. But before he does, what, or who, is he ‘really’? And lest we fail to connect such portrayals of

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derangement to the larger problem of determining what is to count as human reality, Hamlet’s ironic apology to Laertes (as noted before) expressly challenges us to do so. Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? (5.2.206–19)

Who indeed? A worthy question, not satisfactorily answered for theoretical purposes by Hamlet’s ‘His madness’. Nor is this adequate for practical purposes insofar as madness can be feigned. Thus we are returned to the first words of the play: ‘Who’s there?’ Taking all of this into account, one realizes that only a pan-aesthetic ‘mirror’, reflecting the sounds as well as the sights of human nature in its full significant diversity, could in principle offer a credible imitation of humanity in action. One such a mirror is the Theatre. We do well to occasionally remind ourselves, however, that in the strictest sense Shakespeare’s plays exist only as speech – more precisely, as visible speech. And that bringing them ‘to life’ requires someone first imagine ‘action that suits his words’. For the theatrical Director or Actor, the mirror is the active human mind, just as it must be for the Reader. But in the beginning is the Word.13

So much for Mirrors and Logos. However, Hamlet’s injunction to the visiting Players – that they endeavour to hold a mirror up to human nature – invites, indeed requires, still further explication, for it opens upon a maze of unsuspected complexity. The ‘mirroring’ of humanity, whether faithfully or abominably, is largely a matter of imitating the behaviour, the words–deeds nexus, of people who are themselves ‘acting’ more or less in accordance with ‘roles’ – roles established by rules and norms, duties and expectations of various kinds and of various authority: law, tradition, religion, martial discipline, politeness and ceremony, professional codes of conduct, whatever.14 This play, like all plays, though this one more emphatically, is replete with reminders of these facts, but with a special twist: the frequency with which proprieties are violated, the sheer quantity of ‘maimed rites’ we witness.

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Indeed, the play literally begins with one. In the dark of night, two men acting as sentinels – whose words and actions are strictly prescribed by military protocols – exchange greetings, but in a manner directly contrary to normal procedure. For the play’s first speaker is the oncoming watchman, issuing the challenge (‘Who’s there’) that normally would come from the on-duty sentinel he is scheduled to relieve. Accordingly, the latter responds, ‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself’ – which then draws the proper password (‘Long live the King’). We can in retrospect make sense of this strange departure from military routine: Barnardo, the oncoming sentinel, is understandably apprehensive in approaching his station, since for two nights running he has been visited by a ghost (about which Francisco, the on-duty sentinel standing the pre-midnight watch, knows nothing). Presumably, then, the nervous Barnardo heard a strange noise as he mounted the battlements, hence reflexively called out as he did. Once proper order is restored between the two, Barnardo receives a status report from Francisco, then hastens him on his way, never to be heard from again. Thus, what a viewer of a performance of Hamlet would see are two actors in dramatic roles that are imitations of the ‘real-life roles’ of military sentinels. The play is constituted, of course, entirely by the interactions of such imitations: of a King, a Queen, a Councillor, a Sexton, a Prince, a Captain, a Priest, Servants, Students, Sailors, Courtiers, Ambassadors and – of special interest – Professional Actors, both ‘not acting’ and ‘acting’, as is intrinsic to a professional actor’s actual life. It is impossible to be ‘in a play’ yet have no role, even if only that of playing someone who seemingly has no distinct role in actual life (an idler of independent means, say). ‘Seemingly’ should perhaps be emphasized, since – as this play so effectively reminds us – people are typically circumscribed by overlapping roles: of uncle, brother, husband, as well as that of King; of mother, widow, wife, as well as that of Queen; of son and nephew, of daughter and sister, of friend, brother, comrade, citizen, subject, confidant, lover. It is practically impossible to have no role whatsoever in actual, everyday life – often, ‘assigned’ by the particularities of one’s life – whether or not one chooses to conform to the ways of speaking and acting normally expected of it. There is, however, another dimension to the relationship between acting and actual life, as signalled by words such as ‘sincere’, ‘genuine’, ‘artless’, ‘candid’, ‘earnest’, ‘ingenuous’ or just plain ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘insincere’, ‘dissembling’, ‘duplicitous’, ‘two-faced’, ‘pretense’, or ‘hypocritical’ 15). In Hamlet, one word especially points directly to the spectrum of concerns behind this vocabulary: honest. The range of its ambiguity is nicely indicated by the Prince’s first use

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of the term: ‘Touching this vision here / It is an honest ghost – that let me tell you’ (1.5.136–7). Most likely, his companions would understand him as meaning ‘genuine’, a ‘real’ or ‘true’ ghost (much as Marcellus, the first character to voice the word, means ‘real’ or ‘true’ in addressing the departing Francisco as ‘honest soldier’). But as to whether it is a truthful ghost, a truth-telling ghost that really is what it appears to be: the suffering spirit of Hamlet’s father – as opposed to a deceiving vision conjured by Satan to mislead, corrupt and thereby damn young Hamlet’s own spirit – this becomes the question which, perhaps more than all the others, leaves him irresolute, suspended in a kind of mental limbo. The first explicit notice within the play of people’s merely ‘acting a part’, of merely seeming to feel or believe in what they outwardly show or claim, comes from Elsinore’s amateur expert on theatrical matters, the Prince himself. His mother and second-time Queen is gently chiding him for his persistence in wearing mourning dress for his departed father: ‘Thou knowst ’tis common all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.’ When Hamlet concedes it to be common, she asks rhetorically, ‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’ – in effect, challenging him to defend his (allegedly) uncommon behaviour. Whereas he chooses to address instead an accusation she clearly did not intend, but which allows him to denounce something else that is ‘common’: the pervasive hypocrisy that surrounds him, and which to his mind she herself epitomizes (‘Like Niobe, all tears’): ‘Seems’, madam – nay it is, I know not ‘seems’. ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black . . . Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within that passes show, These but the trappings and suits of woe. (1.2.76–86)

The reality is that which is ‘within’. As any competent adult knows, what shows externally may indicate more or less accurately a person’s psychic interior. But then again, it may not. We are thus invited to reflect on the other instances in which people merely act, ‘play’, in ways that are expected of them. Some do so to stay in the good graces of their fellows, and especially of the powerful; Hamlet professes to wonder

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about ‘those that would make mouths at [Claudius] while my father lived’, but now pay good money for little portraits of him: ‘’Sblood, there is something in this more than natural if philosophy could find it out’ (2.2.301–5). Actually, Hamlet, no there isn’t; it is human, all too human. Speaking more generally, often people act a certain way to avoid the public censure that may attend the violating of some conventional propriety; for, as the Prince observes, it can be generally prejudicial to display but just one ‘habit that too much o’erlevens / The form of plausive manners’ (1.4.29–30). Or they do so for some ulterior purpose more personal and particular – as do the inept Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who pretend to have come to Elsinore for nothing but the pleasure of Hamlet’s company, whereas in truth they hope to ‘receive such thanks / As befits a king’s remembrance’ (2.2.26–6, 237–58). However, this ‘within’ that Hamlet speaks of is not as simple as the everyday distinction between outer and inner would suggest. For it presumes that a person truly ‘knows himself ’ – knows how he ‘really’ feels about things, especially other people, what ‘deep down’ he really wants, fears, hopes, loves, hates, admires, resents – hence can in every instance know whether what he outwardly shows does, or does not, accurately indicate his true inner reality. Yet does anyone, however ruthlessly reflective, always know this with complete certainty? Much less, then, is it to be believed of the great generality of people, who are not as ruthlessly reflective as Hamlet – indeed, quite the contrary. That is, most people, far from desiring unadorned self-knowledge, steadfastly decline to seek it themselves, and would run from it were it offered. Thus Hamlet’s compelling his mother to confront the reflection of her soul in the ‘mirror’ he provides is a punishment: ‘Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge. / You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ (3.4.17–19). She is eloquent as to the pain it causes her: ‘O speak to me no more! / These words like daggers enter in my ears. / No more, sweet Hamlet’ (3.4.92–4). Only an ugly truth of one’s ‘inmost part’ can hurt like this.16 As evidenced by the most famous of Delphic inscriptions, achieving selfknowledge has been recognized since antiquity as exceedingly hard – both hard to get and hard to take – and yet is the one thing needful. The difficulty is elliptically alluded to when Osric accosts Hamlet, ‘You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is’, and the Prince responds, ‘I dare not confess that, lest I should compare with him in excellence. But to know a man well were to know himself ’ (5.2.121–4). Thus the broader significance – but also the expanded problem – of self-knowledge: its reciprocal relationship with knowledge of other

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people. As Hamlet affirms, a genuine appreciation of a certain excellence in someone else presupposes some firsthand experience of seeking or possessing it oneself. Wisdom provides the clearest example. On the other side of the ledger, recognizing someone else’s particular vice or baseness, or blindness to a particular fault, may stimulate an honest person to examine whether he detect not the same in himself (cf. 1.4.23–38). Nor does the problem of self-knowledge end here. Ophelia in her madness opens another whole dimension with her ‘Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be’ (4.5.43–4). It has long been recognized that the interior of the human soul manifests varying degrees of consciousness, a seamless spectrum that ranges from full self-awareness to the opacity of repressed memories, vague anxieties and inchoate desires, some common, some idiosyncratic.17 Moreover, that the commonality of people’s subconscious accounts for the endurance of certain mythoi (such as the legend of an antediluvian paradise, or the tale of Oedipus). And that the buried presence of such contents, be they common or peculiar, is at least partially revealed in dreams.18 But one must be cautious what one concludes from this. The mere existence of this pre-rational or arational psychic substratum, however important for understanding oneself and others, does not suffice to establish its ontological priority – as if the subconscious, rather than the conscious self that seeks to understand and rationally rule it, must be acknowledged to be the true reality of a person.19 Still and all, if any play could be said to invite speculative spelunking into the souls of its main characters, and of its eponym in particular, surely it is Hamlet.

The primary fact remains: ‘acting’ of various sorts is intrinsic to the reality of human life. The capacity for it, and an acceptance, even expectation of it, are among the most important constituents of human nature. Much acting is simply intrinsic to being some particular ‘kind’ of person, practising this or that profession, meeting the responsibilities of certain communal or familial roles, participating in established ceremonies, and so on. We accept largely without question the ways of speaking and behaving that are to whatever extent prescribed for a given social or political or economic position, be it policeman or professor, fire-fighter or fashion model – or even court jester, paid to ‘act funny’: madcap antics, bawdy songs, spoofs and taunts, ‘as were wont to set the table on a roar’. One simply cannot be a Catholic Bishop or a Member of Parliament, the Head of Surgery or a Maitre-de, unless one conforms more

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or less strictly to the behavioural code that essentially defines such positions. Similarly, a chaste young maiden, such as Ophelia is presumed to be, would know without being lectured by her brother that she must speak, dress, and behave in a manner that is appropriate for what she is, all of which differs from that of a young man as well as from that of an elderly matron (cf. 1.3.35–51, 119–25; 3.4.66–8). Despite his superficiality, Claudius points to a commonplace truth in observing, ‘youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears / Than settled age his sables and his weeds / Importing health and graveness’ (4.7.77–80). No sensible person needs be exhorted to ‘act his age’, or to behave in a way that befits his social position, for he or she does so as a matter of course. As for people’s everyday conscious dissembling, most of it is not only harmless but positively beneficial in maintaining decent, peaceful civil life. The exchange of pleasantries upon meetings between people who in truth care little for each other preserves a surface amity that is preferable to resentment born of disregard, to say nothing of open dislike. Likewise most such ‘wellmannered’ behaviour that preserves the appearance of communal good will among people who of necessity must continue to associate, whatever their personal feelings about each other. Obviously, political life would steadily deteriorate if everyone who disdains certain fellow community members were to begin behaving towards them as Hamlet does towards Polonius and Osric. The shared recognition of behavioural ‘trappings’ intended to signal what is within – that is, what according to established communal standards should be within, whether or not it really is – generally facilitates the maintenance of this desirable civility. The very etymology of ‘polite’, derived ultimately from the Greek polis (as are ‘polished’, ‘policy’, and ‘police’) suggests the fundamental importance of such matters. However, when genuineness of feeling becomes the exception rather than the rule – when, for example, a community’s rites of mourning are but a hollow ritual for most of the supposed mourners, a mere ‘going through the motions’ – then the effectiveness of such trappings is practically nil. And, not surprisingly, in such circumstance even the formalities become scanted. Thus the disgracefully abbreviated period of mourning for King Hamlet, and his shameless brother’s public chiding of Hamlet for embarrassing the Court with his ‘obstinate condolement’ – as if he’d been at it for years, not a mere two months. Well might a neutral observer agree that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’.

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As a general rule, we expect our fellows to ‘act’ in accordance with established norms of politeness for a given context. Anyone with a claim to our respect recognizes that behaviour which would be acceptable in a football stadium (and not just any is) would not be appropriate in a place of worship, or court of law, or at a symphony concert (as distinct from a ‘rock concert’). There are people who on all occasions and in all circumstances take care to be polite according to the established norms; this is not something false about them, but who they really and truly are, having since childhood been nurtured in norms of politeness that are now ‘second nature’ to them. The forms of warm greetings between old friends differ markedly from the more reserved expressions of pleasure upon first being introduced to strangers, but compliance in either case may be equally sincere. On the other hand, it may not. One wonders, for example, how sincere is Hamlet in concluding his welcome to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – having learned that they are present by royal command, not simply for the pleasure of visiting him (as they originally pretended; 2.2.237): Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore. Your hands, come, then! Th’appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony. Let me comply with you in this garb lest my extent to the players, which I tell you must show fairly outwards, should more appear like entertainment than yours. You are welcome. (2.2.305–12)

Now, there’s a speech that could stand some careful parsing! The difference for which Hamlet expressly excuses himself is amply borne out by the marked enthusiasm and familiarity with which he greets the arriving Players. But there is one venue of human ‘play-acting’ that is more problematic than most – or at least raises more problems – namely, in relations between the sexes. As Hamlet expounds in his cruel assault on Ophelia: ‘I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourself another. You jig and ample and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t. It hath made me mad’ (3.1.141–6). Cosmetics, enhancing a woman’s bodily appearance, represent for Hamlet all that he sees as false about feminine behaviour, the ‘parts’ they ‘act’, the ‘roles’ they merely ‘play’. He recurs to this theme when contemplating Yorick’s skull: ‘Now get you to my lady’s table and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that’ (5.1.182–4). He is especially disparaging of his mother, who when his father was alive seemed the very picture of devotion (‘Why, she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite

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had grown / By what it fed on’), only to prove the very epitome of fickleness: (‘and yet within a month / . . . / A little month, . . . / She married’; 1.2.143–56). The Ghost, however, accuses Hamlet’s mother of more than inconstancy: that she was merely a ‘most seeming-virtuous queen’ (1.5.46), whereas it was all an act. She is an adulterous. Of course, sexual pretense and play-acting are hardly exclusive to the female. Both brother and father warn Ophelia about the games young men play to gain access to a maiden’s ‘treasure’. Presumably, they both know whereof they speak. Old Polonius admits as much: ‘I do know / When the blood burns how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows [etc.]’ (1.3.28–31, 114–19). Later, the songs of the grief-maddened girl seem to teach the same lesson (4.5.48–55, 58–66). Hamlet himself proves adept in another constituent of that special kind of play-acting called ‘flirtation’: suggestive, equivocal wordplay – epitomized by his infamous ‘Do you think I meant country matters?’ (3.2.108–10). The point hardly needs belabouring, for most of us are already aware that no other dimension of life presents such a panoply of pretense as do the erotic relations of the sexes. This play, like all of Shakespeare’s dramas, provides a fair sampling of ‘playacting’ in so-called real life. But it is uniquely complex in this regard. If one imagines a live performance of Hamlet, what does one see? Imitations of various kinds of pretence being played out in an imagined imitation of human reality, and even of characters imitating people who are instructing other characters imitating people on how to go about such pretending as will deceive still other characters imitating people (which must be distinguished from the person playing Hamlet instructing the characters imitating professional Actors on how to imitate human reality in a piece of theatre which the other characters imitating people will ‘know’ to be merely an imitation of reality, happening within the imitation of reality that Shakespeare has crafted). Suffice it to say, the compounded levels of imitation can be confusing. And in sorting out the implications of this fact, one arrives from a different direction at the philosophical problem posed by this tragedy: with respect to people, what counts as Reality. The character Polonius is the portrayal – the imitation – of an incorrigible snoop and dissembler and conniver whose ethos he conveniently summarizes for us in his instructions to his servant Reynaldo on how to spy on his son Laertes in Paris. Reynaldo should pretend ‘as ’twere some distant knowledge

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of him’ in order to draw out what others know of him: ‘And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out’ (2.1.60–3). Polonius claims theatrical experience from his university days – indeed, to have been ‘accounted a good actor’ in the part of Julius Caesar, ironically, ‘killed i’th’Capitol’ (3.2.95–100). Partly on the basis of his possessing such skill, he boasts to the King, ‘If circumstances lead me I will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre’ (2.2.154–6).20 Having terminated his daughter’s romantic relationship with the Crown Prince, resulting (he contends) in Hamlet going mad out of frustrated love for Ophelia, he attempts to prove his hypothesis by staging a seemingly chance meeting between the two. For this purpose, he first instructs his daughter how to act: ‘Ophelia, walk you here . . . / . . . Read on this book / That show of such an exercise may colour / Your loneliness’ (3.1.42–5). However, Polonius is not the only character to be shown instructing another how to act so as to create a misleading appearance. Hamlet does so, too, though his coaching of Horatio and Marcellous is more precisely that of how not to act should questions be raised by his ‘antic disposition’. It is an amusing display of a familiar kind of pretense: that of a person tantalizing others with supposedly privileged knowledge he is obliged not to tell, though he would if he could, and so on (1.5.171–7). But perhaps an equally important instance, so far as its bearing on the plot, is that of Claudius advising Laertes how to conduct himself towards Hamlet so as not to arouse suspicion about their supposedly friendly fencing contest. Since this advice consists mainly of avoiding even meeting the Prince (‘Keep close within your chamber’), the King must believe that Laertes lacks the self-control over his outward expression that a successful actor requires. In any event, Claudius is careful to have a back-up plan: poisoned wine, should their poisoned-rapier scheme fail, ‘And that our drift [i.e. intention] look through our bad performance’ (4.7.127, 148–60). Laertes, incidentally, could profit from being counselled to ‘o’erstep not the modesty of nature’, given his penchant for flamboyant self-dramatization – evident in the manner in which he storms into the royal chamber at the head of a mob, shouting, ‘O thou vile king, / Give me my father’, insisting that nothing else matters but that he be revenged for his father’s death: ‘To hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil, / Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit. / I dare damnation. [etc.]’ (4.5.115–16, 130–2). Likewise his melodramatic leap into Ophelia’s grave, as if he would be buried with her – an extravagance Hamlet openly mocks: ‘And if thou prate of mountains . . . I’ll rant as well as thou’

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(5.1.238–46, 263–73). We know that Laertes’s professed concern for ‘honour’, that his name remain ‘ungored’ (5.2.223–7), is but so much posturing, since he is in reality a knave who would buy a deadly poison for what could only be some base purpose. It is not clear how much this histrionic streak contributes to his being so readily persuaded to serve as Claudius’s foil for removing Hamlet. What is clear is that Claudius skilfully works this vein in him, while also appealing to his vanity: ‘Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?’ – merely acting, that is (4.7.105–7). Now, in first broaching his ‘device’ whereby Hamlet ‘shall not choose but fall’, Claudius establishes as an essential condition that ‘for his death no wind of blame shall breathe / But even his mother shall uncharge the practice / And call it accident’ (4.7.62–6). He really means, of course, that ‘no wind of blame shall breathe’ on him. What follows this proviso is a long-winded tale flattering Laertes’s fencing prowess and alleging Hamlet’s envy of it (for which there is no shred of evidence in anything we see or hear, and some to the contrary). Only after this elaborate piece of ingratiation does the King reveal what in particular he has in mind: staging an entertaining piece of theatre to cloak a deadly reality. That is, they will disguise what is actually an assassination plot as if it were but a friendly fencing contest – the sort of thing on which whoever wishes might place a wager (as the King himself supposedly has). Upon learning the particulars of this scheme, Laertes contributes his own ignoble improvement: anointing his sword with poison, such that even if he cannot manage to run Hamlet clean through, the merest scratch will be fatal. Perhaps Laertes truly is so blinded by a passion for revenge – or so absorbed in acting as if – that on this occasion he simply cannot think straight. Then again, he may simply be too stupid to realize that if Claudius’s scheme is successful, there is not one chance in ten thousand that he will be left alive. For however Hamlet dies, it surely will not look like an accident. It will appear to be just what it is: murder by a person known to have a powerful motive for it, the same reckless young man who had the audacity to threaten even the King himself. Thus, the moment Hamlet falls, whether by the sword play or from drinking poisoned wine, Claudius, acting the parts of outraged sovereign, husband, and stepfather, will cry, ‘Treason! Arrest that man, and carry him to the dungeon this instant.’ The King’s Switzers, recently embarrassed by this same young hothead (4.5.98–102), will happily and vigorously comply, deaf to any protests and accusations Laertes might make. Under torture he will confess whatever

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is required. And for his cooperation, he will go to the block for a quick and easy dispatch, in preference to being disembowelled, drawn and quartered. Thus Claudius will have killed two dangerous birds with one stone. After all, Laertes’s proven capacity for rabble rousing cannot have endeared him to the King. And now in addition he knows too much. However, events do not follow the plotline envisioned by this murderous ‘vice of kings’ – though the finale of the tragedy does have a distinctly dramaturgical tone and flavour. The Queen, having drunk of the wine meant for Hamlet, collapses almost immediately. Yet not before Laertes has wounded Hamlet with the poisoned rapier, exchanged weapons with him in a scuffle, and been mortally wounded in turn. The felled Queen warns that what she has drunk is poisoned, and the dying Laertes confesses not only his own treachery, but also that of the King. Thereupon Hamlet wounds the King with the poisoned sword, then feeling the effects of the same poison upon himself, begins a final colloquy with Horatio. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is more than a whiff of theatre in the Prince’s mode of expression. I am dead, Horatio. Wretched Queen, adieu. You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time (as this fell sergeant Death Is strict in his arrest) – O, I could tell you – But let it be. Horatio, I am dead. Thou livest: report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied. (5.2.317–24)

Only Hamlet, privy to the contributions of the Ghost, could tell the whole crime story to the ‘audience’ that witnesses its bloody conclusion. But feeling his death to be immediate, Hamlet delegates the task to Horatio instead, who speaks and acts as if he would prefer to join his friend in death – how sincerely, we will never know, for Hamlet pre-empts any attempt by seizing the poisoned chalice, pleading, ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile / . . . / To tell my story.’ The English Ambassadors and the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras having – most opportunely – arrived in time to view the dismal sight, Horatio proceeds to fulfil Hamlet’s dying request: ‘give order that these bodies / High on the stage be placed to the view, / And let me speak to the unknowing world / How these things came about.’ Fortinbras responds, ‘Let us haste to hear it / And call the noblest to the audience.’ Horatio then urges, ‘But let this same be presently

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performed / Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen.’ Fortinbras, having reminded the others that he has ‘some rights of memory in this kingdom’, now takes charge: ‘Let four captains / Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, / For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royal.’ Ah, yes: ‘put on’ – not an antic disposition, but a regal deportment. The verbal indications of theatricality in the finale of this particular piece of theatre – unmistakable once noticed, but subtle enough to pass unnoticed – are but one way of making a point that Shakespeare makes repeatedly in his plays: that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.21 That this is a truth which bears so oft repeating attests to its profound importance. Nowhere else, however, is this truth depicted more emphatically and insistently (as opposed to merely pronounced) than in Hamlet. Not surprisingly then, it is in this, his most expansive and overtly thought-provoking tragedy, that our master philosopher-poet has incorporated the means for achieving some genuine understanding of the philosophical significance of what has since become a cliché.

The famous ‘play within a play’ is, literally, the centrepiece of this drama. But not only that: it is also central to Shakespeare’s philosophical intention therein. That is, to lay bare the unique complexity of the problem of determining human reality, epitomized by the practical dialectic between everyday life and the imitation worlds created by human art (especially drama, but including novels, histories and all other forms of ‘music’22). For not only can dramatic imitations shape people’s understandings of issues and events, such portrayals may also arouse their passions as much as do actual happenings – perhaps even more so23 – and this despite the spectators being aware that what they are beholding is merely an imitation. For this awareness can be suppressed, temporarily ‘forgotten’, to the extent that a person becomes absorbed in the moment, sharing old Lear’s grief at the death of young, beautiful, virtuous Cordelia; or inspired by Henry’s rhetoric on the eve of Agincourt; or angry to the point of outrage at the machinations of Iago; or feel joy at the ‘resurrection’ of Hermione.24 Shakespeare manages to dramatize these effects of drama through having a troupe of professional Players visit Elsinore. According to Rosencrantz, they are the very company that Hamlet himself took ‘such delight in, the tragedians

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of the city’ (2.2.291–2). Events bear out the veracity of this claim, with the implication that Hamlet the Student was an avid playgoer. Perhaps as a measure of his enthusiasm, Hamlet no more than greets the Players than he commands, ‘We’ll have a speech straight. Come, give us a taste of your quality. Come, a passionate speech’ (2.2.368–70). When the troupe’s leader asks what speech the Prince would prefer, Hamlet’s reveals an even more intimate relationship with the theatre. For it turns out he is not merely a spectator of plays, but apparently also a reader, and even a memorizer of them: ‘I heard thee speak a speech once – but it was never acted, or if it was, not above once, [this latter would seem the case, for he continues] the play I remember pleased not the million, ’twas caviare to the general.’ He and others of good judgement nonetheless regarded it ‘an excellent play, well digested in the scenes’, despite, or rather because there were no saucy titbits included merely ‘to make the matter savoury’. Instead, being crafted according to ‘an honest method’, it was ‘as wholesome as sweet’ – language which suggests that Hamlet views play-writing itself in a moral light, and regards its products as a source of psychic nourishment.25 However, based on what we subsequently hear of this unnamed play, he has an exceedingly strange notion of fare that is both ‘wholesome’ and ‘sweet’. Responding to the troupe leader’s query, Hamlet identifies a favourite passage by reciting some 13 lines, asking the professional actor to continue from that point, ‘If it live in your memory.’26 Moreover, in Polonius’s judgement at least, Hamlet’s recitation was ‘well spoken – with good accent and good discretion’ (2.2.404–5) – which would imply practice. Whatever the case, either the Prince has a memory for lines of dramatic poetry like that which Mozart was reputed to have for passages of music – able to retain them in the course of a single hearing – or he had studied the play as a written text, and saw fit to make some of the author’s lines ‘live’ in his memory. Any lover of Shakespeare’s lines, and of his Hamlet in particular, would have no difficulty appreciating such a desire; and, more to the point, would regard it as an important datum about the Prince’s nature. The visiting Player does as he is bid, picking up where Hamlet left off. As he proceeds for some three or four dozen more lines, his countenance takes on the passion appropriate to the passage he recites. Apparently Polonius becomes similarly moved, for he interrupts, ‘Look where he has not turned his colour and has tears in’s eyes – Prithee, no more!’ Thus may the germ of ‘The Mousetrap’ scheme have been sown. Hamlet accedes to the termination for now, promising that he will hear the rest ‘soon’, and charges Polonius that

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meanwhile he ‘see the players well bestowed’. But as they are leaving, he detains their leader to ask whether his company can play The Murder of Gonzago (how many other plays is Hamlet familiar with, one wonders). Confirmed as being in the company’s repertoire, the Prince requests it for the following evening, augmented by ‘a speech of some dozen lines, or sixteen lines’ which he – no mere consumer of plays, we now learn – will provide for insertion at some chosen place in the text. Prince Hamlet: play-goer, play-reader, playmemorizer, play-writer. Once left alone, Hamlet proceeds to berate himself by expressly affiliating the passionate reactions aroused by dramatic imitation, and those of real life: O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all the visage wanned –Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit – and all for nothing – For Hecuba? What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? What would he do Had he the motive and that for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech. (2.2.485–98)

As he continues his verbal self-abuse – ‘like a whore [unpacking his] heart with words, . . . a-cursing like a very drab’ – an idea occurs to him that bespeaks another sort of relationship between dramatic imitation and real life. Hum, I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of a scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions. . . . I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before my uncle. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If ’a do blench I know my course. (2.2.523–33)

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So is born the ‘Mousetrap’ strategy whereby to ‘catch the conscience of the King’, but which in the event seems to have such a puzzlingly ambiguous outcome. Its basis is a barely plausible exaggeration of something surely true about the human psyche: that shame and guilt are among the many feelings which well-wrought drama may excite – a point of both political importance27 and philosophical interest. Indeed, are we not made uncomfortable upon viewing depictions of behaviour we’re aware of having engaged in, but of which we are less than proud: slighting parents, say, or lying to friends simply to avoid an inconvenience; or failing to stand up for someone who had a right to expect our support; or even just behaving in a vulgar and boisterous manner when inebriated? Admittedly, adulterers, fraudsters, vandals, shoplifters and such – to say nothing of hardened thieves and murderers – are not apt to proclaim their malefactions publicly upon seeing their ignoble transgressions realistically imitated. But doubtless some at least would not enjoy the show as well as would innocent viewers (a few might even visibly blench), which is sufficient to validate the point.28 When on the evening of the scheduled performance, Polonius arrives early (accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), Hamlet inquires of him, ‘Will the King hear this piece of work?’ Not merely view the work, but hear it – subtly pointing beyond the dumb-show to the dialogical version (cf. 3.1.22–3). Confirmation that both King and Queen are expected to arrive shortly provides an excuse to send Polonius and the two sponges to hasten the Players. This allows Hamlet the privacy to assign Horatio his part in the scheme, namely to find himself a place apart whence to observe most carefully the King during the ‘one scene of [the play] that comes near the circumstance’ of what he has told Horatio about the elder Hamlet’s death (according to the Ghost, that is, for supposedly its veracity is also being tested). Hamlet will likewise keep his eyes ‘riveted’ on Claudius’s face: ‘And after we will both our judgments join / In censure of his seeming’ (3.2.82–3). Thus has Shakespeare established a bemusing complex of actors and audiences – which, not incidentally, reveals a surprising pertinence to the clownish Gravedigger’s seemingly frivolous set of distinctions between ‘to act, to do, and to perform’. For while the professional Players ‘perform’ The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet ‘acts’ the antic with Ophelia. What he is actually doing, however, is attempting to determine the guilt or innocence of the King, and at the same the veracity of the Ghost.

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So, imagine oneself at a live performance of Hamlet. What would one witness in the very centre of the play? Two actors imitating people who are watching other actors imitating members of an audience who are watching still other actors imitating people who are ‘acting’ according to the plot of a fictional play that happens to bear reflexively on the plot of Hamlet. Might not it occur to one to ask, ‘And who’s watching me watch the two men who are watching those who are watching a performance of The Murder of Gonzago’ – as someone might be, for example, the show’s anxious producer, or a drama critic judging the audience’s reaction to this particular performance of Hamlet. But whether or not such is the case, we members of the audience would be tacitly aware of each other’s presence, and act accordingly, that is, more or less according to local standards of behaviour regarded as appropriate to witnessing a theatrical performance.29 So, what counts as real here? In one sense, the answer is obvious. The reality on the stage is simply the playing, the performing. There really are actors playing their respective parts in Hamlet, which happens to have, as an element of its plot, a partial performance of another play variously identified as The Murder of Gonzago or ‘The Mousetrap’. But everyone on the stage is following a script; and no one actually dies in either Hamlet or The Murder of Gonzago, though several pretend to. Therein lies the difference between the make-believe ‘reality’ being depicted on the stage, and the lived reality of historical life, some bit of which the drama purports to imitate. Whereas, per this imaginary scenario, we really are members of an audience watching a performance of Hamlet, each person’s behaviour being shaped, more or less, by his awareness of the established standards of politeness appropriate in a theatre, and by the fact that he is subject to being judged accordingly by everyone else present. But what is the ultimate ground of this behaviour, and (consequently) of that being imitated by the Court ‘audience’ in the play? Again, the answer might seem obvious. It is the concrete, ‘material’ reality in which such standards of behaviour originate. For theatre-goers, this would be the conditions that allow the audience to enjoy the performance (no audible conversation, say, no heckling, a minimum of physical moving about, no large headwear, whatever). Thus is established what counts as ‘politeness’ in a theatre, as ‘good theatre-manners’. However, we know that this is something which actually varies somewhat from time to time and place to place.30 But why does it vary, despite the conditions for comfortably seeing and hearing

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a theatrical performance remaining essentially the same. To say that people’s expectations of acceptable behaviour change with time and place merely moves the question one step further back; it obviously does not answer it. Moreover, there are certain ‘norms’ that are not readily derived from material conditions. For example, what determines when it is acceptable to applaud a performance, much less stand and applaud (but not shout, whistle, stamp one’s feet or ring a cowbell)? Perhaps more to the point, what establishes when applauding is expected, even practically required, regardless of how a given member of the audience actually adjudged the performance. Many, perhaps most people will ‘politely’ clap approval of a performance whether or not they deem it even passable (much less distinguished). How many persons in a ‘standing ovation’ are standing and applauding simply because everyone else is – more or less as if following a script, quite indifferent to what (if anything) they feel ‘within’? To that extent, there would seem to be little difference between the ‘reality’ of the stage action and that of the audience. Suppose the Court audience in Hamlet (including an innocent Claudius), having seen a complete performance of The Murder of Gonzago, gave it a standing ovation. Would this be an imitation of anything more ‘real’ than the imitation itself? Often enough, then, the ‘reality’, whether on the stage of a theatre or the ‘stage’ of the world, simply is (at least in part) the playing, the acting in accordance with an unwritten script – and beyond that, groundless. Now approach the problem from another direction; start with the behaviour being imitated on the stage. Take the simplest case: that of the sentries with which the play begins. The ground of their acting or ‘playing’ a certain way – that is, the objective reality to which either actor or audience would look in order to determine whether their acting is ‘realistic’, whether they have indeed suited the action to the word, the word to the action, and not o’erstepped the modesty of nature but simply held a mirror up to it – is presumed to be the actions of real sentries on duty. Their behaviour, in turn, is determined by the material requirements of their task, or so one would suppose: that of keeping a careful watch against any intrusion, by either friend or foe, that would compromise the security of the locale they guard. Thus they not only must stay awake, and (needless to add) sober,31 they must regularly scrutinize the area they are responsible for, perhaps patrolling a certain sector of the battlements. But they must also guard against the approach of any ‘unauthorized persons’ (thus, the use of passwords), insure that all pertinent information is passed along upon

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the changing of the guard, and so on. Any competent sentry would be able to provide some justification for these requirements. In addition, however, a sentry would likely be expected to ‘look smart’ when on duty: neat uniform, upright manly posture (no slouching), no loud singing or laughing (perhaps no unnecessary conversation), purposeful stride if pacing is necessary (no ambling; perhaps reversals of direction by a neatly executed ‘about face’), and so on. It is more difficult to see these latter specifications as being determined by the task itself. Rather, they likely would be understood as simply inherent in the idea of being, like Francisco, an ‘honest soldier’ – which idea includes a certain appearance, one that projects a persona of discipline, competence, reliability, pride, manliness, and what not. For there is, roughly speaking, a ‘standard’ sort of appearance and posture which has over the centuries (not to say, millenia) become associated with these martial qualities, hence is readily recognizable as indicative thereof. A typical sentry may be thoroughly competent in carrying out his duties despite being unable to provide any explanation whatsoever for why he should march this way rather than that, why his boots and brass must always be polished to a high gloss, why his weapon be carried or worn at a certain angle, why the precise formulae recited upon relieving or being relieved is whatever it is. It has all simply been part of his training, ‘drilled into him’ as it were. He and his fellow sentries act a certain way because ‘this is how sentries are supposed to act’ – and if you don’t believe it, just ask the Sergeant of the Guard. And how does he know? Well, he learned it from . . . . The ‘ground’ of what is right and proper in such cases is ‘How we’ve always done things in this man’s army’ – that is, tradition, custom, with whatever arbitrariness this might entail. Accordingly, here too the specifics vary somewhat with time and place. Virtually all militaries have an established form of saluting, and expect salutes to be smartly executed when ‘appropriate’. But both the precise form of the salute, and the occasions when it is required, differ from army to army. Because of the kind of thing a salute is, it would of course be impossible to show that there is only one ‘right way’ – a single objective standard determined by nature – to salute. Whatever the way, it must be practical and dignified. But within those parameters, militaries over the ages have adopted various forms that serve the purposes of saluting (i.e. as a respectful exchange of greetings, of partings, of acceptance of commands, of signs of respect for flags and anthems, and such). Whatever the form, however, the sharing of it implicitly reinforces, for the most part subconsciously, a recognition of being comrades-in-arms. Nonetheless, in

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practice most saluting is simply habitual, and to that extent ‘thoughtless’. When sentries exchange salutes, they are not conscious of the purpose or broader significance of their doing so. It is just what they do, just how sentries ‘act’. Consequently, when actors portraying sentries do likewise on the stage, the status of their actions is not substantially different than that which they imitate.32 Nor does the ontological complexity end there. For not only does Art imitate Life, but vice versa as well.33 Thought about, one readily sees that this is true only with respect to certain parts or aspects of life and only to a degree; obviously the very possibility is restricted to whatever is portrayed in drama and allied arts. It would be true to a considerable extent with respect to whatever is subject to ‘fashion’, broadly construed; whereas few auto mechanics, tree pruners, or land surveyors model what they actually do on any artistic portrayal. Restricted though its validity may be, the essential point is important: since the days when Greek boys’ education consisted in memorizing Homer, and Hellenic youth were fired by the example of Achilles – or perhaps ‘rugged Pyrrhus’, his son – people’s behaviour, including their speech, has been influenced if not simply modelled on that which is portrayed in fiction, but especially on what they see concretely displayed, first on stage, later also on screen. Well might the Prince caution the visiting Players to set an example of moderate behaviour: ‘use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness’ (3.2.5–8).34 Yet not only do people in everyday life imitate the performances of actors (as to what is suave and debonair, say, or cool and clever, to cite fairly trivial examples; or how a ‘real man’ would handle this or that problem, or how a gentleman, or a genteel lady, would behave in various situations, examples not trivial). Equally if not more significant is the fact that people tend to accept what they see portrayed in the various forms of drama as a basis for judging the behaviour of other people – often to their disadvantage. That said, sanctioning unrealistic expectations by which one then unfairly judges other people is the lesser evil entailed in taking one’s standards from those implicit in dramatic portrayals. Indeed, raising expectations within reason can be a wholesome effect of the practical interplay between Art and Life. Far more serious is apt to be the questionable validity of the portrayed standards themselves. Fine though it be for Hamlet to enjoin the Players ‘to show Virtue her feature’ as well as the image of what properly deserves to be scorned (3.2.22–3). But what truly are the Virtues is a question about which

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there are deep and recurring disputes. It suffices to mention the profound contrast between Christian and Pagan ideas of virtue, and to recall that an antique Roman who failed to revenge the murder of his father would be an object of scorn.

The philosophical point, however, is not primarily about the theatrical situation per se, but about human life in general: in practically all social situations, we are at once actors and audience involved in a dynamic dialectic of watching and being watched, of acting and reacting, of influencing and being influenced. The parts we play are not equal, of course. Persons who are the very glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observed of all observers, are ‘by definition’ few. Yet the essential point remains: however consciously or not, almost all of us are engaged in ‘performing’ a great part of our waking lives (which, doubtless, is why a certain amount of ‘escape’ into privacy has its appeal). As the natural complement of this, we are also of necessity ‘critics’ of the performances of people we observe, evaluating how well or ill they do what they intend, judging the degrees of sincerity and pretense in whatever they profess, speculating as to what – and who – they care about and how strongly (among many lesser matters). And this is so whether they are performing for our sakes, or for others – much as we also are liable to be judged by any or all who see us, not merely by those to whom we direct our attention. This has obvious implications for the personal life of any man or woman who takes to heart the truth Shakespeare has so ingeniously woven into the dramatic fabric of his Hamlet. Bearing in mind the truism ‘You can’t please everybody’, we each necessarily face, day in and day out, the question: of those who may be considered the ‘audience’ of your actions, whom do you most prefer to please? The many ‘unskilful’? Or the ‘judicious’ few, such that their censure o’erweighs a whole theatre of the others? It is not unreasonable to wish to please as many people as one conveniently can – why not? it could prove useful, or otherwise gratifying – but the question remains: whom do you most care to please? To appreciate fully that one’s corner of the world is like a stage on which oneself and one’s fellows regularly perform is to become more self-conscious about the political character of one’s existence, hence about the broader context in which one chooses what to be, or not to be – about the general quality, that is, of one’s political environment. Further, it entails accepting the pervasive ‘artificiality’ which is natural to the human form of being, recognizing that

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the manifold modes of ‘acting’, which to such a great extent regulate people’s everyday behaviour, is a natural consequence of the self-consciousness, however shallow or partial, that is inherent in human rationality per se. Thus, even to characterize such behaviour as ‘artificial’ is misleading; some of it is as real as any psychical constituent can be. The stride and posture of a proud soldier; the ‘bedside manner’ of a caring physician; the bowed head and folded hands of a nun in earnest prayer; the officious deportment of a bank manager – whatever the extent to which ‘acting’ in accord with conventional expectations may have played in inculcating such behaviour, it has become the reality. Nor is this to be confused with actions done without significant conscious attention, such as brushing one’s teeth or tying one’s shoes. For, practically speaking, the everyday reality of the dedicated soldier, the conscientious doctor, the pious nun, even the officious bank manager may be every bit as conscious as the kinds of human acting with which it so profoundly contrasts: sheer intentional pretense (with much ‘mannerly’ behaviour, flattering professions, exaggerations of personal regard, of delight and dole, of woe or wonder, falling somewhere in between). But where exactly – or even inexactly – along this spectrum of acting does the Real give way to mere Appearance, sincerity and authenticity shade into affectation, simulation, feigning, posturing, hypocrisy, guise, utter façade and falsity? ‘Are you honest?’ ‘Are you fair?’ Are you really what you appear to be? Loaded questions, not always easily answered, even in one’s own case. However, there is another side to the political truth Shakespeare herein teaches, and it complicates the personal lessons to be drawn. For all of us who prefer being to the alternative, the question of ‘what to be, and what not’ translates into ‘how to speak and act, and how not to’ in the theatre of everyday life. Accepting that one’s social world is to some considerable extent like a stage – that, unavoidably, one interacts with others, not only as fellow actors but as spectators and critics as well – this is not simply a personal matter insofar as we are by nature political beings. Thus how one chooses to act in one’s live theatre will, according to one’s degree of influence as exemplar, either reinforce or undermine, refine or reform, what so profoundly shapes people’s lives in common: custom. Most people act more or less in conformity with ambient customs; and to that extent, custom, like all regularity of behaviour, shapes habit, what the Greeks called ethos (cf. 1.5.60). Indeed, ‘habitual’ and ‘customary’ are practically synonymous, such that one might say of a callous sexton who sings while grave-

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digging, ‘Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness’ (5.1.64). This customary basis of so much human behaviour is rich with potential for both good and evil. As Hamlet exhorts his repenting mother: Goodnight, but go not to my uncle’s bed; Assume a virtue if you have it not. 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 is put on. Refrain tonight And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence, the next more easy. For use can almost change the stamp of nature And either shame the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency. (3.4.157–68)

So, while custom may begin as mere costume, perhaps ill-fitting at first, it typically comes to feel natural with use. To be sure, a seriously thoughtful person, though to the manner born, may rightly conclude that a certain native custom is more honoured in the breach than in the observance, hence act accordingly. And true it is that whole nations may be ‘traduced and taxed’ for some customary attribute that other peoples regard as despicable.35 But insofar as radical self-consciousness is neither suitable nor even possible for most people, who thus will for the most part be ruled by custom regardless; and since the effectiveness of customs, be they salutary or pernicious, rests on a general prejudice in the favour of what is customary; the reform of customs must avoid destroying the ‘wondrous potency’ of custom per se.

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4

‘Why, What a King Is This!’

The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy. Francis Bacon, Essays

A worthy question. What are we to think of uncle Claudius? Although he has had his scholarly and theatrical defenders over the years, most people’s impression is apt to be heavily influenced by what is said about him by Prince Hamlet and the King-Hamlet-like Ghost, hostile witnesses both. All textual evidence considered, however, he has more complexity than they seem to allow for – specifically, some not necessarily redeeming qualities, but ones that might justify Hamlet’s referring to him as a ‘mighty opposite’. Admittedly, the Prince may mean by ‘mighty’ nothing beyond his uncle’s now being the king, hence wielding the royal power. Then again, he may be implicitly conceding that Claudius the man makes for a more worthy opponent than one would gather from the diatribe with which the Prince berates his mother: ‘a mildewed ear’; ‘A murderer and a villain, / A slave . . . a vice of kings, / A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, . . . a king of shreds and patches’ (3.4.62, 94–9). Or from the Ghost’s characterization in replying to Hamlet’s astonishment at its allegation that ‘The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown.’ Ay, that incestuous, that adulterous 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

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The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen. O Hamlet, what 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. (1.5.42–52)

As noted before, whatever the truth about the Ghost, it must speak like the late King if it is to be accepted as such by his son. So, these sentiments must jibe with the view of Claudius which the elder Hamlet manifested previously – allowing, that is, for a heightened animosity aroused by the crimes of which the Ghost accuses him. It is revealing, however, that nothing the Ghost says suggests there was ever any affection between the brothers; nor is there a tone of disappointment, of betrayed trust, of hurt feelings, no ‘After all I’ve done for him!’ Instead, nothing but contempt and derision for what are admitted to be his seductive qualities – perhaps all the more denigrated for being attributes the elder Hamlet lacked himself? Presumably, then, Claudius is not only handsome, but gracious, warm, witty, whatever makes a man charming, especially to women. This would include pleasing manners, his being a genial dinner and drinking and bedtime companion, generally cheerful and smiling. Thus the Prince’s bitter, ‘O villain, villain, smiling damned villain, / My tables! Meet it is I set it down / That one may smile and smile and be a villain’ (1.5.106–8). In this respect, we may suppose that Hamlet’s father was quite otherwise; that would explain his son’s rather odd question about the Ghost: ‘What looked he – frowningly?’ (1.2.229). Was that the elder Hamlet’s normal countenance: sober, serious, formal, grave? And was his loving of his wife perhaps a bit too ‘dignified’? Why is Hamlet an only child? Of course, if the former King treated his brother slightingly, it would hardly be surprising that other people did so, too (the same sort of sycophantic herd animals as now eagerly buy his portrait ‘in little’; 2.2.300–3). Or that Claudius might take a special pleasure in seducing his overbearing brother’s wife. Claudius is not a smiling villain altogether at peace with himself, however; he is no Iago, nor Richard of Gloucester, someone who positively revels in his villainy. We are provided multiple indications of the King’s troubled conscience. The first comes in his private response to Polonius’s sanctimonious half-apology for coaching his daughter how to appear upon her supposed chance meeting

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with Hamlet (‘We are oft to blame in this – / ’Tis too much proved that with devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself ’): How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot’s cheek beautied with the plastering art Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden! (3.1. 45–53)

But the most telling exposure of his inner conflict is his abortive attempt to pray for forgiveness, wherein he openly confesses that his ‘offense is rank: it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t – / A brothers murder’ (3.336–8). He wishes to pray for forgiveness, but knows it is futile since he is ‘still possessed / Of those effects for which [he] did the murder’, namely: the Crown, the Queen and his continuing ambition (which entails protecting his criminal gains by still more crimes, as events prove he is prepared to commit). He is realistic about how things are in our fallen world, but is equally sure that in this respect it differs radically from the divine realm: In the corrupted currents of this world Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law; but ’tis not so above: There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature. (3.3.57–62)

Clearly, then, Claudius is a believing Christian who accepts Church doctrine regarding repentance and divine forgiveness.1 Whence his frustration, the peculiar torment of living with a deeply divided soul, ‘like a man to double business bound’. Indeed, this feeling not only of guilt, but of being accursed by his crime might explain an inclination for resorting to strong drink on any pretext (1.2.123–8; 1.4.8–12; 2.2.84; 3.3.89) – though, to be sure, there are grounds for supposing that he is a sensual hedonist by inclination. Still, he seems generally complaisant, and dearly loving of his wife. What he professes to Laertes is quite believable in light of his behaviour up to that point, and the more so as he does not treat it as something to boast about: ‘My virtue or my plague, be it either which, / She is so conjunct to my life and soul / That as the star moves not but in his sphere / I could not but by her’ (4.7.14–17). His earlier response to Laertes allowing his return to France is all geniality – ‘What wouldst thou beg, Laertes, / That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?’ – cheerily

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acceding to the son’s request as a measure of gratitude to the father (1.2.45–9).2 He seems genuinely to mourn the sight of Ophelia in her madness; and concerned that no harm come to her, he orders someone (possibly Horatio) as she leaves, ‘Follow her close. Give her good watch, I pray you.’ He then turns to his helpmeet, lamenting, O, this is the poison of deep grief. It springs All from her father’s death, and now behold – O Gertrude, Gertrude, When sorrows come they come not single spies But in battalions. (4.5.74–9)

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he seems like a man who would prefer to be better than he is, but cannot master the desires that make him the lesser that he is. One must credit Claudius with some political sagacity to have managed to get himself elected King in lieu of young Hamlet. For although Denmark’s regime is formally that of an elective monarchy, apparently in practice the principle heir of the sitting king would be regarded, and would regard himself, as the Crown Prince, legitimate successor upon the death of his father unless manifestly unfit. Thus despite Hamlet having this time been passed over, Laertes nonetheless warns his sister against setting her heart on him: ‘His greatness weighed, his will is not his own. / He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself, for on his choice depends / The safety and health of this whole state’ (1.3.17–20) – a caution father Polonius claims to have seconded (‘And my young mistress thus I did speak: / “Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy star”’; 2.2.137–8). Claudius himself publicly affirms his stepson’s natural status (‘for let the world take note / You are the most immediate to our throne’; 1.2.108–9). Rosencrantz attests to this royal profession being common knowledge, responding to Hamlet’s ‘I lack advancement’ with ‘How can that be, when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark’ (3.2.332–4). Claudius in private tacitly concedes that Hamlet would have been a popular choice to succeed his father immediately: ‘He’s loved of the distracted multitude’ (4.3.4; cf. 4.7.17–25). Thus the King’s public affirmation of his heir may be intended, for both Prince and People, to take the sting out of Hamlet’s expected ascension being ‘deferred’.3 All this said, and even allowing for the wheeling and dealing of Polonius, the King’s ever-busy factotum, the brother’s being elected instead of the son would seem

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to imply that the electors thought Claudius at least minimally adequate for the office. Whatever princely qualities these others detected in Claudius, they would not seem to include any conspicuous martial virtue – in marked contrast to his predecessor. Still, he is no coward, at least to judge by his composure when Laertes bursts in on him at the head of a mob (4.5.111–27). He speaks of having served against the French (4.7.82), though he claims no particular distinction gained in doing so. But in explaining the feverish military preparations with which the play begins (1.1.70–8), he acknowledges that ‘young Fortinbras, / Holding a weak supposal of our worth / Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death / Our State to be disjoint and out of frame’, has had the effrontery to demand the return of those lands lost by his father decades earlier. Might young Fortinbras have grounds for supposing Claudius to be weak? And might this be why that ‘honest soldier’, Francisco, complains of being ‘sick at heart’ (1.1.7): not at the prospect of war per se, but at the thought that the Danes will no longer be led by their valiant Warrior-King, but by an unproven, possibly suspect Claudius? In the eyes of some scholars and stage directors, however, the fact that Claudius chooses to deal with the Norwegian threat diplomatically rather than militarily – and, as they see it, with complete success – demonstrates his political prudence, and therefore fully justifies his election. Whereas they regard Hamlet as immature, rash and unsteady – something of a loose cannon – hence, not to be entrusted with sovereign responsibilities.4 Of course, such a judgement would be based almost entirely on what we see of him after the death of his father and marriage of his mother, and especially ‘post-Ghost’, his ‘noble mind apparently o’erthrown’ – not when he was, perhaps with good reason, viewed as the ‘expectation and rose of the fair state’, and not only by Ophelia. Since King Claudius’s dealing with the Norwegian threat is the one political episode upon which any assessment of his royal fitness rests, it is worth examining more closely. As he tells it, the ‘impotent and bedrid’ King of Norway, Prince Fortinbras’ uncle, has been kept in the dark about what his nephew is up to, namely, raising levies of troops and supplies with which to retake by force the disputed lands if Denmark will not surrender them voluntarily. So the King is dispatching a pair of ambassadors to disabuse old Norway of his ignorance, giving them ‘no further personal power / To business with the King more than the scope / Of these delated articles allow’ (1.2.36–8). What more precisely is contained in these

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‘delated articles’5 we can only surmise in light of the returning ambassadors’ report, which comes some two months later: Upon our first he [Norway] sent out to suppress His nephew’s levies, which to him appeared To be a preparation ’gainst the Polack; But, better looked into, he truly found It was against your highness; whereat, grieved That so his sickness, age and impotence Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests On Fortinbras, which he in brief obeys, Receives rebuke from Norway and, in fine, Makes vow before his uncle never more To give th’assay of arms against your majesty. Whereupon old Norway, overcome with joy, Gives him threescore thousand crowns in annual fee And his commission to employ these soldiers So levied (as before) against the Polack, With an entreaty herein further shown That it might please you to give quiet pass Through your dominions for this enterprise On such regards of safety and allowance As therein are set down. (2.2.61–80)

Claudius professes himself well pleased with this outcome. And as we subsequently learn, he does give his permission for this Norwegian army to pass through his territory6 – a force, it turns out, that is not the ragtag mob of ‘lawless resolutes’ that an untried, vainglorious young Fortinbras has ‘sharked up’ from his country’s boondocks (as per the rumour Horatio recounts; 1.1.96–9). Quite the contrary: it is a large, well-equipped, disciplined, hence formidable army, led by a spirited, honour-sensitive prince (or so Hamlet bears witness upon viewing its passing towards Poland; 4.4.46–8). Now, is this grant of permission the act of a responsible statesman, confident of his own strength: to allow a potent army to enter his domain unhindered, for the ostensible purpose of attacking his neighbour? How could this possibly be to Denmark’s advantage? There is no evident benefit thereby gained, and obviously some serious liabilities.7 Even presuming that young Fortinbras is as good as his word, that he harbours no further designs on Denmark (and only a political fool would count on that), either outcome of his Polish adventure would be

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disadvantageous to Denmark. For if he wins, he is made stronger by the victory; whereas if he loses, Denmark has gratuitously offended Poland – a Poland proven stronger by their victory, perhaps already with old grievances against Denmark (1.1.61–2), and aware that its neighbour is no longer led by a proven warlord, but rather by a king who would rather conciliate than fight. Not surprisingly, then, there are few historical precedents for what Claudius has allowed, and invariably they were concessions of weakness, not strength. And since it would be universally seen in that light, such an allowance is incompatible with national honour.8 Nor do the potential problems with Claudius’s decision end there, for the Norwegian army has to return. And whether it does so as straggling bands of pillagers whose discipline has been broken by defeat, or as an organized body of blooded soldiers whose confidence has been swelled by victory – and who may decide to set up camp in the shadow of Elsinore, as happens – neither alternative bodes well for Denmark or its Sovereign. But there may be still more to this story. How was it that bold young Fortinbras complied so readily with his own king’s demand that he – what? immediately disband his army? not exactly – that he disavow any intention of using it for his original purpose of contesting with Denmark for the lands lost by his father, but instead deploy it ’gainst the Polack (as old Norway claims he thought was the target all along). And how was the Norwegian Prince’s (supposed) change of heart effected? Simply by a verbal ‘rebuke’ from his old, bedrid, impotent uncle King? Perhaps. But he was certainly well compensated for his compliance: ‘Whereupon old Norway, overcome with joy [!] / Gives him threescore thousand crowns in annual fee’ – annual fee – along with permission to keep his army and use it to attack Poland, provided good King Claudius allows this force to pass unmolested through his domain! That must have been hard to take. And from where should we suppose this money is actually to come? From the Norwegian treasury, an outpouring of the old King’s joy over the fact that his nephew actually obeys his command – a joyfulness that promises to continue to the tune of 60,000 crowns per year, for untold years to come? Is that plausible?9 Recall, the Danish Ambassadors carried written instructions (those ‘delated/ dilated articles’), the substance of which was not revealed to us. But might therein be the sweetener in the deal – that Claudius is not relying on young Fortinbras’ promise of good behaviour, but instead upon his own promise to pay an annual tribute on condition that such good behaviour continue? Rather like the tribute England is supposed to pay Denmark as the price of being left alone, albeit neglectful of late in paying up, for some reason (3.1.168–9).

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And in the event, does the Norwegian Prince lead his formidable army across Denmark for the purpose of conquering Poland, or at least a significant part thereof? Not quite. Rather, it is ‘to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name’ – according to one of his captains, clearly dubious whether that game is worth the candle (4.4.17–18). Perhaps, however, that was never truly the real game of young Fortinbras, who in an opportune moment admits retaining ‘some rights of memory in this kingdom’ – that is, Denmark, the whole of it – ‘[w]hich now to claim my vantage doth invite me’. Why settle for the occasional golden egg when one is in a position to take the goose that lays them? So much for Claudius’s lauded manner of dealing with foreign powers. Domestically, he shows signs traditionally regarded as indicative of a tyrant. His person is guarded not by his own subjects, but by mercenaries (his ‘Switzers’; 4.5.97). He routinely authorizes spying on those he suspects, and engages in such activity himself (e.g. 3.1.28–160) – and even speaks as if there were nothing ignoble in his doing so (4.1.13). He prefers being served by willing sycophants, although (if Hamlet’s judgement is to be credited) he will in the end use them as ‘sponges’; that is, as someone who ‘soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities’, but only ‘first mouthed to be last swallowed. When he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again’ (4.2.13–19). Of course, most significant of all, whenever he wishes someone dead, he does not openly take responsibility for having him killed, which requires a public justification, but arranges for it to be accomplished surreptitiously by ‘persons unknown’, or by a staged accident – some way as will provide him ‘deniability’ (4.3.60–6; 4.7.61–6).

Hamlet’s perception of Claudius – that he is a lazy sensualist who is bound to prove a weak, tyrannically inclined king, indeed, a very ‘vice of kings’ – could only magnify his indignation at finding himself passed over in favour of his uncle. Recall, the one unanticipated item in Hamlet’s catalogue of grievances against Claudius is that he frustrated the Prince’s own political ambition – that he had ‘Popped in between th’election and [Hamlet’s] hopes.’ The only prior indication of any such factor in Hamlet’s makeup came in his somewhat crazed tirade to Ophelia, claiming ‘ambition’ to be among the sins of which he pled guilty (‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, [etc.]’; 3.1.123–5). Of course, a pagan

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would not regard these as sins. And later, neither does Hamlet. Upon calmly observing the passage of Fortinbras’ army through Denmark, he characterizes that Prince’s imperial ambition as ‘divine’ (4.4.48). It would seem that Hamlet, too, has become more antique Roman than Danish Christian. In all probability, Hamlet had always taken his political inheritance for granted. And whatever indignation he felt upon returning home to find himself supplanted by an uncle that both he and his father despised may have been temporarily submerged beneath his oppressive grief. Presuming some such to be the case, what had since been festering within him at last breaks into the open. And having come to light, it may retroactively colour everything that Hamlet has heretofore said and done. As noted previously, it would explain his loathing of Polonius, who he presumes engineered Claudius’s election, his ‘popping in between’ Hamlet the Second and the Danish crown, and who perhaps also helped foster Court approval of the abominable Royal marriage. Recall, the Prince along with the rest of the Court heard Claudius assure Laertes, ‘The head is not more native to the heart, / The hand more instrumental to the mouth, / Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father’ (1.2.47–9; cf. 2.2.153–5). Thus, the casual indifference – indeed, malicious satisfaction – with which Hamlet kills the knavish ‘rat’. However, old Polonius was merely an instrument, albeit one who (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) did make love to his employment, hence risked being collateral damage in a clash between mighty opposites. In any case, we may be sure he also is not near Hamlet’s conscience. But it is Claudius who most deserves to die, indeed deserves it at least twice, if not thrice, over. Or so the Prince has by then concluded. For if we are to credit the sincerity of his fourcount indictment of his uncle – that Claudius not only pre-empted the son’s succeeding the father, and conspired upon Hamlet’s own life, but that he ‘hath killed my King and whored my mother’ – Hamlet must have been convinced that what the Ghost alleged regarding the death of his father, the adultery of his mother, and not least of all about its own status, is true. He must have done so, moreover, before being tempted to kill Claudius at prayer, and before his ruthless castigation of his mother – interrupted by the Ghost, whom Hamlet treats as unquestionably his father (3.4.103, 133). What are his grounds for doing so? Presumably, it would be his interpretation of the respective reactions of Claudius and Gertrude to The Murder of Gonzago – now better known by the title Hamlet provides the King when asked: ‘The Mousetrap’ (3.2.230–3).

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The latter title is ironically appropriate in that most of the dialogue we actually hear (some 70 lines) seems intended to discomfit the Queen more than the King, whose terms of endearment for her include ‘his mouse’ (3.4.181). But nothing in the Player Queen’s words or behaviour – to which Gertrude famously reacts with ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’ – suggests anything more than the ‘frailty’ of an inconstancy, certainly not adultery, much less complicity in murder. Hence, Hamlet’s privately concluding that she ‘whored’ herself must rest initially on the veracity of the Ghost. Admittedly, her feelings of guilt for something quite serious would appear to be subsequently confirmed from her own mouth: ‘O Hamlet, speak no more. / Thou turn’st my very eyes into my soul / And there I see such black and grieved spots / [etc.]’ (3.4.86–8). What else could she mean? Or later in ruefully musing, ‘To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss, / So full of artless jealousy is guilt / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt’ (4.5.17–20)? However, in briefing Horatio regarding his task during the Players’ performance, Hamlet indicated that he would judge the Ghost’s truthfulness solely by the King’s reaction then and there to the (possibly edited) version of the play (3.2.76–80). And on the face of it, that reaction is far more problematic than Hamlet seems to allow in afterwards exuberantly pronouncing, ‘O good Horatio, I’ll take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound’ (3.2.278–9). First of all, so far as the text makes explicit, Claudius fails to react to the dumbshow image of the manner in which, according to the Ghost, he murdered his brother (poison poured into the ear of the late King while asleep in his garden).10 Did Hamlet fail to notice this, perhaps because preoccupied with Ophelia? That would seem unlikely, inasmuch as judging Claudius’s reaction is the whole point of having the play performed (‘For I mine eyes will rivet to his face’; 3.2.81). Secondly, the reason for his uncle’s abrupt and angry response to the murder depicted in the dialogical version is unclear precisely because Hamlet – and only Hamlet – identifies the poisoner as ‘one Lucianus, nephew to the King’ (3.2.237). Hence, one cannot be sure how to interpret Claudius’s behaviour: as guilt induced by a depiction of his own murderous deed; or, as indignation at the scarcely veiled threat upon his own life by his nephew. But the more one thinks about it, the less can one believe that Hamlet’s ‘choric’ contribution – obviously said within the King’s hearing – was not intended to provoke a reaction. Nor that Shakespeare did not intend a subtle confirmation of this by having Hamlet begin his earlier response to Ophelia’s ‘You are as good as a chorus, my lord’, with ‘I could interpret’. For, as noted in the preceding chapter, that is the issue: how rightly to interpret the

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King’s own quasi dumb-show (since his few words upon storming out – ‘Give me some light, away’ – provide no explanation for his action, one way or the other). But why would Hamlet wish to render ambiguous the results of his own experiment? That the results do seem ambiguous is perhaps indicated by Horatio’s responses to Hamlet’s queries, which are actually non-committal: ‘Didst perceive?’ ‘Very well, my lord.’ ‘Upon the talk of poisoning.’ ‘I did very well note him.’11 How these exchanges are interpreted might depend, at least partly, upon whether or not one supposes that Horatio, having found a place apart from the Prince from which to observe the King (3.2.87), could hear whatever Hamlet said in the immediate presence of Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia. But even if Horatio did not hear Hamlet identify the Player Assassin as a nephew of the Player King, the principled sceptic in him may have reservations about Claudius’s guilt stemming from his impassivity during the dumb-show.12 As for Hamlet, are we to suppose that the equivocality of his friend’s responses failed to register? Or was this mere appearance of agreeing sufficient for Hamlet’s purpose?

To understand the scheme whereby the Prince concludes that Claudius is guilty of killing King Hamlet in the manner the Ghost claimed – thereby lending credence to its veracity in general – one must bear in mind certain facts, but also some nagging questions. We know that Claudius is guilty of murdering his brother, for we overhear him admitting it in his abortive attempt to pray for forgiveness: ‘O, my offense is rank . . . / A brother’s murder’ (3.3.36–8). But we do not know how he did it, though it must have been in some manner such that having been ‘stung by a serpent’ is a credible account of the late King’s death (for so ‘the whole ear of Denmark’ understands it; 1.5.36–8). Hamlet, however, has only the Ghost’s word for both the murder and its manner. And strongly inclined though he is to believe his despised uncle guilty, he is aware that this in itself renders him susceptible to a diabolical entrapment. As he muses when first contemplating a scheme that might resolve the question: The spirit that I have seen May be a de’il, and the de’il 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! (2.2.533–8)

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Hamlet’s scheme for settling the question apparently begins, however, as simply a prank intended to embarrass the King and Queen with the performance of a play that happens to be in the repertoire of the travelling Players, one which will remind all who see it of the royal couple’s o’erhasty, incestuous, all-together scandalous marriage. For as the Players leave with Polonius, who has been ordered to see them ‘well bestowed’, Hamlet draws their leader aside to inquire whether his company can play The Murder of Gonzago. This being confirmed, the Prince asks that it be performed the following night, and that ‘a speech of some dozen lines, or sixteen lines which [he] would set down’ be inserted into it13 – which implies that he will later meet privately with the Players to supply his amendments. At this point, Hamlet seems to have nothing more in mind than adding lines which will amplify the regal pair’s discomfort. But his initial intention to alter the play alerts us to the possibility that, after he has lit upon his scheme to test the conscience of the King, he actually makes changes other than, or in addition to, those which he first contemplated. For once left alone, Hamlet proceeds to berate himself over his failure to execute a suitable revenge on the ‘bloody, bawdy villain’ that secretly murdered his father (‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! [etc.]’). However, in the midst of venting his self-disgust, he pauses (‘Hum’), apparently recalling that he does not actually know for certain that what he is powerfully predisposed to believe is actually true. He so hates his interloping uncle that he is prepared to credit anything nefarious of him. Thus, upon reflection Hamlet realizes that this is precisely why he is vulnerable to Satanic subversion. And so he begins to formulate a plan. Hum, I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions. For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If ’a do blench I know my course. (2.2.523–33)

It is not immediately clear whether Hamlet seeks proof that would suffice merely for him – a telltale ‘blenching’ that would likely pass unnoticed by everyone else.

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Or whether he is after something more than that: a public exposure of Claudius – that the King himself by word or deed proclaim his guilt. Should he indeed be guilty, that is, as the father-like Ghost alleged. What complicates interpretation is Hamlet’s own political situation. Lacking public awareness that the present King was implicated in the death of his predecessor, Hamlet’s attempt to kill Claudius would be seen as motivated primarily by political ambition: that he has acted to undo the results of the electoral process that elevated his uncle instead of him. What is not clear is whether Hamlet cares that he not do anything which would compromise the legitimacy of his own succession – indeed, whether he cares about Denmark at all. Moreover, there is second complication: the Ghost’s injunction against harming the Queen. But howsomever thou pursues this act Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge To prick and sting her. (1.5.83–8)

Given his merciless verbal assault on Gertrude in her closet – which the Ghost mercifully interrupts – one could not say that Hamlet has been content to let hypothetical thorns in her bosom discomfort her. But as for the main proviso, which sets a parameter on how Hamlet is to seek revenge, it has the same force as the revenge injunction itself: in no way is he to harm his mother the Queen. And though the Ghost’s status remains unsettled at this point, Hamlet would feel obliged to heed it against the eventuality of its professed identity being validated.14 These complications aside, we must keep in mind three things when considering Hamlet’s scheme. First, his purpose for having the Players perform The Murder of Gonzago has changed. He is no longer intent on merely embarrassing the royal couple by his choice of entertainment, selected initially because of the opening dialogue between a king and his queen: the man authorizing the wife to seek a new husband upon his anticipated death, and she most emphatically pledging eternal fidelity to him even after he has died. To this Hamlet had originally planned, with the connivance of the leading Player, to add some twelve to sixteen lines, likely ones that would twist the knife, as it were, heightening especially Gertrude’s discomfiture. Whether or not he provides those lines, or others instead (he must have supplied some, for he is insistent that the actors speak his

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lines just as he spoke them, ‘trippingly’; 3.2.1–4), it has been established that the friendly Players are amenable to their script being altered. And yet, neither in respect to the colloquy between the Player King and Queen, nor in any other, does The Murder of Gonzago very closely match the Ghost’s allegations, at least from the little we can piece together. But since the Prince is free to adapt it however he likes (within reason), and yet does not make of it something that does correspond exactly to those allegations, we must presume that this play set in Vienna, about a duke who is murdered for his estate, nonetheless suits Hamlet’s amended purpose. Which is no more than what he says: ‘I’ll have these players / Play something like the murder of my father.’ This is the second point to remember. We do not know how in the original version ‘Duke Gonzago’ was murdered; but in the version we see performed, it is by poison poured in his ear while napping in his garden. If we presume this was Hamlet’s doing, then he must be responsible for the dumb-show as well. Third, the result is still only something like the Ghost’s account of King Hamlet’s murder. Both versions differ in important respects, but most notably the dialogical version in that the poisoner is not a brother, but a nephew. According to Hamlet’s ‘choral’ commentary, that is, for the assassin is not otherwise identified. In briefing Horatio of his role in Hamlet’s scheme – having first effusively praised the young man for his exemplary justness and evenness of temper – the Prince gives some further indication of how his plan is supposed to work: There is a play tonight before the King – One scene of it comes near the circumstance Which I have told thee of my father’s death. I prithee when thou seest that act afoot, Even with the very comment of thy soul Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech It is a damned ghost that we have seen And my imaginations are as foul As Vulcan’s stithy. (3.2.71–80)

Notice again the subtle qualification: one scene ‘comes near’ that of which Hamlet had sometime earlier apprised Horatio regarding how the present King is alleged to have murdered his brother. Presumably, this description would be essentially the same as the Ghost originally provided Hamlet, which he must have acknowledged as its source (and which his friend can credit, having seen the Ghost himself, but which anyone else might dismiss as merely a self-serving tall tale). The operative

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point is this: when Horatio recognizes that scene, he is to keep his eyes glued on Claudius, alert for some sort of guilty reaction upon the King’s hearing a certain speech. Thus the anticipated guilty reaction – if Claudius is guilty – is to be expected during the dialogical version, not the dumb-show. If there is any more to Hamlet’s scheme, Horatio knows no more about it than do we. Having been provided just this much information, one is left with the task of accounting for how the King’s reaction to ‘The Mousetrap’ left Hamlet practically certain that what the Ghost claimed is true. This task is rendered more problematic in several ways. First, the Prince’s certainty may not be well founded. Horatio does not seem fully to share it; and given Hamlet’s hatred of his uncle – ‘this slave’, this ‘Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain’ (2.2.515–16) – his assessment of the evidence is apt to be prejudiced (to say the least). Secondly, the set-up is puzzling. Why have the dumb-show at all, if it is Claudius’s reaction – or non-reaction – to a certain speech that is to serve as the litmus test of his guilt or innocence? Moreover, as the scheme plays out, it is the contrast between his non-reaction to the dumb-show and his extreme reaction to the dialogical version that is so perplexing. Third, why identify the poisoner as a nephew? If Hamlet intends to kill the King, who is constantly protected by armed guards (his ‘Switzers’), success is only made that much more difficult by revealing this intention. The King and Queen attend the evening’s entertainment unaware that Hamlet has had any part in its design beyond that of ordering a performance this night by the travelling Players. For that is the extent of Rosencrantz’s report earlier in the day, though venturing that the Prince seemed pleased by the news of the Players’ arrival. Polonius in confirming the arrangement, added, ‘And he beseeched me to entreat your majesties / To hear and see the matter.’ This, too, might seem to confirm an improvement in Hamlet’s attitude, even if the thought crosses Claudius’s mind that Hamlet may have some antic trick up his sleeve. There is no reason, however, for him to suppose that Hamlet rather than the troupe leader has chosen the play, beyond perhaps indicating what genre he would prefer (a comedy rather than a tragedy, say, or perhaps a history, or a pastoral, or pastoral–comical, historical–pastoral, whatever). Likely he would prefer something new, a play he had not seen before. The King at the time professed delight in learning that Hamlet’s spirits seem to have been raised by the prospect of theatrical entertainment, and bade Rosencrantz and Guildenstern encourage Hamlet to pursue more along this line (3.1.20–7). True, Claudius subsequently

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listens in on Hamlet’s overheated conversation with Ophelia, and concludes that he doesn’t sound lovesick; rather, that ‘There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’ which may prove to be ‘some danger’ (3.1.163–6). The King is clearly uneasy about the Prince. But he has no reason to be especially on guard in attending a Court performance by some travelling Players. When the King and Queen arrive for the viewing, Claudius civilly greets Hamlet, who – true to his recent form – responds in an antic manner. Gertrude invites Hamlet to sit by her, but he declines in favour of Ophelia, whom he treats to some partly risqué, partly sardonic banter. The performance then begins with a dumb-show depicting the murder of a sleeping King by a man who first ‘takes off the King’s crown, kisses it, pours poison in the sleeper’s ears and leaves him’. The Player Queen, who had acted a most loving wife before she had left her husband to his nap, returns; finding her husband dead, she is grief stricken. The covert poisoner arrives with a few others, who ‘seem to condole with her. The dead body is carried away. The poisoner woos the queen with gifts. She seems harsh awhile but in the end accepts love.’ There are a couple of slightly curious features of the dumb-show that are perhaps worth noting. The first is a discrepancy between it and the later dialogical version. In the former, the poisoner indicates a yearning for the kingship by removing and kissing the crown; whereas in the latter, the poisoner does no such thing; and Hamlet announces that ‘’A poisons him i’th’garden for his estate’ (3.2.254). The second is a discrepancy between the dumb-show – which portrays the queen as loving of the king both before and after his murder, and only reluctantly seduced by the poisoner – and the Ghost’s allegation that Claudius and Gertrude were in an adulterous relationship prior to King Hamlet’s murder. It would have been easy enough to mime such a prior relationship (e.g. she could immediately embrace the poisoner when he arrived), but it is left at suggesting merely her moral ‘frailty’ in being so readily consoled (cf. 1.2.146). The dumb-show is set apart from the dialogical version by a brief Prologue spoken amidst some more banter between Ophelia and Hamlet, she seeking to understand the meaning of the pantomime, he continuing to tease and taunt her with sexual innuendo and slanders on her sex. Then the performance proper begins with the lengthy dialogue between Player King and Player Queen reflecting on the consequences of their 30-year marriage and its soon coming to an end, as he apparently has a premonition of his death by some natural cause (‘I must leave thee, love, and shortly too’). He wishes her well in seeking a new husband, while she damns the very idea with lines Hamlet may well have

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supplied (‘In second husband let me be accurst: / None wed the second but who killed the first’; 3.2.173–4). Their colloquy continues in a similar vein for some 40 more lines, ending with her ‘Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife / If once I be a widow ever I be a wife’, to which the Player King rejoins ‘’Tis deeply sworn’, and then expresses a wish to be left alone to nap. At this point, Hamlet asks his mother, ‘how like you this play?’ She makes her famous rejoinder (‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’), and the King queries Hamlet: ‘Have you heard the argument? Is there no offense in it?’ The Prince’s reply to the second question implies an affirmative to the first: ‘No, no, they do but jest. Poison in jest. No offense in the world.’ Then the King asks, ‘What do you call the play?’ Hamlet replies, ‘The Mousetrap’, and adds that it is ‘the image of a murder done in Vienna’, that it’s a ‘knavish piece of work’, but so what: ‘Your majesty and we that have free souls – it touches us not’ (3.2.223–35). Obviously, the principals must all be seated within the immediate proximity of each other for such a conversation to be practical. Now a new Player stealthily enters into the presence of the sleeping Player. Hamlet identifies him as ‘one Lucianus, nephew to the king’, and responds to Ophelia’s ‘You are as good as a chorus, my lord’ with still more innuendo and slander. He then orders, ‘Begin, murderer: leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come, “the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”.’ ‘Lucianus’ responds with three rhyming couplets about the poison that he pours into the ears of the sleeping Player King. Hamlet continues with his choral commentary: ‘’A poisons him I’th’garden for his estate. His name’s Gonzago. The story is extant and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife.’ At this point Ophelia informs us that ‘The King rises.’ The Queen, alarmed, asks him, ‘How fares my lord?’15 Polonius orders the performance stopped. The King commands, ‘Give me some light, away’, which Polonius echoes: ‘Lights! Lights! Lights!’ Thereupon everyone exits the theatre except an exulting Hamlet and his more reserved friend. The Prince announces his verdict: ‘O good Horatio, I’ll take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound.’ Why so, we must wonder, strengthened in our scepticism by the irony of Horatio’s guarded replies to Hamlet’s ‘Didst perceive?’

To understand Claudius’s reaction, consider the whole episode from his perspective, bearing in mind that he has no reason to suspect any peculiar pertinence to the play he is about to enjoy. He does not even know its name,

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much less what it is about. Imagine his surprise when it is preceded by a dumbshow that (per hypothesis) mimes the essentials of his murder of his brother – coincidentally, so far as he knows. For though it portrays an unusual method of poisoning,16 it would not be unprecedented; Claudius learned of the technique somehow, he didn’t dream it up himself. And certainly poisoning per se is not unprecedented; nor, consequently, are dramas in which it figures. This must be a coincidence, he decides, for how could anyone know that this is how the late King died? The common understanding is that Hamlet senior was bitten by a venomous serpent, and there is no conceivable way anyone could be the wiser. So, uncanny as doubtless the dumb-show first strikes him, leaving him practically mesmerized as he reviews the facts, he quickly reaches the only reasonable conclusion: its similarity to the actual murder could only be a fluke. Meanwhile Hamlet gave no indication that he paid the mimed action any special attention, being preoccupied with his rather crass teasing and taunting of Ophelia. Still, the strangeness of the experience puts Claudius’s nerves a bit on edge; he is not apt to relax as the performance proceeds, especially inasmuch as Ophelia’s guess that the dumb-show ‘imports the argument of the play’ would likely be correct (3.2.133). Then the drama proper begins with that dialogue between the Player King and Queen, which must strike everyone in the audience as embarrassingly pertinent to Claudius and Gertrude. This, too, could be a coincidence, but not likely, much less necessarily. For unlike the covert murder, everyone knows how Gertrude used to hang on King Hamlet as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on, only to wed his brother before her former husband was fairly cold in his grave. Claudius can now reasonably suspect Hamlet with having a hand in staging this awkward entertainment, in fact that he chose the play – and prevailed upon the royal couple to attend its performance – precisely because he knew beforehand that it included this embarrassing colloquy. Claudius, however, is determined not to give Hamlet the satisfaction of seeing him discomfited, and the Players’ dialogue provides him ample time to marshal his composure. Thus when it concludes, he registers but mild annoyance as he asks the Prince point-blank whether he is acquainted with the plot, and what is the name of the play. Hamlet’s answers establish the practical certainty that Claudius’s suspicion is correct: his embittered stepson chose the play. And since Hamlet could have pretended innocence (or, more likely, responded with some antic impertinence), he obviously intends this very effect: to tweak his uncle by confirming that he is responsible for arranging the performance of a play with which he was already

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familiar, and did so because it includes this dialogue that both Claudius and Gertrude were sure to find embarrassing. Moreover, certain features of Hamlet’s seemingly casual replies feed the King’s unease and suspicion. Hamlet mentions poison – ‘poison in jest’ – what does that mean? And that the play is called ‘The Mouse-trap’? But again, given a few seconds to reflect, Claudius concludes there cannot be anything to worry about in these offhand replies; probably his disquiet simply reflects the anxiety rooted in his own guilt, that spills itself in fearing to be spilt.17 For the essential fact remains: there is simply no way anyone could know the truth (much less someone who was at school in Wittenberg at the time). And yet, . . . and yet, there may be more to it somehow. Claudius’s edginess increases, and he is proportionally more on his guard. If there are any further provocations in the script, they will not be so lightly dismissed. Most neutral observers would concede that he already has sufficient grounds for being unhappy with the play. He is the King, after all, and has a right to expect that his person be respected, not made the subject of parody. Now another Player enters the presence of the sleeping Player whom Hamlet has identified as a duke by the name of Gonzago. Claudius may relax a bit, as the story seems to be veering away from imaging the murder he committed. But then, referring to the entering Player, Hamlet announces – chorus-like, according to Ophelia – ‘This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.’ (The King? What king? What’s going on?) When this Lucianus first glares and grimaces to establish his sinister character, Hamlet again speaks out loud, ‘Begin, murderer: leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.’18 (Revenge? A ‘croaking raven’?) Whereupon Lucianus does begin, describing a poison of extraordinary potency, which he proceeds to pour into the ear of the sleeping Player. Hamlet, continuing in his choral role, describes the action: ‘’A poisons him I’th’garden for his estate.’ (His ‘estate’ – the same term Claudius sometimes uses to refer to his sovereign powers; cf. 3.3.5.) Hamlet continues, ‘His name’s Gonzago.’ Still Gonzago? Then the penny drops. The dumb-show was no coincidence, nor was anything else. The subtle difference between the dumb-show (wherein the poisoner removes, then kisses the crown), and the following dialogical version (which, as a nervous poisoner would notice, does not include this action), is obviously intentional: they are different stories, the second a response to the first. Thus the queer interjection by Hamlet in his customary suit of solemn black, about a croaking ‘raven’ bellowing for revenge! Somehow the Prince has found out – God only knows how – that

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Claudius murdered Hamlet senior. It cannot be just a lucky guess, since Hamlet junior knows how it was done. Does he have occult powers? Can he read minds? And he has just declared his intention to exact what, according to the Old Testament, is fitting justice: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, a poisoning for a poisoning. Claudius’s composure disintegrates. He rises thunderstruck, a show of anger masking his wonder and fear of this dangerous rival, who is surely not in madness but only mad in craft – indeed, preternaturally so. The King’s apparent indignation at this point makes him seem slightly mad, given that he sat through the mortifying opening dialogue without objection. Why, then, would he suddenly get so upset at the depicted assassination of some Viennese duke named Gonzago by a nephew of whoever was king of the place. There is no reason for attention to be focused on Hamlet, much less have him arrested, or even publicly rebuked. For what has he done? Nothing that would seem the least bit threatening to anyone not privy to Claudius’s secret crime. Hamlet is simply sitting with his ex-girlfriend at a play that he surely did not write himself – it’s the work of some Italian, whose weapon of choice (no surprise) is poison. Why would any King of Denmark find that especially offensive? Such stories are a staple of theatres. So far as anyone else would suppose, Hamlet at most may have chosen the play for the embarrassing dialogue with which it begins. That is the sort of prank he might pull, given his changed condition, his once sovereign reason now more like bells jangled out of tune. It is hardly a secret that he found the o’erhasty, incestuous marriage of his mother to his uncle highly repugnant. Indeed, it is commonly bruited that this, along with grief for his father, has partly unhinged his mind, leaving him subject to lapses of sanity. But perplexing as the Queen at the time found the King’s suddenly rising in evident distress (eliciting her, ‘How fares my lord?’), with the rest of the Court being similarly confused, the explanation after the fact is that something Hamlet did has greatly displeased his Royal Highness. And when the King is displeased, life is not so cordial for his Courtiers either, who are accordingly ready enough to blame whoever has rocked their boat.

The Prince is no longer in doubt: he is sure now that Claudius is a regicide – that his occulted guilt did indeed unkennel upon hearing one particular speech – and that the murder was accomplished much as the Ghost had described. For whether it is truly the spirit of Hamlet’s father (conscious in

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his dying seconds of what has happened to him, and subsequently a nocturnal visitor to his former realm whereby he learned of his wife’s prior adultery); or is an agent of Satan (for if the Devil has the power to know of people’s sinful transgressions, including Who murders Whom, it only makes sense that he would know How as well), what it has alleged regarding the death of King Hamlet is true. But for these same reasons, this does not settle the status of the Ghost itself, as Hamlet may recognize, even if prejudiced in favour of believing it to be his father’s spirit. Whereas, when later it comes to him in his mother’s closet, he is clearly convinced – perhaps by how it looks, or the location, or by what it says – that it is what it appears to be: the ghost of his father.19 In the immediate wake of his scheme’s success, however, Hamlet’s reference to the Ghost is silent about its status, while assuring Horatio that he is convinced of its veracity. However, as remarked before, his friend seems not so sure; his replies to Hamlet’s ‘Didst perceive?’ are carefully non-committal. And when the Prince suggests that what he has staged ought to get him ‘a fellowship in a cry of players’, Horatio will approve but ‘half a share’. Does he suspect that his friend has seen only what he wants to see? Hamlet, however, will not be denied: ‘A whole one, I’ (3.2.267–72). For as he surely realizes, Horatio has failed to grasp the significance of what he has just witnessed – mainly because Hamlet has not chosen to explain the underlying rationale of his scheme. One must presume, then, that for his purpose it is sufficient that Horatio believe that Hamlet, rightly or wrongly, is convinced of Claudius’s guilt. The fundamental premise of ‘The Mousetrap’ is that, should Claudius not be guilty of murdering Hamlet’s father in the manner the Ghost alleged, he will either sit through the entire performance, displaying nothing more than annoyance at the ‘impertinent’ dialogue of the Player King and Queen; or, he will be more than just annoyed by their exchange, and so at that point leave in a huff, perhaps ordering the play cancelled and the Players suitably chastised. In any case, he will have attributed no special significance to the dumb-show. Whereas if he is guilty of what the Ghost alleged, he nonetheless will be utterly convinced that no one could possibly know of his crime. It would be this complete confidence that his secret is safe that Hamlet’s scheme is designed to exploit. Thus, a guilty Claudius will be as much intrigued as disquieted by a dumb-show that happens to depict the essential features of how he murdered Hamlet’s father. For given a moment to reflect, he would have no difficulty reassuring himself that it’s really nothing to worry about, that the similarity is simply a coincidence. What else

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could it be? So, if he is guilty, the uncanny likeness of the dumb-show will hook him, his curiosity aroused about what is to follow. Will the subsequent action, as it must, confirm the purely fortuitous similarity of the mime? Yet, strangely, what follows – the tedious exchange between the Player King and Queen – is obliquely related to his crime. At least, so it could be interpreted by someone aware of a crime such as the Ghost alleged. But since that would seem impossible, a guilty Claudius will conclude that this, too, must be a coincidence, while nonetheless suspecting it to be Hamlet’s doing, though for a purpose having no connection with the murder. Rather, the bitter Prince most probably requested the performance of this particular play as a way of publicly discomfiting the royal couple about their marriage, just another of his antic pranks. True, the King might have left at this point, leaving onlookers to presume he did so because offended by the laboured colloquy between Player King and Queen. In fact, this would have been likely were he innocent; on the other hand, an innocent Claudius might choose to stay rather than give Hamlet the satisfaction of seeing him upset. But if he is guilty, the hook has now been set deeper; he would not leave, being too nervously curious about what might be next. Whatever the case, innocent or guilty, the King stayed, asking a pair of questions intended to reveal whether the Prince was already familiar with the play, and so may have requested it – this very play whose opening dialogue is so uncomfortably pertinent to his own marriage, but which just happened to be preceded by that uncanny dumb-show. Provided the opportunity, the Prince openly confirmed his prior knowledge of the play, and assured the King that there is no offense in it, that though it is about a poisoning, this is merely ‘in jest’. As for what he calls the play, Hamlet answers ‘The Mousetrap’, then expands on its ‘argument’: it is ‘the image of a murder done in Vienna’, casually adding, ‘’tis a knavish piece of work’, as the King will soon see for himself. But Hamlet immediately shrugs this off with the sort of quizzical remark he has so often indulged in of late (cf. 3.2.89–103): ‘Your majesty and we that have free souls – it touches us not.’ Of course not – why should it? If Claudius is innocent, that is. Whereas, if his soul is not free of guilt, then these words – poisoning, trap, knavish, image of a murder – are calculated to set off alarm bells of both fear and bewilderment. For the essential fact remains, there simply is no way that the Prince could know that Claudius covertly killed his brother in order to steal his crown and his wife, much less how he did it. Or is there? Presuming Claudius is guilty, the accumulation of unlikely coincidences would have him sitting on the edge of his seat, thoroughly spooked, incredulous

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and yet fearing there may be more. If he is innocent, on the other hand, none of this would have any special meaning for him. So the trap is set. It remained only to spring it: ‘This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king’ – ‘the croaking black-clad raven doth bellow for revenge’ – ‘’A poisons him I’th’garden’ – ‘You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of the wife.’ Claudius, utterly unmanned, does not stay for that. Thus he rose immediately, and thereby gave himself away. That the assassin be identified as the King’s nephew is necessarily the trigger of the trap, serving to indicate both what Hamlet knows, and what he intends – but relevant to only a guilty Claudius. Moreover, the mystery remaining of how Hamlet could by any natural means know what he clearly does know, raises the level of the potential threat he poses. And while it puts the King on notice that Hamlet intends to kill him in revenge for his having murdered his predecessor, he cannot confide this fact to anyone, much less use it as grounds for publicly arraigning the Crown Prince. He can do only what he does, insist that Hamlet in his deranged condition poses a serious danger to one and all – which as luck would have it, his seemingly reckless killing of Polonius, mistaking him for a rat, amply proves. He thereby provides the King further justification for sending the still popular Prince away immediately, allegedly for his own ‘especial safety’ (while secretly arranging that he never returns; 4.3.39–41, 56–66). Needless to add, Hamlet would anticipate some such response by a guilty Claudius to be a virtual certainty. And he will have planned accordingly.

This vice of kings must die. So Hamlet concludes, his ‘Mousetrap’ having proven to his own satisfaction that what the Ghost alleged is true: Claudius killed the Prince’s father and whored his mother. The villain then took full advantage of the royal vacancy he created to fiddle the electoral process somehow, such that he rather than the Crown Prince (who was conveniently out of the country) succeeded to the throne. The frustration of Hamlet’s own political ambitions – that this murdering mediocrity ‘Popped in between th’election and [his] hopes’ (5.2.64) – would seem the least significant of his reasons for plotting Claudius’s death. But it is surprising that he mentions it at all, given the total absence of anything remotely ‘political’ in any of his several lengthy soliloquies or in his discussions with others, including those with his supposedly close friend Horatio.20 And this despite the fact that, as the story begins, his country is feverishly occupied with preparations for war: sentries on ‘strict and most observant watch’, armouries

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casting cannons day and night, additional arms being imported, impressed shipwrights working double shifts (1.1.70–7). Horatio seems more attuned to Denmark’s political situation than does its Crown Prince. Cognizant of the war rumours, Horatio urges the Ghost, ‘If thou art privy to thy country’s fate / Which happily foreknowing may avoid, / O, speak’; and he interprets its appearing in full armour as boding ‘some strange eruption to our state’ (1.11.68, 132–4). The contrast with Hamlet is striking. Is he simply ‘above’ politics and its parochial concerns? Does this explain the readiness with which he cast his dying vote for a foreigner to succeed to the Danish throne? Yet, that he bothers to express a political preference in those circumstances – for the first and last time – is in itself curious. It is perhaps relevant to an understanding of the Prince’s apparent aloofness regarding political matters that the Ghost seems equally so as well. And whether it is truly, as Hamlet comes to believe, the spirit of his departed father, or is merely a diabolical impersonation thereof, we may assume that its attitude towards the political welfare of Denmark is ‘in character’. But in its case, as in Hamlet’s, one cannot be sure of the reason for this lack of explicit attention to Danish politics. Does its failure to so much as mention anything regarding the nation’s common good – the more remarkable in light of the looming military emergency – reflect an absolute confidence in the strength and stability of the regime as the late King left it, substantial proof of the wisdom of his long rule? That he established a political machine which virtually runs itself, indifferent to the ‘engineer’ ostensibly in charge?21 Thus, even though the sovereign power rests now in the hands of ‘a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of [his]’ (1.5.51–2), there is no need to worry for the country’s future, consequently no mention of any political implications of his being murdered. Or does the character of the Ghost’s complaints and injunctions manifest a markedly self-centred perspective, and – as might be expected – a correlative indifference to the welfare of Denmark once the late King no longer has any use for it? Was his attitude towards the nation he ruled essentially the same as that of a later French monarch: l’etat, c’est moi? Esteemed throughout his realm and beyond as ‘our valiant Hamlet’, it is likely he had long taken for granted both his own political supremacy and the identity of the State’s interest with his own. His one reference to the good of the country betrays the personal preoccupation evident throughout his discourse with Hamlet: ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest’ (1.5.82–3).

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Whichever is the case, it would not be unlikely that the Crown Prince was raised to regard his own relation to the polity in a manner akin to that of his revered father and warrior-king, into whose place he had always presumed he would step when the time came. But further, that this time would not be for many years, long after he had finished his education and acquired more experience in matters both civil and military. Even in his unfinished condition, however, lovestruck Ophelia refers to him as having been the very paragon of a young prince: courtier, soldier, scholar; and as such, ‘Th’expectation and rose of the fair state’ – before, that is, his ‘noble mind [was] o’erthrown’ (3.1.149–51). While allowing for the starry-eyed manner in which she viewed him, we must suppose that her description had some basis in reality. Hamlet does once or twice indicate a special regard for Denmark. For example, he voices dismay that his country’s reputation for heavy drinking ‘Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations’, detracting from its achievements however eminent (1.4.17–22). Still, the paucity of explicit references to his having special political responsibilities, or to Denmark’s being endangered or otherwise disadvantaged by his uncle’s ineptitude, or cowardice, or corruption, is striking. True, Hamlet makes it clear that he regards Claudius as altogether unworthy of the crown – ‘a vice of kings, / A cutpurse of the empire [etc.]’ – but that Denmark will suffer as a consequence is left implicit, at best. To judge by his fulminations against his uncle, the issue is strictly personal: a duty to revenge his father. Unless, that is, one reads more into his rueful ‘The time is out of joint; O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right’ – a markedly reluctant acceptance of any larger obligation, to say the least. It is only upon his surprise arrival at Ophelia’s funeral that he could be understood as asserting himself politically, declaring, ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (5.1.246–7; cf. 1.1.13; 1.2.44). Whether the Prince’s motive at this latter point in the story remains private, or has also become political as a consequence of the King’s craven attempt upon his life, Hamlet is set on killing him. Moreover, having escaped Claudius’s trap, he returns to Denmark with evidence, should he care to use it, that would provide sufficient public justification for a deed that would now be seen, not as regicide, but tyrannicide – namely, the original commission calling upon the English authorities to execute the Prince immediately upon his arrival. Given the readiness with which he dispatched the rat Polonius, and the cold manner in which he consigned his former schoolmates to oblivion, there can be no doubt as to whether Hamlet is sufficiently bloody-minded to carry out

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the killing himself.22 But that raises the question: what is his plan? How does he intend to gain access to his quarry, armed for the deed, given that, as King, Claudius is guarded day and night by Swiss mercenaries? This question tends to be overlooked as a consequence of the fact that Claudius does meet his end at Hamlet’s hand. However, this would seem essentially a serendipitous outcome. So, what then did the Prince have in mind? Or did he have no plan as such, other than to seize the first opportunity to exploit Claudius’s false sense of security, unaware that Hamlet knows of the earlier attempt on his life? If so, the Prince doesn’t have long to wait, for soon comes a courtier – the land-owning ‘water-fly’, Osric, a wonder of obsequious obtuseness – bearing the news that the King has arranged a friendly fencing contest between Hamlet, if he is willing, and Laertes, recently returned from France. And though Ophelia’s brother is highly reputed for excellence in the sport, Osric reports that Claudius has laid a heavy wager on Hamlet’s being able to hold his own in such a match. Amidst all the chaffing the Prince directs upon the uncomprehending Osric – mainly for Horatio’s amusement, it would seem – is an exchange that may have special significance. Hamlet asks about Laertes, ‘What’s his weapon?’ Osric answers, ‘Rapier and dagger’, which draws from the Prince, ‘That’s two of his weapons. But well’ (5.2.127–9). Within Hamlet’s cavil may lie a clue as to why he so readily accedes to a contest of which he could not possibly be other than deeply suspicious. After all, he has very lately had a violent confrontation with Laertes, who roundly cursed him for causing the deaths of both Laertes’s father and his sister (5.1.235–8). And the Prince is sure that Claudius, having failed in his earlier attempt on his nephew’s life, will try again, but once more in some way that the blame will fall elsewhere. Laertes is a likely tool for the purpose. Since what is proposed is merely an athletic contest, naturally the foils will be baited. But what about the daggers (which in each contestant’s offhand are used solely to fend the rapier thrusts of one’s opponent)? Does Hamlet intend to employ this ‘second’ weapon – a ‘bare bodkin’ – to assassinate Claudius at some opportune point in the proceedings? And is he indifferent to what might befall him as a consequence of such an attempt? This second question arises from the curious conversation that follows Hamlet’s confirming he is ready ‘to play with Laertes’. One may read more into his reply than does the lord who bears his message: ‘I am constant to my purposes. They follow the King’s pleasure. If his fitness speaks, mine is ready. Now or whensoever, provided I be so able as now’ (5.2.179–81).

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Left momentarily to themselves, Horatio ventures, ‘You will lose, my lord.’ Hamlet disagrees: ‘I do not think so. Since he went into France I have been in continual practice.’ This may be at least partly true, bearing in mind that he has sojourned the past several weeks with those obliging ‘pirates’. What better way to while away the time than in honing skills that could prove useful in settling scores with Claudius? For that matter, before his ‘kidnapping’ he may have spent his mornings with soldier friends (cf. 1.1.173–4). Admittedly, Hamlet’s claim here is at odds with what he told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when first greeting them, that he had ‘foregone all custom of exercises’ (2.2.262–3; yet cf. 2.2.157–8; 5.2.155). But since that claim is prefaced by one we are sure is false (‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth’), the other may be likewise; in fact, there may not be a word of simple truth in anything he tells these mercenary friends. Admittedly, it seems to square with the worry the Queen expresses part way into the contest: ‘He’s fat and scant of breath’ (5.2.269). She would seem a poor judge of Hamlet’s fitness, however, since he is to that point besting the supposedly superior Laertes. Be all this as it may, the curious point is what follows the disagreement with his friend about the outcome of the proposed contest (with Hamlet predicting instead a qualified victory: ‘I shall win at the odds’). For he confesses, ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart – but it is no matter.’ Not surprisingly, this alarms Horatio. Hamlet, however, now dismisses his own disquiet as merely such ‘foolery . . . as would perhaps trouble a woman’. But his friend is not so easily reassured, urging, ‘If your mind dislike anything, obey it’, offering to make Hamlet’s excuses. Whether he shares Hamlet’s unvoiced suspicions of the contest is unclear, though that would be most likely in light of what he knows of this villainous King. But his prudential advice simply draws from the Prince his famous expression of fatalism – which may actually be elicited by a settled intention: to kill Claudius at the first opportunity. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ’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 of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be. (5.2.197–202)

Hamlet is ready in all respects, including ready to leave this world for the undiscovered country. That is, one must suspect that he has become practically indifferent as to whether he lives or dies, so long as he succeeds in killing Claudius, and – not incidentally – liberates Denmark from the reign of a budding tyrant,

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even should doing so result in the rule of a foreign prince. He is, after all, ‘the melancholy Dane’, world-weary and suicidal when we first meet him. And from then to now, things have only gone from bad to worse. Most notably, perhaps, Ophelia is dead, whom if Hamlet’s words at her funeral are to be given any credit (allowing for their pardonable hyperbole), he loved more than ever could several myriads of brothers. It is one such brother that he has agreed to meet in a supposedly friendly fencing contest. Not in a foot race, nor a wrestling match, nor a game of tennis, but a fencing contest, with the man who holds the Prince responsible for a sister’s death as well as that of their father, whom he accordingly cursed (unbeknownst to him at the time, in Hamlet’s hearing): ‘O, treble woe / Fall ten times double on that cursed head [etc.]’ (5.1.235–8). A fencing contest arranged, no less, by the man who murdered Hamlet’s father, and that has already made an attempt on his own life as well. Who in his right mind would agree to participate in such a contest despite suspecting foul play? Only someone, I submit, who harboured his own scheme for exploiting the situation: ‘O, ’tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet.’ The readiness is all. However, in deference to his mother’s conveyed wish that he ‘use some gentle entertainment to Laertes before [they] fall to play’, Hamlet offers Laertes an apology of sorts. It is a masterpiece of subtle irony, its tone signalled from the outset: ‘I have done you wrong, / But pardon’t as you are a gentleman’ (5.2.204). Ah, yes – as he is a gentleman. We know he is anything but; perhaps Hamlet does too. That beneath a genteel veneer and all his pious noise about honour, he is ever three parts scoundrel – the sort of knave who would purchase deadly poison from a mountebank, for which there could be no use other than something like that to which he puts it. For as Hamlet is the son of his father, so is Laertes of Polonius. Not for nothing were we allowed to listen in on what the manipulative old hypocrite expects his agent Reynaldo to discover about his son. Must not we suppose that, over the years, Hamlet has had ample opportunity to form a fairly accurate view of Laertes’s character?23 They are not exactly two peas of a pod; there are reasons why the one chose to be schooled at Wittenberg, whereas the other goes to Paris. The balance of Hamlet’s apology rests on a claim of ‘diminished responsibility’ – that he is ‘punished with a sore distraction’. His audience will assume he means his ‘antic disposition’. What he actually has in mind may be very different. Laertes pretends to be mollified by Hamlet’s sophistical shifting of responsibility onto madness for anything he has done to which Laertes might

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take exception (!); hence they are free to engage in the fencing contest as if they were friends. And so they do, with results no one quite intended, as not only is Hamlet pricked with the poisoned foil, so too is Laertes – ‘justly killed with mine own treachery’, as he concedes.24 Then with his dying breath he warns the Prince that he too is mortally wounded, while implicating the King in the poisoning of the Queen. Whereupon, Hamlet strikes Claudius with the envenomed weapon. And though various Lords cry ‘Treason’, and the King pleads, ‘O, yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt’, apparently no one responds – nor is this surprising, as presumably most would have heard the dying Laertes’s accusation. Hamlet then forces the same poisoned chalice as doomed the Queen onto he who intended it for Hamlet. The Prince’s final taunt to this once-mighty opposite betrays his own peculiar grievance, as it was that of the father-like Ghost: ‘Here, thou incestuous, damned Dane! Drink this potion.’ Notice, however, the taunt makes no mention of adultery; neither was adultery mimed in the dumb-show. Apparently Hamlet had no intention that his mother’s sin be publicly exposed. In this, too, the Ghost is obeyed. Thus, the Prince’s duty is done. His father is avenged, but at a cost that one might presume King Hamlet would find unacceptable: the extinction of his line, and consequent loss of his realm to the son of his former enemy – who, as it happens, is young Hamlet’s first choice for successor. The established order is about to be overturned, and not only in Denmark.

