In the Geneva version, the first part of Ecclesiastes 10 treats of the the difference of foolishness and wisdom. And yet Shakespeare was not to be dismissed out of hand: the Justness of his Moral, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters meant that he could help to nurture the self-examination and self-discourse on which Shaftesbury believed moral knowledge must be based. Just as blood circulated around the human body long before William Harvey drew attention to the fact in 1628, so various forms of interiority or selfhood may have existed before being theorized in the long eighteenth century. Christen Curtis. Taking in the terrible scene before him, Fortinbras deploys the figure of erotesisthe rhetorical questionto conclude that Death must have been hungry. Cruelty leads to the downfall of each character. Indeed, the instant Hamlet considers the Ghosts command to Remember me, his sense of purpose begins to exceed his grasp. Perhaps so, but none of this amounts to more than well-informed speculation. Compare The Taming of the Shrew, where at the outset the Lord (just returned from a hunting trip) asks a visiting troupe of players to help him gull the drunken Sly: I have some sport in hand/ Wherein your cunning can assist me much. If he cannot bring himself to remember his father or his fathers ghost, he at least commits to remembering what the Ghost said to him, and promises to do so to the exclusion of all else. Accordingly, the actors ability to play the part of a soul or a self that is not his own gestures towards what might very well constitute the problem for Hamlet and Hamlet alike. Henry cannot choose to overlook open rebellion against his rule, and although the rebels grievances are addressed, Mowbray, Hastings, and the Archbishop himself are executed for capital treason. Where Shakespeare differs from his great humanist predecessor is that he does not therefore condemn hunting as a deviation from a gold standard of morality. He cannot say exactly what he will do, but he will do it because providence has determined that he will do it, and because he can therefore do no other. Instead, he now has it that his native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied oer with the pale cast of thought (3.1.8485), and that he is guilty of some craven scruple/ Of thinking too precisely on the thevent (4.4.4142). After chapters 3, 4, and 5 above, I hope that it is by now plain enough that Hamlets ambitious but frequently confused and incoherent mode of discourse sounds like that of an early modern university student. A hare seeks to evade cunning hounds in Venus and Adonis, and in King John, Salisbury attributes to Hubert the predatory slyness of the crocodile: Trust not the cunning waters of his eyes,/ For villainy is not without such rheum. Now, as he half-serendipitously grabs the Danish throne, Fortinbras confirms this understanding of how things have, for him, come to pass: I embrace my fortune (5.2.393). The culminating irony is that this posture of penitence succeeds in furnishing Claudius with a form of deliverance, and an immediate one at that. In another work, Wilson elaborates on this process of search and discovery through a metaphor common to many humanist educational handbooks. Compare the Tusculan Disputations. No response is required, and the Ghost now narrates the circumstances of Old Hamlets murder. In seeking to register his urgency, Hamlet uses a string of purposefully imperative verbs: hold, grow, and bear. Likewise, although it is possible to imagine Old Hamlets spirit looking down with horror on the vile and loathsome crust covering the body that it had until recently called home, it cannot possibly have seen the poison course around Old Hamlets veins or seen his blood inwardly thicken like spoiled milk. Through them, he fashions himself a fig leaf through which to protect his self-image when seeing himself reflected in the mirror of other people, be they the inhabitants of Virgils Aeneid or his own Denmark: an excess of thinking has overwhelmed his native hue of resolution. They think that they are following nature by taking on one role or another, but they are in reality playing parts in the drama of their mutual destruction. After probing Hamlets deliberations on vengeancethe most direct expression of which comes as late in the play as the chapel sceneit follows his turn towards questions of religion and of theology, and especially towards those of providence. These lines have vexed many commentators on the play, but their obscurity need not defy comprehension. As the tragedy unfolds, Senecas Chorus entreats natura to regulate fortuna with the same attention that it regulates the cosmos. Whether the portraits of Old Hamlet and Claudius to which he directs Gertrudes attention are paired miniatures or painted on a larger scale need not detain us. Then, just like that, the Ghost is gone. At this stage of the play, Hamlet only sees his father through the language of more or less polished automaticitythrough descriptions that are, quite literally, commonplace. But the distance between Hamlet and Polonius is not as great as Hamlet and his admirers like to think. Thus Arnold Hauser: It would. Memory was the fourth canon of classical rhetoric, and in remembering and calling to mind lengthy texts or large bodies of data, one technique recommended in the rhetorical handbooks was to adapt the order of numbers as a fundamental schematic with which to facilitate memorization. There is no need to labour the point, but Hamlets claim is absurd. That Falstaff is being unkennelled by the unhappy husbands of Windsor on account of his lechery sheds further light on Hamlets use of the term. Furthermore, and as Apollonius asserts in a later portion of the dialogue, it is this natural power of imagination (rather than the attempt slavishly to imitate the physical manifestations of nature) that allows great artists to represent the world in its complexity. Resembles that it was. Hamlet thus only professes insanity to the extent that the falconer suffers from sun blindnesswhich is to say, only in particular circumstances. There are no easy answers here, and there is no external evidence to suggest Shakespeares engagement with Boethius. Helena recognises that the Countess and Lafew interpret her tears as falling in memory of her father, and although she feels no need to correct their misapprehension, she is bound to admit to herself that, far from mourning her father, his memory has been thoroughly displaced. In scripting Hamlets paragon of animals, he exploits this semantic duality to usher in a searingly ironic indictment of humanity. Unfortunately for Hamlet, this willingness to confront painful memories explains why his idealized images of his father fall flat: to one who actually remembers Old Hamlet as a husband and a man, depictions of him as a god or the embodiment of abstract virtues are either meaningless or a falsification. When composing a speech that needed to be impassioned in order to accomplish its goals, students were taught that they could do no better than to imagine themselves in Hecubas position as Troy and her family were destroyed before her. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. This false fire is ironic on two levelsone rudimentary, the other less so. The Gravedigger may or may not suspect that his high-born interlocutor is, in fact, the young Hamlet of whom he is now being pushed to speak, but must sense that the drift of their conversation towards matters of state puts him in danger. They depict all three as would-be tyrants who lived and died by the sword, and do so in order to illustrate just how degradedly violent the Danes could be. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are ambitious commoners, and must accommodate themselves to others in service of their ambition; Hamlet, a prince fashioning himself as a Beggar (2.2.272), emphatically does not consider himself their shadow. As discussed in previous chapters, the sense in which soul is most frequently used within the play is akin to that of Ciceros ingenium and Aristotles psuchthe animating force and characteristic that make an individual what he or she is (Cicero), or the principle in virtue of which something is alive (Aristotle). Immediately after this, Aristotles text offers another example of a chance occurrence, one that demands the close attention of any Shakespearean: the sea traveller who ends up on unexpected shores after being captured by pirates, or having been carried there by a storm. I wasnt in my right mind when killing your father and fatally wounding your sister. What she tells him of her relationship with Hamlet affirms the gossip, prying if not prurient, that he has heard at court. But by the time this mode reached the zenith of its popularity (to the chagrin of commentators like Nashe) in the years around 1590, English playwrights had begun to exploit its dramaturgic potential. So hamlet is thinking that he should kill him and him thinking if all this is even worth it or if he shouldnt even try. Hamlets final soliloquy shows him struggling with his refusal to consider why he continues to fall so far short of his desired mark. Fortinbras, his army behind him, seizes power and joins Horatio and Osric in asserting his composure through bromides of astonishment, grief, respect, self-righteousness, and so forth. As such, they are unreliable and easily compromised. and the want of knowledge wherefore and to what end he is borne, is the cause of error, of evill, of leaving the right way to follow the crooked, of wandring out of the plaine way to walke in the ragged and uneven way, or upon a dangerous and slipperie mountaine: and lastly, of forsaking the light to walke in darknes. 4.5, Laertes after hearing his father is dead: 'to hell allegiance! In this chapter, I present a different case. As Erasmuss example suggests, such images could therefore resemble spiritual apparitions. Unless we define being alive as an affair of ontological passivityas a condition of significance only because it involves one neither killing oneself nor being deadit is not at all clear that choosing to live can only be seen as the equivalent of not doing something. Much better to keep people looking elsewhere. In considering Hamlets performances as a poet and philosopher, things are more straightforward. All the more striking then that Laertes chooses to foment a rebellion from which Claudius easily dissuades him, to vow vengeance before he knows how and why his father has died, and to connive at Hamlets death by playing him false at fencing. In making a show of designating Hamlet as his chosen successor, and of doing so because he would like Hamlet to consider himself his son, Claudius refuses to let Hamlet forget that this is the case. One that self-exploration, inwardness, honour, loyalty, love, poetry, philosophy, politics, moral scruple, military force, and religious belief are powerless to illuminate. Like Melvilles preternatural sea beast, the Ghost is a fiction with a point. From its first scene to its last, Hamlet is preoccupied with the attempt to make sense of the past. More recently, it has been proposed that Hamlet and Hamlet alike show Shakespeare capturing a historical moment in which secularity (qua fortune and time) was comprehended under the aegis of religion (qua providence and eternity); on this account, to understand Hamlets status as an outrider of modernity, one must understand that modernity has religious origins. Leaving behind his preoccupation with the technicalities of acting, Hamlet turns to the mimetic force of dramaas a mode of expression able to represent something like the murder of my father. . In concluding, it seems important to stress that although Shakespeare takes pains to establish and extend his depiction of Hamlets limitations as a poet, dramatist, and rhetorician, this depiction is not in itself his objective. Immediately, he leaves little doubt that his belief in the validity of the Ghosts testimony is undimmed: The plays the thing/ Wherein Ill catch the conscience of the King (2.2.600601). His appropriation of the conventions of Senecan revenge suggests one fired by condign passion and struggling with its implications, but masks the absence of the feelings that Hamlet feels he should be experiencing as the son of a murdered father. Hamlet chooses to delegate responsibility for initiating his vengeance to the dramatic professionals, who will be paid to perform something like the murder of my father/ Before mine uncle (2.2.59192), and who will thereby procure public confirmation of his guilt. He immediately changes the subject when the Gravediggers comments threaten to lay this reality bare. More of rhetorical memoria and the techniques devised to support it later in the chapter. For when thei see the ground beaten flatte round about, and faire to the sighte: thei have a narrow gesse by al likelihode that the hare was there a litle before. Providence proposes; fate disposes; fortune and chance obey; philosophy helps humankind to understand. We smile warily when Stoppard has one of his Players insist that Were actorswere the opposite of people!, but most sixteenth-century Europeans would not have grasped the joke. The vegetative soul enables body to grow, the blood to circulate, and the lungs to operate without conscious effort. The arrival of an onstage audience in the form of those playing the recorders (most likely the players themselves, though quite possibly itinerant musicians working for them) is a neat meta-theatrical joke. Had Death been killing the Danish aristocracy for a feast, no matter how indulgent, he would not have been guilty of havocking them; if he is guilty of havocking them, he would have killed far more than he needed for his feast. Another good example is the magnificent woodcut frontispiece that is reproduced in figure 5: here, mouse trapping takes its place alongside almost every conceivable sort of early modern hunting, fishing, and fowling. . Hyrcania was famous for its tigers, animals that were seen as ruthlessly appetitive hunters and were thus an analogue for vindictive single-mindedness. (5.2.21220). Inexplicably, they find themselves trappedsequestered from one another and from the world at large. Claudius rises, Polonius calls off the performance, and everyone other than Hamlet and Horatio hurries into the wings. In the words of the Vulgate, mihi vindictam ego retribuam dicit Dominus; or, in the more familiar Authorized Version, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Polonius and Horatio agree, as does Fortinbrass uncle the Norwegian king. Manifestly, Greene expected his audience to recognise the actor-playwright responsible for these lines, the more so because he may also have been the actor who was responsible for speaking them on stage: this man of the theatre takes himself to be dramatically omni-competent. There is a rhetoric of self-verifying interiority here, but Montaigne also insists that to arrive at such understanding depends on a form of self-expression. The lines with which Hamlet begins his fourth soliloquy are possibly the most famous in Western literature: To be, or not to be, that is the question (3.1.56). Discarding his conscience and the knowledge of his inner virtue, he has allowed himself to be guided by rumour, popularity, and by the rewards of other peoples everyday chatter. In fact, his philosophising is bound to superficiality, to seeming, and to the twin demands of his emotions and self-image; he relies on the language and assumptions of early modern philosophy, but he is not even a philosopher as the early moderns understood the category, let alone an embodiment of philosophical transcendence. He clutches at expiation. The underlying causes of these tragic effects are destined to remain hidden. Any champion of providence might venture an erotesis like what ist to leave betimes?, but it takes Hamlet to do so while fixating to the exclusion of all else on the conditions of mortal living. A word. Although the three young men belong to the same university cohort, the prince is likewise determined to remind his friends that he numbers them amongst his servants (2.2.268). His usage exactly echoes that of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy: suspicious that the letter left for him by Bel-Imperia may be intended to trap him, he resolves that I therefore will by circumstances try/ What I can gather to confirm this writ. Instead, he fixes on discourse of reasonand with it the dictates of moral philosophyas the criterion against which to measure remembrance of the dead in general and of his dead father in particular. I do not know whether Shakespeare misread Boethius in the fashion of his monarch, or whether he wants his audience to infer that any misreading belongs to Hamlet. The explanation for this, I submit, relates to the difficulties with which Hamlet has wrestled in his second soliloquyand that he will shortly attempt to ameliorate through the passionate examples of Aeneas, Hecuba, and Pyrrhus. It is that he does not, and perhaps cannot, remember his father as he and the Ghost think he should. Subjectivity is obvious enough: the way in which one remembers something is contingent on where one was, how one felt, and whether one understood what one was experiencing when initially experiencing it. Consider a line from Pierces Supererogation, Harveys penultimate contribution to his feud with Thomas Nashe. Pass over in silence the fact that the player has had to resort to face-pulling improvisations to fill the time while Hamlet has been holding forth. Fortinbrass remarks have a further and deeper unsuitability than this. Such affronts could not go unanswered, and in having their Will Kempe outspokenly champion Shakespeare against their own sort, the St Johns men got to enjoy the fruits of their own wit while exposing the impoverishment of Shakespeares dramatic aspirations: only a semi-literate clown best known for his jig could rank the writings of Shakespeare above those of the elite. Further, as he kills Polonius (rashly and inadvertently) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (rashly and deliberately) without so much a second thought, the commandment against homicide cannot be said to feature prominently in his thoughts. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder Answer Act 1 Scene 5-Hamlet's sense of duty I was born to set it right Answer Act 1 Scene 5-Hamlet will forget book learning from the table of my memory/ I'll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books Answer A1S5 ghost doubt The spirit I have seen/ May be the devil Answer Mother request . Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting. Poloniuss fortuna has handed him the hard lesson that to be too busy is some danger (3.4.3133). If the former, then no more than nine months so. Persuasive though it may be, the Archbishops reasoning proves misguided. In this linethe most famous line in all of ShakespeareHamlet asks whether it is better to exist or not to exist, or to put it another way, whether he should commit suicide or continue living. Of deaths put on by cunning and forcd cause, Falln on thinventors heads. As summed up in Cornwalliss essay Of Knowledge, the ample territories of the properly administered mind stretcheth even to the heavens. Like the wrong sort of courtier, actors can appear to be virtuously humane, but are devoid of anything but self-interest within. Much more might be said of this soliloquy. (We find here a clue as to the status of graphic memory aids like commonplace books. In Act 5, Hamlets exchange with Osric underscores a cognate point: Osric: You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is, Hamlet: I dare not confess that, lest I should compare with, him in excellence; but to know a man well were to know himself. In only paying lip service to the immortality of the soul at moments of mortal crisis, Hamlet is by no means unusual in Shakespeares Denmark. Art more engagd! As he did not intend to kill Polonius, he can only have done so as an instrument of divinity; and, as Augustine makes clear with reference to biblical figures like Samson, to kill by divine ordinance is not only an acceptable transgression of the sixth commandment, but a virtuous one. So shall you hear. The first of these (see figure 7) shows a hunting landscape in which human and animal predation, and vulnerability, is indistinguishable. We are habituated to thinking of the superficiality of the proverbs, commonplaces, sententia, saws, and observations that litter his discourse, just as we are to identifying the complacencies that detach his words from the world they would at once represent and influence. This is another iteration of the rhetorical poetics of sixteenth-century commonplace. This is the sense in which Shakespeare usually uses the verb. He answered, Action; what next? well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning (2.2.44547). This takes us to the heart of an essential difficulty in interpreting the De officiis. The plays responses to these questions are anything but unambiguous, and before turning to them we must pause to examine the series of beliefs and doctrines that make possible Hamlets proposed investigation into the nature of his fathers spectral form. The revelation of Claudiuss crime, and the demand to avenge it, spur the prince into thoughts of passionate action. In a different play, that might have been an end of the matter; after some atmospheric throat-clearing, the revenge plot could have begun. On this not very thinly veiled account, Shakespeare is a Roscius whose ambitious vanity has led him to forget his station, his limited abilities, and his debts. The events surrounding the players speech thus constitute another instance of plays structural attachment to the figure of aposiopesisto things that look as if they are about to happen but that break off before they can arrive at completion. In another hendiadys, Hamlet transforms himself into the scourge and minister of heavenan agent constrained to inflict corrective or retributive pain on heavens behalf, as if administering a flogging with a whip. Marilynne Robinson, Of course 'Hamlet' is a debate about the nature and morality of revenge and whether it is right to do something to assuage your angry feelings. In Hamlet, the codes of conduct are largely defined by religion and an aristocratic code that demands honorand revenge if honor has been soiled.
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