Such an approach has much to recommend it, not least in pushing back against the ideologically interpellated subject that became an article of faith for an earlier critical generation. The court can only interpret the staged spectacle of a nephew poisoning and killing his uncle the king with malice aforethought as a transgression: the disaffected Hamlet has commissioned an indefensibly extreme display of lse-majest. Rather than struggling to find the words or deeds or opportunity to express that within which should be there but isnt, he enjoys the sensation of outwitting Claudius in Old Hamlets name, before filing what he takes to be the public confirmation of his uncles guilt away in the appropriate part of the book and volume of his brainto be recollected as and when necessary. We might, with Boethius and the Stoics, reasonably discuss whether being imprisoned should be understood as a good, bad, or indifferent thing. As such, they are unreliable and easily compromised. La Primaudaye again: Ignorance of a mans selfe. And in suche lyke sorte woulde raile upon all the rest. Hamlets eloquent and self-consciously inward-looking gestures at existential, moral, and personal understanding do have a great deal in common with Montaignes literary noveltynot least in their appropriations of sixteenth-century commonplace learning. He is concerned not with what he says, but the ways in which what he says make him seem to himself and to others. When Rosencrantz imparts the same information to Gertrudepresumably not a courserhe does away with the hunting metaphor: Madam, it so fell out that certain players/ We oerraught them on the way (3.1.1617). She dies not on account of the gods, but through a series of mischances attendant on what Edmund rightly calls the time. One of the most bewildering features of Hamlet criticism is the ingenuity that has so often, and so variously, been expended in reading Hamlets providential language straight. Kyds Hieronimo grapples with the implications of Pauls words at length, before creatively misreading Seneca in the act of deciding that he cannot leave what has to be done to Godwhatever the consequences for his own spiritual well-being. most horrible! (1.5.7580). In describing the prospect of Ophelia having drowned herself in self-defence, he asserts to his less loquacious partner that It must be se offendendo (5.1.9). If a little on the thuggish side, Fortinbras at least appears to be more in control of himself than ever their own Prince Hamlet had been. In performing instinctively, his brains are like an actor taking to the stage without a script, and without a comprehension of the significance or scope of the part he must play. It goes without saying that Shakespeare and Hobbes differed radically as men and as writers. There is recognition that the Ghost is a potentially compromising ally here, to be sure, just as there is that physical infirmity can stand in the way of revenge. / This bad begins, and worse remains behind (3.4.18081). Several of Arcade's contributing bloggers of recent yearsTimothy Hampton, Ruth Kaplan, and Ricardo Padrnare represented bytheir observations out of reading and teaching. Other than conducing to virtuous government, another reason that princes should take care to know themselves is alluded to by Shakespeares Lucrece. Donec aliquet. Of course, the Ptolemaic cosmos imagined in Hamlets first two lines was vulnerable by the end of the sixteenth century, and as such offers up some alluring interpretative contexts. But here the roles one plays are not measured by reason, virtue, propriety, verisimilitude, or even the pleasure they might give to an audience. No doubt he delivers his lines with the spiritual heft of the preacher, but the tortured complexity of his syntax works to obscure an apprehension of death and of the afterlife that remains wholly bound within the material world, and that is Senecan rather than Christian in its assumptions. Is it possible to develop a settled sense of self when human existence is shown to depend on mutual predationwhen, depending on the perspective from which a scene is viewed, a character is likely to be hunter, prey, or a little of both? Hamlet doesnt venture to say what these phenomena might be, and he contents himself with another of the plays indeterminate things. Introspection is exhausted, and we never hear him soliloquise again. This sentiment is complicated by hyperbole, but is in essence clear enough. Hamlets responses to the Ghost thus reinforce the plays suggestion that rhetoric can prove strangely redundant in the face of the world. This, Hamlet asserts, is enough to amaze indeed/ The very faculties of eyes and ears (2.2.55960). How is this task to be accomplished? So, Im going to erase and re-inscribe the latter as if it were the former. He is simply agog at the skill with which the actor is able to inhabit his role so compellingly, whereas he can say nothing (2.2.563)cannot even say anythingdespite professing to have so many weightily provocative things within him. Of most immediate relevance here is that in expounding his plans, he turns to the first of numerous hunting metaphors connected to the inset play: The plays the thing/ Wherein Ill catch the conscience of the King (2.2.600601). Pellentesque dapibus efficitur laoreet. For one thing, he claims to have been in continual practice since Laertes departed for France, and is confident in his preparedness (5.2.2067). For it commeth to passe oftentimes, that that which before we have seene, heard, and knowen, and even kept a while in our memory, is escaped us and so forgotten, that we thinke of it no more then if wee had never understoode or knowen it, neither should we ever remember it, unlesse some body did put us in minde of it, or some evident token made us to thinke of it. After a digression praising his friend as one in whom blood and judgment are so well commeddled that he is beyond the reach of Fortunes finger (3.2.6970), Hamlet outlines his plan: One scene of it comes near the circumstance. To look closely at the language in which Hamlet discusses his dead father is to realise that, at this early juncture, Old Hamlet has not found a prominent place within his sons consciousness or thoughts, much less begun to dominate them. What Hamlet takes pains to delineate is that in each case, the past can assert no identity of its own. And, just like Aristotles esse aut non esse, this is a general question that can only be articulated or assessed through hypothesesthat is, through particular circumstances. Here, he rejects it on the grounds that the Everlasting has fixd/ His canon gainst self-slaughter (1.2.13132)a view that, as I discuss below, is far from unproblematic on its own terms. Hamlets response shows a full comprehension of what ambition, for him, might comprise: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite spacewere it not that I have bad dreams (2.2.25256). The truest poetry is the most feigning. As described to Gertrude, Ophelias slide into despairing insanity can be cast as the distillation of the play as a whole: she speaks things in doubt/ That carry but half sense. Yes, he implies, of course he does. Shakespeare makes us wait to learn why Hamlet takes such a different view. Shakespeare uses dense imagery to reinforce the grand rhetoric with which he builds the world of the play Hamlet. Fences is a portrayal of family lifeof how its characters view their roles as individual family members, and how they each define their commitment or duty to the family; it also explores how ..A.2 Families are very important components of . (Its an idea to which Claudius will return when characterising Ophelias madness at 4.5.8486.) Only someone content with the idealized forms of acting given by the rhetoricianswho is content to think with Roscius and who has not troubled himself to understand the immediacies of contemporary stagecraftcould say such things. Hamlets cynical, melancholy, and full of hatred for his uncle Claudius and his insane behavior is evident throughout the play. Shakespeares conclusions are as penetrating as they are disconcerting: memory, like history, is something that people appeal to in the attempt to dignify or justify their inclinations and impulses in the present. Hamlets suit of black can thus seem extremely well fitted to his needs. Angels are spiritual beings and do not share the material bodies of human beings; their actions do not therefore have to engage the corporealand animalisticpassions that saturate human existence. Two comparisons may be helpful in locating this reading of the play more distinctly. Roscius was Ciceros contemporary and was often held up by him as an example of what the would-be orator should imitate in his manner of delivery. His rush to characterize Pyrrhus as a revenger leads him to transpose an epithet from elsewhere in the Aeneid, used by Dido to denounce Aeneas after he has forsaken her. Envisioning them as a cast of hawks to his heron, Hamlet reassures Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he will not take away the status they enjoy in virtue of continuing to be flown against him. A little later, he theorises that if a man goes to the water, but the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. She begins, My lord, I have remembrances of yours/ That I have longed long to redeliver (3.1.9394), before working up to the culmination of her strategic theme: Their perfume lost,/ Take these again; for to the noble mind/ Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind (3.1.99101). For Gosson, the notion that drama could hold up a morally instructive reflection of virtue or vice was undercut by realities of the theatrical experience: At Stage Plaies. This is protected, as it has been nurtured, by the cartwheeling freedom with which he transfigures the metaphors through which he seeks to hunt his uncle down. Perhaps the Ghost has overheard parts of the first soliloquy, and noted Hamlets disgusted preoccupation with his mothers conduct. On these terms, although the exterior Hamlet may no longer have much in common with even the disenchanted prince of Act 1, the inward man has only ever been accessible through its resemblance or similitude in Hamlets persona. Hamlet and Fortinbras proclaim their mnemonic integrity, but the pasts to which they cleave are selective, subjective, and divorced from the willingness to understand things as they might, in fact, have been. He knows that sententious utterances make one sound more convincing, and he has internalized testimonial patterns of speech to the degree that he finds it all but impossible to speak without them. Although Hamlet and many others in the play invest considerable amounts of energy in pretending otherwise, the pasts to which they respond are a product of the imperatives and desires with which they, in the present, are inescapably absorbed; the past is revealed as another screen on which they can project the personae and pretence of their disconnected moral vision. These broadly contextualizing reflections gesture towards something at the core of this books interpretative strategies: the conviction that only to read Hamlet isnt even to read Hamlet. Whether mediated in mnemonic or historical form, it can only exist through modes of representation that are as subject to partiality as they are to distortion. His comments are nevertheless a tactful correction to Fortinbrass grandstanding: those lying dead at the end of Act 5 had been the authors of their own downfall. Old Hamlet was not a god and could not control the wind, but such sentiments are easy enough to comprehend through the eulogistic hyperbole: Hamlet reveres his father and takes Claudius to be an unworthy possessor of either his throne or his wife. He could see as clearly as someone like Hobbes that there was a problem, but unlike Hobbes or a poet like Milton, he did not think that he had the answerand did not believe that it was his responsibility to provide one. Picking up on Gertrudes intuition that the outcome of the fencing match depends on fortune (5.2.292), he no longer pretends that heaven directs anything: So you shall hear/. When he gets around to telling it after the extended interlude in the graveyard, his freshly burnished providentialism appears front and centre. . Delicate and tender is probably just a circumlocution for young, and Hamlets main intention is to praise the transformative power of one attribute that Fortinbras, like his father before him (1.1.64), has in abundance: ambition, of the most headstrong sort. The fourth soliloquy casts these lines in a disingenuous light, but of greater moment by far is that Hamlets claim about sacred scripture is in fundamental error. There is more than a hint of ironized snobbery here. Human beings must either be perfect or the embodiment of chaotic materiality. As long as it makes everyone feel better, no matter that it be inaccurate or untrue. As discussed in chapter 3, the Ghost structures his account according to the principles of judicial oratory, and closely follows the strictures of Quintilian and Erasmus in forcing Hamlet to behold both the circumstances of his fathers death and the sufferings endured by his fathers spirit in the afterlife. As his emphasis on discovering the truth suggests, Polonius refers to the first of these, and thereby reprises his earlier confidence that Ophelia had explained Hamlets attempts to woo her As they fell out by time, by means, and place (2.2.126). He moves to consolidate his position through fluent sophistry: If it be now, tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. At all times, my guiding principle has been that in selecting the languages through which to interpret her objects of study, the literary critic must be able to exploit the disciplines of the scholar without being limited by them. The successful artist must be able to acknowledge and work with this state of affairs, even as he seeks to move his listeners, viewers, or readers in directions that would not otherwise be their own. Like Hamlet itself, lets pass over in silence the possibility of demonic possession leading one to believe that one is an agent of providence. The conflict expresses the conflict of life itself and the ambivalence of all human attitudes; in short, it expresses the dialectical principle that underlies the whole mannerist outlook. Gascoigne also saw the merit of calls in hunting deer, and when in 1635 John Bate published the first full account of such devices in English, he included varieties to attract the stag, hare, fox, and hedgehog. He thereby establishes a firm connection between his attitudes to fortune and to death (just as thinking about death leads to fear and a hybrid of acedia and apathy, so contemplating any attempt to shape ones fortuna leads one to conclude that it is not worth the bother), but at the same time redefines the question with which he began, now wondering: to do, or not to do?, or to be, or not to be active?. But as a world of mutual predation and deceit means that it can only express itself through other hypocritical guises, it has no means of escape that do not further ensnare it. Hamlet has a particular speech in mind: it was never acted, or if it was, not above oncefor the play, I remember, pleased not the million, twas caviare to the general (2.2.43033). He clutches at expiation. Compare As You Like It, where Duke Senior asserts that Touchstone uses his folly like a stalking-horse and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit. He acknowledges the lead player as his old friend (2.2.419), jocularly noting that he has grown a beard; likewise, he remarks that the boy player is inching nearer to puberty and a broken voice. In alluding to them, Shakespeares purpose is deft. The knowledge of the philosopher standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy than can apply what he doth understand. We are invited by the play not so much to judge Hamlet as to look beyond such judgements to the shortcomings of philosophy as the early moderns understood, taught, and occasionally sought to reform it. Instead, it shows Hamlet ducking the inner realities with which he has been confronted. His efforts at evasion and diversion seem to succeed: Laertess rebellion turns out to be a squib. In other words, he talks precisely because doing so saves him the trouble of considered thought; the philosopher concentrates on res, but Hamlet is ensnared within the verba of the moral and intellectual world within which he has been cast. Second, to establish a dialogue between these models of philosophy and the text of Hamlet. Like so much else in Hamlet, the Princes relationship to his memory is presented in a fashion that is deliberately ambiguous and indeterminate. . But Hamlet gives no indication of feeling troubled. La Primaudaye attacks those natural philosophers who fixate on the study of physical phenomena without regard to the place of God within themselves and creation at large: For what will it profite a man to take so great paines as to measure the whole world, and to compasse on every side all the elementarie region, to know the things that are contained in them, and their nature, and yet in the meane time hee can not measure or knowe himselfe being but a little handfull of earth? When scolding Ophelia for being taken in by Hamlets tenders of affection, Polonius discloses his textbook sense of how self-knowledge should be attained: You do not understand yourself so clearly/ As it behoves my daughter and your honour (1.3.9697). (It is, I would submit, no coincidence that when Hamlet misremembers the description he would have Aeneas give Dido of Pyrrhusprimed for vengeance against those responsible for the death of his father, Achilleshe transfigures him into a determinedly ruthless predator: thHyrcanian beast, or tiger.) There is another and more anxious strain in the De officiis, one that acknowledges the potential for discord between the res of a naturally cunning disposition and the verba of virtuous public life. In making sense of this, I turn again to Boethiuss De consolatione. The time is out of joint. First, it was a science of being; second, it was first philosophy, the grounding on which the principles and axioms of all other learning depend; third, it was a divine science. In concluding, the Phaedra has Theseus echo the hunting instructions spoken by his son at its outset, this time in the vain attempt to restore order and control by tracking down the last of Hippolytuss remains. Just as a criminal seeking to escape justice resembles a deer or hare that has been startedthat is, flushed out from its hiding place so that the chase can beginso Horatio converts the Ghost into a presence as vulnerable as it is mysterious. Crucially, we are also allowed to judge the ways in which Hamlet applies these beliefs in practice; in so doing, a series of disjunctions emerge between the theoretical and practical discourses of humanist poetics. Come what may, his lot is to hear out Hamlets tale. (As Sidney, Daniel, and many early modern authorities attest, one of the benefits of verse is that its prosodic form helps it to stick in the memory.) Norths translation of Plutarchs Lives likewise gives an account of the despot Alexander of Pherae, who abruptly left a performance of Euripidess Troades bicause he was ashamed that people shoulde see him weepe, to see the miseries of Hecuba and Andromacha played, and that they never saw him pity the death of any one man, of so many of his citizens as he had caused to be slaine. This point of comparison is thoroughly in keeping with the broader thrust of the De officiis, in which the social part or role adopted by an individual is his persona. Although for the most part a non-experimental enterprise, it is the parent of what we now think about as science. His lines are inadvertently prophetic. Quite the contrary: as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy. Moving on to delusion, the deeper incongruity of Fortinbrass rights of memory is the implied belief that in the moral universe of Hamlet, rights are conferred by anything other than victoryby overpowering ones rivals or adversaries through guile or force of arms. That is, to counterfeit a letter from Claudius condemning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in his place, thereby removing the net in which he is trapped and enabling him to escape. So what? Here, in the course of an exchange with her parents-in-law (the Earl and Countess of Northumberland), Lady Percys thoughts turn to the dead Hotspur. The plot of Measure for Measure is likewise set in motion by unease with the performance of publicly sanctioned roles. But if Hamlet pays his friends noncommittal responses any heed, they do nothing to dampen his sense of pseudo-forensic euphoria. | About Us On this account, Hamlet views the conventionally mediated self as an exercise in glibness or plausibility, something with no greater claim to authenticity than an actor feigning to be someone other than himself while on stage. Hamlet thus does a more than passable impersonation of one concerned with speculative philosophy. He instead shrouds himself in a doctrine whose obliviousness to temporal contingencieswhose place sub specie aeternitatismeans that it can only be appreciated by submitting oneself to its inscrutabilities with carefully cultivated philosophical humility. Hamlet opens with a question of unusual abstraction. Twenty-two lines later, he is finished. In other words, through the personae that Hamlet tries and fails to make his own, Shakespeare casts Hamlets discursive life as the emblem of a cultural order that has definitively fallen off. But for Cicero, the best way in which to develop such self-knowledge was to recognise the likeness of oneself as reflected in others: directly, from interpersonal observation; indirectly, by studying examples from the historical record.
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