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5

Hamlet’s English Madness

Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings. Joseph Conrad, Victory

The Melancholy Dane – for so Prince Hamlet has become known, surely the most famous exemplar of that malady in all of literature. One can hardly quarrel with the characterization, as it squares both with the mood expressed in his first four soliloquies, and with how others in the play assess his gloomy disposition. Though Claudius’s perplexity may be partly feigned, he nonetheless expresses the general view of his disgruntled stepson when he worries aloud, ‘There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’ (3.1.164). Hamlet himself confirms this description of his mental state as he sets about designing his ‘Mousetrap’, ostensibly out of a concern that he not be duped by Satan, and aware that he is peculiarly vulnerable by reason of his dejection: ‘Yea, and perhaps / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / As he is very potent with such spirits, / Abuses me to damn me!’ (2.2.535–8).1 Given the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which Hamlet has been subjected by the time we first set eyes on him, he has ample reasons for feeling despondent: the sudden death of his idolized father, a great warriorking, whose ceremonial mourning has been obscenely scanted; the de facto usurpation of his own princely inheritance by a despised uncle; the scandalous wedding of his mother, who had previously appeared the doting wife and grieving widow of her late husband. But then to meet with a supernatural agent claiming that his royal father had been murdered, that the killer is the

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very uncle who now occupies the Danish throne as well as the bed of Hamlet’s mother, who for her part had previously been a willing adultress to his father! All this capped off by Hamlet’s being rejected, seemingly capriciously, by his own beloved. Suffice it to say, the Prince has reasons aplenty for the most profound dejection, indeed, several times over. It is against this background that he contemplates suicide in the most famous soliloquy Shakespeare, or anyone, ever penned, pondering whether to die might be a consummation devoutly to be wished. What is especially noteworthy, however, is the fact that Hamlet’s plaint is not personalized. His is not a protest that he deserved better, much less is it a wallowing in self-pity – reactions common enough when things do not go well for this or that person. One might imagine how Laertes, for example, would carry on were he subjected likewise. Whereas Hamlet’s personal situation has stimulated in him a meditation on the human condition per se.2 This is a decidedly uncommon reaction. It bespeaks a certain disposition, evident throughout the play, of being naturally inclined to reflecting on ‘generalities’.3 In deliberating whether ‘to be, or not to be’, he focuses upon several truths of political life in general, not all of which are even pertinent to him: the caprices of fortune, the prevalence of injustice, the frequent arrogance of those in power, the fickleness of those they rule, advancement undeserved, merit unrewarded, love unrequited or unlasting, all the endless toil and suffering in the world. Dwelling disproportionately on such matters, unleavened by comparable attention to life’s joys and satisfactions, may well result in what most people would regard as a jaundiced view. Nonetheless, it may not be wrong. Why should we presume a priori that, on balance, the good outweighs the bad? What assurance is there that a genuinely objective appraisal of the human condition – rigorous, thorough, uncoloured by romance, by hopes and wishes and imaginings – must be to our liking? Why do people dream of heaven? Hamlet, though a rare breed, is neither the first nor the last to endorse the wisdom of Silenus: ‘Best never to have been born; next best, to die soon.’4 A general pessimism about life is a frequently noted characteristic of intensely reflective natures. Indeed, since the time of Heraclitus (‘the weeping philosopher’), melancholia has been especially associated with philosophy.5 Given Hamlet’s ruminative disposition, one might suspect him prone to chronic dissatisfaction with the world even apart from his personal disappointments – that sooner or later he would find this goodly frame the earth to be a sterile promontory regardless, and man himself, though paragon of animals, mere

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quintessence of dust. Were Hamlet to live to ripe old age, such pessimism might not be his final assessment (as it clearly was not Shakespeare’s). Rather, he might in retrospect view it as merely a stage in his transit towards intellectual liberation. However, there’s the rub: living through it. And one must say, our philosopher-poet has surely not made it easy for his Prince, having compounded the young man’s personal difficulties by placing him in an intellectual setting reflective of literally cosmic uncertainty – something like the environment within which Shakespeare himself lived, crafting his masterpiece. And despite all of the historicist analyses of his plays, I believe this is an inadequately understood dimension of Hamlet. To appreciate its significance requires some fairly extensive historical background, as lacking this context one cannot fully resolve several taxing puzzles in the play, including young Hamlet’s melancholy and the perplexing status of the Ghost, catalyst of the entire tragedy.6 Let me begin by citing what I have come to regard as the master key to this facet of the play. As is not untypical of Shakespeare’s devious method, he has placed it in the mouth of a minor character, in this case a sassy Gravedigger who, in one of those scenes of so-called comic relief, is engaging in repartee with the Prince (whom he obviously does not know on sight). Hamlet having asked him, ‘How long hast thou been grave-maker?’ he responds that he began the day ‘that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras’. Hamlet. Grave.

Hamlet. Grave. Hamlet. Grave.

How long is that since? Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that! It was the very day that young Hamlet was born – he that is mad and sent into England. Ay, marry. Why was he sent into England? Why, because ’a was mad. ’A shall recover his wits there. Or if ’a do not, ’tis no great matter there. Why? ’Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he. (5.1.134–46)

True – not necessarily of Englishmen in the eleventh century, to be sure, but of Shakespeare’s day, circa 1600. For the perplexing issues that unsettled his own time are at work in the intellectual environment that he has imposed upon eleventh-century Denmark.7 In this regard, the play exemplifies what Hamlet tells the visiting players is ‘the purpose of playing’: ‘to hold as ’twere the mirror

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up to Nature; to show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.20–4) – a dictum that, applied reflexively to the play itself, means showing of Shakespeare’s age what the ‘form’ of the time impressed upon the natures of people and things.8 As Hamlet warns Polonius in bidding him to see the players ‘well bestowed’: they represent ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time’. However, this need not imply that what the play portrays is merely of historical interest or value, pertinent to only a brief period in a particular place: Elizabethan–Jacobean England. For what was happening then and there – amidst arguably the greatest concentration of intellectual and artistic talent, of spiritual energy and courage, since that which graced Medicean Florence, if not Periclean Athens – was destined to be world-altering, as I suspect Shakespeare suspected it might. Living in the midst of it, however, was of equal measure exhilarating and discomfiting. And if one may characterize as ‘mad’ an age in which seriously thoughtful people are no longer sure that they correctly understand the basic structure of the world they inhabit – and consequently do not know what to think about some of life’s most vital questions, lacking a stable, coherent intellectual architecture within which to think – Late Elizabethan England certainly qualifies. And surely Hamlet qualifies as a seriously thoughtful person, not least about thoughtfulness itself. Some might say he is too thoughtful. And Hamlet might agree: ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’ (3.1.82–4).9 We are provided a subtle reminder of the intellectual turbulence characteristic of the age in another partly comic scene. Hamlet’s having adopted his on-again, off-again antic disposition, the resulting strangeness of his behaviour has the Queen worried, thus the King as well. So, when a frightened Ophelia reports to her father the Prince’s strange visit to her closet, Polonius hastens to Court, claiming to have found ‘The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy’. Apparently to heighten his royal patrons’ sense of expectancy, he recommends that the King first receive the report from his ambassadors to Norway (the content of which Polonius already knows will be welcome), such that his own news may serve as ‘the fruit [i.e. desert] to that great feast’ (2.2.51–2). This done, he proceeds to prate: My liege and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time,

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Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brev’ty is the soul of wit,10 And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes. I will be brief: Your noble son is mad. (2.2.86–92)

Pressed to get to the point, Polonius contends that the cause of Hamlet’s madness is frustrated love for daughter Ophelia, and he presents as evidence a love letter that he has confiscated. We do not know how long ago Hamlet sent this missive, though we know she has been repelling his letters and other advances for the past two months. The letter begins ‘To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia’ – ‘celestial’ Ophelia, as if she belonged to, or in, the visible heavens. And it includes a brief poem that presumes certain beliefs about those heavens: Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love. (2.2.114–17)

In order to appreciate the full significance of these twenty-three words, it is important to bear in mind that when Shakespeare wrote them, the word ‘doubt’ had what we today would regard as two contrary meanings. For we use the word exclusively to mean ‘suspect something is not so’; whereas in his day, it sometimes meant that, but other times it meant ‘suspect something is so’. Thus Hamlet, upon first learning of the Ghost: ‘My father’s spirit – in arms! All is not well; / I doubt some foul play’ (1.2.253–4). And thus Claudius, having spied on Hamlet’s arranged encounter with Ophelia, muses, ‘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’ (3.1.163–6). Because he suspects it will be some danger, he resolves then and there to send Hamlet to England under conditions that will ensure he not return. Actually, the two contrasting meanings of ‘doubt’ are exemplified in the final two lines of the poem: ‘Doubt truth to be a liar’ – that is, ‘even if you suspect something as paradoxical as that Truth itself lies’ (even if you suspect this is so); nonetheless, ‘never doubt I love’ – that is, ‘never suspect that I do not love you’ (suspect anything but that). Now, with these two contrasting meanings in mind, consider the first two lines of the poem, particularly the second: ‘Doubt that the sun doth move’.11 Notice how the meaning of the line changes, according to which meaning of ‘doubt’ one employs. First, read in light of the now obsolete meaning of ‘doubt’

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as supposing something is so – that is, ‘suspect that the sun does move’ – the line affirms the long-held, seemingly self-evident view of the world: that the Sun daily circles the Earth from East to West. However, read as per our now exclusive meaning of ‘doubt’, as suspecting something is not so – ‘suspect that the sun does not move’ – the line contravenes the traditional, commonsense view (and within the amorous purpose of the poem, that is of course how the line is meant to be understood; Ophelia is invited to doubt something even so obvious and commonsensical as that the sun moves – doubt that before doubting Hamlet’s love). But in the latter case, it must be the earth that moves, rotating on its axis at a speed that would result in surface velocity of a thousand miles per hour (contrary to all sensory evidence), and generating a centrifugal force that would fling far into space all objects not securely fastened to the earth. Indeed, would not the earth itself disintegrate from the enormous stress of such a force? The point is, were this line read in isolation, one’s interpretation of its meaning would depend entirely upon – what? – whether one’s view of heavenly architecture is Ptolemaic (the old ‘natural’ commonsense view), or Copernican (the newfangled, counter-intuitive view).12 Now, once again, how does Shakespeare have Polonius begin? ‘To expostulate . . . Why day is day, night night, and time is time, / Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.’ No, Polonius, you simply could not be more wrong. For this is the very question that was to become the Cosmological controversy of Shakespeare’s day, with massive theological implications – hence, likewise political, philosophical and psychological implications – and emblematic of the intellectual ferment and confusion (not to say chaos) of the whole age, a period which we, aware of how things shook out, refer to as the English Renaissance.13 Central to this cultural transformation was what we now recognize to have been truly a ‘revolution’ in Science. And while the broad outlines of this story might seem to be fairly well known, it has some curlicues and filigrees that are not at all well known. More worrisome with regard to interpreting Hamlet, however, are the omissions, anachronisms, and even outright errors that have become incorporated in the common understanding of this momentous development. Thus, it is tale worth telling aright.

The brave o’erhanging firmament in dispute. By the time Shakespeare sets out to compose Hamlet, over a half century had passed since that ‘Polack’,

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Mikotaij Kopernik, had been prevailed upon to publish his speculative Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which he dedicated to Pope Paul III in a politic effort to gain acceptance for a theory of the heavenly architecture quite at odds with Scripture. As early as 1514, Copernicus had acquired sufficient reputation as an astronomer to be invited to advise the Fifth Lateran Council regarding the reformation of the calendar (the Julian calendar having fallen ten days behind the celestial cycle – a problem that would not be rectified for another 70 years). However, Copernicus declined to participate on the ground that the movements of the sun and the moon were not yet known with sufficient accuracy. Evidently his apology was offered in a spirit of irony, for we now know that by then he was already at work on a heliocentric theory of the heavens (based on a stationary sun), having circulated among friends a brief outline of it in a handwritten pamphlet subsequently known as Commentariolus.14 Apropos the well-known discrepancy in the Julian calendar and the controversies involved in its correction, ‘Shakespeare came of age when time itself was out of joint.’15 As a consequence of distributing his ‘Little Commentary’, word of Copernicus’s new theory spread. Among those who learned of it was a young mathematician from – of all places – the University of Wittenberg, Georg Joachim Rheticus, who was sufficiently intrigued to undertake the arduous journey to Frauenberg in the far northeast corner of Poland to meet the author. He arrived in 1539, intending but a brief visit; in the event, he stayed two years, becoming conversant with the theory and the evidence for it, and convinced of its potential importance. He prepared a summary account in the form of a letter to his former teacher, Johannes Schöner; now known simply as Narratio Primo (‘First Report’), its full title identifies it as a digest of Copernicus’s work. Published at Danzig in 1540, with a second edition printed in Basel a year later, the interest generated by this first public presentation of his heliocentric hypothesis helped persuade Copernicus to allow for the publication of the full version – though he was still working on this manuscript that over the decades had grown from a pamphlet to a thick treatise. Young Rheticus nonetheless managed to overcome the hesitancy of which Copernicus speaks in the book’s ‘Preface and Dedication’: I can reckon easily enough, Most Holy Father, that as soon as certain people learn that in these books of mine which I have written about the revolutions of the spheres of the world I attribute certain motions to the terrestrial globe, they will immediately shout to have me and my opinion hooted off the stage.

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For my own works do not please me so much that I do not weigh what judgments others will pronounce concerning them. And although I realize that the conceptions of a philosopher are placed beyond the judgment of the crowd, because it is his loving duty to seek the truth in all things, insofar as God has granted that to human reason; nevertheless I think we should avoid opinions utterly foreign to rightness. And when I considered how absurd this ‘lecture’ would be held by those who know that the opinion that the Earth rests immovable in the middle of the heavens, as if their center, had been confirmed by the judgments of the ages – if I were to assert to the contrary that the Earth moves; for a long time I was in great difficulty as to whether I should bring to light my commentaries written to demonstrate the Earth’s movement, or whether it might not be better to follow the example of the Pythagoreans and certain others who used to hand down the mysteries of their philosophy not in writing but by word of mouth and only to their relatives and friends. . . . They however have seemed to me to have done that not, as some judge, out of a jealous unwillingness to communicate their doctrines, but in order that things of very great beauty which have been investigated by the loving care of great men should not be scorned by those who find it a bother to expend any great energy on letters – except on the money-making variety – or who are provoked by the exhortations and examples of others to the liberal study of philosophy, but on account of their natural stupidity hold the position among philosophers that drones hold among bees. Therefore, when I weighed these things in my mind, the scorn which I had to fear on account of the newness and absurdity of my opinion almost drove me to abandon a work already undertaken. But my friends made me change my course in spite of my long-continued hesitation and even resistance.16

Thus, this seminal book was at last published by Johannes Petreius at Nuremberg, and the first copy presented to Copernicus on 24 May 1543 as he lay upon his death bed (or so tradition has it). But his explanation for the delay of this event, so momentous in retrospect, is somewhat disingenuous, as he makes no mention of scruples having to do with religion: his reluctance to raise problems for the Church he served and in which he held holy orders. For he was well aware that his theory conflicted with certain passages in Scripture. However, quite possibly his concern – if not his intention – was focused upon something more comprehensive and far more radical, a prospect obliquely hinted in his summary discussion ‘On the Order of the Celestial Orbital Circles’ (Book I, ch. 10). Having posited that the outer sphere of the fixed stars does not itself move, Copernicus then recites the order from outward in of the

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‘wanderers’ (erratium), along with their periods of revolution – thus, Saturn, 30 years; Jupiter, 12 years; and so on – with each planet’s orbit centred, roughly, upon Sol. In the middle of all rests the Sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this whence it can illuminate everything at the same time? Hence, not inappropriately [non inepte] do some call it the lamp of the world, others [its] mind, others [its] ruler [or director, guide; rectorum]. Trismegistus [calls it] a visible god; Sophocles’ Electra, [that which] gazes attentively upon [or ‘considers’, ‘contemplates’; intuente] all things. Thus the Sun, as if truly [or ‘really’; profecto] residing on a royal throne [solio regali], governs the family of stars [Astrorum] that go around it. Moreover, the Earth is by no means cheated of the services of the moon; for as Aristotle says in De Animalibus, earth has kinship most with the moon. Nevertheless, it is by the Sun that the earth conceives, and is impregnated [impregnatur] every year. Therefore in this ordering we find that the world has a wonderful commensurability, and that there is a sure bond of harmony for the movement and magnitude of the orbital circles such as cannot be found in any other way.17

Does not Copernicus’s rhetoric here – not merely admiring the utility of the sun’s placement at the centre of everything, but of the reasonableness of several speculations based thereupon – rather obviously smack of heterodoxy, if not outright paganism? That the Sun so placed not only passively illuminates all things, but actively surveys, ‘gazes attentively’ upon them; hence may know them, as would an omniscient ‘mind’; it can even be said to govern, to rule all it surveys, as if seated upon ‘a royal throne’. Indeed, that one may regard the Sun, whether as agent or icon, as ‘God the Father’ who begets all life on earth. That these theological implications were major factors contributing to the attractiveness of Copernicanism for some Renaissance thinkers, and likewise of its repugnancy to others, is a practical certainty. In light of the prominence Copernicus here accords the sun, it is relevant to notice a similar priority in that oft-cited passage from Troilus and Cressida wherein Shakespeare has Ulysses look to the heavens in arguing for the importance of order and degree in human affairs. For though he begins with what would seem the traditional Ptolemaic view, what he attributes to the Sun rather suspiciously echoes the characterization of the illustrious Polack. The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre Observe degree, priority and place,

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Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order. And therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil And posts, like the commandment of a king, Sans check, to good and bad. (1.3.85–94)

Passages such as this suggest that Shakespeare had a firsthand familiarity with Copernicus’s now famous book; perhaps he even entertained a certain sympathy with its radical implications. Combing through his plays, one discovers any number of characters who use epithets which echo Copernicus’s special regard for the sun, such as Troilus’s referring to it as ‘almighty’ (5.2.180), and Timon addresses it as an impregnator: ‘O blessed breeding sun’ (Timon of Athens 4.3.1; cf. Hamlet 2.2.178). Setting a play in a pre-Christian time or place allows Shakespeare to have the sun addressed directly as divine, as when King Lear swears ‘by the sacred radiance of the sun’ (1.1.110); or Arviragus professing shame ‘To look upon the holy sun’ (Cymbeline 4.4.41). But The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not set in pre-Christian times, and yet Proteus admits, ‘At first I did adore a twinkling star, / But now I worship a celestial sun’ (2.6.9–10).18 Several characters treat the sun as an active observer, as does Florizel in The Winter’s Tale: ‘for all the sun sees’ (4.4.490; cf. 791); and Talbot in I Henry VI: ‘The sun with one eye vieweth all the world’ (1.4.83). Or even as an agent, as does Egeon in The Comedy of Errors: ‘At length the sun, gazing upon the earth, / Dispersed those vapours that offended us’ (1.1.88–9); and Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet: ‘Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye / The day to cheer, and night’s dank dew to dry’ (2.3.1–2). Romeo and Juliet, incidentally, has the most mentions of the sun, one character referring to it as ‘the worshipp’d sun’ (1.1.116), another as ‘the all-cheering sun’ (1.1.132), still another as ‘The all-seeing sun’ (1.2.94). And as in Troilus, a multitude of characters scattered through the canon refer to the sun simply as ‘glorious’19 – a word whose various cognates figure so prominently in Christian liturgy when referring to God and His heavens. Make of all such expressions what one will, Copernicus’s mention of ‘Trismegistus’ suffices to suggest an affinity between his view and

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Hermeticism,20 whose relationship with Christianity is a curious one. Some early Church fathers, like Augustine, looked kindly on it, as they did on Plato and various Neoplatonic thinkers. For others, its pagan roots rendered it suspect, if not anathema. It is difficult to characterize Hermeticism succinctly since it has existed in such a variety of forms, from the purely philosophical to the hyper-mystical. All versions, however, claim to take inspiration from the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, ‘Thrice-greatest Hermes’ (being at once the greatest philosopher, priest and king, at least according to one construal of the name). While originally thought to be the books of an Egyptian philosopher-priest of the Homeric–Mosaic era, it is now generally accepted that they are of Neoplatonic origin. 21 It is not difficult to detect some Platonic lineage in the surviving Greek texts attributed to Hermes, particularly in the paramount importance of attaining a well-ordered soul, and in the doctrine of ‘God’ as the power of Unity and Goodness (with the Sun as the visible ‘offspring of the Good/God’; cf. Republic 506e).22 Reduced to its essentials, the wisdom of Trismegistus comprised three main branches: Alchemy (governed by the Sun), which treats of matter and the processes to which it is subject, including its relation to life and death (hence, communication with the dead, making spirits rise, and other such ‘necromancy’ was within the supposed purview of alchemy); Astrology (under the auspices of the Moon), knowledge of the influence of the moon and planets upon earthly happenings; and Theurgy (associated with the Stars), white magic accomplished through alliance with benign spirits (e.g. angels) that can be summoned for the purpose. Thus Shakespeare’s Prospero is generally understood to be, not simply a magician, but more specifically a ‘theurgist’. For according to the doctrine, evil spirits or ‘daimons’ exist as well, and it is through their agency that ‘black magic’ or Goety is possible, a ‘goetist’ being the evil counterpart of a theurgist. Hermeticism teaches that it is through the influence of goety that a person will sin; for example, commit adultery, murder, do violence to one’s parents, commit sacrilege or be led to suicide by leaping from a cliff. The doctrine also condemned as sinful Materialism in any form, from the metaphysical to the hedonistic. Hermeticism emerged in antiquity along with Gnosticism, other variants of Neoplatonism, an intellectualized Paganism, as well as with Christianity; and it displays traces of having synthesized various tenets of all these alternatives. But when Christianity triumphed and no longer tolerated spiritual pluralism, Hermeticism retreated to the shadows and resorted to esoteric forms of

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communication, with which it has been associated ever since.23 It temporarily came back into favour, however, during the Renaissance, often in a Christianized form, or at least cloaked as such. It was rediscovered as a result of Cosimo Medici’s dispatching purchasing agents to search the known world for the books and manuscripts that would eventually constitute the greatest library in Europe. In 1460, one such agent brought back a copy of the extant Corpus Hermeticum. It thus came to the attention of Marsilio Ficino, the brilliant and talented son of Cosimo’s personal physician. Cosimo had installed Marsilio in a villa near Florence and charged him with translating all of Plato into Latin, preliminary to the founding of a new Platonic Academy.24 Ficino, who went on to become one of the most influential figures of the Italian Renaissance, not merely translated the Hermetic texts into Latin (as he did a dozen other Greek authors), but became himself a leading advocate of Hermeticism. However, like Copernicus, Marsilio was a canon of the Church. Not surprisingly, then, he argued that there is no contradiction between Christianity and pagan philosophy in general and Hermeticism in particular.25 Copernicus had spent three years studying Greek, mathematics, and astronomy as well as canonical law at the University of Bologna (1496–9), followed by a year in Rome (where he lectured on mathematics and astronomy), then studied medicine and astronomy for three more years at the University of Padua (1501–3). Bearing in mind that astrology was regarded as essential to the medical practice of the day, he inevitably would have become well acquainted with Hermeticism. But one suspects more than just acquainted. Why else go on so about the Sun – associating it with ‘mind’, ‘ruler’ ‘royal throne’, ‘visible God’ according to Trismegistus – none of this being directly relevant to physical heliocentricity per se? Despite all of the problems its acceptance posed, both theoretical26 and theological–political, the Copernican hypothesis nonetheless gained a respectful hearing and even a few adherents among learned men. That said, however, it did not even begin to supplant the older view until well into the next century. As a recent biographer of Galileo writes: Copernicus’s book aroused a great deal of interest, particularly because it simplified calculation. . . . But there were almost no whole-hearted Copernicans amongst astronomers, and none at all amongst professional philosophers. It is a remarkable fact that in the first fifty years after the death of Copernicus [1543], only four people published in support of the Copernican system: the English mathematician Thomas Digges, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, the

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Spanish theologian Diegode Zuňiga, and the Italian mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti.27

Doubtless there were others persuaded by the new theory, especially among those who wished to identify with the various forms of new learning that were emerging, much of it led by avowed Neoplatonists or Pythagoreans. This was as true in England as elsewhere. John Field (the astronomer, not the strident Puritan preacher and denouncer of the theatre), William Gilbert, Thomas Hariot (or Harriot) and Thomas Digges all subscribed to the heliocentric theory, though as noted only the latter actually argued for it publicly. However, for each of the few thinkers who positively endorsed it, dozens more were acquainted with the radical challenge it posed to the established view, and accordingly were made more aware of that orthodoxy’s various inadequacies. Thus, to appreciate the intellectual ferment in which Shakespeare crafted his Hamlet – shadows of which he chose to visit upon the Prince of Denmark – one needs understand the cosmological upheaval attending the Copernican controversy, intersecting as it did with other major issues that were enlivening and unsettling late Elizabethan England. For this purpose, one can hardly do better than review the career of the one man at the centre of it all.

The busy life of John Dee (1527–1608) – the most illustrious polymath of the period, but equally famous, and infamous, as a magus – provides an ideal ‘mirror’ wherein to view the intellectual ferment and adventure of the ‘very age and body of the time’. Connected as he was with most of the other prominent philosophic–scientific intellects of his day, as well as with many of its leading explorers, adventurers, and political figures, he epitomizes the complex mix of the new and the old – of both rigorous empirical investigations and occult hocus-pocus, hence of both the solid achievements and the extravagant flights of fancy – of which he and his contemporaries variously partook.28 Incarnating the florid cultural ambience of the London in which Shakespeare attained his intellectual maturity, it is easy to believe that Dr Dee was, in whole or in part, the inspiration for Marlowe’s Faust and Jonson’s Alchemist, but most especially for Shakespeare’s Prospero.29 Until fairly recently, however, Dee’s importance to the early history of modern science was obscured by anachronistic prejudices among scholars with regard to astrology, alchemy and any sort of ‘spiritualism’ – Dee being

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deeply implicated in all these now discredited lines of activity. Like so many of his philosophic–scientific contemporaries, he was intrigued by the possibility of alchemy, and had been so since his university days. But in the 1580s it became his dominant preoccupation, which he pursued first in England and then for six years on the Continent, primarily in the company of one Edward Kelley who acted as Dee’s ‘skryer’, that is, someone with a peculiar talent for communicating with angels or other spirits (typically by means of a special crystal or some equivalent in which such beings supposedly revealed themselves and their messages). With Kelley serving as Dee’s ‘medium’, the aging magus hoped to learn from divine sources the deepest secrets of Nature, including that of how to transmute base metals into gold and silver. It was the survival of his own – unfortunately detailed – accounts of these supposed communications with various celestial beings (via his ever-plausible skryer) that have cast Dee’s intellect in the worst light, leading many historians to grossly undervalue his many other achievements. The mercurial Kelley eventually struck out on his own, and garnered an enormous reputation as an alchemist who could transform the metal of virtually any object into gold. Needless to say, this was a skill that every cash-strapped prince would have endless uses for, and Queen Elizabeth was no exception. Accordingly, her chief minister was tireless in trying to lure Kelley back to England, but without success.30 Meanwhile, princely interest in Dee waned to the point that he was without the support of any willing patron in Europe. So at last, disillusioned in Kelley, but not necessarily in alchemy nor in the possibility of spiritual communication, the then 62-year-old magus returned to England. Given the benefit of scientific hindsight, one may confidently dismiss Kelley as just an especially clever charlatan, and consequently disdain Dee as a fool for being so easily conned. More recently, however, as historians of science have become more appreciative of how widely shared and deeply ingrained was a belief in the validity of astrology, in the possibility of alchemy, and in the existence of spirits that can and do interact with living humans – beliefs held not only among the uneducated populace, but by some of the most intelligent and inquiring men of the day31 – a fairer appraisal of Dee’s achievements and importance has become possible. Whatever his foibles (which, to repeat, were not regarded as foibles in his own and Shakespeare’s day), he has emerged as arguably the single most influential scientist-scholar of the Elizabethan age.

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Dee was some sort of religious Hermeticist; he was also a convinced Copernican, perhaps from as early as 1556. He owned not one but two copies of the first edition of De Revolutionibus (this is the more remarkable in that it is estimated only four to five hundred copies of the first edition were printed; something was comparable of the second edition, published in 1566).32 But equally significant were certain other writings he had acquired during an early three-year stint on the Continent, including many important works previously unknown in England. There is no doubt that John Dee was well acquainted with the philosophical currents of Renaissance Italy. He traveled in Italy, and his library included the works of practically all the major philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. One of the most copiously represented was Marsilio Ficino. Dee possessed a set of Ficino’s complete works, as well as his translations and commentaries on Plato and Plotinus. . . . The presence of this collection is hardly surprising because Dee’s Hermetic Platonism is directly traceable to Ficino.33

A dedicated bibliophile from a young age, he boasted the largest library in England. It included virtually every scientific treatise then in existence, whether ancient, medieval, or contemporary, as well as a vast assortment of historical documents. Soon after returning from his first European stay, he had written a ‘supplication’ to Queen Mary to establish a Library Royal and have the country scoured for historically important manuscripts to be stored therein, lest they be lost or destroyed. When the Crown failed to back the scheme, he took the task upon himself, travelling extensively for the purpose. What he collected became part of his library, which was freely available for use by fellow scientists and scholars – a service of no small value in a time before the existence of public libraries of any kind, and in which even university holdings were quite meagre (those of Oxford and Cambridge together amounted to barely a fifth of Dee’s).34 He became known as the Queen Elizabeth’s personal philosopher and astrologer, having been charged with divining the most propitious day for her coronation.35 Thereafter she often visited him and had him visit her. He was sometimes consulted when she needed medical advice, and she returned the favour, sending two of her personal physicians to attend him when once he was seriously ill.36 Being in her good graces, no surprise he was also on friendly terms with many notables of her Court, including Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Lord Burghley (who may have introduced Dee to Elizabeth when she was but a girl).37 Dee had been tutor to

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the Duke of Northumberland’s children, one of whom was Robert Dudley, the future Earl of Leicester and favourite of the Queen, with whom Dee remained close38 – as he did with the Earl’s sister, Mary Sidney, mother of the Earl’s favourite nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. Philip also studied with Dee, and also maintained a familiar relationship with him for the balance of his short life, as did his good friend and fellow poet, Sir Edward Dyer.39 Thus Dee enjoyed a conversancy with the intellectual and artistic group that centred around Sidney, and after his early death, around his vivacious sister, the Countess of Pembroke. He was also acquainted with Francis Bacon; an entry in Dee’s journal (11 August 1582) indicates that young Francis (he was then but 21) visited him at his Mortlake residence. Since upon that occasion Bacon was accompanying Walsingham’s crack cryptographer (Thomas Phellipes), it is reasonable to assume that they were consulting Dee about codes and cyphers – just one more subject upon which the famous magus was an acknowledged expert (and in which Bacon would have a lifelong interest).40 In order to understand the ease with which Shakespeare could become and remain cognizant of contemporary scientific and philosophical activity, one must bear in mind that most of what we now regard as precursory to the scientific revolution in England was not happening at the two universities, but in one or another of the private, less formal associations and discussion groups that met in London and thereabouts: In the capital, numerous non-university people, as well as university men like Dee and Recorde, formed a kind of amorphous third university. Functioning at Syon house, along with Dee’s circle at nearby Mortlake, was the group that gathered around Henry Percy, the ‘Wizard Earl’, during the latter part of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Some of the greatest intellects in England were in this circle; Anthony Wood includes Thomas Hariot, John Dee, Walter Warner and Nathaniel Torporly – ‘the Atlantes of the mathematical world’. To these should be added Thomas Allen, a mathematician who in many ways resembled Dee, Christopher Marlow, John Donne and Walter Raleigh.41

Given that other philosophically inclined poets – for example, Donne, Sidney, Marlowe, Dyer, Fulke Greville – were variously associated with one or more of these private intellectual circles, it would seem curious were Shakespeare in no way similarly involved. Still, no list of habitués of any such group includes his name.

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It is probable that Dee first became acquainted with Ralegh on the basis of their mutual interest in navigational problems, which for Dee were mainly questions of applied geometry and astronomy. Thereafter a more inclusive relationship developed, though nautical matters remained of special import for both men. As a measure of Ralegh’s own catholic interests – which included some decidedly heterodox views, if the rumours surrounding his Durham House group are to be credited – he also possessed a copy of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. And although ‘Ralegh remained a maverick at court’, he was ‘part of an intellectual circle which Elizabeth enjoyed and patronized’: This intellectual circle, which originally radiated from Leicester, expanded, contracted and mutated itself throughout her reign. It had many ramifications, extending, on the one hand, to Sir Philip Sidney, and the group of friends, poets and scientists who surrounded his beautiful sister, the Countess of Pembroke, in Wiltshire; and, on the other, to the growing numbers of historians, cartographers, theorists and adventurers who were working towards the English domination of the high seas and oceans in the latter part of her reign. Intellectual England of the sixteenth century was still a very small world. . . . At Richmond, [Elizabeth’s] favourite palace, she was within easy reach of Walsingham’s house at Barnes, where members of the Sidney circle, and other intellectuals, were frequent guests and visitors; of Syon house, where the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland received Ralegh, Hariot, Marlowe, Donne, and other men of learning; and of Mortlake, where the great mathematician, Dr. John Dee, had created a laboratory and a library of over 4,000 volumes – bigger than anything in England, and the second largest in Western Europe, containing what has been termed ‘the whole Renaissance’.42

Dee achieved early renown as a precocious mathematician, lecturing on Euclid to standing-room-only audiences at the University of Paris when but 23 years old. He later provided an extended ‘Mathematicall Preface’ and annotations to the first English translation of Euclid (by Sir Henry Billingsley, 1570), in which Dee defends both the practical and the mystical–magical applications of this science. Frequently reprinted, this became his most popular book, earning him the name of ‘the English Euclid’. In keeping with many who shared his Hermetic–cabalistic faith, Dee was a firm believer in numerology: that number was the basis of God’s creation.43 At the time, hardly anyone drew a clear line between the mundane uses of mathematics (in surveying, accounting, navigation, astronomy) and the mystical (which were not then regarded as supernatural, but as based on esoteric knowledge of nature itself).

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In 1583, Dee’s mathematical–astronomical expertise was called upon to address the growing problem with the Julian calendar, clearly with an eye towards devising an English alternative to the Papal plan adopted by Catholic Europe the preceding year. Walsingham, having acquired a copy of the Catholic scheme, solicited Dee’s opinion of it. His response was a 60-page treatise that argued the Papal reform was based on calculations using the wrong start date (the Council of Nicea rather than the birth of Jesus), and that consequently not ten, but eleven days should be skipped to harmonize with the celestial arrangement. His draft proposal was approved by Walsingham and Burghley, and so recommended to the Queen by her Privy Council. But the plan was blocked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who objected that the whole idea of changing the calendar catered to Papism. As a consequence, the needed correction was put off for a later century.44 While still hardly more than a youth of Hamlet’s age, albeit of rare precocity and self-confidence, Dee had travelled to Louvain in order to study with the great Belgian cartographer–geographer Mercator, with whom he thereafter remained close friends (as he did with several other leading geographers).45 When he returned home, he brought with him the maps he had copied during his stay with Mercator, and nautical and astronomical instruments heretofore unknown to his countrymen. By applying his knowledge of geometry and astronomy to navigational problems, and by compiling maps and charts, as well as inventing instruments and techniques useful to navigation, he was throughout the rest of his life involved with various English voyages of exploration and colonization. The first such venture of lasting importance was that of Richard Chancellor, who in May of 1553 sailed out of the North Sea in search of a northeast passage to China via the northern coast of Russia. He was relying on the charts and celestial readings which he had prepared with the help of the only man in England who could provide such help. Though then barely 25 years old, John Dee had already acquired the technical and geographical know-how Chancellor needed, and in which he was accordingly tutored. Needless to say, he never reached ‘Cathay’, but he did discover the existence of the seaport that has since become known as Archangel, whence he was summoned to Moscow – 1,500 hard miles of Russian winter away – by Tsar Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’). Chancellor’s voyage, opening a new trade route between England and Russia that circumvented Catholic dominions in Europe, led to the founding in London of the Muscovy Company, which was granted a royal monopoly to explore and exploit the northern latitudes.46

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Decades later, Dee published his magnum opus, a four-volume work titled General and rare memorials pertaining to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577), which set in motion various nautical enterprises.47 He was the guru of Elizabethan exploration, and all the world came to his house by the Thames at Mortlake to examine his wonderful instruments: Drake, Frobisher, Davis, the Gilberts, and Ralegh, the merchants of the Muscovy Company. . . . [Ralegh tried] to obtain some sort of court position for the old scientist as a token of gratitude for all that Dee’s researches had done to help transatlantic venture, for it was the huge chart of the North American coastline which Dr. John Dee had prepared in 1580 that provided the basis for Walter Ralegh’s North American strategy.48

Indeed, some credit Dee with being ‘the moving spirit’ behind Francis Drake’s historic voyage, Dee having convinced the already notorious ‘sea dog’/privateer that circumnavigating the globe was possible.49 He may even deserve recognition as the grandfather of the ‘Brytish Impire’; apparently Dee was the first to use this term, doing so in the first volume of his Memorials, which – whatever else – ‘aimed at shifting English foreign policy into a new, adventurous, expansionist mode’.50 The foundation of his scheme was to be the building of a Royal Navy whereby England could challenge Spain for command of the seas. Drawing on his status as a respected antiquarian, Dee disputed the Papal division of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres. He argued that the Queen of England had a prior claim to much of North America by virtue of the voyages of various legendary predecessors, such as King Arthur and the Welsh prince Madog ab Owain Gwynedd (who according to Welsh folklore, sailed to America c.1170; Dee was himself of Welsh descent).51 Still, for all of his many talents and important contributions in several fields of inquiry and endeavour – and despite the royal favour he enjoyed, though perhaps also partly because of it – John Dee was a controversial figure, suspected of wizardry, witchcraft, conjuring, necromancy, and other questionable practices. To some extent, this was simply a consequence of being adept at advanced mathematics; as previously noted, mathematicians as a class were the target of popular suspicion. But added to that were his alchemical experimentation and arcane studies, and his claiming to have received divine communications and visitations (among other dubious activities and assertions). It is hardly surprising that ordinary people, given the superstitions of the day, looked askance at him.52 Thus, sometime after he had left England in 1583 for what turned out to be a

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six-year stint in various European courts, his Mortlake residence was ransacked, many of his books and documents were stolen and all of the instruments and paraphernalia of his laboratory destroyed. Seen in a Shakespearean context, there is some irony in the fact that Dee’s repute as a magician first arose from the ingenuity with which he staged effects for a production of Aristophanes’ Peace while still a student at Cambridge. According to Dee’s own account, ‘the performance of the Scarabeus his flying up to Jupiter’s palace, with a man and his basket of victualls on his back; whereat was great wondring, and many vaine reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected’.53 ‘Dee left no clue as to how he actually made his creature fly around the stage. . . . Some believed that such an act of levitation could not have been realized by stagecraft alone. Another, possibly diabolical force must have been deployed.’54 Dee’s involvement with the theatre was not confined to his Cambridge years, however. Along with the other consequences of his lifelong association with Robert Dudley, he almost surely would have gained some familiarity with various professional Players. For the Earl of Leicester was the first nobleman to offer the legal protection of his livery to an established theatre troupe (who otherwise would be liable to prosecution under the recently strengthened Vagabond Act of 1572). Moreover, the troupe – thereafter known, naturally, as the Earl of Leicester’s Men, and the first to be granted a royal patent (authorizing them to perform throughout the realm) – was led by James Burbage. James, father of Shakespeare’s famous fellow actor Richard Burbage, was the first to erect a permanent, purpose-built theatre in England (1576), called simply the ‘Theatre’, a name that has since become generic. As scholars have convincingly shown, the shape of this structure – which when the Burbage’s 21-year lease on the building site expired, would be dismantled, transported across the Thames, and reassembled on the south bank as the Globe – ‘was based on classical theory on the design of the Roman theater as expounded in Vitruvius’s book on architecture’ (which John Dee had translated). Vitruvius was known among the artisan class in Elizabethan London through the teaching and writing of John Dee and could therefore have been known to Burbage. Since the ground plan of the classical theater was based on cosmology, . . . the cosmic associations would have been implicit in the Shakespearean theater, and . . . the ‘idea’ or meaning of the Globe Theater would

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have been that of a ‘theater of the world’, expressive of harmonies between macrocosm and microcosm [i.e. between the Cosmos and Man].55

It is generally presumed that Burbage exploited the technical resources of Dee’s library, as well as consulted personally with Dee on the geometrical principles to be used in building the Theatre. Dee would have been quite willing to share his expertise, not only because he was on familiar terms with several of the patrons of acting companies, but as an advocate of using playhouses to promote public spiritedness and national ambition. Thus, his special concern in the design of theatres was for visual and acoustic harmony, such that patrons would be exposed to a refining aesthetic experience whose effect, though mainly subconscious, would amplify that of the dramas performed therein.56 The point of the foregoing discussion bears repeating: for anyone acquainted with the career of John Dee, it is easy to believe that Shakespeare modelled his Prospero on this almost legendary polymath and magus who personified the intellectual ferment and activity of the era, and with whom he may very well have been personally acquainted (as were Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Sidney, Dyer, and other philosophically inclined poets of the day).57 Moreover, as should be obvious, the significance of Shakespeare’s capacity to create a ‘Prospero’ extends well beyond The Tempest. Shakespeare’s familiarity with the New Astronomy, however, has a more particular antecedence, one especially pertinent to Hamlet.

The Copernican theory, according to one literary historian, ‘received a brief, rather ambiguous mention in the mid-sixteenth century by the English mathematician, Robert Recorde, but the first important support in Britain came some years later, when both John Dee and Thomas Digges strongly upheld the heliocentric hypothesis’.58 This is somewhat misleading about Dee insofar as he never did so publicly, though almost surely he argued for it privately among trusted friends. In any event, John Field (or Feild; 1525–87) deserves some credit for having broached Copernicanism as early as 1556. That year he published the first almanac in England, Ephemeris Anni 1557, having based his calculations on Copernicus’s heliocentric model. He was not, however, the first to use this model for the purpose of computing astronomical tables. Five years earlier, Erasmus Reinhold, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wittenberg and

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‘the leading mathematical astronomer in Europe’ had published his Prutenic Tables, which on the continent steadily displaced the older Alfonsine tables based on the Ptolemaic system. ‘The widespread use of these tables meant that Copernican ideas gradually became known to most astronomers.’59 That Shakespeare has Hamlet matriculate at Wittenberg may not have been simply because of its association with Protestantism. Likewise, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus: ‘Of riper years to Wertenberg he went, / Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up.’60 Dee wrote a prefatory letter for Field’s almanac, defending the utility of the Copernican model for more accurate computations, but begged off discussing its physical reality on the grounds that doing so would be inappropriate in such a brief ‘letter’. However, one of Dee’s biographers suggests that his reticence had a deeper cause: ‘Copernicus introduces the centrality of the sun within the framework of the Hermetic religion of the universe in which the sun is perceived as a palpable manifestation of God. For a Hermeticist like Dee, the sun-centred universe of Copernicus would have been a mysterious, mystical and pregnant religious revelation. This is exactly the type of thing Dee would not discuss in print (as he consistently refused to do) since it is a matter for the illuminati, not the common man.’61 His student Thomas Digges (1546–95) had no such reluctance, however. Not only had Dee been Digges’s tutor, but in all likelihood also his guardian after his father, a close friend of Dee, died when Thomas was but thirteen. Thereafter young Digges served as Dee’s assistant. Thus, when in 1572 a new star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia (presumably a supernova, which remained visible until 1574), its position was carefully measured by Dee and Digges who concluded that it was definitely beyond the moon, possibly as far away as the stellar sphere. So too did other astronomers in Europe, notably the soon-to-be-famous Dane, Tycho Brahe, who supplemented his own measurements with those which Digges communicated to him. These findings confuted the established view according to which the heavens were immutable, with all visible changes being necessarily sublunar. And when in 1577 an unusually bright comet appeared, it too was plotted by Dee and Digges, which further confirmed that the heavens beyond the moon manifest changes. But also, given the cosmology of the day, such unusual phenomena were widely regarded as portents of something momentous: ‘The new star of 1572, and the comet following hard after, gave

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rise to a considerable popular literature, nearly all of it concerned with their astrological significance. Both Digges and Dee were consulted by Lord Burghley to find out what portents the comet held for England.’62 Dee reportedly spent three days explaining the comet to the Queen, who had been advised to avert her eyes from the prodigious sight. He persuaded her that the viewing of it posed no danger. By some accounts, Digges was already the leading English mathematician of his generation when he first published in 1576 – a full quarter century before Shakespeare composed Hamlet – an English exposition of the Copernican theory. Titled A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes according to the most auciente doctrine of the Pythagoreans lately revised by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations Approved, it was offered as an addendum to a new edition of his father’s popular perpetual almanac, A Prognostication Everlasting. But while Digges endorsed heliocentricity, he rejected the idea that the stars were all embedded in a celestial sphere some fixed distance beyond Saturn, which thus enclosed a finite universe (with God in His heavens beyond). Digges proposed instead that the universe was infinite, and that the stars were scattered throughout, with the consequence that their varying brightness is strictly a function of their varying distance from the earth (he assumed that the stars were all the same, hence in reality of equal brightness).63 On this view, not merely the earth, but the entire solar system is displaced from the centre, inasmuch as an infinite universe has neither centre nor periphery. Where, then, is the throne of God, about which the Saved are gathered? Shakespeare’s was an age in which such questions mattered, hard though it be for we enlightened post-moderns to sympathize. While there were several other important figures implicated in the Copernican controversy at that time, Thomas Digges has a special pertinence to Shakespeare and his Hamlet. For he had a literary son whom he named after his own father, Leonard. As it happens, Leonard Jr, a younger contemporary of Shakespeare, contributed one of the commemorative verses which preface the First Folio, fulsomely attesting to the immortality of Shakespeare’s words. Leonard Digges’s poem does not speak of a personal relationship with the author – such verses generally wouldn’t (of the Folio’s four, only Ben Jonson’s does) – but it is not unreasonable to assume it. Why so? Not only because he was one of those whom the editors chose to memorialize our philosopher-poet, or that his family’s home was in the same neighbourhood as the Stratford native’s sometime London

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residence. More intriguing is the fact that Leonard’s mathematical astronomer father had been the foremost English correspondent of the renowned Tycho Brahe, whose world-famous observatory and centre of astronomical research was situated on an island within sight of the castle of Elsinore. Tycho Brahe was himself a notoriously lineage-proud man descended of Danish aristocracy, who boasted among his noble ancestors gentlemen by the names of Rosenkrans and Gyldensteren – such singular, now immortal, names. How did Shakespeare hit upon these Danish names? It is quite possible – I think, most likely – that it was via the Digges family. If so, might he have thereby acquired knowledge of and interest in the new astronomy as well?64 Whatever the case, from virtually the beginning of his play-writing career, Shakespeare displayed an uncommon awareness of astronomical problems. One of the most baffling was the difficulty in predicting the position of the planet Mars, which fact he adapted to express a comparable fickleness in the ‘fortunes of war’: ‘Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens / So in the earth, to this day is not known (Henry VI, Pt 1, 1.2.1–2).65 How many readers, much less playgoers, would be apt to understand this simile? Once one cares to notice them, one finds in the plays a plenitude of references to the heavenly bodies and their positions. Some are quite pedestrian. But not all are. Astronomical theories may not be a fashionable topic among the intellectual elite of our day, but they most definitely were for a select cohort of those that so distinguished Shakespeare’s time. Moreover, as is well known (and has been alluded to more than once in the preceding discussion), empirical study of the heavens then remained closely bound up with astrology – indeed, what we now call ‘astronomy’ was then commonly referred to as ‘astrology’, albeit as ‘natural astrology’, to distinguish it from the ‘judicial astrology’ (or ‘astromancy’), upon which predictions and horoscopes were based. Though all versions of Christianity were de jure hostile to the latter, regarding it as a dangerous remnant of paganism – a fact nicely illustrated by Horatio’s recollection of the astral phenomena that reportedly foretold the death of Julius Caesar (1.1.112–19) – it was not merely de facto tolerated, but employed. In ways that were sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, astrology touched nearly every aspect of secular and religious life. Despite the official position of the Church, the persecution of astrologers was also fairly rare. The Church found no fault with medical astrology, and openly embraced ‘elections’ since its

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practice made ‘a calculated effort to modify the future favorably’ by a strategic act of free will. In the Church’s own heavenly hierarchy, the nine orders of angels were also astrologically assigned.66

Various Churchmen, of both Protestant and Catholic persuasions (including some popes), continued to have horoscopes cast, and even kept astrologers on their payrolls. In this respect, their practice reflected the fact that judicial astrology continued to hold a place in popular belief, even becoming intertwined with Christian faith itself – witness Marcellus’s recounting what ‘some say’ regarding the Christmas season: that among other things, ‘the nights are wholesome, then no planets strike’ (or, ‘blast’, understood as akin to being struck by lightning, though less pleasant; 1.1.157–61; cf. 1.1.126). The validity of judicial astrology, however, was becoming increasingly contested on strictly rational grounds, which further compounded the controversies generated by the competing hypotheses about the geometrical structure of the heavens. Nonetheless, most of the leading astronomers of the day continued to supplement their incomes by casting horoscopes. Shakespeare, faithfully mirroring his time, peoples his plays with representatives of divergent views on this matter. Polonius expresses the common belief in his claiming to have warned his daughter, ‘Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy star’ (meaning, ‘outside her determined allotment in life’; 2.2.138). On the other hand, Hamlet’s one reference to astral influences is non-committal. He muses on the overall prejudicial effect of but a single conspicuous fault in men: That for some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth wherein they are not guilty (Since nature cannot choose his origin), . . . Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, (Being Nature’s livery or Fortune’s star) His virtues else, be they pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. (1.4.24–36)

One wonders whether Hamlet has himself in mind here; and if so, of what ‘particular fault’ must he be thinking, and whether he regards it as due to ‘nature’s livery or fortune’s star’.67

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Whatever the case, the same year Shakespeare is writing Hamlet – 1600, as is generally supposed – William Gilbert (1544–1603) publishes the first major scientific work to appear in England, his now classic treatise on Magnetism, De Magnete. (Recall, Hamlet declines to sit next to his mother at the performance of his ‘Mousetrap’, characterizing Ophelia as ‘metal more attractive’; 3.2.106.).68 That same year Gilbert was elected president of the Royal College of Physicians and appointed one of the Queen’s personal doctors. He had received his degree in medicine from Cambridge some three decades prior, but for at least seventeen years had mixed his London medical practice with research into the behaviour of lodestones and other electrostatic phenomena (such as that associated with what the Greeks called electron, i.e. amber), inventing special instruments for the purpose. Gilbert was convinced of the diurnal motion of the earth, finding it far more plausible that the earth could rotate once every 24 hours than that the immense stellar sphere could do so (the existence of which he doubted; he found Digges’s view more persuasive, that the stars are scattered about the heavens at variable distances from the earth). Moreover, he ventured an explanation for the earth’s rotation. Relying mainly on his own empirical investigations with lodestones, combined with seafarers’ reports of the behaviour of compass needles at various latitudes and longitudes, he formulated his revolutionary theory of the earth having an iron core, and that it behaved as an enormous spherical magnet with its magnetic poles roughly coinciding with its rotational axis. Thus Gilbert provided an explanation of how magnetic compasses work (previously speculations included their being attracted by the north star). But not only that; he theorized that the earth rotates due to the inherent potency of its own magnetism (an occult immaterial force), just as does a spherical magnet when its poles are aligned with those of the earth.69 And he further conjectured that ‘gravity’, a similarly occult force, might itself be a kind of magnetism. Kepler will take that idea and run with it. Suffice it to say, the years in the midst of which Shakespeare crafted Hamlet was a time in which the received assumptions about the heavens – and, necessarily then, also about the earth – were being called increasingly into question, each new discovery encouraging still more heterodoxical speculations. By 1600, Tycho Brahe had moved to Prague and was working out still another new theory of cosmic architecture, a sort of compromise between the Ptolemaic and Copernican views which seemed to preserve

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the virtues of each (for several decades thereafter, it proved more popular with astronomers than the Copernican view). At about this time, Dutch opticians are credited with inventing the telescope (though no one patented the device until 1608). In 1609, Kepler, having inherited Brahe’s collection of astronomical observations (unrivalled in quantity and quality), publishes his new version of the Copernican system featuring elliptical orbits of planets held in position – not by the already discredited crystalline spheres – but (he hypothesized) by the magnetic force of the rotating Sun. That same year, Galileo constructs his own telescope, turns it upon the heavens, and discovers the moons of Jupiter, the craters on the moon, and that the planet Venus has phases just as does our moon.70 Likewise, Ralegh’s trusted protégé, Thomas Hariot (1560–1621) – whose investigations ranged from navigational problems to optics to chemistry, and who some regard as ‘the greatest astronomer of his generation’71 – constructs a succession of more powerful telescopes with which he will map the moon, and discover spots on that supposedly perfect heavenly body, the Sun; from his nearly two hundred observations of the Sun between 1610 and 1613, he was able to compute the period of the Sun’s rotation, incidentally thereby adding plausibility to the idea of a rotating earth. The revolution which Copernicus sparked had finally caught fire,

Hamlet’s love poem to Ophelia – with its clever exploitation of the double meaning of ‘doubt’ to allude, ever so subtly, to the emerging cosmological controversy (‘Doubt that the sun doth move’) – is but one of some 80 references in the play to the heavens and the major bodies found therein: Sun, Moon, Earth, Stars and Planets. Most mentions are not especially conspicuous, though we are repeatedly reminded of the one indisputable way in which the heavenly bodies influence all life on earth: by variously differentiating sectors of time (‘Why day is day, night night, and time is time’). Man is thereby provided a natural means of measuring and indicating duration and temporal position – as in the play’s first reference to the heavens: Barnardo indicates the time of night when the Ghost previously appeared (‘When yond same star that’s westward from the pole, / Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven / Where now it burns’; 1.1.35–7). However, people do not merely measure time by the celestial clock; they order their ‘daily’ lives by day and night, confining most of their activities to the former, while regarding the latter with apprehension. Hamlet offers a macabre reminder of this fact: ‘’Tis now the very witching time

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of night / When churchyards yawn and hell itself breaks out / Contagion to this world’ (3.2.378–80). As is obvious, the original measure of months (‘moonths’) was determined by phases of ‘the moist star / Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands’ (1.1.117–18): ‘But two months dead – nay not so much, not two’; ‘And yet within a month’ (1.2.138, 145). Needless to add, all mankind notes the sun’s relation to the seasons, and marks the passing years by their everrecurring sequence (3.2.154–5). Several astral references figure in similes, such as Hamlet’s ‘I’ll be your foil, Laertes. In mine ignorance / Your skill shall like a star i’th’darkest night / Stick fiery off indeed’ (5.2.232–4). Apparently this peculiar expression seems so extravagant that Laertes suspects Hamlet of mockery. Other images are equally strange, not to say bizarre. For example, note how Claudius expresses his deep attachment to Gertrude: ‘That as the star moves not but in his sphere / I could not but by her’ (4.7.16–17); and the Ghost’s strained analogy for one of several effects his telling ‘the secrets of [his] prison house’ would have: ‘Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres’ (1.5.17). And while Hamlet’s depreciation of ‘this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’ may seem wilfully perverse, it is at least sensible (2.2.265–6). So much cannot be said, however, for his confronting Laertes at Ophelia’s grave with, ‘What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow / Conjures the wandering stars [i.e. the planets] and makes them stand / Like wonder-wounded hearers?’ (5.1.243–6). Huh? Thought about, does it not seem that Shakespeare is emphasizing something? Moreover, there is one very conspicuous reference to the heavenly motions: the comically wordy, downright awkward manner in which the Player King and the Player Queen remind each other of the simple fact that they have been married 30 years: P. King

P. Queen

Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus’ orbed ground And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen About the world have times twelve thirties been Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands Unite commutual in most sacred bands. So many journeys may the sun and moon Make us again count o’er ere love be done. (3.2.148–55)

Clearly, this royal couple is still of the old school. But there are grounds for suspecting that Shakespeare was at least open to the new view.

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However, publicly espousing the revolutionary sun-centred theory of the Heavens carried some risk back then, mainly from one or another faction of Christianity (though less so in England than on the Continent).72 Protestants, whose sects had arisen as part of a ‘Back to the Bible’ movement, were especially resistant to the new astronomy, at least initially. Luther is credited with a widely circulated epigram denouncing that ‘upstart astrologer’ Copernicus: ‘This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.’73 Luther, of course is famously associated with the University of Wittenberg, where he taught philosophy and dialectics. And with respect to Hamlet, that would seem to be the main point: for most people in Shakespeare’s England, the name Wittenberg was practically synonymous with Lutheranism. Bearing this in mind, is not Hamlet’s confessing, ‘I am myself indifferent honest but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me’ (3.1.121–3), a bit reminiscent of Luther’s ‘If the sins of which I am conscious in my heart were evident to the world, I should deserve to be hanged’? For that matter, is there not a decidedly ‘Lutheran’ cast to Hamlet’s admonition to Polonius, who proposes to accommodate the travelling Players in the manner they deserve: ‘God’s bodkin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert and who shall scape whipping’ (2.2.467–8)?74 The Catholics, on the other hand, tended to be more accepting of new speculations about how the world works. Indeed, what the Protestants saw as the doctrinal laxity of the established Church was one of their charges against it, indicative of its degeneracy. If the reason Laertes wished to return to France was to complete his education, it would be at the famous Catholic University of Paris. And the specifics of what Polonius suspects spying upon his son is apt to reveal attests to the decidedly liberal – not to say libertine – reputation of Parisians over the years. However, responding to pressure generated by the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church clamped down on heretical ideas; thus the notorious case of Galileo, which remained a cause célèbre throughout most of the seventeenth century.75 It figures importantly in Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637), albeit without his so much as mentioning Galileo’s name – and this despite the fact that Descartes published his Discourse anonymously.76 And the penultimate chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is bracketed by the issue. For that chapter begins with an apparent endorsement of the old view (and in words vaguely reminiscent of Polonius’s fatuous dismissal of any question as

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to its adequacy): ‘So the Astronomer, from the Rising, Setting, and Moving of the Sun, and Starres, in diverse parts of the Heavens, findeth out the causes of Day, and Night, and of the different Seasons of the Year; whereby he keepeth an account of Time.’ But the chapter ends with Hobbes sounding suspiciously Copernican: [E]very day it appeareth more and more, that Years and Dayes are determined by Motions of the Earth. Nevertheless, men that have in their Writings but supposed such Doctrine, as an occasion to lay open the reasons for, and against it, have been punished for it by Authority Ecclesiasticall [again, what is clearly enough a reference to Galileo is nonetheless left anonymous]. But what reason is there for it. Is it because such opinions are contrary to true Religion? that cannot be, if they be true.

Fair enough. But as the Church well understood, if one suspects the Suncentred Copernican view to be simply true (and not merely an hypothesis useful for simplifying calculations), this has implications for what one believes the true religion to be. That, whatever else, it would enshrine this truth, and nothing contrary to it, in sacred writings (which, after all, are presumed to reflect the omniscience of God). Beyond that, a rational religion might treat the Sun – source of heat and light, requisite of all life on earth – as the natural Icon of God, even the ‘Offspring’ of God, which is to say, the source of all that is Good. I do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare has fashioned his Prince Hamlet as cognizant of the competing astronomical theories, though Shakespeare surely was, as were most intellectually inclined contemporaries (including fellow poets Nashe, Kyd, Marlowe, Sidney, Fulke Greville, Spenser, Florio, inter alia). My point is that Shakespeare has embroidered his play with reminders of this fact: that the very structure of the world had become increasingly a subject of debate – to the distress of some people serious in much the same way Hamlet is. John Donne would seem an apt example. In his famous ‘An Anatomie of the World’ (or ‘First Anniversary’, published in 1611), he articulates the melancholic fact that the common understanding of the world has been profoundly disturbed: And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit

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Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this world’s spent When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies. ’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation; Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee. This is the worlds condition now. (205–18)77

As one commentator on the poem observes, ‘There probably has been no age in which intelligent men could look about and truly say, all is well. Donne’s age gave less cause for optimism, less cause for a feeling of well-being, than many. Shakespeare has Hamlet observe that “the time is out of joint”. Donne tells us that “as mankinde, so is the worlds whole frame / Quite out of joint.” ’78 Donne’s ‘The element of fire is quite put out’ provides an oblique reminder of the first line of Hamlet’s love poem to Ophelia: ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire.’ As was noted earlier, that the sun and stars are balls of pure fire had been virtually the universal view since antiquity (recall Barnardo’s ‘yond same star . . . Where now it burns’, 1.1.35–7; and Hamlet’s ‘this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’, 2.2.266–7). But this view rests on the belief that fire is a basic element of matter (along with earth, air, and water; cf. 1.1.152) whose ‘natural place’ is in the heavens (thus flames ‘reach up’ as a fire burns). However, in the half century prior to Shakespeare’s crafting Hamlet, a few respected thinkers had begun to question this received ‘truth’ – that it was in fact false, a ‘lie’. For example, the Milanese polymath Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), already famous throughout Europe as a physician,79 mathematician, and philosopher, published what was in effect a new cosmology, De Subtilitate (1552). In this widely read book (eight editions in the original Latin, seven in a French translation), Cardano – or Jerome Cardan, as he was known in England – attacked several tenets of the established worldview, including the belief that fire is an element. He argued instead that fire is either due to motion or is merely burning air.80 It would be well into the next century before Boyle and others through experimental methods showed to a practical certainty that fire was not an element, but a chemical process. However, this revolution in the understanding of the world’s material composition was

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already underway in Shakespeare’s day, as Donne’s line in his ‘First Anniversary’ attests. But if the stars are not in fact balls of pure fire – if one may sensibly doubt this received ‘truth’ – what then are they? Most of Cardano’s many books were, not surprisingly, available in John Dee’s famous library. Of immediate pertinence is the fact that several scholars regard one of his books, De Consolatione – begun in 1537 but not finished and published until 1542 – as directly influencing Hamlet, and particularly the Prince’s most famous soliloquy. An English translation of the book was made by Thomas Bedingfield, and published in 1573 under the title Cardanus Comforte, apparently at the instigation of the young Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere, who wrote a preface in the form of a letter lauding the book’s importance for philosophy and virtue. More than one student of the play, indifferent if not oblivious to the anachronism, has suggested that this is the very book the Prince is reading when encountered by Polonius, who queries him about it (2.2.188); another Shakespearean simply titled his own analysis of the parallels between the two works, ‘Hamlet’s book’.81 Whereas the competing astronomies and resulting cosmological controversy do not directly figure in the plot of Hamlet, that surely cannot be said for the religious controversies that were interwoven with them, and which were unsettling Elizabethan England as well as the rest of Europe. For the competing religious views do bear more or less immediately on the personal predicament in which our philosopher-poet has placed his Prince. It is generally understood that the Protestant England of Shakespeare’s day remained preoccupied with the Catholic threat, not least because so much of the population (by some estimates fully two-thirds) remained secretly loyal to the ‘old religion’.82 What I have several times alluded to previously is not so widely appreciated, however; namely, that the religious cacophony involved more than the various Protestant sects versus Catholicism. Hamlet’s one mention of ‘pagan’ is a sufficient reminder of an alternative even more disturbing to either version of Christianity: the potential rebirth of Paganism, a threat implicit in the new enthusiasm for the classic works of Antiquity. This pre-Christian disposition is represented in the play by Hamlet himself to some extent, but more explicitly by his well-named college chum, Horatio, who refers ambiguously to ‘my god’ (1.1.55), and who openly avows himself ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (5.2.325). But the neo-Pagan alternative was represented (albeit circumspectly) in late sixteenth-century England by, among

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others, the various admirers of the notorious Giordano Bruno,83 who came to England in April of 1583 as a guest of the French Ambassador. He apparently had a personal audience with the Queen, and was met and befriended by several of the more adventurous intellects of the day, including the poet Sir Philip Sidney (to whom Bruno dedicated two of his books).84 Bruno lectured at Oxford, and even sought a professorship there – without success, not surprisingly, given the radical heterodoxy of his views. He wrote and published several of his most significant works during his two and half year stay in England, including a pair of cosmological tracts (Ash Wednesday Supper and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds) in which he contended not only that the Universe is infinite, and that it includes many worlds, but that God is simply immanent throughout the Universe, having no special relationship with the earth.85 Not himself an astronomer (though he did possess a second edition of Copernicus’s treatise), Bruno argued his view on theological grounds: that a God of infinite power would necessarily create an infinite universe. In this he was presumably influenced by Thomas Digges, who had argued likewise, as later would William Gilbert. After a London mob had attacked the French embassy where Bruno lodged (and may have served as a spy for Walsingham), he left England in October of 1585, returning first to France, where he published his 120 theses against Aristotelian natural science (among other controversial activities that compromised his presence there). Thence he moved to Germany, gaining a teaching position at – of all places – ‘Hamlet’s’ University of Wittenberg, where he published an expanded version of his 120 anti-Aristotelian theses, Camoeracensis Acrotismus (1588). Years later, Bruno imprudently returned to Italy, was denounced to the Inquisition, imprisoned for seven years during his lengthy trial on a catalogue of heresies and blasphemies which he refused entirely to recant, and consequently was burned at the stake in a central market square of Rome, on 17 February 1600 – roughly coincident with Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet. Though by then Bruno had long since left England, the neoPagan seeds he had sown had sprouted and grown in the nooks and crannies of its intellectual life.

Enter the Ghost. Bearing in mind how philosophically and theologically conflicted was England in Shakespeare’s day, one can begin to see why he made the status of the Ghost so ambiguous, and consequently appreciate Hamlet’s perplexity about it. Is it ‘a spirit of health or a goblin damned’? Is it bringing

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‘airs from heaven or blasts from hell’ (1.4.40–1)? This confusion, and more, is a result of Shakespeare’s investing the Ghost with features of all three religious alternatives – Protestant, Catholic, and Pagan – or rather, of his investing the Prince with an awareness of these alternative interpretations. As a result, he is not sure how to regard this spectre and its allegations. So, what about this Ghost? – the catalyst, notice, of the entire sequence of events that culminates in tragedy.86 For to judge by the conclusion of his first soliloquy, Hamlet, thoroughly disillusioned and disgusted, nonetheless seems resigned to a passive acceptance of the weed-infested garden that his world had become: ‘But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue’ (1.2.159). Until, that is, he is galvanized into action by his conversation with the Ghost. True, given time to reflect, he realizes that the encounter is problematic. Is it really what it claims to be: the soul of his Father, suffering in Purgatory – which it might be, but also might not be (the Catholic view)? Or, is it necessarily a vision conjured by Satan to corrupt him? For that would be the Protestant view: the souls of the dead being strictly confined to either Heaven or Hell, and the very idea of Purgatory nothing but an abominable invention of corrupt Catholicism, not just some but all ghosts are necessarily devices of Satan whereby he leads people astray. Protestant divines warned in particular that dispatching ghosts claiming to be souls suffering in Purgatory is one of Satan’s favourite deceptions. As Hamlet later muses: ‘The spirit that I have seen / May be a de’il, and the de’il hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape’ (2.2.533–8).87 Whatever the true status of the Ghost, Hamlet’s encounter with it provokes him out of his passivity, and thus sets in train all the subsequent actions that constitute his story – a story that concludes with his own death; the death of his mother (of whom the Ghost had seemed solicitous, much as Hamlet recalled his father to have been in life); the death of his uncle; and the death of the brother of Hamlet’s beloved, she meanwhile having died deranged, partly because Hamlet killed her father; and last (but one would think not least in the mind of a responsible king) with the loss not merely of previously won lands, but of the entire kingdom, Denmark falling like an overripe fruit into the waiting lap of a foreign prince. And not just any foreign prince, but the son of the elder Hamlet’s erstwhile enemy. Judging the Ghost in light of the consequences of its visitation, it would surely not be unreasonable to conclude that it is indeed a damnable goblin bringing blasts from hell. In any case, this Ghost appears in the visible form of the elder Hamlet. But it is dressed not in the robes in which he would have been buried, much

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less in some soiled winding sheet. Rather, it is accoutred in full armour like that worn by King Hamlet when he killed King Fortinbras in single combat, claiming a swath of Norwegian territory as prize. Why in armour, those who first see him wonder. They speculate that it may have to do with Denmark’s feverish military preparations for a pending conflict with Norway, led by the vanquished king’s son bent on reclaiming ‘those foresaid lands / So by his father lost.’ Accordingly, when the Ghost appears a second time, this military concern is implicit in the central of the three questions Horatio addresses to it: ‘If thou art privy to thy country’s fate / Which happily foreknowing may avoid, / O speak’ (1.1.132–4). And when young Prince Hamlet is subsequently informed of the Ghost’s visitations, he queries his friends at length on this same point: Hamlet. All. Hamlet. All. Hamlet. Horatio.

Armed, say you? Armed, my lord. From top to toe? My lord, from head to foot. Then saw you not his face. O yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up.

Upon Horatio and the others departing, Hamlet muses, ‘My father’s spirit – in arms! All is not well; / I doubt some foul play’ (1.2.253–4). Moreover, when he confronts the Ghost for the first time himself, he asks it directly: ‘What may this mean / That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel, / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon’ (1.4.52–3). As the Ghost never addresses this puzzle, about which all who see it are curious, we too are left to wonder what meaning might there be in the fact that it appears in (presumably spectral) armour identical to that worn by King Hamlet when he famously slew King Fortinbras. Is it because appearing thus would most profoundly impress the worshipful son of a warrior-king – that it would appeal to the image young Hamlet sees in his mind’s eye: his father in his moment of greatest triumph? But why, then, does the Prince seem so perplexed by it, by what it might mean? ‘Our valiant Hamlet’, as Horatio calls the late King, adding, ‘For so this side of our known world esteemed him’ (1.1.78–9) – implying an awareness, perhaps, that Hamlet Sr is thought of differently elsewhere? Why might that be? When the Ghost had a second time come and gone, in this instance upon the crowing of a cock, Horatio characterized its exit rather oddly: ‘And then it started like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons’ (1.1.147–8).

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The Ghost claims that it is ‘confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in [its] days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’ – not common, everyday sins, notice, but foul crimes. Is it possible, then, that King Hamlet’s victory over King Fortinbras of Norway was not altogether as honourable as the official version would have people believe?88 According to Horatio’s carefully respectful account: Our last King, Whose image but even now appeared to us, Was as you know by Fortinbras of Norway – Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride – Dared to the combat, in which our own valiant Hamlet (For so this side of our known world esteemed him) Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact Well ratified by law and heraldry Did forfeit with his life all these his lands Which he stood seized of to the conqueror . . . (1.1.79–88)

Does young Fortinbras have a different understanding of what actually happened – of how fairly, say, the royal combat was fought89 – hence have a special reason for attempting ‘to recover . . . by strong hand / And terms compulsatory those foresaid lands / So by his father lost’ (1.1.101–3)? And does the Ghost, then, appear dressed as was the elder Hamlet when the ‘foul crimes’ for which it is allegedly suffering were originally committed? Whatever explains its appearing in ‘the very armour’ the late King of Denmark wore when long ago he scored his famous victory over the late King of Norway, the father-seeming Ghost claims to have been murdered ‘in the blossoms of [his] sin’, without the opportunity to confess them and so perhaps obtain absolution; hence, it is by day ‘confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in [his] days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’ (1.5.11–13). Its use of the freighted term ‘purged’ suggests the Catholic view: the Ghost is a soul suffering in purgatory, in which case it is surely that of the elder Hamlet, as it claims. But as previously noted, a well-schooled Protestant would regard this as nothing but a Satanic trick: it could not possibly be the departed spirit of King Hamlet, since souls of the dead never revisit the Earth. Further confusing the matter, the Ghost does not burden its ostensible son with any sort of Christian duty. No ‘Pray for my forgiveness’, or ‘get everyone to pray for me’, or pay for masses to be sung, or buy indulgences from Rome.90 Rather, the obligation the Ghost imposes upon young Hamlet bespeaks the

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ancient pagan morality, that of the classical heroes, Revenge: ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!’ Whereas from a Christian perspective this would be tantamount to urging a mortal sin, on the classical view a son’s unwillingness to pursue the ‘wild justice’ of vengeance in such a case would be regarded as impious and altogether reprehensible, bespeaking cowardice and disloyalty (cf. 2.2.506, 511–12, 518–19; 4.4.38–45). Indeed, there is probably no single issue upon which the Classical view and the Christian view more directly clash than on the propriety of Revenge. Unless, perhaps, it is that of Suicide.91 By virtue of his princely status, however, young Hamlet’s situation is more complicated than would otherwise be the case. Jesus’s apparent repudiation of the Old Testament doctrine of lex talionis (as expressed, for example, in Exodus 21.23–5; cf. Matthew 5.38–9) had long since come to be interpreted by Church fathers as forbidding only private vengeance, as distinct from the administration of legal justice by legitimate Rulers, who are understood to be acting in God’s name and who are positively enjoined by New Testament Scripture to punish lawbreakers (Romans 13.1–7). But in a case where the Ruler is himself the lawbreaker, and who moreover has achieved his position by murder and usurpation, special rules apply. Still, the situation is a delicate one, for to license just anybody to act against a sitting king is to pre-empt God’s prerogative; and practically speaking, it is to invite a sea of troubles. Hence, the natural authority for extra-legal recourse is restricted to those of appropriate rank and position. Prince Hamlet would certainly qualify. And so one might read this into his lamenting, ‘The time is out of joint; O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!’ And yet, at no time does Hamlet so much as hint that he regards the killing of Claudius to be his public duty.92 Nor did the Ghost urge this obligation upon its supposed son in the name of the common good of Denmark – unless, that is, one can tease some such implication out of the Ghost’s ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest’ (1.5.82–3). With this dubious exception, everything the Ghost says suggests that the matter is strictly personal: a selfish desire for revenge. Is this also ‘in character’ with the disposition of the elder Hamlet? And is Hamlet’s own self-absorption perhaps ‘genetic’? Horatio conveniently reminds us that there were reports of ghosts in pagan antiquity also: In the most high and palmy state of Rome A little ere the mightiest Julius fell The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead

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Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun [etc.]. (1.1.112–17)

That is, on the ancient view, ghosts, apparitions and other sorts of supernatural happenings – including disturbances in the heavens – are (as Horatio calls them) ‘omens’ of something of great political consequence in the offing. So another of Shakespeare’s Romans famously warns, ‘When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’ (Julius Caesar 2.2.30–1). Thus after first seeing the Ghost himself, Horatio – more antique Roman than Dane – worries: ‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’ (1.1.68). And having recalled the events associated with the assassination of Caesar, he explicitly draws the similitude: And even the like precurse of feared events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climature and countrymen. (1.1.120–4)

That is, ‘demonstrated’ by the nocturnal visit of this spectre. Horatio may not have previously credited the ancient reports, but he and his comrades having just been confronted by a ghost themselves, not once but twice, he would probably now agree even without Hamlet’s prompting that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of ’ in his sceptical empiricist philosophy. Who wouldn’t?93 Hamlet initially voices an unequivocal acceptance of the Ghost’s mission, eager to ‘sweep to [his] revenge’. But given time to reflect on it, he is less sure.94 In soliloquizing about his planned theatrical testing of Claudius, he worries (as noted before) that he is being preyed upon by diabolical forces: ‘The spirit that I have seen / May be a de’il [etc.]’. His confusion as to how to regard the Ghost is but one concrete expression of a mind afflicted with contradictions, a witch’s brew of personal antitheses (about love, loyalty, pride, nobility, beauty, ambition, mortality), but reflective also of the jumble of views competing for credibility in late Elizabethan England.95 Whatever consonance of understanding had existed there previously was fast disintegrating due to the stresses within Christianity, compounded by the reawakening of a Classicism that in several vital respects does not readily harmonize with Christianity.

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As Donne complained, ‘’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone.’ Especially unsettling were the first stirrings of what we in retrospect recognize to be the birth of modern science, in which so many ‘mad Englishmen’ played leading roles, and for whom the importance of the Copernican Revolution extended well beyond astronomy. And as the likes of Bacon and Hobbes rightly anticipated, scientific progress in ‘the relief of man’s earthly estate’ would increasingly supplant the intellectual authority of religion per se.96 We are provided a further indication of Hamlet’s inner contradictions as he observes King Claudius at prayer. Immediately prior, he had professed himself steeled to kill the King: ‘Now could I drink hot blood, [etc.]’ – sounding every bit as ruthless as Achilles’ avenging son, Pyrrhus. Yet, upon being presented a perfect opportunity to enact his declared intention, he declines to do the deed. Why? Certainly not because revenge is prohibited by Christian doctrine (whereas he does seem to accept the Christian prohibition of suicide – or did, rather, when we first met him; 1.2.131–2). In his moral sensibility, as in certain other respects, Hamlet is only ‘ partChristian’. Clearly, he is not imbued with the Christian ethic of love, charity, mercy, and forgiveness. We are provided an early hint of his decidedly unChristian attitude in his response to Horatio’s admitting that he found the Queen’s marriage o’erhasty: ‘Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven / Or ever I had seen that day’ (1.2.181–2). Contrary to what might be one’s first impression, this does not exemplify Christ’s injunction to love one’s enemies and forgive them their trespasses. Yet, Hamlet seems basically Christian in his beliefs about the cosmos – that it comprises at least three distinct realms: Heaven and Hell, as well as that of the Earth (and perhaps four, if Purgatory exists) – and correlatively, about repentance and divine mercy, beliefs grounded on Revelation, not Reason. Thus, he would not kill Claudius in such circumstances as might permit his going to Heaven (for that would be ‘hire and salary, not revenge’97). Contrary to Christian morality, Hamlet wants Claudius to fry in Hell – as well he may, according to Christian dogma, were he to be ‘Cut off even in the blossoms of his sin, / Unhousseled, disappointed, unaneled, / No reckoning made’ – a fearsome Hell whose existence is vouchsafed only within Christian cosmology. One might conceive Hamlet as of an ‘antique disposition’ by nature, imbued with a spirit powerfully drawn to admire heroic warriors, not saintly martyrs (cf. 2.2.383–5; 4.4.45–55), but which has been compromised by a Christian nurture that never became solidly rooted in such uncongenial soil. The result

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is a conflicted soul, manifested in the opening lines of his most famous soliloquy: 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 up arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them; 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 . . .98 (3.1.55–63)

Apparently, Hamlet’s religious beliefs at this point have shifted, judging by how he casts the question he ponders. There is no mention here of a divine power having ‘fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter’. Now it is matter of whether it is nobler to bear with patient acceptance whatever sufferings Fortune visits upon one – a posture recommended by Stoicism simply on the grounds of reason (whereas Christians are forbidden by doctrine to despair, strong in the faith of a heavenly reward); or, whether active resistance to evils and trials is more noble, either defeating and surmounting them or dying in the attempt, thus putting an end to affliction one way or the other. And given that one must eventually die regardless, a hero’s death is positively attractive. But it is not merely that Hamlet hasn’t firmly taken to heart the Christian ethics that go with the Christian view of man in relation to the Divine. His beliefs about the Divine itself are tainted by his antique disposition, at least to judge from the polytheistic description of his father which he uses to verbally bludgeon his mother: See what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man; This was your husband. (3.4.53–61)

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Nor is this the first time that Shakespeare has Hamlet likened his father – not to just any Titan – but to Hyperion (‘So excellent a king, that was to this [Claudius] / Hyperion to a satyr’; 1.2.139–40). According to the ancient view, Hyperion was the father of both the sun and the moon. Once one attends to it, one notices that Hamlet’s language is liberally seasoned with classical allusions throughout.

The Matter of Man. In light of the scientific controversies that agitated England throughout Shakespeare’s career – of which his plays show him to be as cognizant as he was of their diverse religious and political implications – we should not be surprised to find manifestations of such issues penetrating the foreground as well as lurking in the background of a play as overtly philosophical as Hamlet. And so we do. For in addition to the religious uncertainty implicit in the competing cosmologies and theologies that resulted from the intrusion of the Copernican view, Hamlet seems to be suffering from the demoralizing effects of the materialism that was becoming increasingly evident in various aspects of what we in hindsight call the Scientific Revolution. One may detect a hint of this in the rather strange mechanistic image with which he concludes his love letter to Ophelia, promising to be hers ‘evermore . . . whilst this machine is to him’ (2.2.120–1).99 It is true that materialism in general, and atomism in particular, only really ‘took off ’ in the seventeenth century (accompanying the development of modern chemistry), but there were harbingers in the latter half of the sixteenth. With the rediscovery of the works of antiquity came the atomism of Democrates, Leucippus, and Empedocles, along with the materialism of Epicurus and Lucretius.100 Then as now, a sort of inchoate materialism is implicit wherever there is a pronounced emphasis on welfare in the present world, and correspondingly on utility with regards to whatever bears on the workings of everyday life. These sorts of concerns point towards the manipulation of matter in the literal sense, whether by alchemical formulae and experimentation, or by the more prosaic means based on ordinary observation and experience. Thus, when shortly after the turn of the century Bacon will argue for a radically new kind of scientific inquiry – one that is pursued, not for the sake of the (allegedly idle) pleasures of the mind, but for ‘the relief of man’s estate’ (meaning mainly relief from the labours and afflictions of the body) – the educated audience he addressed was a good deal

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more receptive regarding both the possibility and the propriety of such a science than would have been the case a century prior. Although the notorious Bruno was also an atomist, probably the most noteworthy proponent of atomic materialism in Shakespeare’s England was Ralegh’s versatile agent and friend, the afore-mentioned Thomas Hariot. In 1591, Ralegh had posed Hariot several practical problems regarding the most space-efficient ways of stacking cannonballs. When later Hariot turned his attention to chemistry, he applied what he learned from solving these essentially mathematical problems to an atomic theory of matter. But given the pagan antecedents and other grounds for suspecting that atomists-materialists were necessarily atheists, Hariot did not publish his work on this subject (or any other), instead circulating his manuscripts among friends and fellows, such as those associated with the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland, Henry Percy, fellow and later patron of Ralegh’s Durham House group. As noted earlier, various scholars have argued that it is this informal society which is being caricatured by Shakespeare as the ‘school of night’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.3.251).101 All three of the principals associated with it (Ralegh, Percy, and Hariot) were eventually imprisoned on the charge of atheism. While not implausible with respect to any of these three, such a charge might be levied for a multitude of sins since the term was then bandied about quite freely, wherever heterodoxy of whatever sort was suspected, or could be plausibly alleged. In any event, as one scholar put it, ‘It is no wonder then, that when [Hariot] finally regained his freedom, he was loath to give full expression to views which would mark him as politically or theologically unorthodox. His atomism, deriving as it did from ancient pagan materialists, was naturally considered unacceptable.’102 Given the pattern of thought subsequently made manifest in the play, one might see in the first lines of Hamlet’s first soliloquy his tendency to regard the world in materialistic terms (though far from consistently), and of the dispiriting effect of doing so: ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.129–30).103 That is, he here refers to the three states of matter (solid, liquid and gaseous), and to their natural convertibility – he wishing that his own solid matter were as frozen water, that it likewise could simply melt, evaporate, waft away, and he thereby escape the rank, unweeded garden which the world has become for him. As if to emphasize the materialism troubling the Prince’s psyche, there is a subtle prominence of bodies punctuating the play (the term ‘body’ appears more

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often in Hamlet than in any other of Shakespeare’s creations). For example, the Ghost graphically describes the physical effects of the poison on King Hamlet: ‘a most instant tetter barked about / Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body’ (1.5.65–73). And there is Guildenstern’s ironic servility: ‘Most holy and religious fear it is / To keep those many many bodies safe / That live and feed upon your majesty’ (3.3.8–10) – not, as one might expect, the ‘many many souls’ that would rightly count as a ‘most holy and religious’ concern. Moreover, the reaction of the Queen to Hamlet’s claiming to converse with the ghost of his father in her presence – or as she puts it, hold discourse ‘with th’incorporal air’ – subtly underlines the importance of ‘body’ in the play: ‘This is the very coinage of your brain. / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very cunning in’ (3.4.114, 135–7). Most prominent, however, is the black comedy played upon Polonius’s body, which begins with Hamlet’s sardonic exit from his mother’s closet: This man shall set me packing; I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room. Mother, goodnight indeed. This councilor Is now most still, most secret, and most grave, Who was in life a most foolish prating knave. (3.4.209–13)

The comedy continues with the Queen informing Claudius that Hamlet has gone somewhere with ‘the body he hath killed’, whereupon the King bids Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ‘Go seek him out, speak fair and bring the body / Into the chapel’ (4.1.36–7). The dutiful pair finds the Prince, but cannot prevail upon him to cooperate. Upon Rosencrantz asking, ‘What have you done, my lord, with the dead body’, Hamlet, playing the antic, responds, ‘Compound it with dust, whereto ’tis kin’ (perhaps meaning to imply that he has already buried it). Rosencrantz persists, ‘My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the King.’ This draws from Hamlet a riddling allusion to the doctrine of a king’s two bodies (natural, and political).104 At last brought before the King, Hamlet indulges himself in annoying Claudius with an especially clever, albeit obnoxious expression of a reductive materialism: King. Hamlet. King. Hamlet.

Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius? At supper. At supper! Where? Not where he eats but where ’a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your

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Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes to one table. That’s the end.105 Alas, alas. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. What dost thou mean by this? Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. (4.3.16–30)

Hardly an edifying thought, imagining one’s material remains becoming so much food for maggots, thereafter going ‘a progress through the guts of a beggar’ – that being ‘the end’, the foreordained common end of the most glorious king and his most abject subject.106 To appreciate the effect of Hamlet’s sometime materialism, consider the contrast with how his mother expressed the seamless stream of Becoming whereby Being is made naturally manifest. It came in the course of her chiding Hamlet for his persistent – and embarrassing – show of mourning for the late King: ‘Do not for ever with thy veiled lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust. / Thou knowst ’tis common all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity’ (1.2.70–3). Compare this elegantly expressed conception of mortality, as but the portal to an eternal existence, with how Hamlet in his colloquy with Claudius addressed the same phenomenon, but interpreted simply in terms of the eternal circulation of matter, whereby a king – irrespective of whether he be as virtuous as Solomon or as vicious as Claudius – may pass through the digestive tract of some fish-eating plebeian, and onto who knows what sordid transformation next. The Prince expresses essentially the same materialistic reductionist view of human life later in his conversation with Horatio – which occurs, appropriately enough, in a graveyard. Hamlet is addressing the skull of (supposedly) the court jester Yorick:107 Hamlet.

Horatio. Hamlet.

Where be your jibes now – your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning, quite chapfallen. . . . Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. What’s that, my lord? Do you think Alexander looked o’this fashion i’th’earth?

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Horatio. Hamlet.

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E’en so. And smelt so? Pah! E’en so, my lord. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping a bung-hole? ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so. No, faith, not a jot. But to follow him thither with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O, that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw. (5.1.179–205)

‘To what base uses we may return.’ Indeed, seen as simply the recycling of so much matter, all ‘uses’ one may imagine are more or less base. These words are barely uttered before Hamlet is witness to the maimed rites with which Ophelia’s ‘matter’ is being interred. Something of the cynicism infecting Hamlet’s soul, if not its morbidity, is revealed by comparing what Laertes wishes for the remains of his sister – ‘Lay her I’th’earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring’ (5.1.227–9) – compare that with the ‘uses’ Hamlet imagines for the material remains of Alexander and Caesar. Were each person considered as but a briefly animated batch of dust or dirt, of earth or clay, all the differences between man and man, and their respective, perhaps defining accomplishments – between the mightiest Conqueror and the lowliest gravedigger, between a just judge and a prankplaying jester, between an adulterous Queen and a chaste maid, between an immortal philosopher-poet and an itinerant journeyman actor – are reduced to insignificance. In the end, nothing matters (a revealing pun). Infected with this levelling materialist view, which carried to its logical conclusion erases not only the distinction between man and man, but between man and beast, and even between life and non-life – all just so much ‘reusable’ matter – it is hardly surprising that young Hamlet, given his other troubles, has become melancholy. Or that he might regard man as mere ‘quintessence of dust’ (cf. 4.2.5).108

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In short, tempted in his darker moments to interpret the world, human life included, exclusively in terms of an inherently meaningless – because meaningprecluding – materialism, Hamlet is infected with its dispiriting implications.109 Being of that small minority of people who take thought seriously, and whose moods and dispositions as a consequence are determined by the truth as he sees it, or fails to see it, in any case by his conscious understandings of things, Hamlet may well have ‘lost all his mirth’.110 He acts, or fails to act, accordingly.

A Noble Mind O’erthrown. So Ophelia characterizes the state of Hamlet’s soul soon after our first becoming acquainted with him. To assess him fairly, then, we must allow for the fact that we never saw him in what were far happier times. He has not always been morose or melancholic, much less ‘mad as an Englishman’. When his idolized warrior father still ruled supreme, he was cheerful, secure, honoured, with great expectations. After all, he was the Crown Prince, his world his to inherit. The Hamlet that captured the heart of Ophelia had a scholar’s mind, a courtier’s polished manners, but also a soldier’s working familiarity with the tools and skills of the martial trade. Back then he was ‘Th’expectation and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th’observed of all observers’ (3.1.149–53). In short, an eleventh-century precursor of the ideal Renaissance Prince, hence admired, emulated and envied. If a young man so situated is compulsively thoughtful, and so feels the need to make sense of the world, to fathom its many perplexities, he is apt to do so mainly in pursuit of an understanding for its own sake. To the extent he is confident in his abilities, he is not discomfited by having to grapple with radically opposed views, much less is he resentful, depressed or alienated by a persisting puzzlement. Indeed, he may positively enjoy grappling with the succession of challenges that understanding the world and man’s lot in it presents. As for the ‘madness’ inherent in such intellectual controversies and disorder as characterized Shakespeare’s day, they would be taken more or less in stride, because – as a young man – he is not yet truly ‘serious’, not what the ancient Greeks would call spoudaios:111 ‘for youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears / Than settled age his sables and his weeds / Importing health and graveness’ (4.7.77–80). Thus the full import of such matters does not penetrate much beyond the surface of his satisfied soul; at most, they excite his curiosity and provide exercise for his reason. And so his

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happy life may continue in a spirit of youthful optimism, practically undisturbed by any theoretical problems with which he wrestles. So long, that is, as he may take for granted the prospect of living on as comfortably as heretofore. But should that prospect be suddenly threatened, and all one’s assumptions about people and things be overturned, and confusion supplant clarity, then the absence of a stable, reliable, coherent intellectual architecture wherein to reason, assess, judge, decide and act is apt to be keenly felt – all the more so by a compulsively reflective person whose nature demands some confidence of understanding as a precondition of acting. Not surprisingly, then, the profound alteration in Hamlet’s situation has occasioned a proportional transformation in him. Now he is ‘quite, quite down!’ His once ‘noble and most sovereign reason’ has become ‘Like sweet bells jangled out of time and harsh, / . . . Blasted with ecstasy’ (3.1.149–59). The once carefree youth of buoyant spirit has within the space of a few weeks become old and world-weary. As he taunts a bewildered Polonius, ‘For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if like a crab, you could go backwards’ (2.2.199–201). In order to understand what has happened to Hamlet that would adequately account for this radical change, one must understand the full awfulness of what he has been subjected to – as most moderns, it seems, would not. Hence, they may be inclined to endorse the judgement of a famous modern poet who contends that nothing adequately accounts for the complete upheaval in Hamlet’s soul, of which Ophelia laments and others worry. He views the play as basically a retread of some earlier ‘revenge’ story upon which Shakespeare has tried (unsuccessfully) to impose ‘a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son’. And that, he contends, is wholly inadequate as an ‘objective correlate’ for Hamlet’s excessive dissatisfaction with the world (upon which the whole play supposedly turns). In short, that Shakespeare’s Prince makes much too much ado about too little.112 Reflecting upon such an assessment, however, invites its being turned back upon itself: might not there be, then, more to the play than merely a dramatization of ‘the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son’? Nonetheless, one could start with that, for even with respect to this constituent of Hamlet’s ‘objective’ situation, such a view is profoundly anachronistic. It bespeaks a failure to understand not only how grossly ‘maimed’ were the morning rites accorded his father, or how indecent the behaviour of his uncle, but especially what an outrageous, almost inconceivable, abomination Gertrude is a party to – seen in light of Elizabethan standards, that is, of ‘the very age and body of that time’.113

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Consider. A grieving Hamlet returns home upon being informed of the sudden death of his revered father. He finds that his father’s younger brother (whom he regards as an idling sensualist, an always-smiling satyr, and not even a ‘twentieth part’ of his predecessor) has ‘Popp’d in between th’election’ and Hamlet’s own hopes to succeed his father. Hamlet is of age. Step-father Claudius publicly acknowledges him as now ‘the most immediate to our throne’. Why wasn’t he elected as the immediate successor to his natural father then? We do not know how the court behaved during the month separating King Hamlet’s death and his funeral. Perhaps it was a model of traditional decorum, though that seems unlikely, based on the scene we witness but another month later, which is apparently taking place on the very day Hamlet’s mother marries her brother-in-law – a moral atrocity, since such a marriage was regarded as incestuous by English Law, by most Continental Law, and by Canonical Law (rather famously, we should recall, being the grounds upon which a preceding monarch of Shakespeare’s England divorced the first of his six wives).114 As a matter of interest, the status of such a marriage remained unchanged until well into the nineteenth century. According to scholars who have studied the period, this form, like all incest, was morally on a par with bestiality, poisoning and witchcraft. As for the Law regulating the periods of mourning, it was illegal for the widow of the merest peasant to marry within a year. But the customary protocols for the Nobility were stricter,115 and more exacting still for Royalty; and they affected the entire court. Upon the death of a King, everyone associated with the Court would wear ‘customary suits of solemn black’ for at least a year, as would all foreign delegations arriving (for the apparel oft proclaims the man); palace halls would be kept quiet; all festivities would be curtailed, excepting only those celebrating the coronation of his successor, which would follow sometime after the late sovereign’s funeral (typically scheduled several weeks after his death, allowing foreign courts to be informed and for their representatives to arrive); all marriages involving royalty and high nobility would be postponed; music would be sombre and muted, if not forbidden entirely; the very décor of the palace would signal the funereal status of the court: coloured tapestries replaced with black draperies, windows shaded, mourning ribbons on candles, and so on – indeed the ‘whole kingdom. . . . contracted in one brow of woe’ for a full year at a minimum. A brother who succeeded a deceased king would be expected to delay marrying anyone for at least a year, more likely two. Even the serial bridegroom

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Henry VIII waited the customary two years before marrying again after the death of Jane Seymour (the only one of his queens who in his lifetime died in good legal standing, hence was accorded customary mourning rites). There would be stricter expectations of a king’s widow: go into seclusion for months – if not get herself to a nunnery – wear mourning dress for three or four years (if not for life; Mary Queen of Scots wore mourning for five years after the death of her first husband, young Frances II), and certainly not marry anyone for at least two years. Suffice it to say, the ‘decent interval’ before either brother Claudius or his sister Gertrude could with propriety marry anyone would be measured in years, not months, much less days. As for their marrying each other, ever, most Elizabethans would have regarded this as an abomination that could be credited only because attributed to a medieval Denmark still semi-barbarous. Shakespeare, with his sure sense of drama, allows the full enormity of it to be revealed only in stages. First, there is the King’s admission that ‘Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death / The memory be green, and that it us befitted / To bear our hearts in grief ’ – just how green is not clear at this point. A year or two? – ‘Yet so far hath discretion’ subdued natural feeling ‘That we with wisest sorrow think on him / Together with remembrance of ourselves.’ Discretion with respect to what? The military emergency spoken of in the play’s opening scene? Then the first shoe drops: ‘Therefore our sometime sister, now our Queen, / . . . / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / With an auspicious and a dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage / Taken to wife.’ But it is not just the loving couple who are implicated in this enormity. As Claudius continues, addressing the Court: ‘Nor have we herein barred / Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone / With this affair along. For all, our thanks’ (1.2.1–16).116 Parenthetically, anyone instrumental in promoting Claudius’s election – his ‘popping’ in between the two Hamlets – would thereby have declared himself no friend of the Crown Prince. As for a person who facilitated gaining Court approval for this outrageous marriage – an offense dwarfing that of perverting the normal course of succession – would be regarded by anyone the least bit morally scrupulous as quite beyond the pale. Suffice it to say, when son Hamlet has been left alone to soliloquize, an Elizabethan audience would not find his deep distress to be ‘without objective correlate’. Yet they have heard but the half of it. Both new King and old Queen exhort Hamlet to cast off his dreary mourning dress, and chide him for his persevering ‘in obstinate condolement.’ They speak as if he has been carrying

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on like this for years. Whereas, ‘But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two’. Father dies, his funeral follows a month later, at which the mother had seemed ‘Like Niobe, all tears’. And yet within a month she marries her brother-in-law! Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O most wicked speed! To post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets. (1.2.153–7)

I suspect that even we of this less fastidious age, confronted with a comparably hasty sequence of ‘man dies, widow marries his brother within two months’, would look askance at such behaviour. In fact, we might be a bit suspicious of the death in these circumstances, mightn’t we? Yet there is a puzzle here. Why such haste? Why not for the sake of appearances wait a decent interval? If they just cannot keep their hands off of each other, why not consort (and cavort) clandestinely? Presuming the Ghost is to be believed, they had been doing so previously. So, why such haste? Is Claudius bent on fathering an heir on Gertrude while she is still capable of conceiving?117 Whatever the reason, and presuming that the Court’s ready acquiescence in all these proceedings was genuine and in no way coerced, there is indeed something rotten in Denmark. However, that raises a troubling question: has the rot set in only in the two months since Claudius ascended the throne? Perhaps, but that seems unlikely. And in this connection, consider Hamlet’s lamenting his fellow Danes international reputation for dissolute drunkenness (a particular irritant, it would seem, as he alluded to it in greeting first-time visitor Horatio: ‘We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart’; 1.2.174).118 Hamlet explains the braying of trumpets and firing of ordinance as the customary accompaniment of royal toasts: But to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honoured in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. (1.4.14–18)

Must not one wonder about the manners of the Danish Court during the reign of Hamlet’s father – and its other qualities as well? If it has long been the custom to celebrate hard drinking with fireworks, does this mean the elder Hamlet

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‘honoured’ it himself? Or did he actively discourage it, but without much success (despite his decades-long reign)? Or did he merely countenance it in deference to its being so deeply ingrained in manners and custom, but present in his own person a contrary example of sobriety and decorum? In the case of either of the latter alternatives, one can imagine that some members of the Court would welcome the replacement of a stern, frowning disciplinarian by a more lax, smiling bon vivant. Still, whatever his personal conduct in this regard, the behaviour of the Court subsequent to his death must raise questions about his long tenure of rule, hence about his adequacy as a king. Is Hamlet, along with everything else that has so profoundly disrupted his life, also troubled deep down by subconscious doubts about the excellence of the heroic warrior-king father he has always idolized?

The mystery that is Hamlet incorporates (whatever else) the unsettled intellectual landscape Shakespeare has imposed upon Denmark, one reflective of his own contemporary England: an age in which time was indeed out of joint. The cosmology that has ordered Christendom for well over a millennium had been rendered doubtful. Things no longer fit together in a coherent, credible understanding of a bounded universe and the things it actually comprises. Likewise doubtful, then, the nature of man. Is he, despite his apparently ‘godlike reason’, in truth simply an ingenious machine, reducible to his composing matter, mere quintessence of dust? It is within this confused and confusing outer world that Hamlet’s personal world has been overturned. Having been subjected to shock upon shock, he is at once depressed by grief, outraged by events, and deeply ashamed to be the son of such a women as Gertrude has shown herself to be (‘You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, / And, would it were not so, you are my mother’; 3.4.14–15). Well might he wish to flee a domain of such disappointment and corruption, the rank unweeded garden that Denmark has become for him, and return to the relative purity of his humane studies at Wittenberg. But escape from this fetid prison has been denied him.119 It is with his soul in such a state that he meets with an apparition claiming to be the spirit of his father, pronouncing allegations even more jarring: his father was not stung by a serpent, but actually murdered by his brother, with whom his seemingly chaste mother had been committing adultery. Once the initial impact has dissipated, however, Hamlet realizes that the status of this

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Ghost itself presents a problem itself reflective of the time being out of joint: there is simply no unproblematic understanding to be had of it, any more than of reality as a whole, no sure intellectual architecture wherein and whereby to orient oneself. Nor does he have any really close friend or mentor in whom he can confide. There is only Horatio, a fellow student whom he met and befriended at Wittenberg – who to Hamlet’s surprise has come uninvited to Elsinore, and lingered there unbeknownst to the Prince for over a month. Doubtless Hamlet is happy to learn at last of his presence; he enjoys Horatio’s companionship, who for his part is eager to make himself useful. But apparently their relationship is not such as Hamlet would care to unburden his soul to him. Upon the only occasion he might seem close to doing so, confiding prior to the fatal fencing match, ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart’, he pointedly does not elaborate. Thus his admission serves mainly to remind us that Hamlet never, in our hearing at least, shares the deep discomforts of his soul with his college friend – much as he did not divulge the reason he might think it meet to put an antic disposition on. Nor then, so far as we know, can Horatio be a source of comfort when suddenly, for no reason Hamlet can discern, the young lady he loved – ‘Hamlet’s last hope’120 – shuts herself off from all communication with him. There is a final cruel irony in this, as her name comes directly from the Greek: Ωφελíα, ‘succour’ or ‘help’. Suffice it to conclude, whatever Shakespeare’s Hamlet might mean by ‘the heart of his mystery’, there is no great mystery as to why he has become immortalized as The Melancholy Dane. There is a surfeit of reasons for that.

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Epilogue

Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. . . . Out upon them! This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin. Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I hardly need add my iota of praise to what is already so widely acknowledged to be one of the finest works of dramatic poetry ever brought from mind to matter. By way of concluding my study of the play, however, I do wish to emphasize its purpose: to make clear that Hamlet is a consummate work of reason – indeed, that one can regard it as a text of political philosophy in much the same way as is Plato’s Lysis, or his Laches, or his Euthyphro. Hamlet is even better than is generally recognized inasmuch as various criticisms of the play can be shown, as I believe I have shown, to be invalid. And that, more often than not, the objections voiced actually point to puzzles, puzzles which are solvable in light of textual evidence and what that evidence implies. Let me review a few among the more important. Those critics who complain that the plot relies excessively on chance have been taken in by Hamlet’s storytelling. Whereas, thought about, his tale of capture by obliging pirates is so unlikely, its reliance on ‘providence’ so brazen, that it should provoke a suitably sceptical reader to conclude that Hamlet is simply not telling the truth! The Prince of Denmark may be fair, but he is not always honest (as was

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early on made plain enough by his duplicitous welcoming of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Furthermore, given a proper respect for Shakespeare’s artistry, one may presume that our philosopher-poet intends this to be sufficiently selfevident to sceptical readers as to incite their re-examining of his text in search of an alternative explanation. And as I show in my first chapter, an alternative explanation is there to be found. Other critics allege there to be ‘many inconsistencies’ in the character of Horatio, and/or in his relationship with the Prince. Taking their cue from Hamlet’s effusive praise of him prior to ‘the Mousetrap’, they presume Horatio is the very idea of a close and dear friend, Hamlet’s one and only confidant, and so they wonder why, for example: (1) he’s been at least a month in Elsinore without meeting with Prince; (2) Hamlet seems at first not to recognize him when they finally do meet; (3) he has not told Hamlet about either the madness of Ophelia (which he witnessed) or her death. Whereas, it is these critics’ premise that is mistaken. Then there are those who find the plot to be flawed in that the protagonist has insufficient reason for his notorious ‘melancholy’, which seems to incapacitate him for any decisive action, not least with respect to executing the revenge for which he initially seemed so eager. This criticism rests on premises that are profoundly anachronous. It trivializes the offensiveness inherent in the drastic reduction of the mourning rites properly due Hamlet’s royal father, but especially that of his mother’s incestuous marriage with her erstwhile brother-in-law. Likewise, it discounts Hamlet’s perplexity regarding the problematic status of the Ghost, whether it is ‘a spirit of health or a goblin damned’, hence whether one may trust that what it alleges is actually true. Whereas, viewed from within the moral and doctrinal architecture of Shakespeare’s day, Hamlet is not without an ‘objective correlate’ that would justify the depth of both his bitter distress and his perplexity. The questions usually debated concerning Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ – such as when he is merely feigning madness, and when (if ever) his mind is actually, albeit temporarily, deranged – are subordinate to the far more important question of why adopt the antic strategy at all, since it does not further the purpose of either learning the truth or exacting revenge. The key to resolving this oft-noted puzzle rests in the solution to a puzzle that is rarely noted: why does Hamlet warn his two companions that ‘perchance he shall think it meet to put an antic disposition on’? Solve the latter puzzle (and as I believe I’ve shown, it is soluble), and the former is solved as well.

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Not least significant is all the critical debate and dissatisfaction generated by the text’s apparent inconsistency with respect to Hamlet’s age. Having throughout the play been led to regard the Prince as a young man of university age, only to be informed at almost the last minute by a clownish gravedigger that Hamlet is actually 30 years old, practically middle aged, would seem to be an indefensible flaw. Although the intrinsic importance of the issue would seem to be minor, the contradictory textual evidence is often treated as showing such carelessness on the author’s part (or evidence of such textual corruption) as would render careful study of the play foolhardy. But what makes it doubly perplexing is that there would seem to be no reason for the protagonist to be cast as a thirty-year old, much less for the reader to be informed of the fact only at the very end, and contrary to all that’s gone before. Thus, the prudent assumption is that the apparent contradiction is intentional on Shakespeare’s part (after all, he easily could have removed it), and as such not a flaw, but rather another puzzle. The play’s central and most complex puzzle, however, concerns how Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’ works – presuming, that is, it actually does work. And if it does not, what are we to make of Hamlet’s behaving as if it provided him proof positive of both Claudius’s guilt and the Ghost’s veracity? Much of the puzzlement, and resulting controversy, centres upon the discrepancy between the King’s apparent non-reaction to the dumb-show’s portrayal of a murder, and his violent reaction to the dialogical version. None of the ‘standard’ solutions that have been proposed are very satisfying; moreover, they all tacitly demean Shakespeare’s artistry, implying that the scene is so confusing and unconvincing because his plotting is clumsy, if not simply defective. Whereas, given a correct understanding of its psychological presuppositions, ‘the Mousetrap’ scheme is the most brilliant feature of the play, and fully justifies the Prince’s willingness to bet a thousand pounds on the Ghost’s veracity. The purpose of reviewing a few of the more common criticisms of the play, which (to repeat) actually point not to flaws but to solvable puzzles, is to emphasize the deeper coherence of Hamlet. That like the Nature it mirrors, we have warrant to presume that everything in the play, if rightly understood, does ‘add up’. Or adds up as well as do the actual lives we live and observe. By resolving, at least in part, those puzzles that I have addressed – ones which are often treated as faults in what would otherwise be an even better play – I would hope to inspire confidence that those which remain may also be soluble, and that Shakespeare

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crafted the play with their solutions in mind. Thus, adventurous readers might be encouraged to attempt to resolve them, and in doing so experience for themselves the philosophical activity this entails. In principle, the ultimate goal would be to understand Hamlet exactly as its author did, unlikely as ever attaining such perfection of comprehension may be. Its impracticality is irrelevant, however, since the pursuit is what really matters. Moreover, in attempting to solve Shakespeare’s puzzles, in this play as in his others, one is necessarily drawn to reflect more intensively and expansively on human nature in its full significant diversity; that is, as it shows itself refracted in his various characters speaking and acting in their particular political settings. One thereby deepens and broadens, refines and enriches one’s understanding of the world beyond the texts of these dramas. Showing this to be so as regards Hamlet has been among my primary objectives in providing still another commentary on this most famous, most studied play: to enhance appreciation for it as a work of political philosophy, and thereby further the recognition of its author, not as the premier poet he is already universally acknowledged to be, but as a philosopher in his own right. I do not pretend to have solved all of the play’s puzzles, or perhaps any of its most challenging ones. Clearly, many remain, as the dangling questions scattered throughout my text are meant to suggest. And there are others. Some might seem to be of minor consequence: Why, for example, is the sentinel Francisco ‘sick at heart’? Or, is there any reason to suppose the arrival of the theatre troupe, hard on the heels of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is other than a matter of chance? To be sure, some questions may admit of no certain conclusion, their value being in the pondering of the various alternatives – which doubtless, and quite intentionally, contributes to the play’s endless fascination. What was Hamlet’s previous relationship with Ophelia? Is he at all concerned with the political well-being of Denmark? How are we to assess the elder Hamlet, both as a king and as a man? How well informed should we suppose Prince Fortinbras to be regarding the political situation in Denmark? Or about the personal qualities of his Danish counterpart? To mention but a few among the dozens of questions that continue to puzzle me. Needless to add, I do not pretend to have plucked out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery. As I emphasized at the outset of this study, the task of interpreting any of Shakespeare’s masterpieces (always more play than work) begins with recognizing which of the questions it raises are not readily answered – not answered, that is,

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in a way that is wholly satisfying. Such questions constitute puzzles whose solving requires one to venture ever more deeply into the text in search of evidence that might be relevant, evidence perhaps previously overlooked, or whose pertinence was not initially appreciated. In the course of doing so, one will be obliged to consider novel possibilities or reconsider ones previously cast aside, to take up the various characters perspectives on each other, and on events, to reconstruct their rationales, to modify one’s original assessments of their personal qualities, to test various hypotheses, weigh the plausibility of alternatives, and much else of the sort. Throughout the innumerable rereadings this process entails, one is sure to discover still more, and more fascinating questions, perplexing questions whose intrinsic importance transcends the play. No one ought not be discouraged by a failure to find a convincing explanation for each, much less for every puzzling feature of a play. After all, these can only be failures ‘thus far’. But so long as one is exercising one’s rational powers – of observation and memory and imagination, of resolving wholes into their constituent parts and of recomposing parts into coherent wholes – failure in the most important respect is impossible. That is, failure to be a thinking human being, actively using one’s capability and godlike reason, rather than passively allowing it to fust unused, in bestial oblivion.

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Notes

Prologue 1 I have discussed more fully the general principles and assumptions that I employ in studying Shakespeare in chapter 1 of a previous book, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 3–24. Some overlap with that earlier treatment of the issues is unavoidable. 2 Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aph. no. 289. 3 Tusculan Disputations, V.iv.10–11. 4 2nd Ltr 314c. 5 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, par. 35. Whereas the curiosity of certain beasts leads them to discover ‘what’ or ‘that’, the impulse to know why or how is peculiarly human. 6 Of course, these categories are not as distinct and exclusive as such language suggests, but are more nearly so than most people would suppose. In any case, the distinction is useful for preserving analytical clarity. 7 As John Dover Wilson speculated in What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935/1964): To his own generation, one of the most astonishing things about Shakespeare must have been his power to appeal to the ‘generality’ and the ‘judicious’ at one and the same time. To the groundlings holding crude views of spectral appearances, to the more enlightened burghers of the Marcellus school of thought, and to the students and philosophers among the inns-of-court men and the nobility; to all and to each according to his peculiar outlook the ghost scenes made their profound and thrilling appeal. But it was the appreciation of the judicious which Shakespeare was most anxious to secure, and which we to-day are most likely to overlook. 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. (85) There are many valuable insights in this classic work of scholarship, but it is compromised by Dover Wilson’s assumption that the play – despite its inordinate length – was primarily intended for the stage. Thus he must further assume that there was a minor cohort of Shakespeare’s original audience who were capable of

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appreciating its ‘filigree of finer effects’ in the course of its performance – a notion which strikes me as practically impossible. I would hope the chapters that follow will prove beyond doubt that the full scope, depth and complexity of the play can be appreciated only through intensive study of the written text. I shall have much more to say about the ambiguous theological and the ontological status of the Ghost in my final chapter. 8 I have been at pains to address this matter in particular in Of Philosophers and Kings (6–10), but also to refute other dogmas of criticism that one way or another compromise the status of the plays as worthy of philosophical study (e.g. that plays per se were not regarded as serious literature; that accordingly the author did not take them seriously himself; indeed, that they were not even rightfully his; that they were written in haste; that they were intended primarily, if not exclusively, to be seen on the stage; since they were not intended to be read, much less studied as texts, considerations of stagecraft delimit acceptable interpretations). A respectful review of Heminge’s and Condell’s address to the readers of the First Folio is sufficient to render such beliefs suspect, if not simply absurd. Consider its second paragraph: It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have been wished, that the Author himselfe had liv’d to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings; But since it hath bin ordain’d otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to have collected & publish’d them; and so to have publish’d them, as where (before) you were abus’d with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos’d them: even those are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived the[m]. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him. It is yours that reade him. And there we hope, to your divers capacities, you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no more lie hid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you neede them not, you can lead your selves, and others. And such Readers we wish him. Now, at the risk of being tediously explicit, let me count the claims that are at odds with current scholarly prejudices. (1) Shakespeare might reasonably have been expected to have ‘overseen’ the publication of ‘his owne writings’. (2) Irrespective of

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any legal proprietary status to the contrary, the plays were rightfully Shakespeare’s, not some theatre company’s; he vacated ‘that right’ by inconveniently dying, leaving to his friends the task of collecting and publishing his complete works (‘absolute in their numbers’ – so far as we know, fully half of them had never been previously published). (3) The plays were written with sufficient care that those friends endeavoured to provide accurate versions; and they worked from very clean, ‘blot-free’ copies (those of us who study the plays find it practically inconceivable that these were initial drafts, as the editors seem to assume, rather than the final products of a process of careful revision). (4) Irrespective of their suitability for the stage – which has been proven to a fare-thee-well, century by century – the plays were also meant to be read, indeed, read ‘againe, and againe’. (5) Such repeated readings may be necessary to understand fully a given play, and to appreciate the intelligence, the timeless ‘wit’, manifested therein. (6) Even so, there will doubtless be some readers who fail to understand the plays, and thus to appreciate their merit, without help from more competent readers. (7) The plays have been offered forth especially for competent readers. As for the idea that plays per se were not regarded as serious literature, note how Jonson in his Folio encomium praises Shakespeare: I would not seeke For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus, Euripides, and Sophocles to us ... Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe, To whom all scenes [?] of Europe homage owe. Do not ‘thund’ring Aeschilus, Euripides, and Sophocles’ suffice to prove beyond all doubt that Elizabethans were well aware that, however ephemeral were most playhouse offerings, nonetheless plays can be literature of the highest, most enduring kind? And that Jonson would have us acknowledge that the plays of Shakespeare are equal to, if not surpass, the best of those that ‘insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome’ sent forth so many centuries ago? The point is not whether Jonson’s praise is hyperbolic, but that the comparisons he draws are to authors whose works still served as a literary standards two millennia after they were written. 9 Robert Speaight, Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955), 1. 10 Cf. Plato’s Republic 605c–e, Aristotle’s Poetics 1453b1–20. 11 Harriett Hawkins’s quoting of Chekhov is obliquely pertinent (The Devils’ Party [London: Oxford University Press, 1985]): ‘You are . . . confusing two concepts:

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Notes to Pages 9–10 The solution of a problem and the correct posing of a question. Only the second is obligatory for an artist.’ She continues: I believe that Chekhov is right in insisting that what accounts for the survival of certain works of art is that the questions in them are so ‘correctly posed’. This, I believe, also explains why, as Maynard Mack has observed, the world of Hamlet is pre-eminently conceived in ‘the interrogative mood’. Shakespeare’s play itself, Mack reminds us, ‘reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed. From the opening line (‘Who’s there?’), . . . the interrogations posited seem to point, not only beyond the context, but beyond the play, ‘out of Hamlet’s predicament into everyone’s’. (79) For an interesting – and, as it were, complementary treatment of Shakespeare in relation to philosophy – see Stanley Stewart, Shakespeare and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2010). Stewart provides an historical synopsis of ‘Shakespeare as a subject of philosophy, that is, what philosophers say about Shakespeare when they are “doing philosophy”’ (21). ‘Hamlet once more’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 December 1884, as excerpted in Shakespeare’s Critics from Jonson to Auden, ed. A. M. Eastman and G. B. Harrison (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 175–6. In Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), R. A. Foakes observes, ‘Hamlet and King Lear, archetypal tragedies of youth and age, have always challenged for regard as Shakespeare’s greatest work’, but the ‘claims for Hamlet pretty much died out by the 1950s, while those for King Lear become commonplace from the 1950s onwards’ – not, however, without the latter ‘chang[ing] its nature almost overnight’, from a play about personal redemption to one of bleakest despair (3–4). However, Foakes contends that all such questions concerning the comparative ranking of the plays – along with almost everything else of interest involving literature as art – are effectively obliterated in the ascendency of the various schools of post-structural criticism, which tacitly glorify the critic while disintegrating the plays. Though not disputing Foakes claim as to the two play’s (then) ranking among scholars, Stanley Wells (Shakespeare: A Life in Drama [New York: W. W. Norton, 1995]), adds a pertinent clarification: ‘In recent years, at least, King Lear may have overtaken it in critical esteem, but Hamlet continues to exert more genuinely popular appeal; more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, it exemplifies his capacity – encouraged, no doubt, by the mixed audiences at the Globe – to appeal on many levels at once’ (201). Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 18–19. John Masefield, Shakespeare (1911), as excerpted in Shakespeare’s Critics from Jonson to Auden, 179. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), 1. Rabkin contends, ‘[W]hat makes it a problem is precisely what

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makes it Shakespearean. . . . The confusions in which the play involves us, that is to say, are under Shakespeare’s control. They do not detract from our sense of Hamlet’s vivid reality; in fact, they do much to create it’ (1–2); ‘virtually everything in the play is problematic. . . . Many of [the problems] are excruciating for Hamlet, but they are, in another way, just as disturbing for us. They are built into the universe of the play’ (3). However, Rabkin further argues that this is because Shakespeare found the world itself to be irresolvably problematic, and depicted it as such repeatedly in his plays. Thus, ‘The experience of Hamlet, then, culminates in a set of questions to which there are no answers. . . . We see a world in which reason and civilization are absolute values even though they are contradicted by other values that paradoxically turn out to be equally absolute. . . . [Moreover] the vision of Hamlet . . . is utterly typical of Shakespeare’ (9). Whereas, I believe Shakespeare simply precludes easy resolutions between conflicting demands, ones which oversimplify the problems, and this is sufficient to account for the perennial fascination of his finest plays. 17 Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 100. With respect to Hamlet’s unparalleled place in Western culture, Bradshaw makes two further points worth bearing in mind: ‘[I]t will not do to “explain” Hamlet’s melancholy with reference to Timothy Bright or Burton, unless we are also remembering that it is expressed in poetry no age is willing to forget. Similarly, everything that Hamlet does not have in common with so-called revenge plays – which did not even interest English audiences for many years – must be vastly more important than any connections.’ 18 Necessarily, this would presuppose that Shakespeare subjected the text to repeated revisions, refining it to the degree of perfection that he found satisfactory. On this point, I could not improve on the judgement of Swinburne (A Study of Shakespeare [New York: AMS Press, 1965, reprint of 1879 edition]), a man who knew from experience what is entailed in striving for literary excellence. Speaking of ‘but one among innumerable indications’ evident in the transformation of the Q1 version into that of Q2: [O]nly a purblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especial store set by Shakespeare himself on this favourite work, and the exceptional pains taken by him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness of finished form as might make it worthiest of profound and perpetual study of the light of far other lamps than illuminate the stage. Of all the vulgar errors the most wanton, the most willful, and the most resolutely tenacious of life, is that belief bequeathed from the days of Pope, in which it was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in which it was not excusable, to the effect that Shakespeare threw off Hamlet as an eagle may moult a feather or a fool may break a jest; that he dropped his work as a bird may drop an egg or a sophist a fallacy; that he wrote ‘for gain, not glory’, or that having written Hamlet he thought it nothing very wonderful to have written. For himself to have written, he possibly, nay probably, did not

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Notes to Pages 11–17 think it anything miraculous; but that he was in the fullest degree conscious of its wonderful positive worth to all men for all time, we have the best evidence possible – his own; and that not by mere word of mouth but by actual stroke of hand. . . . Scene by scene, line for line, stroke upon stroke and touch after touch, he went over all the old labored ground again; and not to ensure success in his own day and fill his pockets with contemporary pence, but merely and wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of himself and his future students. (163) Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, 103. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 466. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (eds), The Arden Shakespeare: Hamlet (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 1–2. Still, as René Girard observes (A Theater of Envy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]), that of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet ‘has remained the most mysterious, in spite of the almost incredible amount of critical attention it has received’ (272). To wit, ‘I am convinced that were I told that my closest friend was lying at the point of death, and that his life could be saved by permitting him to divulge his theory of Hamlet, I would instantly say, “Let him die! Let him die! Let him die!” ’ (as quoted in ibid.). Harry Levin, The Question of hamlet (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 1–2.

Chapter 1 1 As I indicated in the Prologue, the text I rely upon is that of the Third Arden edition, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), which is based on the Second Quarto version of the play, and which is clearly preferable to the Folio version. In a few instances, however, I do resort to the Folio version, all duly noted. 2 Whatever might have been the case in eleventh-century Denmark, according to Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Material of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) this was a familiar practice in Shakespeare’s England, as attested by numerous legal wills: In his will dated 16 January 1580, Wistan Browne left to his son and heir ‘my armour and weapons in Weald Hall and Rookewood Hall; all which I will shall remain in such studies, galleries and other rooms as they now be to the use of my son’; in 1579, Richard Crook left ‘to my son Anthony my armour and weapons at Gidea Hall’; in 1578, Clement Sysley left to his son and heir, Thomas, ‘my armour and furniture of armour, my guns, dags, pikes, bills, targets and crossbows, and they are to remain as standards and implements of households

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to him and his heirs forever at Eastbury . . .’. What is striking in these [three] sixteenth-century wills is the explicit attempt to prevent the armour from becoming a moveable possession, to ground it in a specific house, even in specific rooms. This is even more extreme in the will of Richard Kynwelmarshe: he leaves his armour not to a person but to a place: ‘to the manor [Newton Hall]’. (250–1) 3 However, this ‘rational empiricist/moral stoic’ view of Horatio – which Hamlet’s generous (not to say, fulsome) praise of his friend encourages (3.2.50–70), and which seems to fit tolerably well most of the little that is revealed of Horatio’s mind – may not do him complete justice. For as Peter Mercer notes in Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), Shakespeare has endowed Horatio with the ‘exquisite lyrical grace’ whereby he concludes the play’s opening scene with ‘the most famous greeting of the dawn in English verse’ (134–5; i.e. ‘But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill’; 1.1.165–6). Thus, when reflecting on Hamlet’s request of Horatio in the play’s final scene – ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile awhile / . . . / To tell my story’ – one may presume the dying Prince is aware of his friend’s way with words. Moreover, as James R. Sieman observes (Shakespearean Iconoclasm [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985]), Horatio’s very name ‘suggests the double sense – both rational and orational – of logos’ (209). 4 Plato’s Republic 424a; cf. 334c–335a, 443d, 470c; Aristotle’s Nikomachean Ethics 1155a32–1157b35. As Aristotle expresses it in his Rhetoric, ‘a friend shares one’s gratification in the good things and shares in the grief of bad things, not for the sake of anything other than the thing itself ’ (1381a3–5). 5 The misunderstanding of the Hamlet–Horatio relationship is quite common – indeed, practically universal, judging from the section devoted to general assessments of Horatio in Marvin Rosenberg’s The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 11–17. The appraisal Rosenberg attributes to a certain actor is fairly representative: ‘Horatio is indeed the ideal friend – to him, Hamlet can pour out his heart, pour out the heart silenced in that atmosphere of duplicity and self-seeking’ (13). Strange that such a view enjoys wide currency, given that Hamlet is never shown actually doing so (excluding the one vague plaint near the very end; 5.2.190–1). Rosenberg himself endorses from first page to last the view that Horatio is the model friend who enjoys Hamlet’s perfect confidence: ‘We have learned to rely on Horatio; he has been a figure of courage, modesty and dignity with an absolute loyalty to Hamlet’ (914). This fanciful assessment of the principals and their relationship causes major distortions in most interpretations of both character and plot. Yet one must immediately add that Shakespeare

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Notes to Pages 19–22 is primarily responsible for inviting this superficial understanding of their relationship. Why has he done so? For example, Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare After All: ‘[Horatio is] a kind of internal censor, a voice that might almost come out of Hamlet’s own mind, screening out unacceptable ideas and memories, confident that ghosts don’t exist, and cautioning Hamlet in the last act against considering “‘too curiously” the question of what happens to the body after death’ (469). Harold Bloom (Hamlet: Poem Unlimited [New York: Riverhead Books, 2003]) is representative of the many interpreters who take Hamlet’s encomium at face value; he offers this preface to his quoting of it: ‘Hamlet, who shows little enough evidence of affection for either Ophelia or Gertrude, manifests astonishing esteem for the startled Horatio’ (14). And while admitting himself flummoxed by the ages of these two young men (‘[Horatio’s] age is even more ambiguous than Hamlet’s’), he is somehow sure that Shakespeare makes no effort to maintain consistency in such matters, ‘and would have been amused at our arithmetic’ (14). Thus, ‘Hamlet can be no older than twenty at the start’, but ‘Shakespeare, wonderfully careless on matters of space and time, wanted a preternaturally mature Hamlet [i.e. of thirty] for Act V’ (6). Why so? Bloom ventures no explanation. And that an author is ‘wonderfully careless’ with regard to certain matters about which he writes is a curious way to explicate works one professes to take seriously. It seems rather a baffled critic’s evasion. Howard Jacobson, in his essay ‘Hamlet’s Sanity’ (Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, co-authored with Wilbur Sanders [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978]) likewise takes the Prince at his word, but with a twist: ‘I have no doubt that all Hamlet does here he does in the name of the warmest good-fellowship’, that ‘his game is not flattery. But he has a game whether he knows it or not, and its prize is the dignifying of his own emotional tumult. It is no accident that critics go to this passage to discover the terms for their own commendation of Hamlet himself ’ (43). As per the Folio’s more graceful version of the line. In The Question of Hamlet, Harry Levin contends, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not really bad fellows; the trouble with them is that they are professional good fellows; their character is to have no character.’ He nonetheless supposes that ‘Hamlet is strongly drawn to repose his confidence’ in them (29). This seems most unlikely, given that the Prince immediately suspects them of an ulterior motive for their visit – precisely because he does know them so well. As A. C. Bradley quite sensibly observes about the two men’s initial encounter (Shakespearean Tragedy [London: Macmillan, 1904/1963]), ‘Is this not passing strange? Hamlet and Horatio are supposed to be fellow students at Wittenberg, and to have left for Elsinore less than two months ago. Yet Hamlet hardly recognizes

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Horatio at first. . . . But he is not doubtful about Marcellus.’ Bradley is openly sceptical about ‘the usual view’: ‘that Hamlet is so sunk in melancholy that he really does almost “forget himself ” and forget everything else, so that he actually is in doubt who Horatio is. And this, though not impossible, is hard to believe’ (342). Yet, for all the puzzles thus raised, Bradley nonetheless seems to subscribe to standard view of their relationship, finding Horatio to be a ‘beautiful character’ (134). 11 One should not make too much of Hamlet’s offer to exchange the name ‘my good friend’ with Horatio, since this is an epithet the Prince bandies about rather freely – which may partly account for his popularity with the lower orders of society. For example, in the wake of his having conversed with the Ghost, he addresses Marcellus also as ‘good friend’ (1.5.139–40). Perhaps more revealing is the fact that he greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with ‘My excellent good friends’, though within a moment he will require that they, ‘in the beaten way of friendship’, answer truthfully what brings them to Elsinore – openly expressing his scepticism about their professed wish simply to visit him, while still referring to them as ‘dear friends’. So, too, in parting from them shortly thereafter, he refers to them as his ‘good friends’ (2.2.219, 235, 239, 481). Similarly, Hamlet greets the travelling Players with ‘Welcome, good friends’, and addresses one of them as ‘old friend’ (2.2.360, 472). That we may suspect him of irony in addressing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern raises the possibility of it in other cases as well, or at least that his use of such terms is nothing more than a condescending politeness. 12 Cf. Nikomachean Ethics 1156b8–30. 13 Given that Horatio must have been aware of Ophelia’s death (as presumably everyone in the Court would have been), and that he and Hamlet have been conversing in the graveyard for some time prior to her funeral procession’s arrival, critics wonder why the Prince was unaware of her death prior to his overhearing Laertes complain of the ‘maimed rites’ with which his sister is being buried (‘What, the fair Ophelia?’). That is, why has Horatio not already informed Hamlet of the maid’s sad end? Must we not assume that Horatio is unaware of her being of any special importance to his friend? Thus, I believe J. Middleton Murray (Shakespeare [London: Jonathan Cape, 1936/1959]) has it about right in observing, ‘Horatio may be a shadowy figure, and it is best that he should be one; but it seems to me indubitable that he represents something precious and essential to the inmost life of the play.’ He is Hamlet’s admiring and faithful friend; and he has chosen that it is nobler in the mind to suffer. But it is not so simple: not so simple in Elsinore as it is in Wittenberg; not so simple if you are a Prince and not only a student; not so simple if you have been wronged as Hamlet has been; not so simple if your disposition has been shaken; not so simple – above all – if you are Hamlet and

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Notes to Pages 24–30 not Horatio. And there appears to be some loving acknowledgment of this in Horatio’s very reticence. The problem is beyond him, and he knows that in Hamlet’s soul there is a final isolation to which, for all his love and admiration and desire, he can bring no aid. Or, whether he knows it or not, that – or something like it – is what Shakespeare conveys in the manner of his putting Hamlet and Horatio before us. How easy and how natural, it seems, it would have been to contrive a scene where the two friends took counsel together! And how fatal! Hamlet’s solitariness and Horatio’s impotence to help could not be exposed to such diminution. (263–4) Any reservations I have about Middleton Murray’s interpretation of the two young men and their relationship do not involve his view of Horatio, nor of Hamlet’s essential isolation. Wilson (What Happens in Hamlet) seems to suppose that Hamlet tells Horatio everything that the Ghost related, including Gertrude’s adultery: ‘Later he takes one person into his confidence, his bosom friend, a man he can entirely trust’ (48–9). Whereas Hamlet is explicit only about the alleged murder: ‘One scene . . . comes near the circumstance / Which I have told thee of my father’s death’ (3.2.72–3). Regarding this ‘divinity’, might Shakespeare, if not Hamlet, have in mind the ‘daimon’ Erös: that what shapes the broad contours of each person’s life is his own erotic nature, determining the order of his desires? Donald A. Stauffer (Shakespeare’s World of Images [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966]) has himself provided a particularly effective ‘image’ of the spirit in which Hamlet has acted: ‘his death-warrant against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seems but a trivial flicking of noxious insects’ (129). In the Folio version, these lines are prefaced by the more clearly exculpatory ‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment.’ Apparently it is possible to construe Horatio’s words as other than an exclamation of shock upon learning of Claudius’s attempt on Hamlet’s life, for William Empson writes (Essays on Shakespeare [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986]), ‘Critics, so far as I have noticed, take Horatio’s remark to mean that Claudius is wicked to try to kill Hamlet, and this is perhaps what Hamlet thinks he meant; but I had always assumed, and still do, that he meant “what a King you have become”; it is Hamlet who is now acting like a king, almost too like a king, after a long period when he didn’t’ (116). An eccentric view, to say the least. Left as per the Second Quarto – ‘Is it not perfect conscience?’ – the meaning of Hamlet’s rhetorical query is unclear: what is, or would be, ‘perfect conscience’? Thus there are grounds for preferring the Folio version, which continues, ‘To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned / To let this canker of our nature

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come / In further evil?’ However, since the succeeding ten lines of the Folio version are almost surely contributions of the editors (or of anyone but Shakespeare – as if he would deign to make explicit such an obvious parallel!), the other three may be too. I have punctuated Hamlet’s speech as an interrogatory, since that seems more natural than the declaratory of the Quarto, even if one prefers to regard his question as merely rhetorical. However, the fact that the next nine lines are missing from the Folio, likewise Hamlet’s essential soliloquy in scene 4.4.31–65, is decisive for preferring the Quarto version as a whole, and powerfully suggestive that, here too, the alterations made in the Folio version are not the work of Shakespeare. Indeed, to judge by the shouting mob with which Laertes boisterously first arrived, vowing revenge for his father, even he is more popular with ‘the rabble’ than is the King (4.5.97–115). Hamlet attests to this fact upon welcoming just such a pair of time-servers: ‘my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little’ (2.2.300–5). Thus Levin, taken in by Hamlet’s fiction, voices a regret that ‘the most exciting part of the story . . . must be narrated at a second and a third remove’, seeing the consequence to be ‘a weakening effect upon our impression of Hamlet’s character’ (The Question of Hamlet, 47). Shakespeare’s ardent admirer, Melville, appropriated this trick for use in his allegorical novel, White-Jacket, wherein the narrator employs ‘craft’ to refer both to the ship upon which he serves, an American Man-of-War, and the author’s own literary craft: ‘Outwardly regarded, our craft is a lie; for all that is outwardly seen of it is the clean-swept deck, and the oft-painted planks comprised above the waterline; whereas, the vast mass of our fabric, with all its store-rooms of secrets, forever slides along far under the surface’ (par. 6 of the final chapter, appropriately titled ‘The End’, but which begins, ‘As a Man-of-War that sails through the seas, so the earth that sails through the air’). Thus, a cherub with a quill pen inscribing a vinyl phonograph record was adopted as the icon or ‘logo’ of the Angel brand of classical records in those bygone, pre-CD days. Because Rosenberg, like almost all commentators, presumes that Hamlet is always scrupulously honest in his dealings with Horatio, he takes seriously these sorts of statements, and so concludes that ‘Hamlet does seem now to consider that some supernatural power protects him’ (The Masks of Hamlet, 835). Likewise, then, Rosenberg finds ‘far-fetched’ the idea that the pirate episode was actually a prearranged rescue because Hamlet ‘surely would have [mentioned it] to

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Notes to Page 38 Horatio’ (757, 863). A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy) is even more absolute, dismissing ‘the attempt to explain this meeting [with the “pirate” ship] as prearranged by Hamlet’ as an idea ‘scarcely worth mentioning’ (140). Instead, because he presumes that the Prince’s is strictly truthful in recounting the entire episode, he assures us, ‘[T]here is a trait about which doubt is impossible, – a sense in Hamlet that he is in the hands of Providence’ (115). Now, I readily concede that divine protection would be the only plausible explanation, for Hamlet or anybody, if one believed his otherwise incredible story. But how, then, could Bradley, or anybody, explain – not merely explain away by congenial assumptions – the significance of what Hamlet revealed he knew at the close of his punishing confrontation with his mother: that he is already aware that the King is sending him to England; that his two snake-like false friends are bearing a mandate which marshals him to ‘knavery’; but that he’s not terribly worried, for he has some sort of scheme of his own whereby to undermine the scheme threatening him, and intends thereby to hoist the engineer on his own petard; indeed, he seems to be looking forward to the sport, for ‘O, ’tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet’? I am not, of course, the first to venture the idea that this episode has been orchestrated by Hamlet. The Variorum edition of the play (ed. Horace Howard Furness [New York: Dover, 1963, orig. pub. 1877]) cites a monograph of 1870 in which George Miles advances a version of this argument. Miles, however, greatly exaggerated the importance of Shakespeare’s clever pun in claiming, ‘If the word craft had its present maritime significance in Shakespeare’s time, the pun alone is conclusive of a pre-arranged capture’ (354). No, it is not; it simply ratifies an interpretation based on a multiplicity of textual evidence, but of which it is itself no crucial part. However, Miles’s claim invited the very objection that several critics took advantage of, contending that the use of ‘craft’ to mean ‘ship’ was unknown in Shakespeare’s day (citing an equivocal entry in the OED), and on that basis – conjoined with assumptions about Hamlet’s nature and his supposedly intimate relationship with Horatio – presumed to bury Miles’s whole argument in scorn. More recently, Martin Stevens in ‘Hamlet and the Pirates: A Critical Reconsideration’ (Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, no. 3, Summer 1975, 276–84) revived the case, but with negligible effect on subsequent scholarship. Given how much emphasis both Miles and his debunkers placed on the linguistic history of ‘craft’ as meaning ‘ship’, it is amusing to learn that ‘it can be regarded as certain that the usage was current in Shakespeare’s day’ – indeed, that it seems to antedate him by over two centuries! The evidence for this is provided by David Farley-Hills in ‘Hamlet’s Account of the Pirates’ (The Review of English Studies, Vol. 50, no. 199, August 1999, 320–31) as a prelude to considering afresh Miles argument, adding observations as well as criticisms of his own. While both Farley-Hills and Stevens

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are on the right track, the case each makes is much weaker than that which I present here, mainly because they both leave crucial questions unanswered (e.g. how might Hamlet have learned about the Claudius’s murderous plot), and both treat as veracious his account of how he came to substitute the King’s commission (i.e. as a ‘rash’, spontaneous act). Consequently, they both mistakenly conclude that there is a ‘providential’ aspect to this adventure which ‘teaches’ Hamlet something important. Thus Stevens: ‘that his own designs are insufficient, that there is, indeed, “a divinity that shapes” our roughhewn ends’, such that he ‘is finally able to confront Claudius without a plan’ (283). And Farley-Hills: ‘By opening the letter Hamlet providentially obtains the public proof of Claudius’s guilt that he would otherwise lack, and he can thereby justify his actions before the Danish people when he finally takes his revenge’ (327). Shakespeare allows us wonder whether Ophelia is actually a maiden, given her initial description of Hamlet’s wooing of her (1.3.98–9, 109–13), especially as seen in light of her suggestive songs (4.5.23–6, 48–66) – much as we are left wondering whether her death was an accident (as per Gertrude’s strangely detailed, eyewitness-like description of it; 4.7.161–81), or a suicide (as the officiating Priest clearly believes, and – judging by the gravedigger’s amusing discussion – must be widely rumoured; 5.1.1–29, 215–27). Hamlet, not privy to the negotiations that led to the presence of a Norwegian army on Danish soil, is unaware that Prince Fortinbras has his eye on a far worthier prize than a little sliver of Poland – that despite any promises made to either his own King or Denmark’s, he still regards himself as having ‘some rights of memory in this Kingdom’ (5.2.373). As I noted earlier (n. 20), the absence of this vital soliloquy from the Folio text – coupled with those nine lines missing from scene 3.4 – is practically proof positive that these excisions were not the work of Shakespeare. Swinburne regards it as ‘the supreme soliloquy of Hamlet’, and I would second his judgement as to its importance (A Study of Shakespeare): The one especial speech, if any one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the very highest of it height and strikes down to the very deepest of its depth, is passed over by modern actors; it was cut away by Heminge and Condell. . . . Yet beyond all question, magnificent as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and resolution. (165) The evidence for this, and its effect on Hamlet’s character, will be explored in my final chapter.

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31 This is an important point, as it bears on Hamlet’s relationships with both Horatio and Ophelia. Did he in fact deeply love her, as he so histrionically claims at her graveside? If so, it is strange that there is not a hint of it in any of his soliloquies, nor in his conversations with his (supposed) bosom buddy. Or did he merely use her for his own ends – as he uses everyone else? True, he reportedly wrote her many letters and gave her keepsakes, and in their one confrontation claims to have loved her once, but also to have loved her not (3.1.92–118). Hence, nothing conclusive can be drawn from this. 32 Horatio is not included in the Folio version of this scene, these lines being given, rather confusingly, to the Queen herself. The second Arden editor (Jenkins) suggests that Horatio’s omission may simply be an economy of staging. In the Quarto version, there is no indication of Horatio’s ever exiting the scene, in which case he would present throughout the King’s and Queen’s seemingly private conversation, throughout Laertes bursting in upon them vowing vengeance for his murdered father, and the King’s insinuating defence of himself, and deranged Ophelia’s second visit. This would make his silence when Hamlet identifies Laertes at Ophelia’s graveside somewhat suspicious (5.1.213). And upon hearing of the proposed ‘friendly’ fencing match, his silence about what he had earlier witnessed – the King’s conspiratorial conversation with Laertes – would be highly suspicious. On the other hand, if it is he (rather than the other ‘Gentleman’ who first entered with him and the Queen) who exits the scene after Ophelia in response to the King’s ordering, ‘Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you’, then either he left off watching her when she returned to the royal presence, or he did not.

Chapter 2 1 Hamlet’s subsequent behaviour will contextually define what is meant here by ‘antic’. When first mentioned, however, the word would suggest clownish, bizarre, uncouth, silly, foolish, buffooning, or some such. But ‘antic’ is also an alternative spelling of ‘antique’, whence it is actually derived. 2 Maurice Hunt, ‘ “Forward Backward” Time and the Apocalypse in Hamlet’ (Comparative Drama, Vol. 36, no. 4, Winter 2004–5) sees in Ophelia’s report of Hamlet’s strange exiting her closet a physical representation of a theme threaded throughout the play, that of looking both backward and forward in time, in one context regressing to infancy, in another to premature agedness (thus, for example, Hamlet to Polonius, ‘You yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if like a crab you could go backward’; and the gravedigger’s referring both back to ‘Adam’s profession’, and then forward to ‘doomsday’).

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3 As Girard, A Theater of Envy, wryly observes, ‘Dr. Ernest Jones, the personal friend and biographer of Freud, has diagnosed the case. . . . Like Polonius before him, Ernest Jones is convinced Hamlet’s problems are strictly sexual. Jones’s only difference with Polonius’s assessment is a shift from the daughter of the analyst to the mother of the patient. That shift makes everything more interesting and modern’ (287–8). 4 Amusingly, there have been some who have attempted to use these scurrilities as a basis for determining what book Hamlet is actually reading when accosted – as if he or any other serious person would waste his time reading the sort of ‘slanders’ about old men which Hamlet mischievously attributes to some ‘satirical rogue’ (guess who). The valid clue to what he was reading may have come two dozen lines earlier: ‘to be honest as this world goes is to be one man picked out of ten thousand’. Not ‘is to be one man in a thousand’ – which, as the Arden editors note, was (and remains) a proverbial expression. Nor even a more emphatic variation: ‘is to be one man in ten thousand’. Rather, it ‘is to be one man picked out of ten thousand’. Now, who was the one man picked out of ten thousand? Is Hamlet, in his antique disposition, reading Xenophon’s Anabasis? Later in the scene, he will perplex Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with his admitting, ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw’ (2.2.315–16). In trying to make sense of this enigmatic pronouncement, it may be pertinent to consider the context of Xenophon’s reminder to the troops that had become suspicious of him: ‘As the saying is, “When the north wind blows, there are fair sailings to Greece” ’ (Anabasis of Kyros, V.vii.7). 5 In The Question of Hamlet, Harry Levin obliquely expands on Polonius’s point: ‘In dissembling, in counterfeiting madness, in playing his antic part, [Hamlet] exemplifies the humanistic tradition of the wise fool. In his wayward fashion, he pursues the wisdom of Socrates, which characteristically masqueraded as ignorance. Hamlet’s behavior has been characterized by a student of Shakespeare’s wit and humor, John Weiss, as a “sustained gesture of irony”. . . . In the dual role of an ironist, Hamlet can remain his tragic self while presenting a quasi-comic front’ (82). 6 I have altered the punctuation of the Third Arden edition (which to me makes little sense), parsing the passage more as Jenkins does in the Second Arden edition. Hamlet’s speech has, not surprisingly, received a fair amount of scholarly attention, for he here inverts the familiar orthodoxy (based on Psalms 8.1–6) that invites us to appreciate the magnificence of God’s creation by contemplating the grandeur of the heavens, and the wonder of His grace in bestowing on us the privilege of exercising dominion over the earth. As David H. Hirsch observes in ‘Hamlet, Moby-Dick, and Passional Thinking’ (in Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, ed. G. B.

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Evans [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976]), ‘Hamlet converts the Renaissance cliché into a probing analysis of the human condition that puts man naturally into a biblical, as well as a Renaissance context’ (139). Among the elements of this speech that make it so powerful is Hamlet’s ability to describe the splendor of the Creation in glowing metaphors and man in grand abstractions, and yet, at the same time, to stop short of glorying in the excellency of his own nature or that of man’s. That is, Hamlet, Renaissance man though he may be, refuses to lapse into a naively Humanist position. Hamlet ends his speech on a peculiar note, with the consistent but seemingly superfluous observation that ‘man delights not me’. (148) The speech has a further significance in light of Copernicus’s disturbing new theory of the heavens, a matter which I treat in detail in my concluding chapter. 7 Jean-Paul Sartre is credited with an epigram to this effect (from his play No Exit), but Nietzsche is the inspiration. It is a recurrent theme in Beyond Good and Evil; some examples: ‘He who, in dealing with people, does not occasionally glisten in all the colours of distress, green and grey with nausea [or, disgust; Ekel], satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and loneliness, is certainly not a person of elevated taste’ (aph. 26). ‘The collective degeneration of man down to what today appears to socialist dolts and blockheads as their “man of the future’ – as their ideal! – this degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal [. . .] into the dwarf animal of equal rights and equal pretensions, is possible, there’s no doubt about that! He who has once thought this possibility through to the end knows another kind of nausea than do other people’ (aph. 203). ‘The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately, propel the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, shatter the selfconfidence of the community, its faith in itself, as if its spine snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, even a great intellect, are felt to be dangerous; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbour is henceforth called evil’ (aph. 201). Also of interest is Nietzsche’s characterization of Hamlet in Ecce Homo: ‘Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt, but certainty which drives one mad. . . . But to feel this way one must be profound, and abyss, a philosopher. . . . We all fear truth’ (II.4). These quotations are based upon the translations of Walter Kaufmann in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968). 8 Commenting on ‘Hamlet’s wordplays’, Theodore Lidz (Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet [New York: Basic Books, 1975]) ventures this interpretation of the Prince’s perplexing pronouncement: ‘ “Handsaw” was a common Elizabethan corruption of “harnshaw”, the word for “heron”; “hawk”, on the other hand, was the name for a plasterer’s implement as well as a bird. Is Shakespeare having Hamlet

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say, “Don’t worry, I’m not so mad that I do not know one tool from another, as well as one bird from another, and I’m bright enough to confuse you by this remark”, and at the same time warning his interrogators, “I know who the hawks hunting me are – I know who is the hunter (the hawk) and who the hunted (the heron)!” The sally is rounded out when we learn from Plutarch, whose writings Shakespeare knew well, that in ancient Egypt the hawk was the symbol of the north wind and the heron the symbol of the south wind’ (24). The Shorter Oxford Dictionary confirms that a ‘heronshaw’ is a young or small heron, and that to ‘know a hawk from a heronshaw’ is (or was) a common expression (1232); also, that ‘hawk’ is a name originating in Late Middle English for the rectangular board with handle underneath which plasterers and bricklayers use to hold wet plaster or mortar (1208). This seems sufficient for understanding the latter part of Hamlet’s remark. As for the first part about the relationship between his supposed madness and the prevailing winds, I am frankly dubious about an interpretation based on Egyptian symbolic ornithology. That said, I nonetheless can imagine Shakespeare’s smiling over the fact that hardly anyone would make the connection that (per Lidz’s hypothesis) he made; after all, on the surface Hamlet is simply speaking in his antic manner. 9 Accordingly, so too does its weather: ‘’Tis bitter cold’ is practically the first thing we learn about the dramatic context in which Shakespeare has located this tragedy (1.1.5). When Hamlet visits the castle’s battlements, he likewise observes, ‘The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold’ (1.4.1). This would seem a fair appraisal of the mood its eponym mostly casts upon the play: cold and bitter (cf. 5.2.80–2). However, according to some folk traditions the very presence of a ghost creates a chill in the air. Significant also is the temporal period in which the story is presumed to be taking place. One might suppose this is fairly obvious, established by the fact that it was a time when Denmark was a major regional power, lording it over Norway and Poland, and to which England paid tribute to be left in peace (gafol, which the Normans later referred to as ‘Danegeld’; 3.1.168–9). Thus King Claudius can dispatch Hamlet to what is in effect a vassal state, confident that his secret instructions will be carried out to the letter – as events prove they would have been (5.2.354–5): ‘And England, if my love thou hold’st at aught / As my great power thereof may give thee sense, / Since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red / After Danish sword, and thy free awe / Pays homage to us’ (4.3.56–60). So, clearly the temporal setting must be sometime in the late tenth or early eleventh century (more or less as per the original tale in Saxo’s Danorum Regum, which Belleforest appropriated for inclusion in his Histoires tragiques). What muddies this clarity, however, are a couple of textual anachronisms: that Hamlet and Horatio (and

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apparently Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well) matriculate at the University of Wittenberg, which was not founded until after 1500); and Laertes perhaps attends the University of Paris, founded in the thirteenth century. It would seem to be these anachronistic details that led the Third Arden editors, among others, to suppose that, though the tale of ‘Saxo/Belleforest [may be] taken to be the major source of his plot, Shakespeare updates the story to a Christian Renaissance Court’ (69). Now, since there is no way to harmonize the contradictory temporal facts, an interpreter of the play must decide which set to favour in locating the play temporally: that which remains true to its ostensible geopolitical framework, wherein an early medieval England is a tribute-paying vassal of a militarily dominant Denmark; or one which can accommodate the various characters’ attending existent universities. In reaching a decision, it is helpful to imagine how Shakespeare’s contemporaries would most likely understand the play. Would not its stipulated relationship between England and Denmark, which is vital to the plot, cause them to suppose the story takes place ‘a long, long time ago’? Many will at least have heard of a Danish presence in England in a bygone age, of Viking raids, of ‘Danegeld’, perhaps even of a Danish claim to the English throne which William the Conqueror pre-empted. On the other hand, what would they make of the references to schools in Wittenberg and Paris? Most would not have the foggiest idea as to when these universities were first established. The play’s allusions to them would have a different significance entirely, Wittenberg being associated with Martin Luther (hence Lutheranism/Protestantism), and Paris with Catholicism. How, in turn, these competing religious doctrines bear on the play will be treated at length in my concluding chapter. 10 I shall also examine more fully the significance of Copernicanism, and of the generally unsettled intellectual situation in England at the time Shakespeare is composing Hamlet, in my concluding chapter. 11 While I see Hamlet’s situation as somewhat more complicated, Paul Cantor’s analysis of this feature warrants quoting at length (Shakespeare: Hamlet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]): The symbolic geography of Hamlet mirrors the interplay of forces that went to make up the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s Denmark is a kind of borderland, lying on the fringes of modern Europe, halfway between the old world of pagan heroism and the new world of Christian civility. . . . Associated with the struggle of the elder Hamlet and the elder Fortinbras, Norway conjures up images of single combat between martial heroes. It is presented in the play as a kind of Homeric realm surviving on the frontiers of modern civilization. . . . Thus, as he often does in his tragedies, Shakespeare places his hero at the crossroads of a divided world. . . . Hamlet’s geographical situation [like

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Othello’s] reflects the range of ethical alternatives available to him. Placed as it were halfway between Norway and Paris, he is able to look beyond the borders of his country and in effect survey the history of Western culture, to see its competing models of human excellence in the figures who surround him. . . . Hamlet’s is thus a peculiar form of heroism: rather than pursuing one heroic model to an extreme, he moves back and forth between a number of competing models, subjecting them all in the process to a critique. . . . His soul itself becomes a kind of crossroads, a battleground on which pagan and Christian, ancient and modern values meet and fight to a standstill, leaving Hamlet unable to remain true to any one ethic and thus unable to accomplish what his concrete situation demands of him. (54–5) My one substantial reservation about this analysis is the implication that Hamlet remains the same throughout the play, while I contend (as I argued in the previous chapter) there is a point when and where he chooses to bestow his allegiance, after which he is a changed man. To appreciate the amusing side of Hamlet’s irony in so addressing old Polonius, one must recall how the biblical account begins: ‘Then Gilead begat Jephthah, and Jephthah the Gileadite was a valiant man, but the son of a harlot’ (Judges 11.1). However, the full story has a larger – and much darker – significance for understanding Hamlet inasmuch as Jephthah, leading the Israelites in this second war with the Amorites, had vowed to God, ‘If thou shalt deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then that thing that cometh out of the doors of mine house to meet me, when I come home in peace from the children of Ammon, shall be the Lord’s, and I will offer it for a burnt offering.’ Jephthah was victorious over the Ammonites ‘with an exceeding great slaughter’. But upon his homecoming, it was his only child, a much-loved virginal daughter, who first came forth to greet him. Thus, Jephthah unwittingly condemned his daughter to be sacrificed (Judges 11.11–40, translation as per the Geneva Bible). As Nietzsche once observed, ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink – he surely did not die of it, but degenerated, to vice’ (Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 168). Cf. Plato’s Apologia Sokratous 40d–e. This possibility raises others, however, that strike me as less likely. For example, that Hamlet is aware of the eavesdroppers from the beginning of his colloquy with Ophelia. The fact that she carries with her those ‘remembrances’ that she wishes to return might lead Hamlet’s to suspect their encounter was prearranged; but that would not in itself license a suspicion that someone would have an interest in overhearing their conversation. More far-fetched is the idea that Hamlet is aware of eavesdroppers from the very beginning of his ‘To Be’ soliloquy. Bearing in mind that soliloquies are essentially dramatic devices – conventions of the theatre whereby the audience can be apprised of a character’s thoughts – precisely because,

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as a rule, people do not speak their thoughts aloud (though they often do pray aloud, as if talking to God), the notion that Hamlet has intended to be overheard ‘thinking’ borders on the absurd. By the same reasoning, the assumption that unbeknownst to him the other characters hear his ‘soliloquy’ is not tenable. For staging purposes, then, Hamlet would deliver his soliloquy sufficiently remote from the eavesdroppers, then move into their earshot upon spotting Ophelia some distance away. 16 Reflecting the spirit of much recent scholarship, Stephen Greenblatt (Shakespeare’s Freedom [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010]) feels obliged not only to register ‘Hamlet’s nauseated misogyny [as] a symptom of his soul-sickness’, but further to assure us that it is ‘not a sign of his philosophical wisdom’ (41)! As typical of Feminist critics, Greenblatt ignores Hamlet’s ‘nauseated misandry’, that is, the fact that he is at least as hard on men, himself included: ‘Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not born me. . . . What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves – believe none of us’ (3.1.120–8). 17 Hard as it may be for the legions of Freud-inspired critics to accept, ‘his mother’s closet’ – as Polonius calls it, informing the King of his intention to secret himself there behind the arras (3.3.27–8; cf. 3.2.322–3) – is not her bedchamber. As Michael Cameron Andrews has conclusively shown (‘His Mother’s Closet: A Note on Hamlet’, in Modern Philology, Vol. 80, no. 2, November 1982), ‘Hamlet does not go to his mother’s bedroom, but to her closet. And for Renaissance readers and audiences, there would have been no possibility of confusing a queen’s closet with her bedroom. The former, as I shall demonstrate, was quite another place’ (164). And so he does, drawing on the resources of the OED and other period literature as well as other Shakespeare plays, to show that a ‘closet’ was a private chamber where one might study, sew (cf. Hamlet’s bizarre visit to Ophelia), have private consultations and such. Thus the verbal use of the term, as in ‘the two conspirators had been closeted together for over a hour’. 18 Apparently discounting Hamlet’s professed reason for abstaining, A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy) makes what would otherwise be a credible case that ‘This incident is . . . the turning point of the tragedy. So far, Hamlet’s delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the disasters that follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself ’ (108). Thus, the issue is whether Hamlet’s alleged reason for not killing Claudius then and there is genuine, or mere rationalization.

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19 The Folio text of the last line here – ‘Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge’ – is clearly superior. 20 The text is explicit at line 99: ‘Enter Ghost.’ The fact that Hamlet sees and hears it but his mother does not is no certain indication that he is hallucinating, since the possibility of ghosts selectively appearing to some but not others was quite in accord with the beliefs of the day. On the other hand, Hamlet’s repeated insistence that she too must see what he sees would suggest that he is at least discomfited by the fact that she claims not to. 21 Hamlet’s initial response to the Ghost’s appearance in the Queen’s chamber – ‘do you not come your tardy son to chide, [etc.]’ – would seem to confirm that he knows he cannot claim even to have attempted to carry out its ‘dread command’ (e.g. in stabbing through the arras; 3.4.103–5). It also confirms his having accepted the Ghost as the spirit of his father. 22 According to Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Material of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ‘although armor was a crucial memorial bequest of clothes amongst the aristocracy, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father is unusual, if not unique, in returning in his armor’ (251). However, they go on to say, ‘Ghosts of both the armored and the shrouded body are in fact present in the most influential of all ghost plays, the play which profoundly influenced Seneca and, through him, Renaissance drama: Euripides’s Hecuba’ (255). 23 Beyond this, I suspect that Shakespeare has purposefully provided such a welter of conflicting evidence about the Ghost precisely in order to defeat all attempts to establish its true status, since were that possible it would allow one to conclude which religious view he was thereby endorsing. As I previously noted, this matter shall be explored more fully in my concluding chapter. 24 In an essay rich with insights (‘Hamlet’s Good Night’), William Kerrigan, Hamlet’s Perfection (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), observes: ‘[W]orks of art often establish their greatness by illuminating everything implicit in an ordinary piece of language, such that those who speak this language feel awakened from their habitual stupor. Hamlet performs this service for “good night”, from Middle English to modern English our daily formula for the last departures of the day, sending us from society to the privacy of bed and sleep’ (34). This formula is a foreshortening of something like ‘God give you a good night’, and it is bestowed ‘[b]ecause, obviously, night is not good’ (i.e. by nature). Most of the adjectives used by poets of Shakespeare’s time to qualify ‘night’ connote its negativity. And, Kerrigan suggests, when we first set eyes on Hamlet, covered cap-à-pie in his ‘inky cloak’, he seems ‘a near personification of night. He is mournful, secretive,

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Notes to Pages 69–72 melancholy, and about to be haunted’ (43). One thinks in this connection of his brief soliloquy before setting out to answer his mother’s summons: ’Tis now the very witching time of night When churchyards yawn and hell itself breaks out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood And do such business as the bitter day Would quake to look on. (3.2.378–82) Similarly, Horatio and Marcellus attest to the belief that ‘extravagant and erring spirits’ range abroad only at night (1.1.147–63). The Queen’s diffuse and rather bizarre image, which virtually all readers find puzzling, may be explained as simply an instance of what Mathew Arnold criticizes in Shakespeare, ‘Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853)’ in On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960), wherein his ‘gift of expression’ rather runs away with him, ‘degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing plainly, even when the press of action demands the very directest language, or its level character the simplest’ (11). In his classic analysis of the play (What Happens in Hamlet), John Dover Wilson contends: ‘The attitude of Hamlet towards Ophelia is without doubt the greatest of all the puzzles in the play, greater even than that of the delay itself ’ (101). One need not concede that it is (beyond doubt, no less!) the very greatest of the play’s many challenging puzzles, but surely almost any serious student of it would agree that Hamlet’s attitude and behaviour towards the girl is highly perplexing. Thus the play nearly ends as it began, for the off-going sentry (Francisco) also complained – albeit rather mysteriously – of being ‘sick at heart’ (1.1.7). The language of sickness and health, much of it used metaphorically, is notable throughout the play; some examples: 1.1.19; 1.3.20; 1.4.40; 3.3.96; 4.3.9–11, 64–5; 4.4.24–8; 4.5.17, 90–1; 4.7.53, 80, 121; 5.2.21. Caroline Spurgeon in her classic study, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), refers to this feature of Hamlet repeatedly in her book (cf. especially 316–18). We know there to be other ways that Claudius might, serpent-like, have murdered his brother. Laertes informs us of another means of poisoning, having returned to Elsinore with ‘an unction of a mountebank / So mortal’ that but a scratch by a knife dipped in it is certain death (4.7.139–44). And, of course, there is always the option of secreting poison in food or drink (such as Claudius prepares as a backup for eliminating the Prince). From the fact that Claudius does not visibly react to the ‘dumb-show’, Stanley Cavell, in his grossly overrated flights of Freudian fancy posing as ‘philosophical’ scholarship (Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays

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of Shakespeare [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987]), concludes this can only mean that King Hamlet was not killed in the manner the Ghost claimed (poison administered through the ear), and so probably was instead by a poisoned drink (179–91). How the whole ‘Mousetrap’ strategy works to establish the Ghost’s veracity will be explicated in my fourth chapter. 29 In The Wheel of Fire (London: Oxford University Press/Routledge, 1930/1989), G. Wilson Knight quite plausibly contends, ‘Hamlet’s pain is a complex of different themes of grief. But absolute loss of control is apparent only in his dealings with Ophelia. Three times after the Ghost scene he utterly loses mental control: first, in the incident narrated by Ophelia; second, in his meeting with her in iii.i.; and third, in the graveyard scene, with Laertes over Ophelia’s body. On all other occasions his abnormal behaviour, though it certainly tends towards, and might even be called, madness in relation to his environment, is yet rather the abnormality of extreme melancholia and cynicism’ (22). 30 I believe Levin (The Question of Hamlet) is on the right track in arguing, ‘Madness, as the abandonment of reason, is a constant danger throughout the play, from Horatio’s desperate warning against the Ghost [1.4.69–74] through Hamlet’s disingenuous apology to Laertes [5.2.204–11]. Yet Hamlet is clearly thoughtsick rather than brainsick – neurotic rather than psychotic. . . . He is, indeed, what circumstance has made him, a monomaniac. . . . But his obsession with his mother’s marriage and his hostility against his uncle are forbidden themes which he may not harp on unless he is granted a certain license, not to say licentiousness. This “crafty madness” provides him with a means of expressing pent-up emotions’ (113). Fredson Bower, Hamlet as Minister and Scourge and Other Studies in Shakespeare and Milton (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989) refers to this as ‘the safety-valve hypothesis’. But in claiming that ‘Shakespeare gives no hint whatsoever to motivate Hamlet’s device’ (85), Bower exaggerates the difficulty of solving this puzzle – obvious from the volume of diverse scholarly speculations about it – into an impossibility. Dover Wilson (What Happens in Hamlet) seems to me correct in concluding, ‘Shakespeare wishes us to feel that Hamlet assumes madness because he cannot help it’ (92). While I have some reservations about certain claims Dover Wilson makes in the course of treating the ‘antic disposition’ – for example, that Hamlet ‘never thinks anything out’ – nonetheless his remains one of the more insightful analyses (92–5). And I do agree that Hamlet’s adoption of the ‘antic’ strategy is spontaneous: ‘realizing he had displayed intense and uncontrollable emotional excitement in the presence of Horatio and Marcellus, he pretends that he has been acting a part, and warns them that it may occur again’ (92).

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31 Cf. Julius Caesar 2.1.322–3. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’ (in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patrick Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York: Methuen, 1985]), traces out Shakespeare’s evolving attitude towards exorcism insofar as this is evident in how it is treated in succeeding plays, beginning with The Comedy of Errors (1590), where ‘the false presumption of demonic possession [is simply] an attempt to make sense of a series of bizarre actions. . . . Exorcism is the kind of straw people clutch at when the world seems to have gone mad’ (173) – thus would be its pertinence to Hamlet’s behaviour. Based on how it is spoken of later plays, Greenblatt concludes that by 1600 Shakespeare himself ‘had clearly marked out possession and exorcism as frauds’ (174). Such a view cannot, of course, be attributed to any of his characters without sufficient textual support.

Chapter 3 1 I have analysed this in the context of a commentary on King Lear in Of Philosophers and Kings, 133–67. 2 Here Hamlet endorses what Plato’s Agathon professes in Symposium (194b–c), knowing it to be what Sokrates, or any judicious person, believes. 3 Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1935; originally published in Danish, 1897–8) makes several observations pertinent to the whole ‘theatre theme’ threaded through the play. For example, bearing in mind the violence and bombast typical of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, ‘although it appears to be Hamlet’s wish to caution equally against too much wildness and too much tameness, his warning against tameness is of the briefest. . . . It is not the danger of tameness, but of violence, that is uppermost in Shakespeare’s mind’ (388). 4 Perhaps this stricture can be finessed by permitting the representation of supernatural phenomena as merely the dramatic license necessary to depict the behaviour of people who do believe in the existence of such things. But one cannot find a license for doing so in the text of the play. Be that as it may, there is a joke implicit in the question of whether the theatre’s purpose of holding a mirror up to nature would permit the depiction of ghosts: according to a widespread belief about such spirits, they are not reflected in mirrors. The questionable status of the Ghost when considered strictly from within the perspective established by the play itself will be examined later (Chapter 5). 5 This is to be distinguished from the fact that the language of the theatre generally exaggerates the linguistic competence of people, very few of whom are capable of expressing themselves in anything close to the smooth, precise, elevated

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language in which their words are nicely suited to their actions, and vice versa (to say nothing of being well adapted for iambic pentameter). For the effects of this ‘exaggeration’ are mainly salutary. As will be discussed later, Laertes exemplifies such a person, though perhaps Hamlet is somewhat prone to this vice also. Speaight, Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy, certainly thinks so: ‘Is there not a connection between Hamlet’s decision to act the lunatic and his enthusiasm for the actors when they presently arrive and his hastily improvised plan to have them perform the murder of his father? Does not all this betray a nature essentially histrionic, a capacity to enjoy and exaggerate whatever happens to him? Is not all of this part of his divorce from reality? . . . Seen thus, the assumption of lunacy becomes an act of escape into the never-never land of “let’s pretend” ’ (26). While I do not agree with Speaight’s conclusion – for it trivializes Hamlet’s predicament – I have some sympathy for the line of reasoning that supports it. It may be relevant to bear in mind that mirrors in Shakespeare’s day were very expensive (since all were imported from Venice); very small, rarely so much as 10 inches in diameter, and most much smaller (there being no way to manufacture large plate glass sheets of uniform thickness); and were used almost exclusively to study the face (thus, the mirror came to symbolize introspection). But the term ‘mirror’ had a broader literary use. Lily B. Campbell writes in Shakespeare’s Histories (London: Methuen, 1964), ‘Anyone who wanders among the Tudor shades is aware of the tremendous popularity of the words mirror, glass, speculum, and image for titles of literary works. There were mirrors of good manners, of policy, of friendship; mirrors for Martinists, for gamesters, for soldiers’ (107). Of particular importance, however, was the genre Mirror for Princes, such as the popular Mirror for Magistrates, which saw seven editions published between 1559 and 1587 – and, of course, Machiavelli’s The Prince, already notorious in Shakespeare’s day. Thus the special pertinence of the subtitle of Campbell’s book about the Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy. Shakespeare crafted an especially effective variation of this situation for his Othello, wherein Iago has staged a meeting with Cassio, having primed the Moor – who can see, but not hear their conversation – to completely misinterpret what is in effect for him (but not us) a dumb-show (4.1.75–175). Similarly, Pindarus and Cassius, viewing the scene from such a distance as precludes their matching words to actions, fatally misinterpret Titinius’s reception by the horsemen that surround him (Julius Caesar 5.3.19–46). Not incidentally, these dumb-show episodes illustrate the radical inadequacy of regarding dramatic poetry as offering nothing more than a mirror-like imitation of the mere appearance of human reality, twice removed from the truth – the

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Notes to Pages 80–84 notoriously superficial view of dramatic poetry ironically advanced by Sokrates in Book Ten of Plato’s Republic (595c–605c). I have analysed the deeper significance of this critique, particularly as it bears on Shakespeare, in Of Philosophers and Kings, 251–66. An analysis of the whole episode is provided in the following chapter. The many instances of slightly strange references to ears and hearing are too numerous to be conveniently catalogued, but an assortment of examples should suffice to make the point. Laertes warns Ophelia, ‘weigh what loss your honour may sustain / If with too credent ear you list [Hamlet’s] songs’ (1.3.28–9). Hamlet rejects Horatio’s claim that ‘a truant disposition’ brought him to Elsinore: ‘I would not hear your enemy say so, / Nor shall you do my ear that violence / To make it truster of your own report’ (1.2.168–71). Proposing that he eavesdrop on Hamlet’s private meeting with his mother, Polonius assures Claudius, ‘And I’ll be placed, so please you, in the ear / Of all their conference’ (3.1.183–4). And having just witnessed Ophelia’s deranged behaviour, Claudius informs Gertrude, ‘Her brother is in secret come from France / . . . / And wants not buzzers to infect his ear / With pestilent speeches of his father’s death’ (4.5.88–91) – again, the possibility of sepsis entering a soul through the ear. Polonius advises Laertes, ‘Give every man thy ear but few thy voice’ (1.3.67). Having read to their Majesties Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, Polonius adds that the Prince’s other such solicitations Ophelia has ‘All given to mine ear’ (2.2.125–7). Upon the approach of Polonius, Hamlet co-opts Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for some foolery at the old man’s expense, positioning them (awkwardly, it would seem), ‘at each ear a hearer’ (2.2.318–19). When Rosencrantz professes not to understand Hamlet’s referring to him as a sponge, the Prince responds, ‘I am glad of it. A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear’ (4.2.21–2). Especially poignant is the Queen’s vain pleading, ‘O speak to me no more. / These words like daggers enter in my ears. / No more, sweet Hamlet’ (3.4.94–6). Cf. also 2.2.498; 3.2.10; 4.5.205–8; 4.6.23–4; 4.7.3. Of course, speech is essential to much else that distinguishes human life – laws, contracts, proposals, pleas, demands, excuses, jokes, curses, criticism, praise and blame, flattery and insults – but as a moment’s thought confirms, these all presuppose the understanding that only speech makes possible, whether it enters through the porches of one’s ears or the windows of one’s eyes. In his excellent essay ‘From Henry V to Hamlet’ (as reproduced in More Prefaces to Shakespeare [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press, 1974]), Harley Granville-Barker captures the essence of Theatre as Mirror. Having first argued, ‘Shakespeare’s progress in his art involved an ever greater reliance upon that other art which is irrevocably wedded to the playwright’s – the art of interpretive acting’ (162), he continues:

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It demands from [interpretative actors] an extraordinary self-devotion. Its greatest effects may be within their reach, but will always be a little beyond their grasp. Actors . . . are brought to the point where they forget themselves and we forget them. And beyond that boundary – it may happen to some of us a dozen times in a lifetime to cross it – we are for a crowning moment or so in a realm of absolute music and of a drama that Shakespeare’s genius will seem to have released from all bonds. I say we must not look for perfect performances of such plays, for there is nothing so finite as perfection about them. They have not the beauty of form and clarity of expression which distinguish Racine and his great Greek exemplars. But, in virtue of a strange dynamic force that resides in them, they seem to surpass such perfection and take on something of the quality of life itself. And they do this the more fitly, surely, in that they demand to be interpreted, less conventionally, in terms of life itself, through this medium of living men and women. Therefore, while we arrive at no perfection in their performance, there need be practically no limit to, nor any monotony in the inspiration actors can draw from them. And their essential technique is likely to lie in the fruitfulness and variety of the means by which the significance of human relations – of men towards each other, of man to the invisible – is revealed. A later theatre has made for us an illusion by which we see men as beings of another world. But Shakespeare worked for an intimacy which should break the boundaries between mimic and real, and identify actor and audience upon the plane of his poetic vision. Is there another art in which the world of the imagination can be made so real to us and the immaterial so actual, in which, not to speak it profanely, the word can be made flesh, as in these few boldest flights of his genius? (165) 14 Thus, the dramatic characters are in effect human archetypes, though virtually always they are sufficiently individualized as to preclude their seeming mere cardboard cut-outs. 15 The word ‘hypocrite’ and its cognates derive from the Greek term for a stage actor who speaks lines: hypokritës (as distinct from a pantomime actor: mimos). Hypocrisy being itself a pretense, thus a form of acting (e.g. preaching principles and standards of behaviour that one does not actually practice; cf. 1.3.44–9), an actor playing the part of a hypocrite – not at all an uncommon role, as various kinds and degrees of hypocrisy are so common in the human lives which theatre mirrors – is necessarily ‘double acting’ (cf. 2.2.244–6; 3.1.45–52; 3.2.385–6). 16 To be sure, one may also be pained (as well as angered) by a verbal portrait that one believes to be false or unfair, especially if provided by a person one cares about, but that is a different pain: the pain of suffering injustice, perhaps mingled with that of disappointment.

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17 In Phaedo, Plato’s Sokrates tacitly suggests that the human soul is itself a kind of labyrinth, with the fear of death a brooding minotaur prowling its very centre – a monster one must slay if one wishes to enjoy rational freedom. 18 Cf. Republic 571a–572b. 19 The legions of Freudians, both amateur and professional, who are attracted to Hamlet like beggars to a feast, would do well to digest this truth. It is worth adding that to justify the identification of a given person’s inner reality with his rational self-consciousness would not necessarily require anything like complete success in his subjugating the subconscious. One might reasonably conclude that a firm and persistent resolve to try would be the single most important feature of a person’s true inner self. 20 Is not the author hereby pointing to the centre of his play? It would by no means be uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to use a fatuous windbag to convey a vital clue to its interpretation. 21 As You Like It, 2.7.139–40. Consider also the Chorus in Henry V bidding us to imagine ‘A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, [etc.]’ (Prol. 3); Antonio in The Merchant of Venice: ‘I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one’ (1.1.77–9); maddened Lear’s ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’ (King Lear, 4.6.180–1); the ‘worthy Thane of Rosse’ in Macbeth discussing with an old man the previous night’s extraordinary storm: ‘Ha, good Father, / Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, / Threatens his bloody stage’ (2.4.4–6); Henry Percy’s ‘Let order die! / And let this world no longer be a stage / To feed contention in a ling’ring act’ (2 Henry IV 1.1.154–6); and old York’s simile in Richard II (5.2.23–8). Perhaps most famous is Macbeth’s nihilistic pronouncement: Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Needless to say, this is not Shakespeare’s own view, having written dramatic masterpieces that ensure his being heard practically evermore. 22 Using this term in the ancient sense as inclusive of everything inspired by the various Muses, that is, Calliope of epics, Terpsichore of dance, Erato of lyrics, Melpomene of tragedy, Urania of astronomy, Polyhymnia of mime, Thalia of comedy, and Clio of history. 23 Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (Pt I, par. 36) invokes this phenomenon as providing evidence for the naturalness of pity (compassion, commiseration, sympathy), which persists despite the distorting artificialities of corrupt civil life:

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Such is the pure movement of Nature prior to all reflection: such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved morals still have difficulty destroying, since in our theaters one daily sees being moved and weeping at the miseries of some unfortunate person people who, if they were in the Tyrant’s place, would only increase their enemy’s torments; like bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills which he had not caused, or that Alexander of Pherae who dared not attend the performance of a single tragedy for fear that he might be seen to moan with Andromache and Priam, but who listened without emotion to the cries of so many citizens daily being murdered on his orders. (The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 152–3) This capacity to arouse people’s passions, strengthening those feelings through what people regard as a harmless (and enjoyable) exercise of them, is basic to the case Plato’s Sokrates makes for the ‘exile’ of dramatic poetry from his ‘City in logos’ (Republic 603e–608b). For thereby is aggravated the difficulty of establishing rational self-rule – an ordering of the soul that Hamlet seems to endorse in praising Horatio: ‘Give me that man / That 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’ (3.2.67–70). Does this perhaps explain the strange prominence of gastronomic language used metaphorically in the play, for example, Polonius delays reporting his supposed discovery of the cause of Hamlet’s madness with ‘Give first admittance to th’ambassadors. / My news shall be the fruit to that great feast’ (2.2.51–2); Ophelia, lamenting what has happened to Hamlet’s ‘noble mind’, adds, ‘And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, / That sucked the honey of his musicked vows’ (3.1.154–5); Hamlet speaks of the flatterer’s ‘candied tongue’ (3.2.56), and berates his mother with, ‘Here is your husband like a mildewed ear / Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? / Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed / And batten on this moor?’ (3.4.62–5); also 1.1.98–9; 1.2.174, 179–80; 1.4.8–18; 3.1.46–8; 3.2.89–90; 3.4.89–92, 159–60; 4.1.21–3; 4.3.16–30; 4.5.88–9; 5.2.348–51. Does Hamlet’s preferred fare, ‘as wholesome as sweet’, perhaps reflect Shakespeare’s own intention, but with the added advantage that his offerings nonetheless manage to ‘please the million’ as well (albeit with soul food less substantial than that which he serves to the judicious)? Needless to say, the substance of Hamlet’s choice reverberates with significance for understanding him and his situation, but it is not particularly relevant to the line of analysis being pursued here. Consider, for example, the cumulative political effect of the many recent films depicting the various malign consequences of racial discrimination.

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28 Girard, A Theater of Envy, sees in Hamlet’s strategy the embryo of a feature hypertrophied in much modern drama: Hamlet’s purpose, when he sets up his play within the play, is to expose Gertrude and Claudius or, rather, force them to expose themselves. This is amazingly similar to what many dramatists are doing today, except that Hamlet has not yet reached that supreme stage of self-deception where the theoreticians join in and the whole enterprise is justified as a superior form of aesthetic responsibility. With Jean-Paul Sartre and his successors, the showmanship of ressentiment has been presented as the strictest moral obligation for the writer to denounce all his ‘bourgeois’ spectators indiscriminately. The rule of the game is to have all the Gertrudes and Claudiuses in the audience rise up in the middle of the performance and leave the theater in an uproar. Nothing is acceptable anymore that has not been indignantly rejected by the public. Unfortunately, the public too can learn the rules and embrace its own denunciation with an enthusiasm that has become a second nature and does not even have to be feigned anymore. No difference remains between scandal and convention, between revolt and conformity. Contraries merge, not in some glorious Hegelian synthesis, but in unnamable monstrosities. The salt of the earth does not even know it has lost its savor and the most pungent demystification, the most sophisticated deconstruction, turns into the platitudes of a Polonius. (285–6) 29 Like all norms of politeness, these standards are not exact, nor would they be precisely shared by everyone present at a given performance. But all would quickly become conscious of their outer limits should someone in the audience grossly violate them – a drunk, say, who began loudly cursing the actors and attempted to mount the stage; or a couple having a noisy domestic argument, or even just carrying on an audible conversation during the performance. Needless to add, these standards vary some from time to time and place to place – and in Shakespeare’s day, from class to class. Less decorum would have been expected from the groundlings in the theatre’s pit (mostly incapable of appreciating anything but dumb-shows and noise, according to the Prince’s hyperbole) than from the better class of patrons able to afford the covered seating, but in no case would just anything go. 30 For example, most people today would regard the frequent boisterousness of playgoers in eighteenth-century London as totally ‘unacceptable’. Some indication of the disruptions to which patrons then might be subjected is depicted in Fielding’s philosophical comic novel Tom Jones (Book 7, ch. 1).

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31 And so, were a ‘sentry’ in a play to appear asleep or drunk on watch, the standard for this being recognized as portraying a ‘dereliction of duty’ would, once again, be the proper behaviour of real sentries. 32 To be clear, I am speaking here solely of the discrete action in question (i.e. the exchange of salutes), not of the broader context in which it occurs. 33 Indeed, ‘Life imitating Art’ has become virtually a cliché, and the fact that it captures some truth about life compounds the imitation involved in portraying such art-imitating life, whether the imitation is of something sublime (as of Alexander modelling himself on Homer’s Achilles) or ridiculous (e.g. portraying the life of an Elvis impersonator). 34 Cf. Republic 604b–606d. 35 It suffices to mention female circumcision.

Chapter 4 1 As articulated by St Augustine (based on Numbers 5.5–8): ‘If men be able to make restitution, and do it not, their repentance is not repentance, and their sin shall not be pardoned until actual restitution is made.’ 2 Of course, one must consider the possibility that the King’s being so forthcoming, even effusive, in granting Laertes’s request is intended to annoy Hamlet, who will be denied that which Laertes anticipates: escape from the Danish Court. Whether this is a factor would depend upon how one supposes Claudius truly regards Hamlet at the outset of the play. 3 Not that the King’s announcement would offer much comfort to Hamlet, since ‘deferral’ in this case could amount to a quarter century or more. 4 Wilson Knight (The Wheel of Fire) is – notoriously – one of the most extravagant proponents of this view: Now Claudius is not drawn as wholly evil – far from it. We see the government of Denmark working smoothly. Claudius shows every sign of being an excellent diplomatist and king. He is troubled by young Fortinbras, and dispatches ambassadors to the sick King of Norway demanding that he suppress the raids of his nephew. His speech to the ambassadors bears the stamp of clear and exact thought and efficient and confident control of affairs. . . . The ambassadors soon return successful. . . . Tact has found an easy settlement where arms and opposition might have wasted the strength of Denmark. (33) Claudius, as he appears in the play, is not a criminal. He is – strange as it may seem – a good and gentle king, enmeshed by a chain of causality linking him with his crime. And this chain he might, perhaps, have broken except for

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Hamlet, and all would have been well. . . . [A]nd granted the fact of his original crime which cannot now be altered, Claudius can hardly be blamed for his later actions. They are forced on him. As King, he could scarcely be expected to do otherwise. Hamlet is a danger to the state, even apart from his knowledge of Claudius’ guilt. He is an inhuman – or superhuman – presence, whose consciousness – somewhat like Dostoievsky’s Stavrogin – is centred on death. . . . He is a creature of another world. As King of Denmark he would have been a thousand times more dangerous than Claudius. (35) Marvin Rosenberg wryly notes (The Masks of Hamlet), ‘[Claudius] has enough of a conscience to trick sentimentalists into picturing him merely noble. Hence Wilson Knight’s perverse characterization, never quite retracted, of a “good and gentle king” ’ (48). Still, the number of English Lit professors who endorse Claudius’s handling of the Norwegian threat conveys a lesson in itself. A small sampling: Howard Jacobson (Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, with Wilber Sanders [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978]) assures us, ‘Here is competence, authority, the most consummate contempt for that which he knows he can contain’ (26). Peter Mercer, though more restrained than Wilson Knight in his enthusiasm for Claudius, also praises ‘his brisk competence [which] strongly reinforces his image of reason and authority. The matter of young Fortinbras that had seemed so threatening in the previous scene [i.e. 1.1] is confidently reduced to its proper proportions’ (Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge), 140. Graham Bradshaw (Shakespeare’s Scepticism) is all sympathy for the Claudius we meet at the play’s beginning: ‘One paradox of the scene is that we find ourselves watching the villain struggle, rather manfully, to say and do the right thing, while the hero is spitefully intent on disruption: the main business of the Council meeting could hardly be more urgent, but Hamlet is entirely indifferent to the threat of invasion. We discover that Claudius has already dealt with this danger, very shrewdly, and we see him trying to be a magnanimous ruler – and solicitous father’ (107). Bradshaw applauds ‘the efficient diplomacy which has saved Denmark from war’, and judges ‘it is a good thing that Claudius is on the throne’ (108). Not to be outdone, Stephen Greenblatt (Shakespeare’s Freedom) contends, ‘if one seeks genuine skills of governance in Shakespeare, they are most attractively on display in Claudius, the usurper in Hamlet’. Then, having quoted the portion of the King’s speech outlining his Norwegian policy, Greenblatt adds, ‘Shakespeare risked this uncharacteristically dull speech in order to convey the voice of authority: businesslike, confident, decisive, careful, and politically astute’ (80). 5 Or ‘dilated articles’ according to the Folio text.

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6 This would be the most generous interpretation: that Claudius did somehow convey explicit permission to the Norwegians. What calls this into question is the fact that Fortinbras and his army are marching across Denmark within 48 hours of the King’s ambassadors return from Norway! Did those delated/dilated articles they carried authorize them to be as accommodating as was necessary to fend off the threat of war? Or did Fortinbras, having taken the measure of his opponent from the tenor of this embassy, embark his force with the intention of confronting Claudius with a fait accompli? His instruction to his captain would seem to suggest one or the other: ‘Go, captain, from me greet the Danish King: / Tell him that by his license Fortinbras / Craves the conveyance of a promised march / Over his kingdom.’ Is this a reference to an earlier tacit understanding? Or, is this a last minute ‘request’ backed up by a veiled threat: ‘If that his majesty would aught with us / We shall express our duty in his eye, / And let him know so’ (4.4.1–7). 7 Zdravko Planinc puts it succinctly: ‘It should be clear that Denmark is being offered a Trojan horse’ (‘“It begins with Pyrrhus” [2.2.451]: The Political Philosophy of Hamlet’, Hamlet Studies, Vol. 20, nos. 1–2, 1998). 8 Thus, for example, when in 1914 the Germans sought permission to pass through neutral Belgium in order to attack the unprotected north of France, they were of course refused, despite Belgium’s being militarily far inferior to Germany. As Martin Gilbert writes (The First World War: A Complete History [New York: Henry Holt, 1994]): It was . . . [on] a rapid overland march through Belgium, that the German War plans depended. It was in order to achieve this goal that, at seven o’clock on the evening of August 2, Germany delivered a twelve-hour ultimatum to Belgium: German troops must be given free passage through Belgium. The Belgians refused. . . . ‘Were the Belgian government to accept the propositions conveyed to it’, Brussels informed Berlin, ‘it would be sacrificing the nation’s honour and betraying its engagements to Europe’. (32) The Germans drove into Belgium anyway, which virtually dictated that Belgium declare war and resist, despite knowing this would prove costly, and almost surely be futile. 9 In the Folio version, the sum is a ‘mere’ three thousand crowns per annum, but this is no more plausible as an expression of Norwegian joy than that specified in the Second Quarto. It is, however, a more realistic amount, and preserves the meter of the line (whereas the Quarto’s ‘threescore thousand’ subverts the meter). 10 This is, of course, a notorious crux in Hamlet, and surely meant to be one of the more perplexing interpretative puzzles it presents. Thus, practically every scholarly treatment of the play includes an attempt to resolve it, but so far no one has succeeded in a way that commands broad (much less universal) acceptance. Rosenberg has a useful discussion of the ‘dumb-show “problem” ’, including a consideration of ‘Why the dumb show at all’ (The Masks of Hamlet, 574–8). Andrew Mollin also provides a useful review of the various standard gambits and

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Notes to Pages 117–119 their inadequacies (apparently based on Harold Jenkins ‘long note’ in the Second Arden) prior to offering his own answer – which, overall, I find psychologically implausible (‘On Hamlet’s Mousetrap’, Interpretation, Vol. 21, no. 3, Spring 1994, 353–72). Of several more specific objections to Mollin’s analysis, however, is the fact that he, as do so many critics, simply assumes that the dumb-show does accurately depict the murder of the elder Hamlet. Whereas, Hamlet must allow for the fact that, were the Ghost’s account of how Claudius assassinated his brother not accurate, that could in itself explain the King’s non-reaction to the pantomime version. Compare these carefully ambiguous responses with the categorical answers he provides Hamlet in the graveyard (5.1.186–95). Horatio’s hearing may not be especially acute, to judge by his failure to hear the crucial midnight striking of the castle clock, though Marcellus heard it (1.4.3–6). If he did not hear Hamlet’s various ‘choral’ comments, he almost certainly could not understand the scheme as Hamlet does. Although Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain present until Hamlet in effect dismisses them (2.2.481–2), he surely would not have allowed them to overhear the arrangement he makes with the leading Player – neither his having specially chosen the play, nor his intention to contribute some lines to its script. His ‘Dost thou hear me, old friend’ (2.2473–4) signals his taking the Player aside for a quiet word (as the Third Arden editors treat the exchange). That neither of the pair in reporting back to the King makes any mention of Hamlet’s dealings with the Player tends to confirm this surmise. Dover Wilson (What Happens in Hamlet) makes much of this restriction on Hamlet, and in doing so assumes as settled what for Hamlet remains at issue in designing his Mousetrap – that the Ghost truly is the suffering spirit of the late King: ‘Hamlet was to avenge his father without in any way injuring the woman who shared the murder’s crown and his incestuous bed. The salvation of his Queen by rescuing her from the seductions of her paramour is as strong a motive with the Ghost as the vengeance itself, which is after all the only means of rehabilitating the family honour’ (46). Dover Wilson further argues, endorsing A. C. Bradley’s view, that this restriction rendered any public exposure of Claudius’s guilt as ‘entirely out of the question’ (47–8). I do not see why, and moreover presume that Horatio in telling ‘Hamlet’s story’ will manage that very thing: indict Claudius for murdering his predecessor, but make no mention of Gertrude’s adultery (of which, in all probability, he knows nothing). Nor is there any way to salvage the ‘family honour’ entirely, since her being a party to ‘damned incest’ has been publicly known since she married her brother.

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15 Here one misses Hamlet’s ‘What, frighted with false fire’ that in the Folio (and the First Quarto) is sandwiched between Ophelia’s and Gertrude’s reaction. 16 Hence the Ghost’s ‘Murder most foul, . . . strange and unnatural’ (1.5.27–8). 17 That Claudius is susceptible to being affected by unexpected reminders of his guilt is shown by his private response to Polonius’s hypocritical lament about human hypocrisy (3.1.45–53). 18 As the original Folio text does not set this as a quote, nor would it likely be heard – certainly not by Claudius – as a line lifted from some earlier play, I have here punctuated it as if simply spoken by Hamlet. 19 Upon the entry of the Ghost, Hamlet first prays for divine protection (‘Save me and hover o’er me with your wings, / You heavenly guards!’), then addresses it tentatively, ‘What would your gracious figure?’ Perhaps reassured by the Ghost’s demeanour, he ventures, ‘Do you not come your tardy son to chide [etc.]’? The Ghost speaks just once, and though its first words are a stern rebuke, what it adds is apt to strike Hamlet as too humane to be Satanic: Do not forget! This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. But look, amazement on thy mother sits! O step between her and her fighting soul. Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Speak to her, Hamlet. (3.4.106–11) Needless to say, whatever we imagine the effects of these words on Hamlet, presumably so in character with his remembrances of his father, they do not in fact provide proof positive that the Ghost is what it appears to be, rather than evidence of the subtlety of Satanic impersonation. Thus, Shakespeare’s hand remains untipped. 20 The closest Hamlet comes to political commentary in some 216 lines of soliloquy is his including among the specifics of his lament for the human condition, ‘Th’oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / . . . the law’s delay, / The insolence of office and the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes’ (3.1.70–3). However, in indicting the dilatory effects of ‘conscience’, he does speak of ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment [losing] the name of action’. One might suppose this includes great political enterprises, but the sardonic manner in which he later characterizes the fate of Alexander and Caesar, despite their world-shaping achievements, leaves one wondering. 21 Cf. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Bk II, Ch. 7, par. 2. 22 Here I register my general agreement with A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy): ‘This man, the Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet [of various critics] had crossed him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm’ (81).

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23 That Hamlet once refers to Laertes as ‘a very noble youth’ (5.1.213) may mean ‘noble’ in the conventional sense, that is, in terms of his genealogy. Certainly in the action which immediately follows, Hamlet displays no marked respect for Laertes. 24 That both men are wounded with the Laertes’s poisoned rapier is a consequence of their somehow exchanging weapons in the course of their duel, and this is widely viewed as an unlikely contrivance on Shakespeare’s part – empirically proven it would seem by how difficult it is to make this action believable in theatrical productions. The stage direction in the Folio (which the editors adopted for the Third Arden) is not helpful; it reads, ‘In scuffling they change rapiers’ (5.2.285). That of the First Quarto, however, is more expansive, and it holds the clue: ‘They catch one anothers Rapiers, and are both wounded, Leartes falls downe, the Queene falls downe and dies.’ James L. Jackson, taking his cue from this latter direction, has convincingly shown that it would have been quite credible on Shakespeare’s stage. In ‘ “They Catch One Another’s Rapiers”: The Exchange of Weapons in Hamlet’ (Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, no. 3, Autumn 1990), Jackson contends: [T]hat exchange was almost certainly brought about . . . by a method of disarm, known and apparently common in the Renaissance, called the ‘left-hand seizure’, a move in which the fencer, after discarding the dagger, takes his opponent’s rapier hilt with his left hand and twists the weapon outward from his grasp. The defender’s only practical move in response is to take the same action, grasping the attacker’s hilt with his left hand and disarming him, the two actions resulting in an exchange of rapiers. . . . The ‘left-hand seizure’ is discussed in the three English fencing manuals of the 1590s and, though not illustrated there, is pictured in a series of woodcuts illustrating the disarm and exchange in [a manual] published in Paris in 1573. (281–2) Jackson, himself a lifelong fencer and coach of fencing as well as a professor of English literature, actually learned the art of Elizabethan fencing in order to confirm the practicality of his hypothesis.

Chapter 5 1 And yet, despite the gloom the Prince imparts to his story, the man himself is the most witty of Shakespeare’s tragic figures, albeit mostly at the expense of the play’s various comic figures, which are more abundant in Hamlet than in any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies. For one analysis of this feature, see Manfred Draudt, ‘The Comedy of Hamlet’ (Atlantis, Vol. 24, no. 1, June 2002). 2 It is on this basis that the soliloquy with which Hamlet is most closely identified has attained its special status. As Frank Kermode notes in Shakespeare’s Language

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(New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2000), ‘This soliloquy has been discussed interminably, but one thing is surely obvious: Hamlet is referring his own to a more general view of the human condition’ (115). Garber (Shakespeare After All), goes further: ‘[It] has become the hallmark of interiority and consciousness, the speech that – quoted, parodied, parsed, and pondered – has come to define modernity and modern self-consciousness, the birth, in effect, of the modern subject, of modern subjectivity itself ’, that it ‘draws a verbal picture of the anguish of thought’ (475). Cf., for example, 1.4.23–36; 2.2.175–6; 3.2.64–7; 4.4.32–8. In his classic essay on the play, A. C. Bradley contends, ‘There is really nothing in the play to show that Hamlet was ever a “student of philosophies”. . . . His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare’s own, the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind’ (Shakespearean Tragedy, 90–1). Since that is the very essence of philosophy in its original meaning, as I argued in the Prologue, it would justify calling Hamlet philosophical, albeit hardly a philosopher. For he is still a youth, and there are no prodigies in philosophy. As Nietzsche tells the story in The Birth of Tragedy, when King Midas at last captured ‘the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysus’ and asked him what was the best of all things for man, the satyr laughed and said, ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon’ (translation based on that of Walter Kaufmann in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche [New York: Modern Library, 1968], 42). Sarah A. Shea in ‘A Dionysian Hamlet’ (Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Bruce E. Altschuler and Michael A. Genovese [Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014]) explores Nietzsche’s suggestion in The Birth of Tragedy that Hamlet is akin to the ‘Dionysian man’ of ancient Greek tragedy who declines to act precisely because he shares this wisdom of Silenus, hence understands the ultimate futility of all action. Cf. The Merchant of Venice 1.2.47–8. In this respect, Plato’s ever-cheerful Sokrates is exceptional. Even in Phaedo, which portrays his death by hemlock, he is shown to laugh but not cry – though several of his friends who have gathered to share his last hours, and are treated to a conversation on the fate of the soul after death, weep openly at what they regard as a tragedy. The term ‘melancholy’ is Greek in origin: μελαγχολοσ, meaning literally ‘black bile’ (i.e. under the dominant influence thereof), hence ‘jaundiced’, as per the physiological theory of the four humours. One has to be cautious in treating the historical dimension of any of the plays so as not to slide into the kinds of historicism that compromise so much contemporary Shakespeare scholarship – typically by condescension to the author, presuming

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Notes to Pages 139–141 him to have been more or less circumscribed by the prejudices of his time and place (unlike the scholars themselves, of course). But also, there is the danger of marginalizing a play by interpreting it primarily in terms of parochial issues of Shakespeare’s day. It is this latter hazard that requires my treading most carefully, since my own interpretation, on the face of it, would be liable to this failing. The period, that is, of Denmark’s being a major power in northern Europe, with England subordinate to it, that is, c.1017–66 (cf. 3.1.168–9). Dover Wilson (What Happens in Hamlet) fastens upon the decisive datum in noting, ‘The Hamletsaga derives from a remote pre-Christian past, and Shakespeare shows his consciousness that the whole thing happened a long time ago, by making England a tributary of the Danish crown’ (68). And I argued earlier (Ch. 2, n. 9), despite the resulting anachronisms this temporal location entails, it is preferable to any other since Denmark’s geopolitical situation in the eleventh century is fundamental to the story, and those anachronisms are not. Obviously the dictum is not meant to preclude the dramatization of stories ostensibly set in other times and places, since that would rule out several of Polonius’s genres – ‘history, pastoral, pastoral–comical, historical–pastoral’ – indeed, rule out virtually the entirety of Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus, as well as faithful revivals of Seneca, Plautus, and all other playwrights of a bygone age (2.2.333–7). Thus, as a general principle of dramatic art, the Prince can be understood as insisting upon fidelity to Nature as it shows itself in a given historical setting, a certain particular ‘age’. That said, Hamlet would seem to be a special case precisely because the historical context in which Hamlet’s words would first be heard or read (i.e. Shakespeare’s own time) would unavoidably invite this reflexive application to late Elizabethan England along with that of its more direct application to medieval Denmark. The meaning of ‘conscience’ in this, as in most Shakespearean contexts, is not primarily that of an instinctive moral monitor, but rather that of ‘rational selfconsciousness’, which of course includes one’s beliefs about right and wrong, noble and base. ‘Sicklied o’er’ is a choice of words that adds credence to A. D. Nuttall’s ironic contention in Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007): ‘Hamlet is Shakespeare’s prime example of a thinker, and thought is making Hamlet ill’ (202). I have added the Folio’s ‘since’ to make the preceding line more intelligible, and contracted ‘brevity’ to make it scan; these changes require replacing this line’s full stop with a comma. I shall later discuss more fully the first line, ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire’. Suffice for now to note the belief that sun and the stars are pure fire, one of the four basic elements (along with earth, air, and water), had been the regnant view since the

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pre-Sokratic age. However, by the time Shakespeare writes Hamlet, a scattered few thinkers had begun to question this understanding of fire, and consequently of the composition of the stars. 12 ‘Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously with a waggling motion like a top about to fall. This is the Copernican system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much about it as its name. But while watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs, and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy. He holds it without knowing it.’ Joseph Conrad, ‘The Ascending Effort’, The Works of Joseph Conrad (London: William Heinemann, 1921), Vol. 18, 98–9. 13 Harry Levin, in Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), is quite mistaken in speaking of ‘the old Ptolemaic astronomy’ as if ‘a generation before Shakespeare’s birth, had been all but discredited by the more open and less anthropocentric system of Copernicus.’ And that accordingly ‘Hamlet, as a man of the Renaissance, registered some doubt about the traditional worldview’ (45). Shakespeare may well be regarded as a ‘man of the Renaissance’, but not so his Hamlet, who is a Prince of eleventh-century Denmark, then exercising lordship over England (see n. 7). Hamlet’s line in the love poem only serves his evidentiary purpose on the presumption of the old cosmology; Hamlet invites Ophelia to doubt something so seemingly indubitable as the Sun’s daily circling the Earth before doubting his love. Likewise, then, the Third Arden editors are mistaken in their explanatory note on Hamlet’s love poem to the effect ‘that Shakespeare (if not Hamlet) knew [the Ptolemaic view] to be outmoded’ (246). Very few people accepted the Copernican alternative at the time Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, and it remained controversial even among astronomers throughout most of the succeeding century. Thus, if what William Kerrigan claims is correct – ‘It is often pointed out that most Elizabethans could doubt the sphere of fire and the movement of the sun’ (Hamlet’s Perfection, 65) – then there are that many scholars and critics who are profoundly mistaken on this point. And it is a particularly unfortunate mistake, since it trivializes an important dimension of the play, and treats Shakespeare’s quite unusual conversancy with astronomical issues as if it were commonplace. Moderns, so thoroughly accustomed to the idea of a mobile earth, have the greatest difficulty appreciating how nonsensical, counter-intuitive, downright perverse the idea would seem to anyone not similarly indoctrinated in the view, as remained the case for several generations after Shakespeare wrote. Thus Nietzsche observes about ‘the Pole Copernicus’, he has been one of the two ‘greatest and

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most successful opponents of visual evidence so far’ (the other being Ruggiero Boscovich, 1711–87, who advanced a view of ‘matter’ like that held by physicists today): ‘For Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast’ (Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 12). 14 In The Book Nobody Read (New York: Walker & Company, 2004), Owen Gingerich writes, ‘Never printed during his lifetime, [the “Little Commentary”] was apparently distributed by manuscript to a few of [Copernicus’s] confidants. For a long time this document remained out of sight to Copernican scholars, and then around 1880 a Swedish scholar discovered a manuscript copy at the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. A few years later a second manuscript turned up in the National Library in Vienna. At first it was dated in the 1530s. . . . Then, however, researchers found an inventory of the library of a sixteenth-century Cracow professor, one Matthew of Miechow, with an entry, “A manuscript of six leaves in which the author asserts that the Earth moves while the Sun stands still.” [T]hey realized that the Commentariolus had to antedate May 1514, the date of Matthew’s inventory’ (31–2). 15 James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). About the attempt to resolve the discrepancy in the calendar, with which many Elizabethans would have been familiar, he continues: ‘In 1577, Pope Gregory XIII proposed skipping ten days, and in 1582, Catholic Europe acted upon his recommendation: it was agreed the day after October 4 would be October 15.’ But England and other Protestant countries rejected the change, ‘and, as a result, nations began to keep different time. By 1599, Easter was celebrated a full five weeks apart in Catholic and Protestant lands’ (150). 16 Translation that of Charles Glenn Wallis in Vol. 16 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952). Copernicus’s reference to the Pythagoreans takes on added significance in light of what Rheticus claims in the Narratio Prima – on good authority, one must presume, given his privileged relationship with the author whose work he is introducing: He therefore decided that he should imitate the Alfonsine Tables rather than Ptolemy and compose tables with accurate rules but no proofs. In that way he would provoke no dispute among philosophers; common mathematicians would have a correct calculus of the motions; but true scholars, upon whom Jupiter had looked with unusually favorable eyes, would easily arrive, from the numbers set forth, at the principles and sources from which everything was deduced. Just as heretofore learned men had to work out the true hypothesis of the motion of the starry sphere from the Alfonsine doctrine, so the entire system would be crystal clear to learned men. The ordinary astronomer, nevertheless, would not be deprived of the uses of the tables which he seeks and

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desires, apart from all theory. And the Pythagorean principle would be observed that philosophy must be pursued in such a way that its inner secrets are reserved for learned men, trained in mathematics. (As translated by Edward Rosen in Three Copernican Treatises [New York: Dover, 1959/2004], 192–3) Rosen writes in his Introduction to these Treatises that despite the fact that Rheticus was Lutheran and Copernicus Catholic, relations between the two men were cordial (5). This might suggest that both men were rather easy-going with regards to doctrinal matters. Notice, Rheticus credits ‘true scholars’ with having enjoyed the favour of Jupiter. Jupiter? I have modified Wallis’s translation as per my examination of the Latin text. William C. Carroll, editor of the Third Arden edition of the play (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), glosses this as ‘a conventional conceit of romantic love’ (196). So it would seem; Romeo famously enthuses, ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east and Juliet is the sun’ (2.2.2–3). Still, cannot one imagine Shakespeare smiling as he pens, ‘But now I worship a celestial sun’? For example, Love’s Labour’s Lost 1.1.84; Twelfth Night 4.3.1; King John 3.1.3/77; I Henry VI 5.3.87; 3 Henry VI 22, 26, 5.3.5. Thus Peter French, commenting on these lines, concludes: ‘In Brief, Copernicus introduces the centrality of the sun within the framework of the Hermetic religion of the universe in which the sun is perceived as a palpable manifestation of God’ (John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972], 103). Whereas Edward Rosen, in ‘Was Copernicus a Hermetist?’ answers – most unconvincingly, to my mind – that he was not (Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science, ed. Roger H. Stuewer [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970]). Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Rosen seems determined to believe that ‘Mersenne’s judgment of Campanella (“he will teach us nothing in the sciences”)’ may be extended to virtually all the other persons in the hermeticcabalist tradition’ (171). Apparently Rosen is unaware that Kepler, Newton, and Boyle were ‘hermeticists’ of one sort or another, as were a few dozen other thinkers who made important contributions to the scientific revolution. Their supposed author is not included by Diogenes Laertius (c. second–third century AD) in his encyclopaedic ‘Lives and Maxims of Eminent Philosophers’, though reportedly there is some mention of him in Plutarch (which would mean he was known by the first century AD at the latest). In 1614 a Swiss scholar, Isaac Casaubon – working on a commission from King James, who was interested in discrediting Hermeticism – contended that philological analysis showed that the texts were from the Christian era. Subsequent scholars, however, have concluded that they were written earlier, but not in remote antiquity. Robert P. Multhauf (The Origins of Chemistry [New York: Watts, 1967]) reflects the modern consensus: ‘the

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Notes to Pages 147–148 first “Hermetic” literature appeared in Egypt about 150 bc. The earliest Hermetic books suggest that it was a blend of Platonic and Stoic philosophy’ (90). Thus, Bensen Bobrick in The Fated Sky: Astrology in History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005) flatly asserts (though it is at best a plausible speculation), ‘[I]t was Neoplatonic Sun worship, not mathematical calculation, that inspired his conception of the universe as having a heliocentric design. . . . Copernicus was completely captivated by what he called “the choral dance of the stars”, and it was from reading the astrologer Manilius that he first encountered the idea that the Earth turned on an axis and revolved about the Sun’ (151). The ‘choral dance’ alludes to Plato’s Timaeus 40c, and more generally to the Platonic teaching of ‘the music of the spheres’ (elaborated, for example, in Republic 616c–617c); so too does Copernicus’s ‘sure bond of harmony’ – ideas dear to several Renaissance astronomers, as Shakespeare attests in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.54–65). Thus the term ‘hermeneutics’, which has since become a general term for principles of textual interpretation. A brief but substantial account of Cosimo’s relationship with Marsilio and their establishment of a new Platonic Academy, as well as of Cosimo’s efforts to assemble the collection of books and manuscripts which would later serve as a model for the Vatican Library, may be found in Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York: William Morrow, 1975), 68–9. As a consequence of Marsilio’s translations, published in 1485, a Latinized version of Plato became available throughout Europe. The historian George Sarton writes in Six Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1957), ‘The Academy of Florence became a center of Platonic discussion; Cosimo was its patron and Marsilio Ficino its high priest. It continued with a fair degree of success the mediaeval task of reconciling Platonism with Christianity, and it stimulated the study of Plato and Neoplatonism not only in Florence but also in the whole republic of letters. Platonism in the West was deeply influenced by Ficino’s translations, commentaries, and separate writings’ (101). Whatever Ficino’s actual views of Christian dogma, he practically worshipped Plato, albeit a Plato Hermetically interpreted. As the tutor of Lorenzo the Great, Ficino’s teachings reached beyond scholars to the broader public, and not least through his influence on some of the eminent artists of his and subsequent times (including Alberti, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Dürer). For example, given that there is no detectable parallax in the position of the stars as the Earth travels its orbit, one would have to hypothesize that the stellar sphere is far more distant, hence far larger (by, say, two whole orders of magnitude) than previously supposed. Why all that extra space? And how huge must the stars be if they can be visible from a hundred times farther away?

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27 David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 53. 28 As Roy Strong writes in The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts (London: Pimlico, 2000): The roots of the scientific explosion which took off in England after 1640 lay in the Elizabethan age. Its central figure was a colourful one, the magus John Dee, consultant to the queen and to the court and also to all those involved in maritime endeavour. Deeply committed to the hermetic and occult tradition it was nonetheless Dee who set the style of English science whose preoccupation was to be utilitarian, practical and experimental. In 1570 he wrote a preface to an edition of Euclid in the vernacular to encourage ‘common artificers’ ‘to find out and devise new works, strange engines and instruments for sundry purposes in the commonwealth’. Dee in no way looked to the universities but instead to the merchants and craftsmen of Elizabethan London, speaking to them indeed in their own language. (278) As Dee is an almost ubiquitous presence in the intellectual life of his time, contributing to both theoretical and practical advances in a variety of fields, he has received his fair share of scholarly attention, being the subject of numerous biographies and even of novels. He figures in many of the historical works I have consulted, but for an overview of his life I have relied mainly on Peter French’s John Dee and Benjamin Woolley’s The Queen’s Conjurer (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). 29 The editors of the Third Arden edition of The Tempest (1999), Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, suggest a number of its possible connections with John Dee, ‘believed by some critics to be Shakespeare’s model for Prospero’ (67). For example, ‘ “Ariel” must have had rich resonances for a Jacobean audience: “Uriel”, the name of an angel in the Jewish cabala, was John Dee’s spiritcommunicant during his ill-fated experiments with magic’ (27). Moreover, The roots of Prospero’s magic art may lie in the neo-Platonic authors translated by Marsilio Ficino. . . . Prospero is often described as a theurgist, a practitioner of ‘white magic’, a rigorous system of philosophy that allows the magician ‘to energize in the gods or to control other beneficent spiritual intelligences in the working of miraculous effects’. The antithesis of theurgy is ‘goety’ or ‘black magic’: ‘its evil practitioner produces magic results by disordering the sympathetic relationships of nature or by employing to wicked ends the powers of irrational spirits’. While practitioners such as Dr John Dee may have viewed themselves as theurgists, the Anglican Church and King James condemned magical studies as damnable. (62) The editors also report that ‘Peter Hall costumed his Prospero in the 1974 National Theatre production [of The Tempest] to resemble the Elizabethan astrologer

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Notes to Pages 150–151 John Dee’ (116) – there being a famous portrait of him in skullcap and robe, and sporting a long pointed white beard, upon which to base the likeness. Thus, ‘Lord Willoughby, [English] ambassador to Prague and himself a patron of alchemy, reputedly brought back a bedpan to present to Elizabeth, with a section that Kelley had transmuted into gold. He also claimed to have seen Kelley make gold rings out of pieces of wire.’ Secretary Cecil assigned the task of retrieving Kelley to the poet Edward Dyer, who had been pupil of Dee and was godfather to his eldest son. Dyer managed to gain access to Kelley’s laboratory and observe the work done there: ‘The experience left Dyer utterly convinced of Kelley’s abilities. Back in England, he tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade the Archbishop of Canterbury of Kelley’s powers’, stressing that he had been an eyewitness to their wondrous effects (Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer, 268–9). Fully 70 years after Dee wrote out in detail the conversations he had with various angels (courtesy Kelley’s creative imagination), the transcripts came into the hands of a scholar, Meric Casaubon, who decided to publish them (1659) as a warning against ‘presumptuous unlawful wishes and desires’ – that is to say, against prying into matters which are the business of no mere man. As Woolley explains: Dee’s delusion did not lie in his belief in the spirits’ existence. No learned man, in Casaubon’s opinion, ‘can entertain such an opinion (simply and seriously) that there be no Divels or Spirits’. Dee’s ‘only (but great and dreadful) error’ was that he ‘mistook false lying spirits for Angels of Light, the Divel of Hell (as we commonly term him) for the God of Heaven’. (Ibid., 294) Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 128. Of the first edition, 276 are known to be still in existence, 315 of the second. The 23-year lag time between these two editions perhaps gives some indication of the theory’s limited appeal. French, John Dee, 50–1. Dee also had copies of the Hermetic Asclepius and Pimander, as well as the edition of the Corpus Hermeticum produced at Paris in 1554 by the classical scholar and Hermeticist, Adrianus Turnebus, with whom Dee had exchanged ideas there in 1550 (55). That is, Dee’s ‘Externa bibliotheca’, which comprised the vast majority of his holdings, was open to scholars and copyists. But he also maintained an ‘Interna bibliotheca’ that served as his private study: ‘Only a select few were ever invited to enter this room, and only he was allowed to enter the adjoining private chapel or “oratory”, where he presumably shelved the Bibles and devotional texts so conspicuously lacking from the catalogs of the Externa bibliotheca’ (Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer, 84–5). By 1575, when Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by her privy council and other members of the nobility, visited Dee’s house at Mortlake expressly to see his library, it already consisted of some 4,000 volumes – this at a time Cambridge’s Library

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contained but 450, Oxford’s less than 380 (French, John Dee, 44–5). Her visit was unfortunately timed, however, as Dee’s wife had died just four hours before. ‘Hearing this, the Queen would not come in, but asked Dee to bring out and show her the magic glass of which she had heard much. Some say this speculum was made of polished coal and some that it was volcanic glass. . . . Dee said it was brought to him by an angel’ (Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great [London: Victor Gollancz, 1958], 195–6). According to Peter Marshall (The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology, and Magic in Renaissance Prague [Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006]), Dee’s ‘magical crystal or “shew-stone” used to conjure up celestial spirits . . . resides now in the British Museum with an Aztec polished stone which he claimed could foretell the future’ (112). 35 As Derek Wilson recounts (Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester [London: Allison & Busby, 1997]), it was Dudley who arranged this: ‘[T]he Queen gave careful consideration to the most propitious date for her crowning. Robert . . . brought to court the man who eventually decided the matter. At age thirty-one John Dee was already a much traveled scholar, widely known and respected among the international community as England’s foremost exponent of Euclidean geometry and its terrestrial and celestial application. Robert now commissioned Dee to cast the Queen’s horoscope. Dee made his observations and calculations and concluded that 15 January was the most appropriate’ (88). 36 Edith Sitwell, The Queens and the Hive (London: Macmillan, 1962), 482. About this mysterious, incapacitating illness, Woolley (The Queen’s Conjurer) notes that Dee was at the time engaged in alchemical experiments: ‘He does not identify the symptoms; however, it is possible that, like many who dabbled in alchemy and metallurgy at the time, he was poisoned by some of the chemicals he was handling’ (88). 37 According to Dame Sitwell (ibid.), ‘Dr. Dee had been in the confidence of the Queen from the reign of her sister Mary, when she narrowly escaped a charge of witchcraft. (He had been presented to her, in her early girlhood, by Sir William Cecil.)’ Other accounts have her first meeting Dee through Robert Dudley (Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I [New York: Ballantine, 1998]), 22; or through Dee’s cousin, Blanch Parry (Neville Williams in All the Queen’s Men [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972]), 195. All sources agree, however, about his serious run-in with political authorities during the reign of Queen Mary. J. E. Neale (Queen Elizabeth I [London: Jonathan Cape, 1934]) directly connects Dee’s arrest with the suspicions Mary and her supporters had of anyone associated with the (then) Princess Elizabeth: ‘In June, John Dee the astrologer and three others, one or two being [Elizabeth’s] servants, were arrested for casting her horoscope along with the King’s and Queen’s’ (56). Carolly Erickson (The First Elizabeth [New York:

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Summit/Simon and Schuster, 1983]) provides more details of the episode: ‘Dee had had the misfortune to cast the nativities [i.e. horoscopes] of the queen and king and Princess Elizabeth; he was suspected of attempting to enchant the queen, just at the time when her fruitless pregnancy was reaching its nerve-racking climax. He was eventually released, but only after enduring the terrors of imprisonment. His fellow prisoner Barthlet Green, who shared his cell and wretched sleeping pallet, was burned at the stake’ (152). French writes that Dee was charged with treason but that the exact terms of the indictment are unknown; he was subjected to Star Chamber proceedings, but under interrogation managed to clear himself. ‘Although he was released without penalty on 29 August 1555, Dee feared for his life from this time on’ (John Dee, 35). However, his persecution by Queen Mary further endeared him to Mary’s successor, who similarly had feared for her life during the reign of her sister, and so made a point of offering Dee her royal protection. 38 ‘Robert had little aptitude for book learning. . . . Only in one area of scholarship does his interest seem to have been seriously aroused: he was fascinated by mathematics and the new sciences. In this he was almost certainly influenced by John Dee, one of the most remarkable men of the English Renaissance, who was employed for a time as a tutor to the Dudley children’ (Wilson, Sweet Robin, 16). 39 In his capacity as an astrologer, Dee was frequently consulted for advice, but according to Woolley (The Queen’s Conjurer), ‘rarely committed his findings to writing’. The only interpretation of any length that survives concerns Dee’s pupil, the glamorous poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, for whom Dee drew up a sixtytwo page nativity that made a number of tentative predictions. He foretold that Sidney would enjoy a wonderful career between the ages of fifteen and thirtyone. Thereafter, he faced mortal danger from a sword or gunshot injury, which if survived would inaugurate even greater glories and a long life. Sidney was killed fighting in the Low Countries on 17 October 1586, aged thirty-one. (9) Specifically, he died from a gunshot wound in the thigh that turned gangrenous. 40 It was mainly through the skills of Phellipes that Walsingham was kept apprised of the conspiracies which swirled around the captive Mary Queen of Scots. Thus, according to Derek Wilson (Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror [New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007]), ‘Mr Secretary knew all the plans of the Catholic network often before the members of that network knew them themselves’ (210). Given the close connection between Dee and Walsingham, some have speculated that Dee himself occasionally served as spy, and undertook covert assignments during his visits to the continent. It has even been suggested James Bond’s iconic ‘007’ designation derived from Dee’s

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manner of signing some of his correspondence with a pair of circles surmounted by an elongated upper bar of a seven, supposedly symbolizing his role as the secret eyes of the Queen. French, John Dee, 171. Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 221. Johnson contends that the Queen ‘lived vicariously the intellectual life through Dee, as she touched heroic adventure through Ralegh. Highly original speculation was always a risky business in her day. Dee noted in his autobiographical fragment that the Queen gave him her full protection and “promised me great security against any in her kingdom, that would by reason of any my rare studies and philosophical exercises, unduly seek my overthrow” ’ (222–3). According to French, ‘By the time Dee left Cambridge for Louvain [i.e. 1547], he had already been studying alchemy, Hermeticism, and probably the cabala (magical subjects) for several years. All these subjects were closely connected with mathematics, which actually became a tainted discipline because of its association with them’ (John Dee, 28). The popular prejudices against mathematicians, and by extension astronomers – and anyone else who worked with the ‘magic’ of numbers – were downright dangerous, because such arts were regarded as diabolic or atheistic. A. J. Meadows contends, ‘In general, actual accusations of atheism were leveled against individual astronomers, but not against the profession as a whole (though Thomas Nashe, at the end of the sixteenth century, said that all mathematicians were atheists). An obvious target for such attacks was John Dee who seems to have led a charmed life against both physical and oral opposition. Perhaps it was due to the protection he received in high quarters’ (The High Firmament: A Survey of Astronomy in English Literature [Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969], 80–1). As late as his writing of Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes includes in his indictment of the universities of his day, ‘And for Geometry, till of very late times it had no place at all; as being subservient to nothing but rigide truth. And if any man by the ingenuity of his owne nature, had attained to any degree of perfection therein, hee was commonly thought a Magician, and his Art Diabolicall’ (Leviathan, XLVI, par. 13). Cf. Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer, 171–3. According to Woolley (ibid.), ‘He became inseparable from the thirty-six-year-old Mercator. “It was a custom of our mutual friendship and intimacy that, during three whole years, neither of us willingly lacked the other’s presence for as much as three whole days”, he reminisced later. As a mark of his respect and affection, Mercator gave Dee a pair of his globes, one of the earth, the other of the heavens, objects of huge financial and incalculable scientific value. In return Dee would later dedicate his 1558 astronomical work, Propaedeumata Aphoristica, to Mercator’

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Notes to Pages 154–155 (18–19). Mercator, not surprisingly, owned a copy of De Revolutionibus (Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 242). Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer, 97–9. The establishment of regular trade with Russia, which incidentally provided Englishmen a superficial introduction to Russian culture (including styles of clothing), is the background of the several amusing references to the disguised ‘love delegation’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example: ‘appareled thus, / Like Muscovites, or Russians, as I guess’ (5.2.121–2); ‘Disguised like Muscovites in shapeless gear’ (5.2.303); ‘Twenty adieus, my frozen Muscovites’ (5.2.265; cf. 5.2.361, 367–8, 398, 401). As one instance, the Queen ‘gave a charter to Dee, John Davis and Ralegh to set up a “Fellowship for the Discovery of the Northwest Passage” ’ (Johnson, Elizabeth I, 338). A measure of his influence in this regard is the frequency with which the nation’s leading sailors and explorers visited Mortlake. According to French (John Dee), ‘Adrian and Humphrey Gilbert, half brothers to Sir Walter Ralegh, were frequently Dee’s guests, and a visit from John Hawkins, “who had byn with Sir Francis Drake”, is noted in Dee’s Diary. Sir Francis Walsingham came to consult Dee about navigational matters with Sir Edward Dyer’ (62). Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 59. Cf. Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2003), 62–4. According to Paul Johnson, ‘Walsingham, Leicester, Hatton and Dyer – all backers of Drake’s world voyage – came to seek his advice and documentation before Drake set off in 1577. His advocacy was one reason why Elizabeth gave the expedition her approval’ (Elizabeth I, 222). Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer, 118. It is worth noting that all the voyages of discovery, of whatever nationality, worked to undermine established views in general. In revealing ‘brave new worlds’ unknown to the ancients, not only was Ptolemy’s geography proven to be defective (thus further eroding confidence in his astronomy), but doubt was cast upon the whole Aristotelian world-view of which it was a part. As A. L. Rowse observes, ‘In the Renaissance geographical knowledge was vastly more exciting and obvious to the ordinary man than Copernicanism, which was grasped by few. Everyone could appreciate that a New World had been discovered, new lands and seas were opening up before men’s astonished eyes: it was unsettling, but immensely stimulating to the imagination. And also to science’ (The English Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement [London: Macmillan, 1972]), 217. John Aubrey, who claims that his great grandfather and John Dee ‘were cousins and intimate acquaintances’, includes the old man’s recollections in his account of Dee in Brief Lives: ‘he told me of John Dee conjuring at a pool in Brecknockshire, and that they found a wedge of gold; and that they were

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troubled and indicted as conjurers at the assizes; that a mighty storm and tempest was raised at harvest time, the country people had not known the like’. Surprisingly, perhaps (given his reputation as a lightweight antiquarian), Aubrey had once owned a first edition of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 146). In The Expansion of Elizabethan England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), A. L. Rowse describes Dee as an ‘admirable mathematician and geographer’, but adds, ‘He became more popular – or rather unpopular – as an astrologer, and indeed there was something of the visionary, hieratic seer in his personality like that portrayed so wonderfully in Shakespeare’s Glendower’ (51–2) – a suggestion Rowse repeats in The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement (London: Macmillan, 1972) (213): ‘in Dee sense is so much mixed up with nonsense that reading him in the original is enough to give one Hotspur’s reaction to Glendower. (It is likely enough that Shakespeare drew upon the Welsh magus for his portrait of Glendower.)’ As quoted in French, John Dee, 24. Woolley provides a detailed description of the episode in The Queen’s Conjurer, and notes, ‘Dee believed such artificial marvels showed that, with mathematics, man could achieve miracles to rival God, and in his production of Peace he had his first opportunity to prove it. . . . Dee’s coup de théâtre had its intended affect. A “great wondering” spread through the audience. Dee left no clue as to how he actually made his creature fly around the stage, but the mechanisms mentioned in his “Preface” include pneumatics, mirrors, and springs’ (14–15). Frances A. Yates, in a letter to The New York Review of Books replying to a review by Wylie Sypher of her book, Theatre of the World, 12 March 1970. Sypher defends his minor criticisms, but generously concludes, ‘by a stroke of scholarship she has incontestably established the Vitruvian influence on the idea of the Globe theatre as cosmological’. This was also the view of the principal historical adviser for the modern reconstruction of the Globe, John Orrell. According to Barry Day (This Wooden ‘O’: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn [New York: Limelight, 1998]), ‘Orrell believed, along with many other scholars, that the Elizabethan playhouse was less an accidental evolution of the inn yard or bear baiting arena than a considered adaptation of the classical Roman amphitheatre. It owed its design to the architectural teachings of Pollio Vitruvius, a Roman writing in the time of the Emperor Augustus (40 BC), whose work had been rediscovered during the Renaissance’ (95). See in this connection Joy Hancox, Kingdom for a Stage: Magicians and Aristocrats in the Elizabethan Theatre (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 122–7. This is an eccentric book in many respects, but it does contain some useful information about the arcane geometry pertinent to theatre design in the period.

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57 With respect to Marlowe’s acquaintance with Dee and other figures important to early English science, such as Thomas Hariot, see Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1992), especially chapter 21, ‘The Wizard Earl’ (191–201). There is no conclusive evidence of Shakespeare’s being personally acquainted with Dee, but according to Steve Roth (Hamlet: The Undiscovered Country [Seattle: Open House, 2009]), ‘A royal chambers accounts item for December 2, 1603 . . . records a payment of 30 pounds to “John Hymyngs one of his majesty’s players. . . . For the paynes and expenses of himself and the rest of the company in coming from Mortelake in the countie of Surrie unto the courte aforesaid [at Wilton] and there p’senting before his majesty one play.” Mortlake was the site of Dee’s estate’ (152–3). Roth’s book is filled with offbeat observations and suggestions about the text of Hamlet, many of them insightful or otherwise useful, but it is compromised overall by major interpretative missteps. For example, his temporally positioning the play at the beginning of the seventeenth century, utterly ignoring its vitally important geopolitical context. Thus, he suggests, ‘If [King Hamlet] died in the first week of September 1601, the mousetrap sequence occurs in the first week of January, 1602’ (and so on; 48). 58 Meadows, The High Firmament, 77. 59 Ibid., 70. In 1970, Owen Gingerich discovered Reinhold’s heavily annotated copy of Copernicus among the rare books on astronomy held by the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh. This motivated his endeavour to track down all surviving copies of both the first and second editions of De Revolutionibus in an effort to determine whether it was in fact a book ‘nobody read’, as Arthur Koestler had claimed in his best-selling history of astronomy, The Sleepwalkers. Gingerich’s investigation has clearly proved that the treatise had a limited, but quite distinguished readership (The Book Nobody Read, 22–8). 60 And in the lines that follow, we’re told ‘So soon he profits in divinity, . . . Excelling all whose sweet delight disputes / In heavenly matters of theology . . . And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts, / He surfeits upon cursed necromancy. / And nothing so sweet as magic is to him.’ The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Prologue, 13–28. 61 French, John Dee, 103. Recall, Copernicus expressed a similar reserve. 62 Meadows, The High Firmament, 86–8. 63 According to Stillman Drake, ‘Reports of optical experiments by Leonard Digges [Thomas’s Father] and John Dee in England as early as the 1550s have occasioned speculations that telescopes were made and used there long before 1590. These speculations are not idle with respect to the history of the reflecting telescope, introduced astronomically much later by Sir Isaac Newton’ (Galileo Studies [Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970], 156). Supporting

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this speculation is the Preface Thomas Digges wrote upon publishing his father’s Pantometria (1571): ‘My father, by his continuall painfull practices, assisted with demonstrations mathematicall, was able, and sundry times hath, by proportional glasses duely situate in convenient angles, not onely discovered things farre off, read letters [etc.]’. The claim that Leonard Digges was using a reflecting telescope to view the heavens decades before Galileo did likewise with a refracting version (like that first patented in Holland by Hans Lipperhey in 1608) has received support from Colin Ronan, Past President of the British Astronomical Association, as well as from several historians of science. Moreover, there is independent testimony of Dee’s and Thomas Digges’s use of various ‘perspective glasses’ (‘telescope’ is a term from the seventeenth century). Sometime around 1580, Sir William Cecil was apprised of their possessing such instruments – whose military utility would be self-evident – and he commissioned William Bourne, an acknowledged expert in both navigation and ballistics, to determine whether there was any truth to the claims. Bourne’s detailed report (which has been preserved) leaves little doubt that he saw for himself the construction and effectiveness of these glasses. That Thomas Digges used such a device to view the heavens, thereby seeing so many more stars than were evident to the naked eye, may have been what led him to reject the notion of a stellar sphere and to posit instead an infinite universe. In this connection, there is an interesting line in the Folio version of the text that is not present in Q2, namely, Hamlet’s rejoinder to Rosencrantz’s suggestion that Hamlet finds Denmark a prison because it’s ‘too narrow for [his] mind’: ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams’ (2.2.252–6, as per the Second Arden). 64 The Third Arden editors, citing Bullough, suggest two other possibilities. First, that the English ambassador to Denmark upon the ascension of Christian IV mentioned these names in his report of the occasion (143). How a lowly actorplaywright would have been privy to such a report is not explained. Their second suggestion is more plausible, and retains the connection with Brahe and astronomy: ‘the portrait of the Danish astronomer which was published in the 1596 and 1601 editions of his collected astronomical letters: the family names “Rosenkranz” and “Guildensteren” appear under coats of arms representing Brahe’s ancestors on the arch surrounding the likeness’. This possibility presumes, however, that Shakespeare had sufficient interest in the new astronomies to consult such a book. What else would explain his perusing – of all things – a collection of Brahe’s astronomical correspondence? As such, it might indirectly point back to the Digges family. Moreover, there is another Digges connection. The editor of the Third Arden edition of Henry V, T. W. Craik, appends this note to Fluellen’s pedantic reference

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to the ‘true disciplines of the wars, look you, of the Roman disciplines’ (3.2.72–3): ‘Fluellen is endorsing the views of the mathematician Leonard Digges [Sr], whose Stratioticus (completed by his son Thomas and published 1579; reprinted 1590 by Richard Field, Shakespeare’s fellow Stratfordian who published [Venus and Adonis], 1593) commends “the ancient Roman discipline for the wars” ’ (210). Lily B. Campbell (Shakespeare’s Histories) repeats Leslie Hotson’s suggestion that ‘before writing Henry V “Shakespeare had had observed Digges’ peculiarities and had also glanced over his military treatise”. Thomas Digges had been muster-master general under Leicester and had peculiarities which Hotson thinks may have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he drew his picture of Fluellen.’ Digges dedicated Stratioticus to the Earl of Leicester (299–300; cf. 247). Finally, as a matter of peripheral interest, there was also a political aspect to Digges’s career. According to Derek Wilson (Sir Francis Walsingham), Digges was a member of the Parliament that met in 1584–5, principally to consider the proposed ‘Bond of Association’ that Walsingham and Burghley had drawn up (probably with Leicester’s support). The Bond aimed at ensuring that England remained Protestant by vesting power in a ‘Great Council’ to decide which claimant was awarded the throne upon the death of the Sovereign. This ‘radical, almost republican, proposal’ to, in effect, elect the next sovereign was warmly supported by (among many others) ‘Thomas Digges, parliamentarian and one of the scholars of the DudleySidney-Walsingham circle’ (‘the foremost mathematical and scientific writer of Elizabethan England’; 189–91). 65 It was Kepler’s discovery that the observational data for Mars fit an elliptical trajectory that led to his revolutionary modification of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, positing elliptical rather than circular orbits for all the planets, with the Sun at one foci of the ellipses. 66 Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 113. 67 Multitudes of astrologically inclined readers have proven that Shakespeare’s texts offer numerous opportunities for indulging their proclivity; Romeo and Juliet seems to be a particular favourite of aficionados. What is more pertinent to the rest of us, they attest that those texts prove Shakespeare to be thoroughly versed in what are regarded as sound astrological principles. There can be no question but that he, as dramatic poet, mirrors astrological beliefs and practices repeatedly in his plays – most memorably in King Lear, with old Gloucester expressing the long-established view by way of explaining such implausible happenings as Lear’s disinheriting Cordelia, banishing Kent, his own natural son Edgar’s supposed conspiracy, and so on: ‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet Nature finds itself scourg’d by the sequent effects’ (1.2.100–3). Whereas his bastard son Edmund, left

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alone to soliloquize in a tone heavy with scorn and sarcasm, reasons according to the wisdom of Nature: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. 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. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing (1.2.118–33; as per the text of the Third Arden edition, ed. R. A. Foakes) Given the muscular eloquence with which it is expressed, it would seem that Shakespeare the philosopher inclines to the view of Gloucester’s bastard son, that recourse to astrological explanations of people and events are but so much ‘foppery of the world’. Still, this is problematic evidence, since Shakespeare endows all of his major villains with eloquence, especially in defending their villainy. 68 It seems Shakespeare had a penchant for employing psychic analogues of concepts pertaining to material nature. Probably the most elaborate example is found in Othello, where he establishes four psychic correlates of the material ‘elements’ (i.e. ‘liberal as the air’, ‘rash as fire’, ‘false as water’, ‘ignorant as dirt’) that in effect determine its tragic outcome. I have provided a detailed analysis of this feature of the play in Of Philosophers and Kings, 194–214. Shakespeare’s evident interest in the new science of his day, based on new modes of inquiry, makes plausible W. H. Auden’s interpretation of Iago (in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays [New York: Vintage, 1989]): ‘For is not Iago, the practical joker, a parabolic figure for the autonomous pursuit of scientific knowledge through experiment which we all, whether we are scientists or not, take for granted as natural and right?’ (270). Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific inquiry as putting Nature to the Question. If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask him: ‘What are you doing?’ could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, ‘Nothing. I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really like’? And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he knows the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot, ‘What you know, you know’, so terrifying for, by then, Othello has become a thing, incapable of knowing anything. (271)

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69 Given the range of their overlapping interests – medicine, navigation, cosmology, scientific inquiry – it would seem most unlikely that Gilbert and Dee were unacquainted, but I’ve been unable to find any clear indication that they were. 70 However, as David Wootton shows quite conclusively (Galileo), Galileo had become a convinced Copernican by 1597, long before he had made these astronomical discoveries which so enhance the plausibility of the Copernican account. Doubtless contributive to his conversion was his becoming acquainted with Giovan Vincenzo Pinelli after Galileo began teaching at the University of Padua (1592): ‘Pinelli had an astonishing library, which he took great pains to keep up to date. It contained two copies of Copernicus, works by Bruno and a Copernican work by Thomas Digges; and publications by astronomers such as Tycho and Kepler were added as quickly as Pinelli could obtain them’ (56). 71 Meadows, The High Firmament, 81. 72 Meadows (ibid.) writes, ‘In easier times, perhaps, a heliocentric theory might have been . . . absorbed. As it was, the degree of acceptance varied from country to country. Copernicanism actually advanced most rapidly in seventeenth century England. Here, the position of the Church – partially reformed and partially unreformed – may have resulted in a somewhat less dogmatic attitude. More importantly, all the leading English astronomers supported, or did not actively oppose, the new Copernican ideas [i.e. by the mid-seventeenth century]. England had long possessed a tradition of Aristotelian criticism. . . . A part of the background to this criticism was the continuing neo-Platonic bias amongst English mathematicians. This was important for the acceptance of Copernican ideas, for neo-Platonists usually grouped Plato and the Pythagoreans together. Since the Pythagoreans were then believed to have been the originators of the heliocentric hypothesis in antiquity, there was a natural tendency for the neo-Platonists to be prejudiced in favour of the concept’ (76–7). However, as my subsequent quotes from Hobbes attest, even 50 years after Shakespeare writes Hamlet, espousing the heliocentric view could prove imprudent, in England no less than on the continent. Most people today, weaned on some more or less simplified version of the current orthodox account of celestial architecture – aware, at the very least, that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than vice versa – can scarce imagine how implausible, even perverse, this would strike people, the learned as well as the unlettered, who believed as had countless preceding generations what seemed virtually self-evident: that the centre of the earth is the centre of the world, towards which all heavy objects fall, and about which all heavenly bodies revolve. Much less have people today any real appreciation for the subtler psychic consequences of the earth’s displacement – of how differently we would view the earth, and all life on earth, and thus ourselves, if we still believed the entire universe to be centred on

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us. How striking the contrast with the now regnant view: the manifold forms of life on earth regarded as the result of hundreds of billions of chance happenings, and the earth itself as but one of several balls of matter revolving around a nondescript star located in the boondocks of the so-called Milky Way, a galaxy composed of a hundred billion other such stars, and itself but one of a hundred billion such galaxies, all expanding towards the unfathomable. There is, to be sure, some irony in Luther’s denunciation, since (as noted earlier) it was primarily through the efforts of the Wittenberg’s young Professor of Mathematics, George Joachim Rheticus – who was, moreover, a protégé of Luther’s good friend and de facto lieutenant, Melanchton – that Copernicus’s revolutionary treatise was finally published. ‘God’s bodkin’ would seem a rather peculiar oath, presuming its literal meaning: ‘God’s dagger’. The Third Arden editors gloss it as ‘an abbreviation of “bodykin” = small (or dear) body’, and doubtless this is how it would be heard in the theatre: as ‘God’s little body’ (‘bodikin’ being an archaic diminutive of ‘body’, and ‘’Od’s Bodikinns’ a common expression at the time, that is, late sixteenth century, according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary). This interpretation itself takes on added significance in light of the prominence of ‘body’ in the play. However, Shakespeare’s intention – at least for readers – may not be thereby exhausted. The one time he has a character employ that oath (Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.3.40), it is spelled ‘Body-kins’ in the original Folio text. Whereas the other three times ‘bodkin’ appears, it refers to either a stiletto-like hairpin (Love’s Labour Lost 5.2.611) or a dagger (cf. The Winter’s Tale 3.3.85), as it does elsewhere in Hamlet: ‘When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin’ (3.1.74–5). And, indeed, remains so even today, thanks to its place in the mythology of science. In 1632, the Church punished 68-year-old Galileo with extended house arrest for violating his oath not to teach the Copernican theory as the truth – something which neither he nor anyone else could possibly prove – rather than merely as a useful hypothesis (which is what he had promised to do when first brought before the Inquisition in 1616). Then, and well into the nineteenth century, establishing with certainty the true structure of the heavens was regarded as in principle impossible; that all that anyone could ever hope to provide is an account that would entirely ‘Save the Appearances’ – that is, correspond perfectly with visual evidence. See Owen Gingerich’s classic essay ‘The Galileo Affair’ first published in Scientific American (August 1982). Also useful for understanding this ‘affair’ is Lawrence S. Lerner and Edward A. Gosselin, ‘Galileo and the Specter of Bruno’, Scientific American (November 1986). Cf. first paragraph of Part Six.

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77 Text as reproduced in Master Poems of the English Language, ed. Oscar Williams (New York: Trident Press, 1966), 91–3. As his poem continues from this point, Donne recurs repeatedly to the various controversies about celestial architecture: We thinke the heavens enjoy their Sphericall, Their round proportion embracing all. But yet their various and perplexed course, Observ’d in diverse ages, doth enforce Men to finde out so many Eccentrique parts, Such diverse downe-right lines, such overthwarts, As disproportion that pure forme: It teares The Firmament in eight and forty sheires, And in these Constellations then arise New stares, and old doe vanish from our eyes: As though heav’n suffered earthquakes, peace or war, When new Towers rise, and old demolish’t are. They have impal’d within a Zodiake The free-born Sun. (lines 251–64) Donne published his poem just a few months after Galileo published The Starry Messenger (1610, some five or six years after Q2 of Hamlet appeared). David Wootton (Galileo) contends, ‘We know Donne had read The Starry Messenger – he referred to Galileo in Ignatius His Conclave, written about the same time, where he made clear his own support for Copernicanism. Donne writes in The First Anniversary as someone who understands at once the logic of Galileo’s position’ (5). Wootton goes on to suggest that, since Donne was probably in Venice in 1605 and perhaps 1606, and apparently met Galileo’s close friend Paulo Sarpi, he probably met Galileo as well (6). 78 Robert M. Bender, in Master Poems of the English Language, 100. 79 Cardano’s fame as ‘the greatest physician in the world’ resulted in his being courted whenever and wherever any of the Rich and Powerful desired the best medical treatment available. Only once, however, was the promised reward sufficient to tempt him to leave Italy (1553). John Hamilton, the Archbishop of St Andrews, Scotland, was near death from the chronic asthma he had suffered for some ten years, and Cardano was successfully prevailed upon to make what turned out to be a four-month trip through Europe to Edinburgh, feted by the intelligentsia of every city along the way as one of the world’s pre-eminent scientists. Within two months of Cardano’s arrival, the Archbishop had begun recovering, and the celebrated doctor departed Scotland 2,000 gold crowns the richer (two years later the Archbishop wrote his benefactor that he had recovered completely).

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However, Cardano did not immediately depart Britain. As W. G. Waters recounts in Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1898): Before he quitted Scotland there had come to him letters from the English Court entreating him to tarry there some days on his way home to Italy, and give his opinion on the health of Edward VI, who was then slowly recovering from an attack of smallpox and measles. The young King’s recovery was more apparent than real, for he was, in fact, slowly sinking under the constitutional derangement which killed him a few months later. Cardan could hardly refuse to comply with this request. . . . But he soon found out that those about the Court were anxious to hear from him something more than a statement of his opinion as to Edward’s health. They wanted, before all else, to learn what the stars had to say as to the probable duration of the sovereign’s life. (132) Though as a skilled physician he could not have been other than pessimistic about the future of the sickly youth, nonetheless, under pressure, he prudently cast a fanciful horoscope which predicted a long and distinguished reign for the young King. Within six months of Cardano’s return to Milan, Edward VI was dead. Dee met Cardano while he was residing with John Cheke during the famous Italian’s sojourn in England. Doubtless, given their shared interests, they found much to discuss (French, John Dee, 51 and 51n. 3). 80 Multhauf, The Origins of Chemistry, 239–41. 81 Hardin Craig, ‘Hamlet’s Book’, Huntington Library Bulletin, No. 6, 1934, 17–37. Echoing a suggestion first made in 1845 by the Reverend Joseph Hunter in his New Illustrations of Shakespear, Lily B. Campbell (Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930]), writes: ‘It is easily seen that this book of Cardan has long been associated with Hamlet. I should like to believe that Hamlet was actually reading it or pretending to read it as he carried on his baiting of Polonius.’ As I argued in a note of my second chapter (n. 4), I think a far more plausible candidate is Xenophon’s Anabasis. 82 Consequently, it was also a time of much political turbulence, focusing mainly on the fact that the childless, and now aged Queen refused to acknowledge clearly a successor – more precisely, to do whatever was necessary to guarantee a Protestant succession. The ‘Essex problem’ might be said to epitomize how factionalized English politics had become after the death of Lord Burghley (1598). It is generally thought that Shakespeare finished Hamlet around the time of the execution of Essex for treason (25 September 1601), his attempted palace coup having failed (which had been preceded – notoriously – by the scheduling of a special performance of Richard the Second, including the usually omitted scene depicting the coerced abdication of an anointed king).

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83 In The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), David Riggs writes, ‘Public interest in magic peaked during the mid-1580s, when a London printer brought out seven of Bruno’s books. The printer prudently gave Paris or Venice as the place of publication, for the wizard’s enthusiastic account of idolatry and conjuring disclosed the most shocking aspects of pagan theology’ (177–8). Riggs characterizes ‘Bruno, the frenzied sun-worshipper’ as ‘Marlowe’s kindred spirit’ (223). That Shakespeare, in turn, was on familiar terms with Marlowe and his ‘world’ would seem the natural implication of a variety of evidence, including the fact that both contributed plays for the same theatre companies. Riggs cautiously notes, ‘Marlowe never mentions Shakespeare, nor would Shakespeare allude to Marlowe until the turn of the century, when his mighty rival had been dead for seven years. Yet they must have been aware of one another. They both wrote for Strange’s Men and they both moved on to Pembroke’s Men. They both lived in Shoreditch, near the Theatre; they were both supremely talented’ (282–3). Moreover, each tacitly responded to the other in his plays (Shakespeare most explicitly – and famously – in As You Like It, 3.3.13; 3.5.82–3). Charles Nicholl (The Reckoning) states flatly, ‘Shakespeare had known Marlowe personally’ (74), though he has no documentary proof of this and so must simply believe that the circumstantial evidence – including some of the clear allusions to Marlowe in the plays (which he cites) – is so strong as to preclude any other conclusion. What is not so clear, however, is whether Shakespeare shared Marlowe’s broader range of acquaintances, such as the Sidney–Pembroke circle, or ‘the one definable intellectual group where Bruno’s influence as a philosopher persist[ed] – the Northumberland circle. The Earl [of Northumberland, Henry Percy] himself was an assiduous collector of Bruno texts’ (210). Moreover, ‘the philosophical centre of this [Durham House] group was Marlowe’s friend Thomas Hariot’ (211), who was closely allied with Ralegh throughout most of his adult life. And though it is a widely held belief among scholars that Shakespeare is parodying this group as the ‘school of night’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, it is a curious fact that his name never turns up in connection with this group or any other. 84 One should not make too much out of these dedications, since Sidney – a paradigm Renaissance gentleman of many talents and broad interests, and patron of like-minded scholars and artists – was the dedicatee of over 40 works, ranging from Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar to Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582). Still, since the normal practice was to secure a dedicatee’s permission for so honouring him, one can presume a degree of acquaintance between Bruno and Sidney.

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Peter French (John Dee) says that Sidney, former student of John Dee, was the ‘the favoured acquaintance of the great Hermeticist Bruno’ – that ‘Indeed, John Dee was probably the only person in England who could have prepared the Sidney circle for the arrival of that wild but brilliant ex-friar [Bruno]’ (158–9). No one knows what personal relationship, if any, Shakespeare had with Sidney – or with any other person of consequence, with the possible exception of Ben Jonson. This is but one of many curious facts about Shakespeare’s occulted life: the almost total lack of any evidence regarding its private side. But he would necessarily have been aware of the slightly older poet’s works and activities, who (as previously noted) died a soldier’s death fighting the Spanish in Holland (September 1586), and who was given an elaborate London funeral and burial in St Paul’s Cathedral. He was celebrated in memorial volumes by both universities, and almost all poets of the day composed verses in his praise – except Shakespeare (who, so far as we know, composed no memorial verses for anyone, not even upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, nor celebrating the ascension of her successor). That said, Shakespeare’s Sonnets are widely and variously linked with Sidney’s sonnet sequence (Astrophil and Stella, published posthumously in 1591). 85 Park Honan suggests, ‘Marlowe may have read or skimmed Bruno’s Explicatio triginta sigillorum or his Sigillus sigillorum (both printed in England by 1583), and could hardly have avoided hearing of them. [One might add, Shakespeare likewise.] Marlowe took an interest in arcane forces, and what he knew of Bruno helped to prime him for the magic of Faustus’ (Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 142). Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, reviews the textual evidence for Bruno being a direct influence on Shakespeare, and on Hamlet in particular, and concludes: If Giordano Bruno really had anything to do with these passages, it must be because Shakespeare had heard some talk about the great Italian’s doctrine, which may just at that time have been recalled to the recollection of his English acquaintances by his death at the stake in Rome, on February 17, 1600. . . . All the passages in Hamlet which have been attributed to the influence of Bruno really stand in much closer relation to writers under whose literary and philosophical influence we know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare fell. There is preserved in the British Museum a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays, folio, London, 1603, with Shakespeare’s name written on

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the fly-leaf. The signature is, I believe, a forgery; but that Shakespeare had read Montaigne is clear beyond all doubt. There are many evidences of the influence exerted by Montaigne’s Essays on English readers of that date. (351). The publication date of Florio’s translation raises a difficulty for alleging parallels in Hamlet, presuming it to have been written c.1600–1. Brandes sensibly suggests, ‘we must assume either that Shakespeare knew the French original, or that – as is likely enough – he may have had an opportunity to read Florio’s translation before it was published. . . . Florio’s close connection with the household of Southampton renders it almost certain that Shakespeare must have been acquainted with him; and his translation had been entered in the Stationers’ Register as ready for publication so early as 1599’ (352). 86 As Dover Wilson rightly argues (What Happens in Hamlet), ‘[W]e do not know what Shakespeare believed, though it seems by no means improbable that he regarded ghosts as at least a sublunary possibility. Certainly as a poet he believed in this ghost, and determined that his audience should believe in it likewise. The Ghost in the linchpin of Hamlet; remove it and the play falls to pieces’ (52). That granted, it simply raises the stakes for whoever presumes to provide a sympathetic interpretation of the play in an age dogmatically sure that ghosts are not a sublunary possibility. Thus, J. Middleton Murray (Shakespeare), in calling attention to the problem, actually understates its difficulty: It is very hard for us nowadays to make the Ghost as terrible as Shakespeare meant him to be. He was writing for an age that expected ghosts. . . . Whether Shakespeare believed in them or not we have no means of knowing; but there is not the faintest reason to suppose that he disbelieved in them in the cocksure, a priori way we do. I imagine that his own attitude was not very different from Prince Hamlet’s: the afterlife was a terra incognito. But the point is that the appearance and the speech of the Ghost to Hamlet convulse him with a new and hitherto unknown terror of the afterlife. (244) For better or worse, the Ghost seems ready-made for Freud-assisted speculations as to its transcendental – and certainly trans-Shakespearean – significance. Let a few excerpts from Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987) serve as an illustration: ‘But at the center of the question of uncanniness lies not only the castration complex but also the compulsion to repeat’ (128). How does this connect with the play, you ask? ‘What, indeed, is revenge but the dramatization and the acculturation of the repetition compulsion? The agent of repetition, clearly, is the ghost. And what is a ghost? It is a memory trace. It is the sign of something missing, something omitted, something

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undone. It is itself at once a question, and a sign of putting things in question’ (129). But Barnardo, Marcellus and Horatio also see the Ghost. Is it, then, their ‘memory trace’ as well? Of what? Now comes the best part: Horatio associates the appearance of a ghost with the death of Julius Caesar. Jacques Lacan associates it with the castration complex, the ‘veiled phallus’. . . What does it mean to say that the ghost takes the place of the missing signifier, the veiled phallus? The ghost – itself traditionally often veiled, sheeted, or shadowy in form – is a cultural marker of absence, a reminder of loss. Thus the very plot of Hamlet replicates the impossibility of the protagonist’s quest [now quoting Lacan]: ‘the very source of what makes Hamlet’s arm waver at every moment, is the narcissistic connection that Freud tells us about in his text on the decline of the Oedipus complex: one cannot strike the phallus, because the phallus, even the real phallus, is a ghost.’ Thus, not only is the ghost the veiled phallus, but the phallus is also a ghost. (130) Now, which ‘association’ makes more sense in the context of the play: Horatio’s, which connects such apparitions with momentous political events? Or Lacan’s, with its wholesale subordination of the text to a tendentious pseudo-scientific theory alleging the dominance in human nature of subrational sexual desires and fears – the sort of theory which inspired the philosopher of science Karl Popper to see the importance of falsifiability as a criterion of genuine scientific claims (see his Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge [New York: Harper & Row, 1963], 33–7)? In fairness to Professor Garber, however, it must be said that in her commentary on the entire canon published two and a half decades later (Shakespeare After All), the chapter on Hamlet is much better simply because there is much less forcing of the play into a Procrustean bed of Freudian–Lacanian interpretation. For a whole volume of this sort of untethered imaginative analysis applying ‘continental’ literary theories to Shakespeare’s plays, see Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John J. Joughin (London: Routledge, 2000). Hamlet in particular seems to invite these amusing efforts at originality. Thus, for example, Linda Charnes in her contribution to the volume (‘We were never early modern’) asserts, ‘In Hamlet the Ghost is an excessively present “obscene father”. . . . Hamlet attempts to “download” the obscene father into Claudius; but he cannot act on his knowledge of Claudius’s guilt because, unable to assume the social existence that paternal identification would confer, Hamlet is literally incapable of finding his place in the story. And Claudius, like all good Derridean supplements, cannot contain everything he is supposed to “hold”. The excess of paternal obscenity spills over onto everyone, including Ophelia and, most crucially, Gertrude’ (57). Rebuttal is pointless; one can only sigh, and move on.

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87 Of course, to invest a prince of eleventh-century Denmark with some conscious awareness of ‘the Protestant view’ is anachronistic (just as is having him matriculate at Wittenberg, birthplace of Lutheranism, and first founded in 1502). Nor is it strictly necessary to an explanation of Hamlet’s anxious perplexity inasmuch as the Catholic view can accommodate either possibility: that the Ghost is what it claims to be (the spirit of Hamlet’s recently departed father suffering in Purgatory), but on the other hand may be a diabolical trap designed to lead him into committing a mortal sin. However, it is convenient for the purpose of analysing the play to speak of the Protestant view, bearing in mind that the play is also, as I noted at the outset of this chapter, a mirror held up to Nature whereby to show ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ – which, applied reflexively to the play itself, means showing of Shakespeare’s age what the ‘form’ of the time impresses upon the natures of people and things. On religious controversies and other details of the historical context in which Shakespeare composed Hamlet, I am especially indebted to Roland Mushat Frye’s The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Similarly useful with regard to the clashes within Christianity is Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). He makes a strong case that the idea of purgatory, being a source of wealth for the Catholic Church, contributed to the strength of the Protestant reformers denunciation of it (23–4, 35, 45). Also useful with respect to both religious and political attitudes towards revenge in the latter half of the sixteenth century is Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967). 88 Similarly, might Horatio’s mention of the time ‘when in an angry parle / [King Hamlet] smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’ refer to a violation of a truce to parley? The most emphatic indictment of the previous King that I have encountered is that of Anselm Haverkamp in ‘The Ghost of History: Hamlet and the Politics of Paternity’ (Law and Literature, Vol. 18, no. 2, 2006). Although his presentation is marred by several of what I regard to be interpretative mistakes, as well as by other assertions that are at best interpretative possibilities, this essay is provocative in the best sense: it stimulates a radical rethinking of certain aspects of the play. His appreciation of the importance of young Fortinbras is a case in point. If all these indications at the margin of the drama are taken and added together, the story of Hamlet is instantly transformed and displaced into a quite different story: that of the Norwegian conquest of Denmark made possible under the pretext of an invasion of Poland. . . . In this barely perceptible framing of the vengeance plot, which the ghost sets in motion, a back-story is concealed that need have nothing to do with Hamlet

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himself, [but which] if it ends up having to do with revenge at all, the revenge cannot be that of old Hamlet but, rather, of Fortinbras on old Hamlet. Because did not the latter, old Hamlet, in the prehistory of the play, have the treacherous murder of Fortinbras’ father on his conscience and the usurpation of the Norwegian throne? (180) As Haverkamp rightly notes about ‘the Danish-Norwegian double-mystery’, the ‘psychological intricacies’ of Oedipal applications to Hamlet’s story ‘have caused many to forget the politically conditioned framework that literally hovers at the edge of the family saga’ (182). 89 Here one might recall the contrast between Homer’s account of the heroic duel to the death between Achilles and Hector, and that of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the same episode in Troilus and Cressida: an unarmed Hector is surrounded by Achilles and a pack of his Myrmidons, who all at once fall upon the Trojan and slaughter him, whereupon Achilles orders, ‘On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain, / “Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain” ’ (5.9.13–14). 90 Cf. Henry V 4.1.290–9. 91 Similarly, the Ghost’s reference to the river Lethe, boundary of the Underworld in classical mythology (i.e. pagan theology), bespeaks a pagan view of death and Hades (1.5.33). Marjorie Garber’s suggestion in Shakespeare After All is surely pertinent: ‘Thus old Hamlet emerges in costume, language, and message as the embodiment of lost epic and heroic values, the tutelary spirit of a heroic past’ (486). However, this seems to make its appearing in armour rather too ‘incidental’ for all the curiosity it raises in the other characters. One of the best general discussions of the Ghost’s ambiguous status, to my mind, remains Robert H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1968): The pneumatological evidence on the nature of the apparition seems, then, to point about equally in three directions: to a Catholic ghost, a paganesque ghost, and a devil. . . . I grant, of course, that pneumatology in a play is largely a matter of equivocal hints and passing references sure to leave an audience with some fairly arbitrary interpreting to do. Still the dramatist could manage action and atmosphere to establish one definite pneumatological rationale if he liked. (61–2) . . . My thesis here is that Shakespeare knowingly mixed the evidence and did it for the sake of dramatic impact and of a kind of philosophical reserve from which he seems often to draw some of his impact. (63) . . .

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Decisive explanation of supernatural figures tends to reduce their effect of awe and mystery; the indecisive answers Hamlet provides to the standard questions it raises tend rather to create awe and mystery. . . Shakespeare gives the Ghost ‘vitality’, in part simply by reminding the audience that apparitions were a subject of current and serious experience and speculation and that anybody might find himself confronted with one. Dr. Dee and his friends were troubled in the night by a ‘spiritual creature’, Jean Bodin knew a man who had seen an angelic light, and the Earl of Derby was reputed to have been blasted by a ghost that he had ‘crossed’. (65) West concludes, ‘Just as ghosts in the real world are never wholly explicable under any pneumatological scheme, so the Ghost of King Hamlet is never explicable. . . . Shakespeare strongly asserted the reality of the supernatural, . . . but in sum he left the apparition almost as mysterious as it was at first entrance’ (65–6). 92 In the Q2 text being followed here, that is. In the Folio version, however, one may see a hint in what is added at 5.2.56, which in the Quarto ends Hamlet’s speech rather strangely with ‘Is’t not perfect conscience?’ Whereas in the Folio, he continues, ‘To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damn’d / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?’ 93 As previously noted (n. 86), what is arguably the most difficult constituent of the play for the twenty-first-century reader to deal with seriously is the Ghost. Puzzled as Hamlet might be by the alternative interpretations of it available to him – Protestant versus Catholic versus Pagan – it is the one feature of the play’s historicity which no amount of scholarly explaining can generate complete empathy in us, since we, beneficiaries of four more centuries of modern science’s demystification of the world, subscribe to a fourth alternative: it is wholly fictitious, imaginary, a fantasy. We enlightened moderns are practically certain there are no ghosts, whereas most Elizabethans – including most educated people, whatever their religious beliefs – were just as certain that there are. The story requires of us a ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’; but it would not most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Why so? Not, of course, because their world was ‘objectively’ different than ours, theirs including ghosts, whereas ours does not. Rather, is it not because our metaphysical architecture, in light of which we presume to understand Reality, precludes ghosts, whereas theirs allowed for ghosts? They were born into theirs, as we were into ours. Neither most people then nor most people today could even begin to justify rationally their respective convictions concerning what is possible To Be and what Not To Be – any more than they could convincingly ‘expostulate’ their beliefs about why Day is Day, Night Night, and Time is Time. Thus, anyone who thinks that metaphysical questions have little or no bearing on everyday human life, would best think again – about ghosts.

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94 My understanding of Hamlet’s conflicted soul is indebted to Paul Cantor’s analysis in his excellent (but regrettably brief) study, Shakespeare: Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). As he notes, ‘In some ways the figure of the ghost encapsulates the polarities Hamlet faces’ (33). 95 Marvin Rosenberg is one of a minority of scholars who shows any real appreciation for how the intellectual situation in Shakespeare’s England is reflected in the play. As he notes in The Masks of Hamlet, speaking summarily about the times: With the experience of the new and rediscovered learning, and the new doubting, humanists were beginning to search beyond all dogma. Wittenberg had been known, since the early sixteenth century, to be strongly committed to the new, humanistic study; and though Luther’s rise had moved the college towards another kind of authoritarianism, strains of humanism persisted in the theological-philosophical area. Inevitably skepticism flourished. A way had been opened to a new concept – and even, as in the School of Night in England, a doubt – of God. Astronomy was displacing humankind from its center in the universe; explorations over uncharted seas were opening new, strange worlds; so were the explorations into the psyches and bodies of mortals. Hamlet’s own inner ferment matched a ferment of Shakespeare’s time. (170) 96 Having quoted Claudio expressing his fear of death in Measure for Measure (‘The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature is a paradise / to what we fear of death’), which is akin to that expressed by Hamlet in his famous soliloquy, J. Middleton Murray (Shakespeare) underlines its significance: Again we are struck with the feeling how alien is the thought of these impressive verses to a modern mind. It is the prospect of annihilation, which Shakespeare presents as eagerly to be desired, which chills the modern man. He is anxious (if he has any anxieties at all in this order) to be assured of the mere fact of existence after death. The possibility that a future existence should be worse than this one has been practically banished from the modern world. The religious revolution (for it is nothing less) is astonishing to contemplate. Is there any good cause for it? Probably there is. We are less the ‘fools of nature’ than we were, in the sense that the boundaries of the unknown have been pushed further from us. The incalculable and prodigious have been beaten from near the centre to the circumference of our practical lives. We have, as we say, conquered Nature. To a vast degree, of course, we delude ourselves in this. (253) 97 Here opting for the Folio’s clearly superior alternative to the Quarto’s ‘this is base and silly, not revenge’ (3.3.79).

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98 J. Middleton Murray (Shakespeare) endorses Samuel Johnson’s interpretation of the first line of this soliloquy – ‘which might claim to be the most famous speech in all the literature of the world’ – namely, that it pertains to post mortem existence: [quoting Johnson’s reconstruction of Hamlet’s reasoning] ‘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’ [italicized as per Middleton Murray’s quoting of Johnson]. That is, Johnson and Middleton Murray contend that the answer to ‘Which is nobler, to suffer evil or to risk death in resisting it?’ depends on the answer to a prior and primary question: ‘Do we exist after death or not?’ On the basis of that understanding, Middleton Murray then proceeds to criticize Hamlet’s position as ‘rather ignominious’ (236–7). As my own analysis attests, I am not persuaded of the premise of this argument – that the ‘To be’ line pertains to post mortem rather than to present existence (in oppressive circumstances) – but it is a plausible interpretation that compels a thorough reconsideration of the entire soliloquy. 99 The Third Arden editors note, ‘This is Shakespeare’s only use of the word machine (and OED’s first use of the word in a metaphorical sense)’. Given the broader pattern of textual evidence, one cannot be sure that Hamlet intends it metaphorically. 100 As Multhauf observes (The Origins of Chemistry), ‘Humanist learning put the Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in possession of the bulk of ancient literature on natural philosophy and gave them a full awareness of the extent of ancient differences of opinion. The Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner [in his Physicarum Meditationum, 1586] found that there had been eight systems of elements between Thales and Empedocles! Liberated from the illusion of the monolithic character of ancient philosophy the Peripatetics and their adversaries alike set themselves to reshuffling the elements of Aristotle’ (275). 101 The play’s Third Arden editor, H. R. Woudhuysen, explains, though without endorsing this interpretation: The School of the Night was supposed to be a secret atheistical, philosophical and scientific academy, the chief source for English Copernicanism and precursor of Baconian scientific investigation. It was run by Sir Walter Ralegh under the patronage of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his friend Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, fifth Earl of Derby. Others supposed to be involved were writers like Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Mathew Roydon as well as the mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot, the translator John Florio, the Spanish educationalist Juan Luis Vives and the Italian intellectual Giordano Bruno. Shakespeare, it was supposed, belonged to an opposing group allied to the earls of Essex and Southampton;

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it included the writer John Eliot and Thomas Nashe. Love’s Labour’s Lost became a defence of aristocratic women, especially of the Earl of Essex’s sisters, Penelope Devereux (Sidney’s ‘Stella’) and Dorothy Devereux, the Countess of Northumberland. (70) There is no direct or otherwise unproblematic evidence that Shakespeare ‘belonged to an opposing’ or any other group. Still, as I’ve been at pains to suggest, any context in which Marlowe’s name crops up tends to arouse curiosity about Shakespeare as well. Robert Kargon, ‘Thomas Hariot, the Northumberland Circle and Early Atomism in England’ (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 27, no. 1, January 1966), 133. Here I opt for the Folio’s text. The Quartos’ ‘sallied’ for ‘solid’, while less overt, may nonetheless serve the purpose well enough, as the word does double or even triple duty, suggesting ‘solid’ and perhaps ‘sullied’, as well as sallied, that is, ‘assailed’. Which word is correct has generated no end of argument. The Second Arden editor, Harold Jenkins – who settled on ‘sullied’ for his edition – begins his ‘Longer Note’ by declaring it, ‘The most debated reading in the play in recent years’, and follows with a survey of the views and arguments (436–8). I incline to that expressed by G. V. Monitto, ‘Sallied Flesh’ (Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 36, 1983) who, having reviewed numerous examples of contemporary usage, concludes that the ‘evidence strongly suggests that the range of connotations implied in modern emendation could well have already been included among recommended senses of ‘sallied in 1600/1’ (178). That is, the view that a king bears both a natural physical body, which is subject to all the imperfections of ordinary mortals, and a political ‘body’ that is not physical but institutional, and is in principle immortal and otherwise perfect. Thus the sense of ‘The King is dead. Long live the King’ – for upon the death of a king’s natural body, the kingship itself does not die but passes immediately to his legitimate successor. Jerah Johnson, in ‘The concept of the “King’s Two Bodies” in Hamlet’ (Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 18, no. 4, Autumn 1967), relying on the work of F. W. Maitland and E. H. Kantorowicz, traces the doctrine back to Tudor times: ‘This theory of the nature of kingship had a long tradition and complex history stretching deep into the legal and political thought of the Middle Ages, but found its first clear elaboration under the hands of English crown jurists of the sixteenth century’ (432). Johnson goes on to argue that Shakespeare was doubtless acquainted with the theory since ‘The legal jargon of the “two Bodies” was a commonplace of Elizabethan England’ (433). As is generally acknowledged, here Shakespeare (not Hamlet!) is cleverly alluding to the Diet of Worms of 1521, convened by Emperor

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Notes to Pages 180–182 Charles V primarily in order that Martin Luther be required to address the controversy generated by his 95 theses (1519), which Pope Leo X had by papal bull declared to be riddled with doctrinal errors. Under a guarantee of safe passage, Luther duly appeared, but refused to recant, supposedly concluding his defence with, ‘Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen.’ The outcome of the convocation was the Edict of Worms (25 May 1521), ordering Luther’s arrest as a heretic, and forbidding anyone to defend either him or his views. In the meantime, however, Luther had prudently fled to the domain of a sympathetic German prince. Stephen Greenblatt suggests that, beyond this reference to the Diet, Hamlet’s words may be seen as a Protestant mockery of the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, ‘a grotesquely materialist reimagining of the Eucharist’ (Hamlet in Purgatory, 240–1). As a measure of the bleak futility with which this reductive materialism can infect the mind, Hamlet even associates this image of decaying flesh, albeit elliptically and to a different point, with his (former?) beloved. Recall his dark, rather nasty teasing of Polonius: ‘For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion – have you a daughter’ (2.2.178–9). Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, describes the significance of skulls for Elizabethans: ‘Shakespeare’s audience considered meditating on death a spiritual exercise, even as devout Christians do today. The only difference lies in the more brutal realism with which the Elizabethan faced the unavoidable facts. Beginning with the Dance of Death at the end of the fourteenth century, the skeleton became the accepted Christian symbol of death, and by the Elizabethan period the skull had become an extremely popular symbol for everything from tomb monuments to jewelry’ (221–2). Dame Edith Sitwell, A Notebook on William Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1948) interprets this metaphorically, and thus sees other implications: ‘To Hamlet his body is dust, – earth – and the ghost of his father is a mole working, secretly, in the darkness, bringing into being ancestral impulses, dark urges from forgotten sources in the blood.’ She then adds, ‘Nothing can rest in the darkness’, quoting Hamlet’s ‘Canst work I’ th’ earth so fast? A worthy Pioneer!’ and wonders, ‘May there not be depths of meaning beneath that phrase? Is not the “earth” of which Hamlet speaks, his own too-sullied flesh, his body, the nature which governs his body in which many things that were hidden are now thrown up by that mole, into the light?’ (91–2). I believe I have shown in chapter 2 of The Platonian Leviathan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) why this is unavoidably the case, basing my analysis on Aristotle’s account of matter and material cause, which I regard as simply definitive and fully born out by modern physics.

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110 Whatever the status of the Ghost, whether the spirit of a dear departed or a deceiving devil, it would seem to put the lie to materialism. Or would it? Within a half century of Shakespeare’s crafting Hamlet, metaphysical materialism having meanwhile gathered intellectual momentum among devotees of the new science, no less a thinker than Thomas Hobbes will assert that all so-called spirits, insofar as they are real, are actually very thin bodies (‘as the Aire, the Wind’; Leviathan, ch. 34, pars 3, 17). According to Christopher Prendergast in ‘Derrida’s Hamlet’ (SubStance, Vol. 34, no. 1, 2005), Derrida treats the Ghost as emblematic of the ontological problem of the very elusiveness ‘being’: ‘For Derrida, the significance of the ghost resides in its radical indeterminacy. This, however, is not to be understood in terms of the normal theological reading particular to the Catholic/Protestant disputes of the Reformation. . . . [I]t is indeterminate in the more strictly ontological register of occupying a place/non-place between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. The spectre is a “Thing” (Shakespeare’s term) and yet not a thing, not a substance. It hovers uncertainly between material embodiment and disembodiment’ (45). However, precisely because we today presume that ghosts do not exist, are ‘unreal’, it would seem a singularly problematic basis for any ontological analysis, much less that it was intended by Shakespeare to represent his view of the problem. 111 Cf. Plato’s Republic 539a–d. See also chapter 7 of my study of this dialogue, The War Lover (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), especially 265–6. 112 T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, in Selected Essays: 1917–32 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932). As Rosenberg observes, ‘Eliot’s myopia here ranks with his praise of Rymer on Othello as one of the historic follies of criticism’ (The Masks of Hamlet, 205). Still, given Eliot’s standing with respect to literary matters, his criticism enjoyed wide currency; and doubtless there have been myriads of frustrated readers and viewers of Hamlet who, though unacquainted with Eliot’s essay, more or less share his view. Dover Wilson (What Happens in Hamlet) devotes a three-page Appendix (‘D’) to Eliot’s criticism, with which he admits having ‘some sympathy’. But as he rightly points out, when Eliot ‘asserts that Hamlet’s emotion “is in excess of the facts” of the play, he [forgets] one very big fact, but once again a fact bigger in the seventeenth than in the twentieth century; I mean the fact of incest’ (306–7). C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler (The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986]) also sympathize with Eliot’s criticism, but have a different take on where he goes wrong, one that implicates the poet himself: ‘What Eliot ignores, focusing only on Hamlet’s disgust in response to his guilty mother, is Hamlet’s own sense of guilt – what the Freudian explanation

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makes central. Hamlet’s guilt refers to his father not his mother; it refers to his parricidal wish. It is this that cannot be given objective expression. . . . Hamlet cannot kill a ghost.’ The authors continue in this vein, concluding with the claim, ‘It is Hamlet’s “bafflement” in this situation that extends into the play the problem confronting its creator.’ Their diagnosis is that Hamlet ‘is a play in which something gets out of hand’ (266). Whereas, the burden of my preceding chapters has been to show that Hamlet is a play in which its creator is in complete control throughout. Bradley Greenburg begins his essay ‘T. S. Eliot’s Impudence: Hamlet, Objective Correlative, and Formulation’ (Criticism, Vol. 49, no. 2, Spring 2007) by observing, ‘When T. S. Eliot revised his English collection Elizabethan Essays for an American edition, he made a number of serious cuts’, leaving out (among others) the notorious ‘Hamlet and his problems’: ‘he remarked that [the omitted] essays, “on re-examination embarrassed me by their callowness, and by a facility of unqualified assertion which verges, here and there, on impudence. The Hamlet, of course, has been kept afloat all these years by the phrase ” ’ Given the abuse it has brought on his head, impugning his capacity for fair-minded criticism, one can readily appreciate why Eliot would prefer that the essay be forgotten. Greenburg, however, goes on to contend: The essay is . . . one of the steps in the poet/critic’s efforts to clear the way for, while clarifying the genealogy of, his modernist project. Eliot’s aggressive reading of this play has much to tell us about the role of the critic in configuring the identity of modernist poetic practice as well as demonstrating how the play lures readers, even ones as astute as Eliot, into a fixation with its main character. (215–16) ... What goes unexamined in both the Romantics view of Hamlet and of Eliot’s is that Hamlet is not simply a character who can be taken at face value, as an avatar for the founding of an aesthetic practice. If the play has been treated as an Academy, where subsequent poets and dramatists come to hear the master speak, they have been listening to Socrates too closely and failing to read beyond him to the Plato who labors to produce such intellectual, rhetorical effects. (217) 113 For a fuller appreciation of this, see Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, ch. 3. 114 The various laws on this matter were framed to comport with Scripture, specifically, the injunctions in chapters 18 and 20 of Leviticus. Leviticus 18.16 in the Geneva Bible reads, ‘Thou shalt not discover the shame of thy brother’s wife: for it is thy brother’s shame.’ And Leviticus 20.21 adds, ‘So the man that taketh his brother’s wife, committeth filthiness, because he hath uncovered his brother’s

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shame, they shall be childless.’ (The later King James version prefers the translation ‘nakedness’ to that of ‘shame’.) The only possible exception to this prohibition is found chapter 25 of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 25.5–6 reads, ‘If brethren dwell together, and one of them die and have no son [which obviously would not apply in Gertrude’s case], the wife of the dead shall not marry without, that is, unto a stranger, but his kinsman shall go in unto her, and take her to wife, and do the kinsman’s office to her. And the firstborn that she beareth, shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name not be put out of Israel.’ Addressing the apparent conflict between the two books, the Genevan’s scholars include a scholium on the term they translate as ‘kinsman’: ‘Because the Hebrew word signifieth not the natural brother, and the word that signifieth a brother, is taken also for a kinsman: it seemeth that it is not meant that the natural brother should marry his brother’s wife, but some other of the kindred that was in that degree which might marry.’ The King James’s scholars, however, translate the term in question as ‘brother’. 115 At least, supposedly. However, there are enough exceptions on record as to suggest that the customary was honoured almost as much in the breach as in the observance. 116 Howard Jacobson (Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, with Wilber Sanders [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978]) – while generous to a fault in his estimation of Claudius, and conceding that the new King is in an awkward political situation in addressing the Court, one calling for ‘a delicacy and a tact’ – nonetheless cannot excuse his rhetorical ineptitude: But delicacy and tact as Claudius employs them can seldom have been so emptied of their distinguishing virtues. We might allow the propriety of ‘wisest sorrow’ as an outcome of discretion’s battle with nature, and we might even feel he gets away tolerably with that groped for and judicious sounding paradox of ‘as ’twere with a defeated joy’; but ‘one auspicious and one dropping eye’ is crazily bad – the improbability of the moral contortion being suggested by the impossibility of the physical; and when we get to ‘mirth in funeral’ and ‘dirge in marriage’, we do not know where to look. Neither, presumably, does the assembled court, which is not so far inured to bad taste as to need no menacing reminder that if the form of the apology is all Claudius’ own, the affair itself met with a free and general approval. (25–6) Of course, one must remind oneself that it is Shakespeare who has supplied Claudius with this bungling attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, and that it launches the scene in which we first meet the Prince and get a taste of the rhetoric, both public and private, that the philosopher-poet has been provided him. The contrast could hardly be more stark.

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117 This possibility raises the vexing problem of Gertrude’s age, hence that of Hamlet’s as well. I imagine her to be in her late thirties, still physically attractive and sexually active (despite Hamlet’s berating her for it; 3.4.66–8); and the Prince to be (at most) in his early twenties, and more likely less. He is a university student, as are Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and perhaps Laertes (all apparently age-mates) – in a time, moreover, when youths often matriculated, and matured, at a younger age than they do now. This squares with Ophelia’s description of Hamlet as of ‘unmatched form and stature of blown youth’ – meaning ‘full-blown’, in the full bloom of youth – prior, that is, to his being ‘Blasted with ecstasy’ (3.1.158–9). Similarly, it fits with the King’s characterizing Laertes’s skill in fencing as ‘A very ribbon in the cap of youth’ (4.7.76), the same skill which the Prince himself claims to practice (5.2.189), and proves it. Everyone in the play treats Hamlet as a youth or young man, including the Ghost who addresses him as ‘thou noble youth’ (1.5.38). Of course, the problem with this construal is that it fits with everything except the clownish Gravedigger’s response to Hamlet’s query, ‘How long has thou been grave-maker?’ He claims that he began the same day ‘King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras’, which happened to be also the very same day that the Prince was born (‘he that is mad and sent into England’). Seconds later, the fellow provides a quantitative answer to Hamlet’s question: ‘I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years’ (5.1.152–3) – or so the Second Quarto reads. Shortly after that, he throws up a skull that he claims has lain ‘i’th’earth three and twenty years’, and that it is ‘Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester’. This elicits from Hamlet, ‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times’ (5.1.163–4, 171–6). This would fit with a 30-year-old Hamlet, presuming Yorick died when Hamlet was 7. How is this information to be reconciled with the Prince being a young man of university age, a ‘full-blown youth’ in form and stature? A. C. Bradley is typical of those otherwise sensible critics who have allowed themselves to become so utterly befuddled by the problem of Hamlet’s age as to abdicate interpretative responsibility and propose resolutions that would render the play hardly worth analysing. Thus Bradley: ‘The only solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young students at Wittenberg, and when he determined to make them older men (or to make Hamlet, at any rate, older)’ – Bradley does not explain why the poet would see any need to do so – ‘he did not take trouble enough to carry this idea through all the necessary detail, and so left some inconsistencies’ (Shakespearean Tragedy, 344). It is hard to decide which is more absurd: to regard the ‘noble youth’ Hamlet as actually

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30 years old (which in any period would count as a fully mature man, and in Shakespeare’s day would verge on middle aged); or to presume that Shakespeare was such a careless writer as to allow his play – otherwise an exquisite masterpiece of poetry and plot such as only repeated revising could produce – to be spoiled because he was too lazy to do what would be required to remove a glaring inconsistency. And to repeat: why does anything in the plot’s later stages necessitate an ‘older Hamlet’? To resolve the puzzle, we should notice that the cavilling sexton is responsible for both datings, neither of which is confirmed by Hamlet – who may not recall exactly how long ago Yorick died, but who surely is aware of his own age. Might he smile to learn that this clown, who obviously does not know the Prince on sight, believes him to be 30 years old, when he is actually only 20 (say)? And since the Prince evidently enjoys bantering with the fellow, he may not wish to disclose his own identity by challenging the credibility of such a ‘character’ who (out of vanity?) dates his own career as commencing on one of the most memorable days in recent Danish history – which might, or might not, also have been the day young Hamlet was born. Be that as it may, what is the likelihood that a gravedigger would (1) recognize the skull of any particular person who had been a long-time buried; and (2) remember precisely how many years ago a particular person died? In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare himself calls attention to the unreliability of men’s memories in matters of this sort. Capulet asks his cousin, ‘How long is’t now since last yourself and I / Were in a masque?’ Cousin: Capulet:

Cousin: Capulet:

By’r Lady, thirty years. What, man, ’tis not so much, ’tis not so much. ’Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio, Come Pentecost as quickly as it will, Some five and twenty years: and then we masque. ’Tis more, ’tis more, his son is elder, sir: His son is thirty. Will you tell me that? His son was but a ward two years ago. [i.e. was then but twentyone, thus only twenty-three now] (1.5.32–40)

The gravedigger’s professed – but obviously bogus – knowledge of ‘Crowner’s ’quest law’ (5.1.4–22) may serve for more than comic relief. His pretentious misuse of legal terms and other confusions should compromise the credibility of everything else he claims – as, indeed, does his alleging the Prince to have been born 30 years ago when the entire play bears witness to his assertion being off by a decade.

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Notes to Page 186 Harold Jenkins’s long note (Second Arden edition, 551–4) offers a quite adequate resolution of what scholars and critics treat as a notorious crux. As he rightly observes, ‘Hamlet’s own youthfulness is crucial’ at several earlier junctures in the play. Whereas, to insist at this late point in the story that, contrary to all the earlier evidence, ‘the seemingly young hero is no less than 30 after all, far from removing an inconsistency, would be the surest way to draw attention to one, as the fuss over Hamlet’s age has only too well shown’. Jenkins adduces a plenitude of textual evidence from other plays that justify regarding the impression of precision in the sexton’s numbers as spurious, that both ‘thirty’ and ‘three-and-twenty’ often serve as little more than figures of speech – that, for example, ‘thirty years was a traditional formula for a stretch of time covering most of a man’s life’. Jenkin’s point is well taken: that often Shakespeare’s characters, like people in real life, use numbers rather loosely. Thus, when Hal urges Peto ‘to horse, to horse, for thou and I / Have thirty miles to ride yet ere dinner time’ (1 Henry IV, Part One 3.3.196–7), he is roughly indicating the distance – it might actually be 24 miles, or 35 (cf. 3.3.40–7). And when the shepherd in The Winter’s Tale laments, ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty’, then goes on to ask rhetorically, ‘would any but these boiled-brains of nineteen and twoand twenty hunt in this weather?’ (3.3.59–65), he is not to be regarded as offering sociological statistics. Similarly, Pandarus is speaking rhetorically when he observes of Troilus, ‘O admirable youth! He ne’er saw three-and-twenty’ (Troilus and Cressida 1.2.226–7) – it is unlikely he knows Troilus’ exact age, and could mean ‘he can’t yet be twenty-three and may actually be a good deal younger’. When Portia admits to Nerissa, ‘I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching’ (The Merchant of Venice 1.2.15–17) – or rejects the French suitor (who ‘is every man in no man’) because ‘If I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands’ (1.2.57–60), or insists to Bassanio, ‘yet for you, / I would be trebled twenty times myself, / A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich’ (3.2.152–4), or any of the other occasions she mentions ‘twenty’ (e.g. 3.2.306; 3.4.74, 84) – we presume it is for her a favourite figure of speech. We all have many numerical expressions that are not to be taken literally, perhaps epitomized by Hamlet’s own claim that Yorick ‘bore me on his back a thousand times’. However, at the risk of further agitating waters that have already been muddied enough, there may also (or instead) be a textual issue involved. ‘I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years’ – or so the edited Second Quarto reads. The Folio, however, is puzzlingly different: ‘I have bin sixeteene here, man and Boy thirty yeares.’ Virtually every editor of the text either ignores the Folio’s ‘sixeteene’ entirely, or presumes it’s a wayward spelling of sexton; in any case, opts for the

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Quarto’s ‘sexten’ (thus, sexton). But ‘sixeteene’ is not really plausible as a variant of ‘sexten/sexton’, and in its other appearance in the Folio text, it clearly means sixteen: ‘a speech of some dosen or sixteene lines’ (at 2.2.477 in Q2); whereas, in the only other mention of ‘sexton’ in the text (Hamlet’s ‘knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade’; 5.1.84–5), the Folio spells it ‘a Sextons Spade’. Moreover, the Folio version can be understood as replying to Hamlet’s query (‘How long hast thou been grave-maker?’) thus: ‘I have been grave-maker here for sixteen years, but man and boy altogether thirty years (i.e. including my grave-making elsewhere).’ 118 As per the Folio text; the Second Quarto awkwardly reads, ‘We’ll teach you for to drink ere you depart.’ 119 Hamlet’s explicitly likening Denmark to a prison, which in the Folio version of the text occurs in the course of his greeting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is not in the Second Quarto. But it certainly fits. 120 Wilson Knight, wrong as he may be about much in the play, may be right about this: ‘The love of Ophelia is thus Hamlet’s last hope. This, too, is taken from him. Her repelling of his letters and refusing to see him, in obedience to Polonius’ command, synchronizes unmercifully with the terrible burden of knowledge laid on Hamlet by the revelation of the Ghost’ (The Wheel of Fire, 20).

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List of Works Cited

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Lerner, Lawrence S. and Edward A. Gosselin. ‘Galileo and the Specter of Bruno’. Scientific American, November 1986. Levin, Harry. The Question of Hamlet. New York: Viking Press, 1959. —. Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Lidz, Theodore. Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Marshall, Peter. The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology, and Magic in Renaissance Prague. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. Masefield, John. Shakespeare. Excerpted in Shakespeare’s Critics, A. M. Eastman and G. B. Harrison, eds. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Meadows, A. J. The High Firmament: A Survey of Astronomy in English Literature. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969. Mercer, Peter. Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987. Mollin, Andrew. ‘On Hamlet’s Mousetrap’. Interpretation, Vol. 21, no. 3, Spring 1994, 353–72. Monitto, G. V. ‘Sallied Flesh’. Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 36, 1983. Multhauf, Robert P. The Origins of Chemistry. New York: Watts, 1967. Murray, J. Middleton. Shakespeare. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. Neale, J. E. Queen Elizabeth I. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934. Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans. New York: Modern Library, 1968. Nuttall, A. D. Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Planinc, Zdravko. ‘ “It begins with Pyrrhus” (2.2.451): The Political Philosophy of Hamlet’. Hamlet Studies, Vol. 20, no. 1–2, 1998. Popper, Karl A. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Prendergast, Christopher. ‘Derrida’s Hamlet’. SubStance, Vol. 34, no. 1, 2005. Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967. Rabkin, Norman. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding. New York: Free Press, 1967. Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Rosen, Edward, ed. Three Copernican Treatises. New York: Dover, 1959/2004. —. ‘Was Copernicus a Hermetist?’. Historical and Philosophical Perspective of Science, Roger H. Stuewer, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Roth, Steve. Hamlet: The Undiscovered Country. Seattle: Open House, 2009. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Victor Gourevitch, ed. and trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Rowse, A. L. The English Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement. London: Macmillan, 1972. —. The Expansion of Elizabethan England. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955. Sarton, George. Six Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1957. Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Shea, Sarah A. ‘A Dionysian Hamlet’. Shakespeare and Politics, Bruce E. Altschuler and Michael A. Genovese, eds. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014. Sieman, James R. Shakespearean Iconoclasm. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Sitwell, Edith. A Notebook on William Shakespeare. London: Macmillan, 1948. —. The Queens and the Hive. London: Macmillan, 1962. Speaight, Robert. Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Hollis & Carter, 1955. Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935. Stevens, Martin. ‘Hamlet and the Pirates: A Critical Reconsideration’. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, no. 3, Summer 1975. Stewart, Stanley. Shakespeare and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2010. Strong, Roy. The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts. London: Pimlico, 2000. Stuewer, Roger H., ed. Historical and Philosophical Perspective of Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Study of Shakespeare. New York: AMS, 1965 (reprint of 1879 edition). Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor, eds. Hamlet (Third Arden edition). London: Thomson Learning, 2006. Vaughan, Virginia Mason and Alden T. Vaughan, eds. The Tempest (Third Arden edition). Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1999. Waters, W. G. Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1898. Weir, Alison. The Life of Elizabeth I. New York: Ballantine, 1998. Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare: A Life in Drama New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. West, Robert H. Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1968. Williams, Neville. All the Queen’s Men. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972. Williams, Oscar, ed. Master Poems of the English Language. New York: Trident Press, 1966. Wilson, Derek. Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. —. Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. London: Allison & Busby, 1997.

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Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935/1964. Woolley, Benjamin. The Queen’s Conjurer. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wootton, David. Galileo: Watcher of the Skies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Woudhuysen, H. R., ed. Love’s Labour’s Lost (Third Arden edition). London: Thomson Learning, 2000. Yates, Frances A. Letter to the New York Review of Books, 12 March 1970.

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Index of Names The following index includes only actual persons, not places or peoples, nor names of divinities or literary characters. Also, it excludes the hundreds of mentions of Shakespeare, and the names of persons in the titles of works cited. Aeschylus 197n. 8 Alberti, Leon Battista 236n. 25 Alexander 180–1, 225n. 33, 229n. 20 Allen, Thomas 152 Altschuler, Bruce E. 231n. 4 Andrews, Michael Cameron 214n. 16 Aristophanes 156 Aristotle 145, 201n. 4, 262n. 109 Arnold, Mathew 9, 216n. 24 Arthur, King 155 Aubrey, John 242–3n. 52 Auden, W. H. 247n. 68 Augustine, St 147 Augustus, Emperor 243n. 55 Bacon, Francis 107, 152, 175, 177 Barber, C. L. 262n. 112 Bawlf, Samuel 242n. 49 Bedingfield, Thomas 168 Benedetti, Giovanni Battista 149 Billingsley, Sir Henry 153 Bloom, Harold 202n. 7 Bobrick, Bensen 236n. 22, 246n. 66 Bodin, Jean 258n. 91 Boscovich, Ruggerio 234n. 13 Botticelli, Sandro 236n. 25 Bourne, William 245n. 63 Bower, Fredsson 217n. 29 Boyle, Robert 235n. 20 Bradley, A. C. 202–3n. 10, 206, 214n. 17, 228n. 14, 229n. 22, 231n. 3, 266 Bradshaw, Graham 199n. 17, 200n. 19, 226n. 4 Brahe, Tycho 158, 162, 163, 245n. 64 Brandes, Georg 218n. 3, 253–4n. 85 Bright, Timothy 199n. 17 Browne, Wistan 200n. 2

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Bruno, Giordano 148, 169, 178, 248n. 70, 252nn. 83, 84, 253n. 85, 260n. 101 Bullough, Geoffrey 245n. 64 Burbage, James 156, 157 Burbage, Richard 156 Burghley, Lord see Cecil, William Burton, Robert 199n. 17 Caesar, Julius 18, 92, 160, 174, 181, 229n. 20 Campanella, Tommaso 235n. 20 Campbell, Lily B. 219n. 7, 246n. 64, 251n. 81 Cantor, Paul 212n. 11, 259n. 94 Cardano, Girolamo (Jerome Cardan) 167, 168, 250–1n. 79 Carroll, William C. 235n. 18 Casaubon, Isaac 235n. 21 Casaubon, Meric 238n. 31 Cavell, Stanley 216n. 27 Cecil, Sir William (Lord Burghley) 151, 154, 159, 239n. 37, 245n. 63, 246n. 64, 251n. 82 Chancellor, Richard 154 Chapman, George 260n. 101 Charles V, Emperor 261–2n. 105 Charnes, Linda 255n. 86 Cheke, John 251n. 79 Chekhov, Anton 197–8n. 11 Christian IV, King 245n. 64 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 2 Condell, Henry 196n. 8 Conrad, Joseph 17, 137, 233n. 12 Copernicus, Nicolaus 143–9, 153, 157, 169, 210n. 6, 233n. 13, 234n. 16, 236n. 22, 243n. 52, 244n. 59, 246n. 65, 248n. 70, 249n. 73

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278

Index of Names

Craig, Hardin 251n. 81 Craik, T. W. 245n. 64 Crook, Richard 200n. 2 Davis (Davys), John 155, 242n. 47 Day, Barry 243n. 55 de Belleforest, François 50, 211n. 9 de Montaigne, Michel 253–4n. 85 de Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford 168 Dee, John 149–58, 237nn. 28, 29, 239–40n. 37, 240nn. 40, 43, 45, 242nn. 47, 52, 243n. 54, 244n. 57, 244–5n. 63, 248n. 69, 251n. 79, 253n. 84, 258n. 91 Democrates 177 Derrida, Jacques 263n. 110 Descartes, René 165 Devereux, Dorothy, Countess of Northumberland 260n. 101 Devereux, Penelope 261n. 101 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 251n. 82, 260n. 101 Digges, Leonard Jr 159 Digges, Leonard Sr 244–5n. 63, 246n. 64 Digges, Thomas 148, 149, 157, 158–9, 160, 162, 169, 245n. 63, 245–6n. 64, 248n. 70 Diogenes Laertius 235n. 21 Donne, John 152, 153, 157, 166, 167, 168, 175, 250n. 77 Drake, Sir Francis 155, 242nn. 47, 49 Drake, Stillman 244n. 63 Draudt, Manfred 230n. 1 Dudley, John, Duke of Northumberland 152 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 152, 153, 156, 239nn. 35, 37, 240n. 38, 246n. 64 Dürer, Albrecht 236n. 25 Dyer, Sir Edward 152, 157, 238n. 30 Eastman, A. M. 198n. 12 Edward VI, King 251n. 79 Eliot, George 1 Eliot, John 261n. 101 Eliot, T. S. 263n. 112 Elizabeth I, Queen 150, 153, 155, 159, 169, 238n. 30, 238n. 34, 239–40n. 37, 242nn. 47, 49, 251n. 82, 252n. 84 Empedocles 177, 260n. 100

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Empson, William 204n. 18 Epicurus 177 Erickson, Carolly 239n. 37 Euclid 153, 237n. 28 Euripides 197n. 8, 215n. 21 Evans, G. B. 209–10n. 6 Farley–Hills, David 206–7 Ficino, Marsilio. 148, 151, 236nn. 24, 25 Field, John 149, 157, 158 Field, Richard 246n. 64 Fielding, Henry 224n. 30 Florio, John 166, 253–4n. 85, 260n. 101 Foakes, R. A. 198n. 13, 247n. 67 French, Peter 235n. 20, 237n. 28, 238n. 33, 241n. 41, 242n. 47, 243n. 53, 244n. 61, 252–3n. 84 Freud, Sigmund 214n. 16, 254n. 86 Frobisher, Martin 155 Frye, Roland Mushat 256, 264n. 113 Furness, Horace Harold 12, 206n. 26 Galilei, Galileo 148, 163, 166, 245n. 63, 248n. 70, 249n. 73, 250n. 77 Garber, Marjorie 200n. 20, 202n. 6, 231n. 2, 254n. 86, 257n. 91 Genovese, Michael A. 231n. 4 Gesner, Conrad 260n. 100 Gilbert, Adrian 155, 242n. 47 Gilbert, Humphrey 155, 242n. 47 Gilbert, Martin 227n. 8 Gilbert, William 149, 162, 169, 248n. 69 Gingerich, Owen 234n. 14, 238n. 32, 242n. 45, 243n. 52, 244n. 59, 249n. 75 Girard, René 200n. 21, 209n. 3, 224n. 28 Gosselin, Edward A. 249n. 75 Gourevitch, Victor 223n. 23 Granville–Barker, Harley 220–1n. 13 Green, Barthlet 240n. 37 Greenblatt, Stephen 214n. 15, 218n. 30, 226n. 4, 256n. 87, 262n. 105 Greenburg, Bradley 264n. 112 Gregory XIII, Pope 234n. 15 Greville, Fulke 152, 166 Guildensteren, Axel 160, 245n. 64 Hakluyt, Richard 252n. 84 Hall, Peter 237n. 29 Hamilton, John 250n. 79

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Index of Names Hancox, Joy 243n. 56 Harriot (Hariot), Thomas 149, 152, 153, 163, 178, 244n. 57, 252n. 83, 260n. 101 Harrison, G. B. 198n. 12 Hartman, Geoffrey 218n. 30 Hatton, Sir Christopher 151 Haverkamp, Anselm 256n. 88 Hawkins, Harriett 197n. 11 Hawkins, John 242n. 47 Heminge, John 196n. 8 Henry VIII, King 185 Heraclitus 138 Herbert (née Sidney), Mary, Countess of Pembroke 152, 153, 252n. 83 Hermes Trismegistus 145, 146, 147, 148 Hibbert, Christopher 236n. 24 Hirsch, David H. 209n. 6 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 165, 166, 175, 195n. 5, 241n. 43, 248n. 72 Homer 102, 225n. 33, 257n. 89 Honan, Park 253n. 85 Hotson, Leslie 246n. 64 Hunt, Maurice 208n. 2 Hunter, Reverend Joseph 251n. 81 Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) 154 Jackson, James L. 230n. 24 Jacobson, Howard 202n. 7, 226n. 4, 265n. 116 James I, King 235n. 21 Jenkins, Elizabeth 239n. 34 Jenkins, Harold 208n. 32, 228n. 10, 261n. 103, 268 Johnson, Jerah 261n. 104 Johnson, Paul 241n. 42, 242nn. 47, 49 Johnson, Samuel 260n. 98 Jones, Ann Rosalind 200n. 2, 215n. 21 Jones, Dr Ernest 209n. 3 Jonson, Ben 149, 159, 197n. 8, 253n. 84 Joughin, John J. 255n. 86 Kantorowicz, E. H. 261n. 104 Kargon, Robert 261n. 102 Kaufmann, Walter 210n. 7, 231n. 4 Kelley, Edward 150, 238nn. 30, 31 Kepler, Johannes 162, 235n. 20, 246n. 65 Kermode, Frank 230n. 2

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Kerrigan, William 215n. 23, 233n. 13 Kierkegaard, Søren 189 Knight, G. Wilson 217n. 28, 225–6n. 4, 269n. 120 Koestler, Arthur 244n. 59 Kopernik, Mikotaij 57, 143 see also Copernicus Kyd, Thomas 166 Kynwelmarshe, Richard 201n. 2 Lacan, Jaques 255n. 86 Lacey, Robert 242n. 48 Leo X, Pope 262n. 105 Lerner, Lawrence S. 249n. 75 Leucippus 177 Levin, Harry 200n. 23, 202n. 9, 205n. 23, 209n. 5, 217n. 29, 233n. 13 Lidz, Theodore ix, 210–11n. 8 Lipperhey, Hans 245n. 63 Lucretius 177 Luther, Martin 165, 249n. 73, 262n. 105 Machiavelli, Niccolò 219n. 7 Maitland, F. W. 261n. 104 Marlowe, Christopher 149, 153, 157, 158, 166, 244n. 57, 252n. 83, 260n. 101 Marshall, Peter 239n. 34 Mary I, Queen 151, 239–40n. 37 Mary Queen of Scots 185, 240n. 40 Masefield, John 198n. 15 Matthew of Miechow 234n. 14 Meadows, A. J. 241n. 43, 244n. 58, 244n. 62, 248nn. 71, 72 Medici, Cosimo 148, 236n. 24 Medici, Lorenzo 236n. 25 Melanchton, Philipp 249n. 73 Melville, Herman 77, 205n. 24 Mercator, Gerardus 154, 241n. 45 Mercer, Peter 201n. 3, 226n. 4 Mersenne, Marin 235n. 20 Michelangelo 236n. 25 Midas, King 231n. 4 Miles, George 206 Mollin, Andrew 227–8n. 1 Monitto, G. V. 261n. 103 Multhauf, Robert P. 235–6n. 21, 251n. 80, 260n. 100

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280

Index of Names

Murray, J. Middleton 203–4n. 13, 254n. 86, 260n. 98, 2590n. 96 Nashe, Thomas 166, 241n. 43, 261n. 101 Neale, J. E. 239n. 37 Newton, Sir Isaac 235n. 20, 244n. 63 Nicholl, Charles 244n. 57, 252n. 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 49, 195n. 2, 210n. 7, 213n. 13, 231n. 4, 233n. 13 Nuttall, A. D. 232n. 9 Orrell, John 243n. 55 Owain Gwynedd, Madog ab 155 Parker, Patrick 218n. 30 Parry, Blanch 239n. 37 Paul III, Pope 143 Percy, Henry, Earl of Northumberland 152, 153, 178, 252n. 83 Petreius, Johannes 144 Phellipes, Thomas 152, 240n. 40 Pinelli, Giovan Vincenzo 248n. 70 Planinc, Zdravko 227n. 7 Plato 2, 3, 8, 83, 147, 148, 151, 189, 201n. 4, 213n. 14, 218n. 2, 220n. 9, 222n. 17, 223n. 24, 231n. 5, 236nn. 22, 24, 25, 248n. 70, 263n. 111, 264n. 112 Plautus, Titus, Maccius 232n. 8 Plotinus 151 Popper, Karl 255n. 86 Prendergast, Christopher 263n. 110 Presley, Elvis 225n. 33 Prosser, Eleanor 256n. 87, 262n. 107 Pythagoras, Pythagoreans 2, 144, 149, 234–5n. 16, 248n. 72 Rabkin, Norman 198n. 16 Racine, Jean 221n. 13 Ralegh, Sir Walter 151, 153, 155, 163, 178, 241n. 42, 242n. 47, 252n. 83, 260n. 101 Raphael 236n. 25 Recorde, Robert 152, 157 Reinhold, Erasmus 157, 244n. 59 Rheticus, Georg Joachim 143, 234–5n. 16, 249n. 73 Riggs, David 252n. 83 Ronan, Colin 245n. 63

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Rosen, Edward 235nn. 16, 20 Rosenberg, Marvin 201n. 5, 205n. 26, 226n. 4, 227n. 10, 259n. 95, 263n. 112 Rosencratz, George 160, 245n. 64 Roth, Steve 244n. 57 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 222n. 23 Rowse, A. L. 242n. 51, 243n. 52 Roydon, Mathew 260n. 101 Sanders, Wilbur 202n. 7, 226n. 4, 265n. 116 Sarpi, Paulo 250n. 77 Sarton, George 236n. 24 Sartre, Jean–Paul 210n. 7 Saxo Grammaticus 49, 50, 211n. 9 Schöner, Johannes 143 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 232n. 8 Shapiro, James 234n. 15 Shea, Sara A. 231n. 4 Sidney (née Dudley), Lady Mary 152 Sidney, Sir Philip 152, 153, 157, 166, 169, 240n. 39, 246n. 64, 252n. 83, 252–3n. 84 Sieman, James R. 201n. 3 Silenus 231n. 4 Sitwell, Edith 239nn. 3, 37, 262n. 108 Sokrates 2, 83, 222n. 17, 223n. 24, 231n. 5, 262n. 112 Solomon, King 180 Sophocles 145, 197n. 8 Speaight, Robert 197n. 9, 219n. 6 Spenser, Edmund 157, 166, 252n. 84 Spurgeon, Caroline 216n. 26 Stallybrass, Peter 200n. 2, 215n. 21 Stanley, Ferdinando, Lord Strange Earl of Derby 258n. 91, 260n. 101 Stauffer, Donald A. 204n. 16 Stevens, Martin 206–7n. 26 Stewart, Stanley 198n. 11 Strong, Roy 237n. 28 Stuewer, Roger H. 235n. 20 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 199n. 18, 207n. 29 Sypher, Wylie 243n. 55 Sysley, Clement 200n. 2 Taylor, Neil 200nn. 1, 21 Thales 260n. 100

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Index of Names Thompson, Ann 200nn. 1, 21 Titian (Tizaiano Vecellio) 236n. 25 Torporly, Nathaniel 152 Turnebus, Adrianus 238n. 33 Vaughan, Alden T. 237n. 29 Vaughan, Virginia mason 237n. 29 Vitruvius, Marcus 156 Vitruvius, Pollio 243n. 55 Vives, Juan Luis 260n. 101 Wallis, Charles Glenn 234nn. 16, 17 Walsingham, Sir Francis 151, 153, 154, 240n. 40, 242n. 47, 246n. 64 Warner, Walter 152 Weir, Alison 239n. 37 Wells, Stanley 198n. 13 West, Robert H. 257n. 91 Wheeler, Richard P. 262n. 112 Williams, Neville 239n. 37 Williams, Oscar 250n. 77

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Wilson, Derek 239n. 35, 240nn. 38, 40, 246n. 64 Wilson, John Dover 195n. 7, 198n. 14, 204n. 14, 216n. 25, 217n. 29, 228n. 14, 232n. 7, 254n. 86, 263n. 112 Wood, Anthony 152 Woolley, Benjamin 237n. 28, 238n. 34, 239n. 36, 241nn. 44, 45, 242nn. 46, 50, 243n. 54 Wootton, David 237n. 27, 248n. 70, 250n. 77 Woudhuysen, H. R. 260n. 101 Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton 260n. 101 Xenophon 209n. 4, 251n. 81 Yates, Frances A. 243n. 55 Yeats, W. B. ix Zuňiga, Diegoda 149

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