William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” –
Recently I re-watched an old BBC production of Hamlet. In the scene where Claudius breaks up the play-within-a-play, the king (Patrick Stewart) has already figured out Hamlet’s game back at the “Mousetrap” line, and so when he says “Give me some light,” he does it only with suppressed, angry patience. He will not be made a fool of further by this volatile young man who seems to have stumbled onto something too close to home.
Here was an approach completely opposite from the more conventional portrayal of the scene in which even the best actors of Claudius show a man in panic and flight. But this reading of the scene was entirely valid and not at all contradicted by the ensuing exchange between Hamlet and Horatio in which the latter can be seen simply to have been talked into agreeing with Hamlet that his trick has worked[1].
The Timeline.
Thinking about Shakespeare is something I often do. What provoked me to start writing this particular note was some idle thinking about the relative age of the characters in Hamlet. And that soon took me to what I call the “timeline,” a subject that can usefully be considered in many of the plays. In Hamlet, most of the crucial timeline is to be found in Act I’s battlement scenes, as rounded out by the gravedigger scene in Act V. Among other things, the timeline obliges us at the outset to contemplate the oldest major character in the play (though he appears but fleetingly), the murdered King Hamlet.
King Hamlet. We only see King Hamlet as a ghost – and in some respects that is no doubt what he was also in life both to his son and young wife. This had been a man who was foremost a warrior, a soldier who spent his active life in the field, fighting the Polack and the Norwegians. I envision a man who had only recently returned to court life before his death and found there little to compare with the excitements of his years in battle. Indeed, he confides to his son that he was murdered by his brother Claudius while taking his afternoon nap, which was his “custom.” Customary naps are not for young or even middle aged men. I don’t mean to suggest that King Hamlet was in his dotage when killed, only that his days of utmost vigor were behind him[2]. And so when he appears to Hamlet in the play, he is not dressed in a king’s robes, but in the armor of a victorious general of battles. He is back in his prime as young Hamlet has always seen him.
Gertrude. This brings me to his wife Gertrude, whom I believe to be considerably younger than he. How old is she? Hamlet is 30 (born on the very day his father killed old Fortinbras[3]), but I don’t believe that his mother is even a full generation older than he. I say this for a number of reasons. It is inappropriate for royalty to marry outside of its rank (a point that is periodically made in respect to Ophelia) and so Gertrude was probably a princess when she was contracted to old Hamlet. If so, I surmise that she was not a native Dane, but probably came from one of the numerous nearby German principalities. More specifically, I suspect she had been a child bride of about 14 or 15, the same approximate age of Ophelia at the time of the play. There is nothing in the text to support (or refute) this, but it makes sense to me. It makes sense that Hamlet the King was surely around long enough after the wedding to beget his son on such a young wife before he got back to the business of warfare. But it also makes sense that Gertrude thereafter grew up in this foreign court more or less without a husband at her side. The only adult member of the royal family who we can be sure was there to comfort this maturing girl was the king’s younger brother, Claudius. Claudius is no soldier like his older brother[4] – indeed, his dismissal of the menace of Fortinbras in Act I and his easy willingness to permit him safe passage to a dubious alternate adventure suggests otherwise – but everything suggests that he was a most adept court politician, deadly if not charming, with “wicked wit and gifts.”[5]
It is essential to the play, of course, that Claudius has made Gertrude his willing mistress. But how is it that we learn of Gertrude’s “adulterate incest” with Claudius? It is Hamlet himself who first mentions it and then the king’s ghost. But there is no indication that in his lifetime old Hamlet (or anyone else) had known of an adultery. Indeed, everything about the king suggests that if he had suspected such a thing, he would simply have run his brother through and there would have been no play at all, as A.C. Bradley remarked in a different context[6]. In other words, the king’s knowledge of this liaison has only come to him after his own death.
More of this in a moment, but what does this tell us about Gertrude? For me, it fortifies the conclusion that she is not over-bright. Only rarely in the play does she express anything like a personal opinion. Most famously, she is recalled as having advanced the observation that the player queen “doth protest too much.” But even allowing that this remark in context is a criticism of the writing and not the acting of young Hamlet’s little playlet, I don’t think it shows insight. I think it shows a parroting of a line that Gertrude may have heard over the years at court entertainments. She is not being critical, she is being vapid[7].
Otherwise, Gertrude only comes alive in the play in relation to Ophelia. In Ophelia Gertrude sees something of herself, a young girl dazzled by a man almost twice her age. How romantic; they will surely marry. Gertrude vaguely knows she has erred, although there is no reason to believe that she has previously dwelt on it. After all, things have turned out so well. Her decline only begins when Hamlet confronts her directly in her closet, a scene which she begins imperiously enough as a mother but which she is incapable of sustaining under his onslaught. Even then, although understandably distraught by the indescribable drama of that scene, she is only dimly aware of how much she has missed. It is only later when the announcement has been made of Ophelia’s madness does the queen deliver an aside, confessing to her own “sick soul” – which is entirely attributable to Hamlet’s having forced her to think of her own betrayal of his father.
Presently Gertrude gives her most beautiful speech, describing Ophelia’s death and recognizing that the girl had been like “one incapable of [understanding] her own distress.” That is an echo of her own predicament: Gertrude never seems to penetrate entirely what is going on. I honestly believe that if she had actually had an adultery with Claudius of longstanding duration, dimwit that she is, she would have betrayed it herself. She was never more than a trophy bride who got extremely lucky. Just as her flagging heroic husband has come home and died, her new lover is proclaimed king, they marry, and her position remains unchanged. Indeed, it is improved; she now has a younger husband and is still in the opening raptures of a new romance.
But as for an adultery between Claudius and Gertrude in the modern sense (if there is any modern sense of adultery), I am certain that there was nothing of the sort[8]. When the ghost refers to it, he is surely speaking of the Biblical notion from Leviticus that a man may not marry his dead brother’s wife. For some that would have been considered both adulterous and “incestuous.”[9] Whether young Hamlet makes that distinction is beside the point, of course, because he is disgusted by the idea of his mother as Claudius’s sexual partner under any circumstances. For him it is as much a crime as the murder itself, which is why he gets so carried away in his scene in the closet that the ghost must intervene to put the young man back on track. But it is the murder which is obviously the ghost’s preeminent concern and Gertrude is as ignorant of it as everyone else. She has no idea what her son is talking about when he mentions killing a king, and her only insight in the entire play comes just before she dies in the last act when she finally realizes that she has been inadvertently poisoned by Claudius. Even then, it leaves her with nothing to say.
Polonius. A character with plenty to say, by contrast, is Polonius. He is no more complex than Gertrude, but I still have difficulty figuring him out. Partly I suppose this is because Shakespeare intended the character to be a parody of Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state. But this is Shakespeare and a simple parody is hardly sufficient to explain this character whom Claudius appears to have chosen as his chief adviser. Why was he chosen? Simply because he is “the father of good news”?
