113 - The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600

The Renaissance Hamlet:
Issues and Responses in 1600
By Roland Mushat Frye
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984. 398 pp. $28.50.

This is a large and handsome book by an eminent scholar. Decorating its pages are more than eighty black-on-white reproductions of emblems or woodcuts, paintings or parts of paintings, and tomb sculptures. Here one finds, for instance, allegorical figurings of prudence, folly, and fortune's wheel (with a royal ass at the top of the wheel); depictions of ladies looking into mirrors of various kinds, and of gentlemen meditating on skulls, and of souls being transported to heaven under the banner of Christ's cross. Such graphic reminders of the cultural horizons of Shakespeare's age are in themselves rich food for thought. And along

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with them, Frye's chapters include surveys of the age's range of attitudes on debatable matters such as ghosts and purgatory and the political duty of citizens under conditions of tyranny. His purpose in assembling this historical background is "to reconstruct relevant aspects of the Elizabethan context" so that today's readers of Shakespeare's play may be able to see it "more nearly as it would have been seen by the original audiences." His hope is to establish "working approximations and qualified probabilities" regarding what Hamlet meant to its author and his contemporaries.

He recognizes in part, but perhaps not fully, the difficulties in estimating what a great artwork meant to its contemporaries. None of them has left us comments on what issues of the day he saw reflected in Shakespeare's drama. And do not auditors, in any age, come to a play with differing capacities for understanding and evaluating its ethical issues? Even an historian, moreover, unless he is very careful in studying implications, can warp an author's meaning or misguess audience response. It seems to me Frye is on slippery ground when he concludes, in his final chapter, that "most" of the Elizabethan audience would have been prepared to applaud Hamlet's stabbing of Claudius and forcing poison down his throat. Hamlet's words-"Here, thou incestuous, murd'rous, damned Dane, / Drink off this potion"-are defended by Frye as having about them "something of the quality of those Elizabethan summaries of crimes committed by a criminal which were read at public executions." But do they really? I can recall no public execution at which an Elizabethan officer declared a criminal "damned" and used poisoned instruments to dispatch him. On the other hand, I remember that the twelfth century John of Salisbury sanctioned tyrannicide only as a last resort by persons who first pray to God for redress and try to correct abuses through means of patient reproof, and who when fighting "in behalf of charity" avoid using poison. Has Hamlet been guided by those criteria? At least many of the Globe's spectators, I would think, very likely sympathized with the bystanders in Shakespeare's scene who cry "Treason" at Hamlet's act and then stand mute and trembling while Horatio comments on deaths brought about by "unnatural acts" and "purposes mistook." That is, they would have accepted with woe and wonder an outcome in which one sinner's illegal deeds could be seen as providentially punished by another's, but they would have stopped short of approving the morality of either Claudius or Hamlet.

In my book on Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (1969), I interpreted the poisoned winecup as Shakespeare's symbol of an unholy communion which Claudius and Hamlet minister to each other. Professor Frye replies in a footnote that I have inverted the play's "obvious meanings." I mention this to apprise readers of how longtime friends such as he and I can reach differing assessments of a drama as challenging as Hamlet. We agree that there developed among Catholics and Protestants alike in Renaissance times a wide spectrum of attitudes regarding ethical justifications for armed resistance against

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tyrants. But the point in question is whether or not Shakespeare is showing, on both sides of tragic conflict, modes of response that are unhealthy and ethically aberrant. Frye focuses chiefly on the abuses committed by Claudius, and indeed magnifies them by allowing Hamlet's view to be our guide. Overlooked thus are some residual good qualities in Claudius, notably, in his prayer soliloquy, his honest self-criticism and cry to angels to help him repent. Frye mistakenly says that Claudius has decided on a second murder, that of Hamlet, before he kneels for prayer, whereas Shakespeare makes evident that the king wrote his evil letter only after being made desperate by the news of Hamlet's murder of Polonius and subsequent wildness in parading the old man's guts.