Many productions of Hamlet are content to portray the old man as little more than a fool, and they can do this chiefly by omitting his scene with Reynaldo. Earlier in the play we have seen a father naturally curious about what his daughter and son have been chatting about. (Actually, on a second reading of the scene, I note that Polonius acknowledges – characteristically – that he has already picked up a bit of gossip about his daughter and Hamlet.) But the Reynaldo business, which follows shortly thereafter, in which Polonius cooly instructs a subaltern to spy upon his own son – and even to lie a bit in the process – immediately casts a much more sinister light on this odd father. Indeed, the Reynaldo commission itself turns out to be just a variation on Claudius’s later engagement of Rosencranz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet.
Perhaps Polonius is a professional spy, for the play itself has many angles of spying. It is not long before Polonius heartlessly directs Ophelia to draw out Hamlet while he and the king eavesdrop on a very painful confrontation (not that Polonius notices the pain). Still later Polonius is killed by Hamlet while semi-officially lurking behind the arras in Gertrude’s chambers. And yet Polonius’s maneuvers are less malign than they are obsessive. He is an aging Main Street barber who has found himself in a Danish court. He is a man of rank, but unable to curb his instincts toward court gossip. This makes him no better a father, of course, but for Claudius in an odd way it makes Polonius a more reliable counselor. Apart from the sense of pride that any gossip has in telling his confidential stories, Polonius seems to get nothing out of his avocation, a situation which seems to work well enough for Claudius.
But why does Claudius keep Polonius so close? There is no suggestion of blackmail regarding knowledge of King Hamlet’s death. Polonius is not clever or ambitious enough to have pulled that off anyway (though he has more wits than his son Laertes, who in Act IV completely fumbles his one opportunity to replace his father as Claudius’s adviser). There is one ambiguous line which, if taken as applicable to Claudius, suggests to me that Polonius has perhaps figured it out[10]. Meantime, if Polonius were ambitious, the connection between his daughter and Hamlet would be of surpassing interest to him. But if anything, he is merely troubled by it, fearing (gratuitously) that it will make him a fool and probably endanger his position. Unlike Polonius, Claudius knows soon enough that Hamlet is having him on. He never really accepts the idea that Hamlet is lovesick and I doubt that he ever seriously believes the young man is mad. Polonius fears the former and believes the latter.
Claudius. If Polonius is the best that Claudius can find as his right hand man, Claudius’s position is weak indeed. But that tells us more about Claudius than Polonius. Claudius is less a man of action than Hamlet is. His success is entirely the result of guile and innovation, aided by Polonius’s random bits of information: He is indeed “a king of shreds and patches.” It is entirely characteristic of Claudius that when things begin to go wrong for him – Hamlet’s defiance, Polonius’s death, Ophelia’s madness – he groans that “Troubles come not single spies, but in battalions.” Claudius can handle spies; battalions are not his metier[11].
Horatio. To the extent that I have considered Horatio, it is easy to see him as Hamlet’s straight-man. He is given a very pretty speech at the end of the play, but he does not move the plot[12]. And yet I have always felt that there must be something more about Horatio, even though he is unarguably a minor character.
Part of that uncertainty comes from my understanding of the timeline. In the play, no one except Hamlet seems surprised to see Horatio. As the play begins, Hamlet may have been home from school at Wittenberg perhaps two months. He welcomes his fellow student with some astonishment and shortly afterwards must explain a Danish custom to him, strongly suggesting that Horatio is not native. But if Horatio is not a Dane, how is it that in the very first scene of the play he has already been given admittance to the barricades, before Hamlet even knows that he is in town? Indeed, Marcellus immediately defers to Horatio and asks him why they have been compelled to go on guard – to which Horatio responds readily enough with court gossip which turns out to be entirely accurate (i.e. the threat posed by young Fortinbras).
Without any text to support it, the idea continually suggested itself to me that Horatio was somehow associated with the diplomatic community in Denmark, possibly the son of an allied potentate (although he behaves too modestly for that and later Hamlet also remarks that Horatio is poor and buffeted by fortune). This might explain why in the past weeks Hamlet, preoccupied and sulking over the funeral and marriage, has simply overlooked Horatio in the crowd[13]. But striking to me also is the ambiguity of Horatio’s response when twice Hamlet asks him why he is there. First, Horatio attributes it to a “truant disposition.” That answer is plainly not true and Hamlet simply shrugs it off as a pleasantry and asks again. This time Horatio explains that he had come “to see your father’s funeral,” which we know is about two months past[14]. Now Hamlet turns the second answer into a bitter joke but doesn’t follow up.
And yet, aren’t these strange responses? They presage the later conversation between the prince and Rosencranz and Guildenstern who also dissemble when Hamlet asks them why they are there. Hamlet begins that second exchange even more as the welcoming, bantering host than he did with Horatio, but with those two he quickly realizes that they are Claudius’s spies and will not let them off the hook as he did Horatio. And their answer to his question – that they came only to see Hamlet – is one that would seem more natural for Horatio to have given than the one he actually made – i.e. to see a funeral which has already been conducted.
But for the dissimulation about “truancy,” at least Horatio’s answer is consistent with the obligations of a diplomat and ambassador. Hamlet might have no reason to question it and he lets it go. Furthermore, a moment later, Horatio states that he has previously seen (actually, “knew”) King Hamlet well enough to verify to young Hamlet that the ghost resembles his father. Possibly this previous viewing had been at court, but King Hamlet led his active life in the field, and in the very first scene of the play we are also given to believe that that is also where Horatio saw him (where the king would have been in armor, as Horatio later sees him on the battlements). This, by the way, would probably make Horatio older than Hamlet. Meanwhile, it is evident that Hamlet’s affection for Horatio was cemented, not at court, but from their days together at Wittenberg, where their fellow students were Guildenstern and Rosencranz whom Hamlet had known from childhood[15].
The university at Wittenberg was founded in 1502, only about 60 years before Shakespeare was born. At that date it was Catholic. Of course, we now identify Wittenberg with Martin Luther, whose most dramatic moments in that university town were about 1518-20. Denmark at that time was still Catholic and did not become Protestant (Lutheran) until the mid-1530s. Based on the Catholic implications of Ophelia’s funeral, I would say that Hamlet occurs around 1530[16].
In any event, whatever his origin, Horatio’s role in the play is that of a man who is essentially a doubter. He is discreet, not given to overstatement, and inclined to equivocal and indirect responses. (These are good qualities for a spy.) In the darkness, Marcellus asks if it is Horatio whom he sees on the battlements. The answer: “a piece of him.” Later Marcellus comforts himself with a religious interpretation for the ghost’s eery disappearance but Horatio responds that he believes it only “in part” and changes the subject. Wouldn’t his playlet, so successful, get Hamlet “a fellowship in a cry of players?” “Half a share,” says Horatio. Toward the end of the play, Hamlet chides the rationalist Horatio that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy,” though the audience has no reason to know what that “philosophy” is.
Finally, although Horatio does not contribute to the movement of the plot, there is the moment at the end of Hamlet when it suddenly becomes clear both what Horatio is and who he is. In the midst of all of the chaos and deaths of the final scene, he offers, Stoic-like, to commit suicide, saying that he is more an ancient Roman than a Dane – and the dying Hamlet quickly talks him out of it. Not only would a suicide at that point be dramatically absurd, in the context of the plot it would be an empty gesture – an anachronism, actually.
Horatio has no reason to commit suicide, and this play is emphatically about the reasons that could justify choosing death in the modern world. But he does have a reason for being in the play, as Hamlet makes crystal clear. Horatio’s mission is nothing less than to tell Hamlet’s story to the world. He is the only one who can do so. He has had access to everyone in the play. He is the playwright, doing exactly what Hamlet asked him to do[17].
Making a Good End.
Death is at the far end of every timeline, of course, and of death there seems to be no end in Hamlet[18]. The crucial death is that of Ophelia, of which I shall write more in a moment. And yet I must begin with the first death we hear of, that of King Hamlet’s besting of Old Fortinbras on the day of Hamlet’s birth. I said earlier that this must have been an auspicious day in Denmark. Not only was a new prince born on this day of national victory, but the victory itself was regally won, the culmination of an honorable struggle between two equals on a field of honor with no other contestant. This is the stuff of legend, the vanquished as noble as the conqueror[19]. It is also not a little ceremonial[20] – and for that reason, antique in the context of the play.
In classic antiquity, the noble death was a suicide. But by the time of Hamlet, Wittenberg, and Henry VIII, the noble suicide had been superseded by the Christian ethic that no life may be taken except at the will of God. Suicide is the sin of “self-slaughter.” This (plus dramatic reasons) is why Horatio’s offer in the last act is not taken seriously and not pressed. The notion of a “good end”[21] had changed.
What had taken suicide’s place as an acknowledged “good end” were the conventions of Medieval religion and pageantry[22]. This is the point of the magnificent duel between Old Fortinbras and Old Hamlet in which the former met a “good end.” His death was according to the highest traditional standards. Against it, all of the other deaths in Hamlet, each of which can be seen to be flawed, must be set. This includes the very next one we learn of, that of the murder of old Hamlet.
When the ghost tells his son of his murder by Claudius, it is the absence of the sacrament which he most laments.
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unaneled;
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
(It is the exact reason why Hamlet, later in the play declines the opportunity to take Claudius when he is praying.) Not only was old Hamlet cast into the purgatory of walking the earth for a time, his death is also an explicit echo of the first murder, of Abel by Cain.
It was also a regicide. Let me recall here the lament from another play that the death of kings is the occasion of “sad stories.” When a king dies, a state itself is set at risk and the implications for all – royalty and common citizen – are dangerous and unforeseen[23]. When Old Fortinbras died, for instance, his unnamed brother became king of Norway and his son, young Fortinbras, was disinherited like young Hamlet. Hence it is not only Hamlet who “lack[s] advancement,” though his case is more serious than that of Fortinbras. But it is the immature Fortinbras who labors under an uncomplicated need for redress.
Although I have said that the deaths in Hamlet must be measured against that of Old Fortinbras, a good portion of that measuring is done by Hamlet himself, who conspicuously broods on suicide in his famous soliloquy. But the frankest conversation about suicide is the comic conundrum considered by the gravedigger in Act V. There is no reason to repeat it here, but I do recall a foolish amateur production which my colleagues and I did of that scene several years ago. A witty fellow took the part of the gravedigger, but then ruined the entire scene by inserting his own witticisms, which fell completely flat. I am grateful to him, though, because he thereby gave meaning to a line that Hamlet himself sententiously delivers to the players in Act III:
“And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered.”
And so it is with Ophelia’s death. The clown’s joke about the ambiguity of suicide touches directly on a “necessary question of the play”: what is a good end? As one who is mad, did Ophelia go to the water or did it come to her? Is the act of suicide still a sin if one lacks the ability to will her own end? Here is a possibility to be scanned[24]. When Hamlet contemplates suicide, he approaches it from the aspect of what is “nobler in the mind,” concluding that conscience and the fear of divine retribution argue against it. To him, it is a question of guilt. This is not Ophelia’s dilemma. She is an innocent and at the time of her death may have had no mind to speak of. She did not prepare for it by prayer; in fact, we last see her singing bawdy songs. And yet, hers is the only death in Hamlet which cannot be said to have been as the direct result of either violence or the sin of others.
And so, although Ophelia dies ambiguously, either by accident or suicide, if Hamlet is correct that the only legitimate spur of suicide is nobility of mind, she did not make a good end. Her end was out of her hands. She was only a victim, and her end was made for her. Thus Hamlet’s remark that “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will,” a remark that echoes a Calvinist concept of predestination.
But Shakespeare certainly does consider a good end by suicide. Apart from Hamlet, suicide is depicted in two plays from the classic world – Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra – and in two Christian era plays – Othello and Romeo and Juliet. In Julius Caesar, both Cassius and Brutus take their own lives ignominiously for no better reason than their painful failure and incompetence[25]. Theirs is not a good end. Brutus may have been the “noblest Roman of them all,” but he was also incapable of the task he had set for himself. Similarly, Othello is bewildered by events beyond him and destroys himself with no expectation of eternal justification. He is going to hell and he knows it[26]. Juliet, by contrast, dies purely for love with no stain of sin on her soul[27]. And Cleopatra’s suicide – coming latest in the canon – appears to be the greatest good end in all of Shakespeare: it is justified both by her innate sense of nobility and, more important, her unexpected eternal love for Antony after all.
Hamlet The Dane
“This is a story,” Olivier says in the beginning of his film Hamlet, “of a man who could not make up his mind.” That is a popular view of the prince, but I think it is inadequate. The story is primarily that of a man who wrestles with and finally answers the question of how to die. He does make up his mind.
The last act of Hamlet opens a month or two after Hamlet’s dispatch to England. During his off-stage absence – while Ophelia has gone mad and died and her brother has returned with a wild rebellion in mind – Hamlet himself has lived an adventure worthy of a completely different play. On shipboard, he has discovered Claudius’s plot to kill him using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his agents, he has surreptitiously switched the execution instructions, making those two the instrument of their own deaths, he has then been captured by pirates on the high seas, has won their confidence in captivity, and has finally been deposited back in Denmark. He is a different man. There are no more soliloquies of doubt and self-prodding. We do not again see him alone with his thoughts.
And so, upon the commencement of Act V, I think it finally useful to consider the questions Hamlet has earlier asked himself in Acts 1 through 4 as a prelude to the consummation which he will now come to. He has delivered six soliloquies and several similar speeches. They are a record of his deepening thoughts. The soliloquies are as follows:
* “O that this too too solid flesh would melt,” (I, ii)
* “One may smile and smile and be a villain,” (I, v)
* “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” (II, ii)
* “To be or not to be,” (III, i)
* “‘Tis now the very witching time of night, (III, ii)
* “Now might I do it pat,” (III, iii), and
* “How all occasions do inform against me” (IV, iv).
To these I add some other speeches in which he appears to be speaking as much to himself as others:
* His lament to Horatio, “So oft it chances in particular men,” (I, iv)
* “What a piece of work is a man,” his taunt to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (II, ii)
* “Speak the speech,” a condescension to the player king (III, ii), and
* “Look here upon this picture and on this,” his frantic declamation to his mother.
Though it also introduces some plot lines and the suicide theme, Hamlet’s first soliloquy is all callow emotion. Following the ceremonial scene in Act I in which Claudius gives Laertes leave to return to whatever it is that he does in France and then makes an avuncular speech to Hamlet about getting past his grief, Hamlet, finally left alone, condemns his mother, wishes he were dead, and complains that God has made self-destruction impermissible. He presents himself as a petulant and self-centered young man.
His change begins – but does not end – a few scenes later with his dramatic encounter with the ghost. That scene, so critical to the plot, also marks the base starting point from which the prince starts his life again, eventually to become Hamlet the Dane in the last act. Directly from the afterlife – incidentally, the Catholic afterlife of purgatory – the ghost tells Hamlet of the murder and commands retribution (sparing Gertrude), thus giving a mission to the poetic but feckless youth of the first soliloquy. But what the ghost orders is less than lofty or particularly Catholic; it is innate revenge, bound with medieval ideas of family honor[28]. And it is specifically personal: “Remember me.” There is really no larger consideration. No other memory is to intrude. Hamlet, still callow, takes it exactly that way, frantically and without reflection:
“. . . . I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
[Will] sweep to thy revenge.”
He vows to cleanse his memory of “trivial fond records” (of Claudius? of Gertrude? of tradition?) and embrace the homicidal mission in his father’s undiluted memory. From his mind, he will efface the lessons of “books, all forms, all pressures past.” He vows to forget all he has learned.
This resolution lasts for six lines. Because although Hamlet begins to look at things anew, unshackled by convention, he is still Hamlet and considers everything. And so in the instant, he begins his new outlook with a dash of skepticism, setting it down in his “tables” – those which he has just renounced – that villains like Claudius may smile. Over the years, this line from the play has become a truism, but in the play itself the line serves to emphasize a recurring Shakespearean theme concerning artifice. The prince had never trusted Claudius, but only through the ghost is he shown his uncle’s true skill at dissimulation: he has got away with murder. Now, therefore, Hamlet himself determines to adopt an “antic disposition” as a means of getting at the truth (including whether he is being had by the devil). He now considers his innate gift – a keen observation of other people – as inadequate and so he determines resorts to stratagem as his avenue to truth.
Hamlet is routinely called irresolute, and of course he eventually permits the water to come to him as I discuss below. By nature, though, it is obvious that he is not a murderer, nor is he a man of action. He is confounded by the fact that although he can read others, he is puzzled by himself, which is the central consideration of his next soliloquy. There, he concludes that he is “dull and muddy-mettled” coward, thus deciding upon a play within a play by which he calculates that he will be able to see with his own eyes how Claudius’s own soul reacts to a reenactment of his brother’s murder. Instinctively penetrating by nature, he now determines that he also needs evidence.
Before the plan can even be executed, however, Claudius and Polonius spring their own artifice on Hamlet, using Ophelia as the bait. In other words, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be speech,” delivered alone on stage, is actually overheard by the plotters, though probably not Ophelia. Indeed, even Gertrude, though asked to leave by Claudius, is privy to the plan to eavesdrop on her son.
The soliloquy is scholastic, in old church style, beginning with a question: “To be or not to be.” This is the student at work, Hamlet reasoning his anguish[29] between honor (his father’s old school of single combat with old Fortinbras) and nobility[30]: is suicide lawful because it may save a man from a greater evil, or might it call down a punishment which might be worse than the pain that led to it in the first place? Thomas Aquinas himself recorded this very debate, eventually concluding that suicide remains unlawful. Hamlet makes no overt reference to that, of course, but he actually has some basis for the utilitarian consideration since the ghost has already told him that his suffering is unimaginable. Hamlet calls this “conscience” and the “pale cast of thought” and, when interrupted by the sight of the praying Ophelia (who is counterfeiting, it turns out) he not accidentally solicits her to mitigate his sins.
Nobility has a dual meaning. First, of course, it is a state of birth, but that is irrelevant to what Hamlet is thinking of. For Hamlet, the question is whether it is nobler to suffer “in the mind” or to “take arms” against a sea of troubles (a famous Shakespearean mixed metaphor). This is the turning point in Hamlet’s thinking. Originally he rejected suicide because it has been forbidden by God’s law. Now he injects this new element of nobility in which action is only one element.
In other words, the soliloquy can be seen not so much as a meditation on suicide as one on nobility. Specifically, does nobility require action or sufferance? The latter, after all, makes a “calamity” of life. Action, by contrast, opposes troubles but thereby risks death – and the illusory peace that comes with it. The irony, Hamlet concludes, is that taking it on that level, one chooses life, not for its nobility of sufferance, but out of cowardice. In his immediately preceding soliloquy, Hamlet has already feared that he is a coward. It is dishonorable to be a coward and yet it is also jejune if not foolhardy to expose
“. . . what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare
Even for an eggshell.”
This latter phrase, of course, is Hamlet’s evaluation of his other antagonist, Fortinbras, who like Hamlet seeks revenge for lost honor. But Fortinbras is only a man of action, willing to risk the lives of others for “a fantasy and trick of fame” while biding his time to confront Denmark. Hamlet thinks Fortinbras is shameful, but witnessing him in the field brings back his own private conundrum of life vs. death vs. cowardice vs. honor vs. nobility.
“ . . . Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake.”
Denmark
The background environment of most of Shakespeare’s plays is the moral and political security of the state. In the Histories and Tragedies it is a chief element in the plot. Characters reveal deep, familial, and heartfelt love of their homeland They ask about or comment on the condition of England, or Scotland, or Rome -- even Venice. The possibility of banishment is like death. And the death of a king is a preeminent event.
But in Hamlet this is only true in part. No one expresses or shows love or concern for Denmark. We are no more than a few lines into the play before we learn that Denmark is “rotten.” Several scenes later, Hamlet – who was not present for that observation – himself volunteers that Denmark is a “an “unweeded garden.” Unlike MacDuff or Gaunt, he does not mourn over a perverted paradise and champ to correct it all. For him, it is no more than some sort of divine “spite” that it falls to him to redress the order (which, incidentally he fails to do). But for a sardonic remark that he lacks “advancement,” Hamlet betrays no outrage that the state is not in his hands as the natural heir. And yet Denmark’s troubles clearly transcend Hamlet’s family problems. Not only is Fortinbras’s army crossing the realm (supposedly with a pass from Claudius to invade Poland)[31], but some sort of internal rebellion is also obviously afoot. In Act IV, when Laertes bursts in on Claudius and Gertrude, we are told that there is a mob at his back proclaiming him king. Soon afterwards, Claudius acknowledges Hamlet’s popularity with the people as jeopardizing his own status. Perhaps Hamlet was not being strictly metaphorical when he earlier told Rosencranz and Guildenstern that Denmark is a “prison.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
NOTES (This entire essay began with fragmentary notes like the following which over time I began to assemble into my larger purposes. What follows, therefore, is what is left over, what may or may not have validity, and what and may or may not therefore eventually make it into the text above the line.)
The play actually goes beyond the notion of a theme or themes and ventures into Platonic territory by posing a question. It is not how a man can make a good end, which finally sounds like little more than a medieval gesture. Rather Socrates asks, how should a man lead his life? Hamlet asks, what is the purpose of a life – and by extension the purpose of anything contained in a life?
For the purposes of the plot, that question, having been asked by Hamlet to himself throughout the first three acts, he finally answers when he learns that his murderous thoughts against Claudius are reciprocal. In other words, once Hamlet learns that Claudius has already attempted his life (the abortive mission to England), Hamlet becomes much calmer and concludes that “the readiness is all,” one more bow to making an end with a clear conscience.
When it comes to Hamlet himself, there are the several suggestions during the play comparing him to Julius Caesar (even including his capture by pirates). Horatio makes the first such gesture in the very first scene when he muses that somewhat before Cesar’s murder, ghosts were said to have emerged from their Roman graves. Later Polonius keeps the topic alive when he recalls that he himself had played Caesar in a college play. For those wishing to make the connection, it can also be recalled that Hamlet’s capture by pirates duplicates an important element in Caesar’s biography. And finally, during the gravedigger scene in Act V, Hamlet himself reflects that Caesar (and Alexander) having returned to dust might very well have ended up with no greater mission than patching a wall against the wind or stopping a beer barrel. Hamlet is always conscious of both the greatness and baseness of human nature. “Thus might a king go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”
Hamlet continually wrestles with a man’s ability to control his ends. He is not one to accept the Lutheran dogma that a person can be justified by faith alone. He knows about original sin (particularly in sexual matters) and free will. “Virtue cannot so innoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.” And presently: “We are arrant knaves all.”
The religious turmoil of Wittenberg would have been well-known. As I see it, throughout most of the play Hamlet falls on the Catholic side, taking the conventional view that one is saved by works, not faith. He accepts that when a man dies, he goes to hell if he is in a state of sin. (Horatio seems more content to let heaven direct matters.) On the other hand, it is Hamlet who decides that there is “a divinity that shapes our ends rough-hew them as we will,”
Hamlet’s first two lines in the play are essentially puns. Possibly his third line, too, is a pun on the meaning of the word “common.” The gravedigger, of course, is the only character in the play who can give Hamlet any competition for wordplay.
Endnotes
1. Stewart’s interpretation also flows more easily into Claudius’s finest moment later in the play when he cooly faces down Laertes who has a mob at his back.
2. Hamlet also makes this point in the lines that he gives to the player king.
3. In single combat. It must have seemed an auspicious day.
4. He does tell Laertes in passing that he once served against the French. If so, it could only have been as subaltern to King Hamlet.
5. Claudius’s success at court intrigue does not appear to have extended beyond Elsinore. He is evidently politically insecure and unloved by the general population. Hamlet, by contrast, is described as widely popular. And the fickle Danes, distressed at Polonius’s mysterious death, even briefly batten their affection on Laertes when he returns home.
6. Bradley was contrasting the personalities of Young Hamlet and Othello.
7. “More matter with less art” might also be a current cliche of the court. Criticism seems to have been an Elsinore pastime. Hamlet, of course, makes a famous apostrophe to actors and even Polonius ventures a bit of criticism of both the player king’s text and Hamlet’s love letter.
8. The evidence on the other side is a brief exchange between Gertrude and Horatio in Act IV, scene 5. He urges her to talk to the raving Ophelia to protect Hamlet from “dangerous conjectures” about Polonius’s death. She agrees, but her aside suggests that his remark has actually awakened fears of discovery of her own unspecified guilt.
9. This argument was actually made against Henry VIII when in 1509 he married Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his older brother Arthur. Like Gertrude, Catherine was a teenager at the time of her first marriage. Is this irrelevant? I suggest below that Henry was still King of England at the time that Claudius sends Hamlet there to be murdered.
10. After Ophelia has described Hamlet’s mad pantomime in her closet, Polonius is anxious to tell the king of what he has decided is the young man’s sexual obsession. That is a topic that Claudius will understand and might mitigate against his mistrust of the prince. He says to himself, “This must be known; which, being kept close, might move/ More grief to hide than hate to utter love.” The line would appear to apply to Hamlet, but Claudius too surely hides his hate so that he may “utter love” for the prince.
11. Yet characteristically Shakespeare give Claudius a personal touch. He has a kind streak toward Ophelia, something her own father never shows.
12. He does a bit of light work in Act IV as a witness to Ophelia’s madness while Hamlet is in England.
13. And yet it also seems that he was never so melancholy as not to flirt with Ophelia in this period.
14. What has Horatio been doing around Elsinore in the interim? Also note that later he obligingly stays in Denmark while Hamlet is sent off to England.
15. Compare Laertes, whose days in France were apparently not spent as a student and appear to have been entirely self-indulgent. And yet since some unrest appears to have been provoked by Polonius’s death and hasty burial –not to mention Laertes’s dramatic secret return in Act IV – there is reason to believe that this family was prominent in Denmark in its own right. Meantime, Horatio does not interact at all with Rosencranz or Guildenstern.
16. Henry VIII (1491 - 1547) was therefore England’s king, in this period having his own struggles with both the Reformation (Henry style) and family killings. And yet, Claudius’s remark about the scars left on England by “the Danish sword” suggests a much earlier time frame.
17. This is not to say that he is Shakespeare, who never reveals himself.
18. There are 12 deaths in Hamlet: Old Fortinbras, Old Hamlet, Priam, the player king’s portrayal of Gonzago, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz and Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet.
19. The stakes, however, do not appear to have been particularly noble: each king put up the lands that he controlled in the medieval fashion. Actually, Norway was more or less a Danish fiefdom at this time. This is not made explicit in the play, however, and later Claudius had sent ambassadors, thus treating Norway as independent.
20. Compare Macbeth I, iv: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.”
21. The phrase, of course, is from the insane Ophelia’s imagination of her father’s ignominious death. For that matter, making a good end is one of Shakespeare’s chief themes. It is dealt with, for example, in the porter scene in Macbeth and extensively in the last Act of King Lear.
22. If the forms were followed, the two combatants prepared themselves for their contest by prayer the night before. Notwithstanding the stakes, the soul of the loser would at least have the consolation of eternal life in heaven.
23. Rosencrantz also says as much in praise of Claudius, who ignores him. III, iii.
24. In fact, it was already scanned by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa. The gravedigger’s exposition of the question in many way is but a parody of Thomas’s methodology.
25. This is even more painfully true of Antony’s botched suicide. Brutus’s Portia comes much closer to the ancient mark.
26. Contrast Desdemona who in her very last words claims that her death, though obviously a murder by her husband, is really of her own making yet “guiltless.” This is almost inconceivable nobility.
27. Unlike Romeo who is responsible for two deaths – three, if you count Mercutio.
28. At best, “honor” (as a singular noun) is problematic in Shakespeare. In his funeral oration, Antony disdains it. It causes Bassanio no end of trouble when relies on it as the reason to surrender his ring in the Merchant of Venice. Think also of the ridiculous abortive combat at the beginning of Richard II. And the most cynical appraisal of this virtue belongs to Falstaff: “What is honor? A word. . . . What is that word? Air. . . . Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.” And the comment of Leo Strauss is that, “According to the classics, the highest good is a life devoted to wisdom or to virtue, honor [which he equates to prestige] being no more than a very pleasant, but secondary and dispensable reward.” Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero.
29. Hamlet’s reasoned approach is completely unlike the impulsive Lear who in his own anguish implores his daughters, “Reason not the need!” Lear, however, is all passion while Hamlet’s passion is persistently tempered with evaluation and consideration. And the key to his evaluation is what he calls nobility.
30. Is this a distinction without a difference? Leo Strauss says of the noble that it is “neither genuinely pleasant nor conducive to genuine pleasure. The noble is that which is praised, which is pleasant only because it is praised or because it is regarded as honorable . . . .” Natural Right and History, “Origin of the idea of Natural Right.”
31. It’s hard to imagine Henry V tolerating such a demarche; and Hotspur would have been immediately in the field. For Hamlet, it is but the occasion for more introspection about his own situation.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World; How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare –
Stephen Greenblatt is a Harvard professor and so I would have expected this biography of Shakespeare to have been heavily footnoted, each factual reference tethered to an identifiable source. But there is nothing of the sort. The only evidence the author is content to give are quotations from the plays, sonnets, etc., plus some contemporary documents whose provenance is not documented.
This is not a complaint. In anything but contemporary politics, I trust a Harvard professor to tell the truth in his own field, and when it comes to controversy, Greenblatt has no reluctance to explain that the debate on a given point is unsettled. The rewards of this approach are that the book is not clotted with sources like a legal brief and something like a narrative can be approached. But since it is obviously not a novel, the book’s compromise with imagination frequently takes Greenblatt into the subjunctive voice and the inevitable “probablys,” “possiblys,” “likelys,” etc. The following sample is derived from Shakespeare’s introspection in and about Hamlet and Greenblatt’s speculation that he was simultaneously dwelling on the death of his own son Hamnet:
“Even if the decision to redo the old tragedy were a strictly commercial one, the coincidence of the names – the act of writing his own son’s name again and again – may well have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed.”
Writing like this is not a cardinal sin after all and it necessarily flies its own warning flags. For that matter, there is nothing offensive about a biographer having a thesis. Greenblatt’s big thesis in his book is not the familiar Stratfordian/Oxfordian debate, but instead his conclusion that Shakespeare was a sometimes recusant, completely understanding of and frequently sympathetic to the Catholic Church. Even this premise is not a striking novelty, like A.L. Rowse’s discovery of the “dark lady.” Unlike the pompous and self-congratulatory Rowse, Greenblatt’s approach is simply to assemble the evidence – much of which has been brought forth previously – toss in a few “probablys” and go on.
To the extent that Greenblatt provides literary analysis, he does so in the context of his speculations about Shakespeare’s psychology. Following the foregoing supposition about the effect of young Hamnet’s death’s on Hamlet, Greenblatt concludes that “the excision of motive” in that play (and in Othello and King Lear) “expressed Shakespeare’s root perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken . . . .”
For what it is worth, Greenblatt’s Shakespeare seems personally more focused, introverted, and bourgeois than the carousing Elizabethean countryboy favored in many portraits. His improvident marriage, the problematic liaison with Southhampton, an obsession with the “dark lady” are all recounted, but without changing the picture of a man who in maturity can focus on his own future without frivolity.
William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays –
It was this summer2012 that I saw for the first time productions of both “A Comedy of Errors” and “Henry VIII,” the only two plays I had not read or seen before. That freed me to read 1817 Hazlitt’s volume of essays, each one devoted to a specific play. The postponement was just as well. Hazlitt obviously expected the reader to be familiar with every play[1].
THE WINTER’S TALE[1]
F |
rom the very outset, The Winter’s Tale is a puzzling piece of work, carried forward by an unusual timeline, several misdirections, dissimulations, and disguises, and with a most unusual plot. Indeed, for Shakespeare, even the title is odd. Ultimately, it seems best to think of it as a Christian fable or allegory or, even better, a parable, perhaps intended as a counterpoint to Greek tragedy. Most of what follows is my effort to call attention to the clues which point in that direction.
Shakespeare was never so clumsy as to write an allegory about anything. And yet, when a story culminates with a supposedly dead person having been called back to life, it is hard to avoid reviewing what has gone before without some impulse toward a religious interpretation. In considering The Winter's Tale, I was certainly never completely able to overcome that instinct, and so I confess that much of my thinking was consciously devoted to trying steer myself around awkward or conjectural “symbols” and to avoid analogies that would be of no help. On the other hand, so many of the play's features can be enlarged by a religious sensibility, that a dogmatic dismissal of such things would be equally unhelpful.
The play is set in two distinctly different countries, Sicilia and Bohemia, and in different seasons of the year[2]. In fact, most of the action is set in Sicilia and what we later see in Bohemia (confined to Act IV)[3] is distinctively different from the environment in Sicilia. Calling upon this and several other unusual features of the play, what follows are my somewhat haphazard reflections about the strange storyline. I have not consulted anyone else’s efforts, so only I can be blamed for an equally incomprehensible solution.
Title. And so to begin let me submit that the title of The Winter’s Tale is intended to suggest regret and retrospection in a Christian context, meaning Purgatory. And why would it be otherwise? The title is derived from a scene early in Act I when the boy prince Mamillius, pressed by his mother Hermione to invent a “merry” story, contrarily announces “a sad tale’s best for winter.” (Remember, it is winter in Sicilia.) “I have one,” the boy continues, “of sprites and goblins” -- and Mamillius then begins that once there was “a man [who] . . . dwelt by a churchyard.” Likewise, later in the play King Leontes’s lost daughter Perdita offers “flowers of winter” – specifically forget-me-nots and rue, i.e. regret -- in greeting to her royal visitors at the Bohemian sheep shearing festival. Well, the catalyst of the play, meaning Leontes’s sin and his epiphany, had occurred in Sicilia essentially when Perdita was born and an oracle had told him that Hermione was innocent. Thenceforth the Sicilian king has lived for 16 years in a netherland of guilt and repentance.
The Opening. Raised as boys in each other’s company, the two kings have remained close friends into their maturity. Each has married and each has a son. Their recent time together has again been idyllic. But when the Bohemian king Polixines is finally about to depart from Sicilia, both Leontes and his queen Hermione urge him to stay just a bit longer. Polixines’s desire to see his son is too great and he protests that he must go.
Suddenly Leontes is seized with a completely unfounded conviction that Queen Hermione had been impregnated by Polixines. In an hysterical aside to himself Leontes bursts out, “Too hot! Too hot!” He purports to see Hermione and Polixines
“paddling palms and pinching fingers
. . . and making practic’d smiles
As in a looking glass; and then to sigh, as ‘twere
The mort o' th’ deer.”
As a director of this scene, I would have Hermione and Polixines, though talking together in the background, standing somewhat apart in friendly conversation with no demonstrative blocking. That would allow a more literal reading of “too hot!” as a sudden internal physical blow to Leontes himself on the forestage rather than his impulsive interpretation of the unremarkable scene in the background[4]. And it would permit building on his then saying,
“I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances,
But not for joy.”
In the event, his eruption is so abrupt that he immediately orders the killing of Polixines and the jailing of Hermione. Polixines successfully escapes back to Bohemia, but Leontes’ rage is so great that he announces that he will put Hermione to the fire and furthermore that to prove her guilt to all who doubt it (which is the entire court), he orders a mock trial[5], arranging that Apollo’s undoubted affirmation of the adultery be brought from Delos as evidence.
Before the trial begins, however, Hermione, now imprisoned, gives an early birth to her baby, a girl. On learning this news, Leontes orders that the child also be put to the fire. It is now that the noblewoman Paulina, Hermione's greatest defender – whose role will swell in the final act -- makes a striking appearance. She takes the baby from the jailed queen and fearlessly appears with it before Leontes, tells him he is insane, and argues for the queen's life. His response is to threaten her with the same punishment as he has ordered for the baby, but she warns him “It is an heretic which makes the fire, not she which burns in it.” Presently, upon the pleading of the court attendants, Leontes relents somewhat and instead orders a courtier to take the baby out of the country and expose it to the elements.
The Location. Winter in Mediterranean Sicilia and summer in northern Bohemia may not seem to the audience particularly odd at the outset, but from that first glancing reference I sense a hint of some disorder. For example, although Sicily has been known by the same name since at least Roman times and even today is called “Sicilia” by Italians, in the play it has a somewhat elusive identity. There is scant indication in the text to suggest that it is an island at all and in Shakespeare's time Sicily was never an independent kingdom. Indeed, we really get no specific sense of the country or its citizens, except that it is obvious that Leontes is an absolute king and a law unto himself.[6]
Meantime, in Shakespeare's day, Bohemia was a somewhat tumultuous central European duchy with ever changing boundaries – but no seacoast. Like Sicily, it was part of the Holy Roman Empire and had also been an early locus of anti-Roman Catholic religious rebellion. Shakespeare's Bohemia, however, is something of a fantasy place with wild bears and pagan rituals. It is a land of “sleepy drinks” which leave visitors “unintelligent of our insufficience.”[7] There is also a slight tincture of melancholy and subtle sense of contradiction in Bohemia. One of the characters, turning Mamillius’s remark on its head, innocently reflects that he personally most loves a ballad of a “doleful matter merrily set down, or very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.” Later, as part of some pleasant conversations about the land's abundant flowers (including some indirect sexual references), the innocent Perdita observes that the flowers in this pagan world – here I derive a reference to Florizel, Polixines’s son -- have been brought by Proserpina and fallen from the wagon of the underworld.
The Timeline. After the first three acts during winter in Sicilia, in Act IV we suddenly leap ahead 16 years ahead and land in Bohemia in sheep-shearing season. Sixteen years between acts is a surprisingly elongated timeline and yet nothing of significance seems to have changed, except that the child Perdita has been rescued and brought up by an innocent Bohemian shepherd, both of them ignorant of her history. Moreover, in that time gap, the love plot has developed in Bohemia between the now teenaged girl[8] and Polixines’s now grown son Florizel. For his part, Leontes, as I have said, has lived offstage back in Sicilia in a purgatory of remorse, regret, and ignorance.
Paganism. It is hard to ignore Shakespeare’s purposes in the opening acts to make overt and forthright use of paganism: specifically the Delphic oracle and the god Apollo. Of course ample references to “the gods” and “Jove” can be found elsewhere in his other plays, but to my recollection only in The Winter’s Tale and As You Like It is there personification of a mythical figure. But The Winter’s Tale does not take place in the classical world where this could go unremarked. The Winter’s Tale is clearly set in Renaissance Europe in the first half of the 16th century, where a courtier refers to Christ’s betrayal, where a minor character fears that he may have to be buried without the Christian church’s last rites, where Leontes and Polixines were apparently raised together in a Hapsburg court, and where the characters are familiar with the contemporary sculptor Julio Romano[9].
The pagan references having now been carried forward into Bohemia, a sense is fortified that certain words and references throughout the story – and certainly the dramatic climax of the last act – were not coincidental. In short, although The Winter's Tale is not intended to be metaphorical or didactic, it proceeds according to a specific Christian point of view. This interpretation permits seeing elements like the repeated threat of punishment by fire, a child having been given the name of Perdita, and Leontes's lengthy period of contrition as intentional. Even the intervention of a character called Paulina is consistent with the Christian resolution of the final act.
Paulina and Autolycus. Most Shakespearean plays have many characters and most of them, even in the smallest parts, have identifiable personalities. But when it comes to the two kings in the The Winter’s Tale, neither of them is particularly interesting. Leontes is little more than impulsive, headstrong, and emotional and Polixines is even less interesting – a pleasant visitor and later a stereotypical patriarch committed to the integrity of the family name.
Instead, play's main energy comes chiefly from two secondary characters, Paulina, the Sicilian noblewoman mentioned above, and Autolycus, an amusing Bohemian scalawag. It would be too much to suggest that Paulina is intended to be the personification of some prophet, but it would not be preposterous to see her as the embodiment of rectitude whose appearance in the last acts as that of a Christian deus ex machina. And Autolycus, though not a devil, is certainly an imp.
Autolycus[10] is a light-fingered small time grifter and con man, which he cheerfully (and impishly) justifies by several trenchant asides about the general weaknesses of human nature. Happy to confess his own knavery, he often speaks directly and candidly to the audience, boasting about his past and imminent misdemeanors. He does little to advance the story, but he lifts twice his weight in tricks and hilarity in the sheep shearing scene of Act IV. With him, we are not only in a different land, but also in what bids to be a new story – which the chorus has already warned the audience against anticipating.
Motive. In the early acts, Paulina specifically attributes Leontes's impulsive ordering of his wife's and child's killing to insanity (though she doesn't absolve him of blame) and Shakespeare gives no other reason. This acts to relieve the audience of searching for a rational motive[11] and is why that I have suggested that The Winter's Tale can be seen as a counterpoint to Greek tragedy in which the drama is normally premised on some irreversible mistake. Leontes mistake is ultimately reversed, but at a cost.
The Crisis. When in Act III, the stricken Hermione, newly delivered of her baby, is roughly summoned to court she delivers a brave, tragic, and eloquent defense of her innocence.[12] “Apollo be my judge,” she says, to which Leontes remains implacable. But then lightning strikes. The messengers return from Greece and report that Apollo has entirely vindicated both Hermione and Polixines. Although Leontes instantly dismisses this as a falsehood, a second blow is then struck. A messenger reports that Mamillius, their older son and heir to the throne, has died. Hermione collapses. Paulina announces that the situation is beyond hope and that the queen whom she carries offstage will surely also die. And suddenly Leontes is miraculously transformed, concluding that his son's death had been divine retribution for his smug assumption of the Delphic judgment against Hermione. He apologizes to Apollo, publicly abjures all of his sins, and gives his entire life over to regret. Paulina then returns and resumes hectoring Leontes. (Talk about Purgatory.) Even genuine repentance of his injustices to others, she says, is inadequate given his unforgivable usage of the queen who, she affirms, has now indeed died. That behavior, she says, exceeds mere regret; it justifies Leontes's imminent suffering, viz.,
“A thousand knees
“Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, . . .”
But characters in The Winter's Tale are not given to reasoned reflection. Paulina instantly repents of her outburst. She offers to be punished for her rashness and vows that henceforth she will never mention the entire matter again. And Leontes's epiphany having been complete[13], he ignores her request for punishment and only asks that he be taken to the chapel where Hermione and Mamillius are buried. This is presumably done off stage and becomes his regular ritual for 16 years.
In fact, however, as we will learn two acts later, Hermione did not die. Act III ends.
Bohemia. Act IV is set in the Bohemian spring. It is opened by a Chorus who identifies himself as Time. He assures us that his appearance after a 16-year interval does not signal that we are about to pick up a new story, but he also reminds us that he both “makes and unfolds error” and also that he has the power to overthrow law and overwhelm custom. He will not foretell what is about to occur, but assures us that it will be known “when 'tis brought forth.”
Bohemia is portrayed as a colorful, uninhibited, bawdy country, and one where all of the mad, inexplicable, and unjust events of Sicilia are unknown and unmentioned. Furthermore, the springtime festival where all the action occurs also has its own significant pagan features set in a puzzling context of concealed identity. Perdita, appointed this year’s Mistress of the Feast, is embarrassed because she must wear a “goddess-like” costume. Florizel, who himself is traveling under the name Doricles[14], dismisses her concern. Even the gods, he assures her, take disguises when love is afoot. He compares himself to Apollo and swears that they will marry regardless of her station.
Into this scene steps King Polixines and his adjutant Camillo[15]. They are also both in disguise, searching for Florizel, the prince who has recently gone missing[16]. When they encounter the young lovers[17], the adults eventually realize that the two are indeed the missing heir apparent and a mere peasant girl. When the shepherd and his son explain that Perdida was actually a foundling, Polixines then reveals himself and decrees that his son may not marry beneath his station. In response, Florizel angrily renounces his heritage and decamps with Perdita, intending to present himself to Leontes in Sicilia as his father Polixines’s emissary of peace.
The Resolution. The play ends in Sicilia. There are some additional evasions and more Christian references.
Through gossip we are told about what had happened next in Bohemia. Polixines and Camillo, when they learned the shepherd had found the baby Perdita in possession of certain significant relics which unmistakably pointed to her true identity, had “looked as they had heard of a world ransom'd, or one destroyed.” Paulina, who has also heard this, senses the “fulfillment of an oracle.” They say that her reaction was so piteous and striking that “who was most marble there changed color.”
Then, for the first time, we are told that for many years Paulina had daily visited “a removed house” where she was said to have recently engaged a specific Italian sculptor to create a statue of Hermione. Upon this slender introduction, in V, iii they all go to Paulina’s house where she acknowledges that she does have the statue. Though we know the statue will presently come alive, Paulina attenuates the illusion for several lines. Then she suddenly says that she can make it move if Leontes will “awake your faith.” She then speaks directly to the statue: “Descend; be stone no more; approach . . . . I’ll fill your grave up.”
And then Hermione the statue speaks. She begins by invoking “the gods,” but then turns to Perdita and explains, “Knowing by Paulina that the oracle gave hope thou was’t in being[18], [I] have preserved myself to see the issue.”
Questions. So this is where the “evidence” which I have mined from The Winter’s Tale has left me. For reasons not particularly tendentious, the imagery is largely Christian notwithstanding the reference to a possible pagan “world destroyed.” What poetry there is is best in Bohemia’s Act IV, but not otherwise prominent in the other Acts. Except for Paulina and Autolycus, the characters are not particularly complex. The unusual loss of a life offstage to a bear lacks the excitement of a swordfight and the real threats of death by fire are really too fleeting to sustain any horror in a theatrical audience. The pagan references are benign, illustrative, and even colorful, including the characters’ periodic invocation of the gods, but useful mainly to move or underline the plot; Shakespeare has simply acknowledged a harmony between old and new cosmic views, albeit that the ethical Christian vision prevails.
I do puzzle about Paulina. It may be possible to suspend disbelief about her having secretly cosseted Hermione for 16 years, but where does that leave us when considering the statue and the alleged sculptor? At all times in the scene, Paulina seems to know exactly what is about to happen and she certainly betrays no wonderment when the flesh and blood Hermione steps down and speaks to her daughter. Was the entire last scene simply one more dissimulation, this one engineered by the two women, Paulina and Hermione? Was there an actual statue which miraculously came to life? Was there a sculptor at all? My powers are not great enough to answer this problem.
Finally, although this is not my principal thesis, it seems probable that in The Winter’s Tale the various novelties and departures from conventional storytelling – even by Shakespearean standards – are grounds for seeing this play as the playwright’s own effort to use his powers in novel ways. At times like this I must always remind myself that I am just an amateur in these things, writing to entertain myself and keep my wits alive for the time left to me. No one else will care.
FOOTNOTES
[2] The story opens in Sicilia during its winter season. King Polixines of Bohemia has been sojourning there for nine months, the guest of his boyhood friend the Sicilian king, Leontes. We also learn that in the approaching summer Leontes intends to visit Bohemia (though he never does).]
[5] For Englishmen of the 16th Century, the trial of a queen ordered by a dominant king was not hypothetical.
[6] The Bohemia of The Winter's Tale as we see it in Act IV is also strangely askew. The Bohemian speaker who has opened the play, has cautioned his Sicilian interlocutor that Bohemia would disappoint in comparison with the “magnificence” of Sicilia.
[7] Lotus eaters?
[9] Died 1546.
[10] “Litter'd under Mercury,” he says. IV, 3.; in Greek “lycus” means “wolf.”
[12] Cf. Katherine of Aragon.
[13] But an abjuration of sin is not its expungement.
[18] This is one of several times that Apollo’s was said to have carried such an implication. Personally, I have been unable to detect it.
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