Frye attempts a favorable reading of Hamlet's reduction of duty to "the one commandment all alone" of revenge, his subsequent use of an "antic disposition" to license satirical jibes, his thundering dagger-words toward his mother, and his forging of a letter to order the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "Not shriving time allowed." True, Frye cannot and does not approve Hamlet's thirst for hot blood or his wish to see the praying Claudius tortured in hell. Correctly he declares: "The depravity of the Prince at this point would have seemed evident from every point of view in 1600," since Hamlet here usurps and blasphemes both the judgment of God and the hope of man. Yet Frye adds, as if in extenuation, that we do not know what Hamlet would have done in this encounter if the king had not been surrounded by (are they on stage at this point?) a platoon of armed guards, and that Hamlet is affirming, although with the wrong reasons, a will to "act against Claudius." To reassure us, Frye explains that the "Luciferian stance [Hamlet] adopted after the mousetrap play does not suit him for long" and that he will continue "weighing the available alternatives" until, at the end of the play, he can speak with a "perfect conscience" which Frye identifies with the resistance theory of Philip Mornay and other Protestant moderates. In short, Hamlet is to be viewed as a long and agonizing struggle on the part of the hero to find "the proper conclusion of a full analysis of conscience, a degree of assurance that would undergird action," and when he attains this by "trust in divinity" he achieves a "virtuous tyrannicide" (p. 263). My impression is that Frye has in the back of his mind a hero like Samson, whom his studies of Milton have predisposed him to look for. But such an approach seems to me to shortchange Shakespeare's play.

Let us note for instance the slippery logic of his comments on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play "does not make clear," he says, "whether or not they are fully aware of what is involved" (in the plot by Claudius), but Hamlet "thinks they are, and I am inclined to follow his judgment" (p. 135). Are we then to judge them "adders fanged," as Hamlet thinks? "I suggest we are to read this not as hyperbole, but as a straightforward factual appraisal" (p. 259). Frye then slides into stating bluntly that they "had elected to play a deadly game against their prince," and hence Hamlet's response was justifiable:

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Johannes Althusius in Shakespeare's time declared, of those who will not assist the prince but support the tyrant instead, that "those who refuse to help the resisting ephor with their strength, money, and counsel are considered enemies and deserters." There is no way to deny that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were in fact "enemies and deserters" who refuse to help the resisting ephor (p. 262).

I would deny this conclusion for the simple reason that Shakespeare shows them clearly ignorant of a plot by Claudius, and that Hamlet has never asked for their assistance or presented himself to them as a true prince resisting a tyrant. Hamlet has preferred to act alone, with secrecy and an antic behavior, not as a public leader of an army or a political party. In these respects it seems to me unfair to Althusius-or to Philip Mornay-to suppose that Hamlet represents their ethic.

Another argument accompanied by weak evidence is that Hamlet's state of soul" is endorsed by Horatio's "assurance that angels will convey the Prince to his rest" (p. 280). Actually, Horatio expresses only a friend's conventional wish, followed by a realistic appraisal of "purposes mistook." Moreover, since Horatio is a stoic whose first impulse was a Roman one to die by suicide alongside Hamlet, his understanding of "rest" lacks a Christian dimension. To establish a Christian paradise as Hamlet's reward, Frye reproduces artworks which depict holy angels carrying up to Abraham's bosom innocent children and kneeling suppliants whose hands are uplifted in prayer. But can the attitudes thus depicted be found in Prince Hamlet? Do they not, rather, make evident Hamlet's difference from these models?

Finally, of what significance is Hamlet's having studied at Wittenberg? "One of the clearest things about this play," Frye comments, "is that Shakespeare has carefully and consistently cast Hamlet as a Protestant." While protest, no doubt, is a central characteristic of Hamlet (and in a mode that draws protest against him by others), his motivation seems to me to have as little relation to a Wittenberg evangelicalism as that of Laertes does to a Catholic orthodoxy of Paris. When Hamlet accepts revenge as his "one commandment," Shakespeare shows him to be serving a Ghost which Horatio (a Wittenberg scholar) distrusts as "extravagant and erring." When he denounces his mother, his preaching arises not from Scripture, but from idolizing of a father on whom "every god (of the pagan pantheon) has set his seal." And when, later, he talks of "a divinity that shapes our ends," this conclusion is accompanied by a "Praised be rashness!" indicative of no intention of repenting his rough-hewing. Hence, the kind of providence he acknowledges has seemed to many critics (not mentioned by Frye) to be a reductive fatalism, more pagan than Christian. Denmark's catastrophe, in Shakespeare's story, strikes me as the result of evident lapsings by characters only nominally Christian.

Roy Battenhouse
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana